The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t hit theaters until May 1, but it’s already spawning a brand ecosystem.

TRESemmé, L’Oréal Paris, and Grey Goose all aired campaigns during the Oscars. Diet Coke is rolling out limited-edition cans across Europe. Cinemark has six collectibles. 

TRESemmé is the most interesting one to me. It recently announced its status as the “signature hair brand” of the film. This word choice matters. It goes beyond being a sponsor, or a co-branding partner. 

“Signature” is pro sports league territory. It’s how Infosys talks about its premium relationship with Madison Square Garden—where it has naming rights on a theater—or how Gatorade is the “official sports drink” of the NFL, MLB, WNBA, and multiple others. It doesn’t just mean your logo is on something. It means you’re structural, and are part of the game itself. 

And that’s so important given the competitive landscape TRESemmé finds itself in, and the opportunity that Devil Wears Prada 2 provides.

TRESemmé has fallen behind in the race for purchase consideration

The Devil Wears Prada is a film about women’s ambition, choices, and power, against a backdrop of Chanel and Prada. Its protagonist is a woman trying to survive in that world, not own it. 

That’s the audience TRESemmé is reaching with its Devil Wears Prada 2 alignment: women who aspire to the fantasy, but shop at Target. 

And TRESemmé needs to solve a problem: it trails competitors like Suave and Pantene in purchase consideration across every female age group, according to data from Morning Consult. Over the past year, it has only a 28% consideration rate among women 18-29; 39% among women 30-44 as well as women 45-64; and a 30% consideration rate among women 65 and up. 

TRESemmé’s “signature” partnership—which feels more like Verizon’s deep relationship with the NFL than Dunkin’ making a limited edition Wicked-themed drink—is really a long-term growth strategy. It goes well beyond a themed bottle.

For a drugstore brand competing against Suave, Pantene, Garnier, and others for the same wallet, it signals that Miranda Priestly, the ultimate arbiter of taste, would reach for your product. No paid media buys that.

Devil Wears Prada fans are a crucial demographic

TRESemmé is also hitting this audience at a crucial time. The fans that made the original a phenomenon are now in their 40s and 50s, with real money and long memories. 

Nearly 45% of women have already changed their spending behavior by avoiding brands or spending less because advertising didn’t feel made for them, Zappi research found. That disconnect hits hardest in their 30s and 40s, right when purchasing power peaks and brand loyalties calcify.

Once lost, brands rarely win those women back.

TRESemmé likely knows this. And its play to be the “signature hair brand” of The Devil Wears Prada 2, unlike a classic product placement gimmick, is meant to help consumers feel that they’re part of the film’s world, not just watching it through a screen. 

Consumer attention has become exponentially harder to grab, and consumer packaged goods manufacturers need to elevate themselves beyond tried-and-true marketing tactics, because they are saturated with competitors and a constant stream of challenger brands.

The sponsorship playbook that TRESemmé is tapping was actually built by sports, and largely targeted men. Hollywood studios have also chased this model for properties whose fanbases typically skew male. The 2023 release of Barbie seems to have tipped the scales. 

And now, Devil Wears Prada 2 is fully embracing it, and TRESemmé has fully bought in with an integration designed to help audiences extend the cinematic moment and carry it out of the theater, and—quite literally for the shampoo brand—into their lives.

On February 3, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video on Instagram where he held up the chain’s new Big Arch burger, marveled at its size, took a careful bite, and called it a “product”—a word that any CEO would use. 

His post sat largely unnoticed for three weeks.

Until a comedian in Ireland found it.

On Feb. 25, Garron Noone stitched a reaction on TikTok, and racked up millions of views almost overnight. By February 28, Cat Sullivan’s parody had earned 17 million views on its own. Last week, Burger King’s U.S. president posted himself taking a huge, sauce-smeared bite of a Whopper. A&W followed. Wendy’s followed.

A routine product launch became a global cultural moment, but not a single dollar of paid media made it happen.

How does a three-week-old Instagram post from a Fortune 500 CEO become the internet’s main character overnight? The answer isn’t luck. Here’s how it all works behind the scenes.

Creators win over influencers

Kempczinski was meant to be the influencer in this story. He had the platform, title, and gravitas. But the moment didn’t travel because of him. 

It traveled because of a creator, someone who can read an audience and translate a moment into something shareable, who spotted the raw material, and knew exactly what to do with it.

Influencers have audiences. Creators have instincts. The best ones watch a CEO describe his own burger in corporate language and immediately spot the gap between brand ambassador and consumer sensibility. They name the thing everyone is feeling but hasn’t said yet. Then, the algorithm does the rest.

Geography is now irrelevant to this equation. A comedian in a country of five million can ignite a conversation that circles the globe before a brand’s communications team has even had a chance to agree on a response.

Authenticity doesn’t guarantee people will react the way you want

It seems at first glance that Kempczinski made a mistake, and our instinct is to hop on board and enjoy the mockery. Mark Ritson’s opinion is that the higher you rise, the further you get from the product you sell. 

I see something different. 

I believe we witnessed an executive who showed up, trying to be genuine, who expressed his version of enthusiasm for a product he clearly believes in. Authenticity wasn’t the problem.

The problem, for marketers, is that it’s unpredictable how people will react to authenticity.

In a globally connected world, you don’t get to choose which three seconds, or whose take on it, will become the lens through which millions of people interpret your brand.

Every brand on the planet has moments like these. Executives misspeak. Products get mocked. Campaigns land differently than planned. The real story isn’t what Kempczinski did or didn’t do. It’s what happens next. When these moments inevitably arrive, what should a CMO actually do about it?

The vital lesson is this: Authenticity may get you raw material, but creators will decide what to do with it. If Garron Noone had never found that clip, the Big Arch would have launched quietly, and the video would have simply faded in the feed like so many others. 

The moment only existed because a creator recognized its potential and jumped on it with agility. That’s precisely the skill more brands need to build. 

Culture moves faster than fast food

The speed of culture has accelerated to a point where “fast” is simply insufficient. A product that launches on Tuesday can be memed into irrelevance or elevated into a must-try by Friday.

Burger King’s response wasn’t in any campaign brief. It was reactive, fast, and did not include any CEO commentary. It reframed the entire conversation, proving that cultural fluency can eat marketing strategy alive.

Red Lobster’s CEO Damola Adamolekun went on The Breakfast Club in late February, started reading customer comments publicly, and posted product launches on his personal Instagram. One social video hit 1.8 million views. Sales climbed 10%. He wasn’t more authentic than Kempczinski. But he successfully translated authenticity into commercial momentum, and his brand had the infrastructure to capture what that created.

Watch for more local creators to spark global movements

With social media reaching people across borders, marketers no longer have as much control over which creator finds your brand, or where they’re from. 

The global creator economy has made geography irrelevant and timing everything.

Your brand can only control whether it’s ready when the moment arrives—if your response is fast enough, or how you stay in tune with consumers while remaining commercially sharp. That’s what turns a cultural moment into a sales outcome. We’re reaching a phase now in the Creator Economy where speed outweighs spend, and simply having an audience matters less than knowing what to do with it.

When a founder wires $150 million of his own money into a stock that is down 60 to 70 percent, he is not just betting on his company. He is betting on how media will be bought in the future. 

Jeff Green’s open market purchase of roughly 6 million shares of The Trade Desk, about $148 to $150 dollars in personal capital, comes after a brutal derating across adtech and high-multiple software. 

The Trade Desk’s revenue is still growing in the teens, but it has clearly slowed, and 2026 guidance landed softer than investors wanted. Add in noisy debates around pricing and competition, plus a market still trying to price what large language models like Claude and ChatGPT mean for incumbent platforms, and the instinctive response has been simple: mark down the stock.

Because, you do not pay peak era valuations for what Wall Street views as yesterday’s model.

Green is betting that The Trade Desk becomes infrastructure

Green is being more contrarian about what comes next. Across the industry, early AI systems are already taking over work that used to require teams, interpreting briefs, ingesting performance data, reallocating budgets, and tweaking campaigns across CTV, open web, and retail media. These AI systems often have faster planning cycles and tighter feedback loops than human-only workflows. 

As these automated agents scale, they will still need neutral platforms they can trust for identity, access to quality supply, and reliable performance data.

That is where independent infrastructure like The Trade Desk matters. 

It looks less like Green is wagering on a simple rebound in software, and more like a shift toward automated, agent-driven media buying in which The Trade Desk becomes one of the core rails those systems run on. 

Green is buying in at a time when the market sees slower growth, tougher competition, and macro uncertainty, because he is wagering that the street is underestimating The Trade Desk’s role in that automated future.

That context makes The Trade Desk’s strategy more interesting. 

Green has argued that AI does not replace independent platforms, it makes them more powerful if they are open, neutral, and wired into enough data and supply. 

Despite their limited success during their initial rollouts, initiatives like UID2, OpenPath, and the recently unveiled OpenTTD point in the same direction. The company is increasingly positioning itself as infrastructure for identity, measurement, and access to premium inventory, exposed through APIs that other tools and agents can build on. 

We have seen signs that The Trade Desk aims to acquire the decisioning layer above the bidstream—advanced planning and modeling capabilities that inform advertiser strategies and influence automated execution. 

3 reasons some adtech firms will endure despite AI

While general purpose AI will make some software companies easy to replace, it’ll be hard to replace adtech companies that offer three things: unique demand and conversion data; closed loop measurement over years of campaigns/ and the plumbing into CTV, open internet, and retail media. 

If The Trade Desk can continue to strengthen that combination and add more decisioning capabilities, it will look less like a point solution, and more like core infrastructure for an automated buying stack. 

So, Green’s $150 million trade is not a bet that The Trade Desk magically reclaims its peak 2021 multiple. 

Even for the winners in this cohort, that is not the right base case. 

It is a bet that as advertising becomes more automated, a handful of well-connected, data rich platforms will continue to show value, because they’ll be the pipes that conduct money across the open web and CTV.

In the very short term, Green’s trade has already worked. 

Between the disclosure of the buy and renewed optimism around AI-driven inventory, the stock move has created about tens of millions of dollars in paper gains for Green. 

That’s more a byproduct than the point. 

The core of his move is to signal that, despite real risks and a skeptical market, he believes investors aren’t giving enough credit to the value of automated open web media buying, and that The Trade Desk’s current valuation does not reflect its chance to win in that future.

Investors can disagree with that view. What they cannot say is that he failed to put a clear price on it.

The best marketers build from the fundamentals up. Learn how The ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing gives you the structure and confidence to make better decisions. Sign up here.

A few months ago, at the Spanish offices of Suntory Beverage where I served as its European CMO, I was presented with a brilliant activation for our Schweppes brand.

It was one that would teach me an important lesson. 

Our team had created some eye-popping bar takeovers in venues across Spain, with bright yellow lounge furniture, outfits for bar mixologists, Jacob Schweppes paintings—a whole Instagrammable set.

It was spectacular. It created that warm, intoxicating feeling every marketer secretly chases. Schweppes was showing up as the most dominant, visible brand precisely where our drinks were sold.

Then, the CFO asked the only question that matters for a mass brand: Could we take it from a couple of showcase venues to hundreds of bars next year? Can we scale this?

That’s when the spell broke.

My team had been inspired by another Suntory brand: the elegant Japanese gin Roku.

Roku is premium by design, the kind of brand that should be flaunted on terraces in a cherry-blossom spectacle. As such, Roku had brand activations to match.

My soft drink team observed Roku’s takeovers with envy. Schweppes existed in the very same bars, linked literally by gin and tonics. We worked with the same bar owners, were served by the same bartenders, and were consumed by the same customers.

Seeing the level of theater Roku could present made everything Schweppes had been doing, by comparison, feel a little too plain. A little too functional and mass.

Our mistake, I realized later, was that we did the Roku execution for Schweppes.

Premium gin math is not tonic math

Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson famously said about communism: “Great idea. Wrong species.” Communism is a wonderful system for ants, but it is structurally incompatible with humans. 

Marketing has its own version: great marketing, wrong category.

A bottle of gin can generate several euros of gross margin. A bottle of Schweppes generates pennies. 

But while the margins differ drastically, the activation costs are the same. 

So what’s rational in premium spirits turns into financial self-harm in soft drinks: great execution, wrong economics.

Marketers are easily dazzled. We’re great at spotting magic, and that’s what makes us such good storytellers. The trouble is, once we’ve spotted it, we immediately want to import it.

Certainly, inspiration is oxygen. But the problem is what happens next.

To do great marketing in the right category, you need to sanity-check your ideas against three unsexy variables marketers ignore whenever they get too excited.

What is your margin?

Margin defines how much “romantic spending” you can afford per recruited buyer. 

Premium categories can fund high-touch programs. Many fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) categories cannot, unless that program scales massively or converts at a gravity-defying rate.

A few years ago, when Lipton Ice Tea in Europe tried to reposition around “better-for-you” territory, it moved from massive summer beach activations to targeted spa activations. It was an elegant idea, but didn’t work for a low-margin refreshment category that still wins on reach and repetition.

How involved are your consumers?

In spirits and luxury, people may seek meaning, ritual, status, and discovery. 

In most mainstream FMCG categories, people seek simpler things: familiar taste, refreshment, availability, value reassurance. 

For soft drinks, they just want something cold and tasty.

Boursin is a mass-market garlic-and-herb cheese spread, sold in virtually every supermarket in France. 

Last year, it posted a congratulatory LinkedIn post about an invitation-only yacht day in Stockholm with about a dozen influencers. 

It seemed to me that they were influenced by luxury glamor brands like Dom Pérignon. I felt the activation would be highly memorable for the guests, but that the economics were probably tougher to justify for a brand that recruits through mass sampling, new formats, and price promotions.

How are you positioned against your competitors?

Challengers sometimes need to over-invest in “top image” outlets to buy credibility or disrupt leaders. 

But marketers who spend like challengers can pay luxury prices to solve problems they don’t actually have.

In Spain, Coca-Cola is the default in bars, with over 90% marketshare. Many bar owners see Pepsi as a cheap alternative, and are reluctant to serve it, because they worry they will lose customers.

So Pepsi has a logical incentive to invest in the best venues and dress them up in Pepsi branding, not because it drives mass volume, but because it buys credibility. It tells bar owners that if they pour Pepsi, customers won’t see it as second best. 

It works because it is the strategy of a challenger trying to gain credibility and punch above its weight. 

If Coca-Cola were to invest as much in these bars, it would lose money and gain no real benefit.

Steal, but don’t copy

Copy-paste for marketers is dangerous.

Great marketers must keep the inspiration, but translate the idea through category reality: What purchase driver do we need to hit? What cost per recruit can we afford? Are we acting like a leader, or a challenger?

Because the most expensive mistake in marketing isn’t bad creative; it’s great creative in the wrong category.

In recent years, news has never been more in demand—or more misunderstood by advertisers.

As the war with Iran escalates and as AI-generated content makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction on social media, audiences are turning to trusted news sources, creating an unprecedented opportunity in premium, high-intent environments that drive efficient performance and brand growth. 

Yet at the very moment when news consumption is surging, many brands continue what Stagwell Chairman and CEO Mark Penn has correctly labeled an “unintentional boycott”—the slow, systematic draining of ad dollars from news, driven by unfounded brand safety fears.

News is a premium attention environment

Stagwell’s 2025 Advertising Impact Study found that 57% of self-described news junkies—roughly 25% of the U.S. population—are following the news more closely than before. They check the news an average of 25 times per day and read seven articles daily. But this isn’t just a news-junkie phenomenon: 43% of the broader U.S. population reports consuming more news than a year ago.

This is not idle scrolling. Traditional news content generates significantly longer time on page than soft news, meaning more seconds where ads are actually in view. Eye-tracking work from Teads and Lumen shows that higher interest in traditional news yields roughly 20% more ad-attention seconds than softer content and produces a 77% lift in brand recall. 

In a performance-obsessed market, news has become one of the few remaining environments where people are actively leaning in, not swiping past.

Brand safety fears around news are outdated

For years, blunt keyword blocklists have treated words like “war,” “Iran,” and “election” as radioactive without regard for context, starving quality publishers of revenue and pushing brands into lower-quality environments. 

The brand-safety rationale doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Stagwell’s Future of News research, conducted with nearly 50,000 U.S. adults, found that ads adjacent to hard-news stories—covering the Middle East, crime, Trump, Biden, and inflation—performed on par with ads next to “brand safe” business, sports, and entertainment content across purchase intent, favorability, and eight core reputation metrics. The studies have since been replicated in the U.K., Asia-Pacific, and Germany, with identical results.

Consumers, in fact, respond positively to brands that show up alongside news. The IAB’s News Trust Halo study found that 84% of consumers say their trust in a brand stays the same or increases when they see its ads alongside news, and 90% react positively or neutrally.

Nearly half of respondents said brands advertising in news felt more customer-focused, more innovative, and more relevant—and 45% said they’d be more likely to visit that brand’s website. 

News delivers unduplicated, high-value reach at scale

In a fragmented media landscape, news is one of the few remaining mass-reach plays—and it reaches people other channels miss entirely. Stagwell’s research found that “exclusive news junkies”—Americans who follow news closely but not sports or entertainment—have grown from 11.1% to 13.8% of U.S. adults in just over a year, bringing the total to approximately 80.4 million people. This 14% of U.S. adults cannot be reached by paid advertising anywhere outside of news.

This audience is also disproportionately valuable: Gen X (64% vs. 58% of the general population), college-educated (51% vs. 38%), fully employed (46% vs. 40%), and six-figure earners (37% vs. 28%). They are the high-income, high-influence consumers brands say they want but often chase in less accountable channels. Reallocating even a portion of tentpole TV, CTV, or creator budgets into a sustained news presence buys access to a genuinely unduplicated audience without sacrificing scale.

News drives measurable performance

Performance marketers have quietly been proving what brand marketers are still debating: news works. Case studies from Ad Fontes Media, executed with The Trade Desk and its News Navigator platform, show that shifting budget into high-quality, low-bias news environments consistently reduces customer acquisition costs and improves ROAS.

For a major Hollywood studio, a curated news segment across display and CTV delivered a 23% lower CPA versus benchmarks on display, a 41% lower CPA and 34% lower CPM on CTV, and a 50% higher conversion rate overall. A financial services marketer using the same Ad Fontes-qualified inventory saw CPMs come in 31% below forecast, overall CPA 60% below benchmark, and 78% viewability—results strong enough to justify a 25% budget increase the following quarter. 

Stagwell’s own news-focused campaigns have delivered 3x the average ROAS, and Assembly’s Media Mix Model showed news driving 136% transaction growth for one global logistics client.

For CMOs juggling performance pressure and brand stewardship, news is not a risky edge case—it is an underpriced, under-allocated channel for driving growth. Rebalancing plans to include a deliberate, always-on news layer allows brands to meet unduplicated audiences where their attention actually is, while lowering acquisition costs and strengthening the journalism that keeps those audiences engaged.

Most mornings this year started the same way: an early workout before the house woke up, the chaos of getting kids out the door, a quiet walk before I officially started my day. 

Coffee in hand, I’d run through the decisions waiting for me: Questions about where to take the business, how fast to move, and how much change people could absorb at once. 

Those walks became a moment to prepare myself to lead with both conviction and care before stepping into another day of leading a major transformation. 

After 20 years in this industry and more than a decade in executive leadership, I thought I understood change. I’d helped global brands navigate disruption, led through integrations and restructures. But stepping into the CEO seat at AnswerLab was different. This wasn’t about advising transformation; it was about owning it. 

Here are 7 core lessons I learned from leading through transformation as a first-time CEO.

1. Transformation is emotional 

I knew we needed to pivot. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how deeply that shift would affect the people who had built the business we were evolving. 

AnswerLab had deep roots and a strong sense of identity. My job was to guide it into a new era without losing what made it special. That meant learning where the heartbeat of the company was strongest, what needed to evolve, and what absolutely needed to be protected. It also meant making decisions that prioritized the long-term health of the business, even if they created short-term discomfort. 

I understood the transformation intellectually. What I didn’t anticipate was how exposed it would make me as a leader — how often I’d have to say, “I don’t know yet,” while still asking people to trust where we were headed. That tension defined my first year.

2. Transformation is non-linear 

Transformation is messy, but leading through it isn’t about slowing down; it’s about maintaining pace while becoming more intentional. 

To keep us moving forward without burning people out, we treated it more like an enterprise digital transformation than a traditional organizational change. We shifted to operating in sprints, revisiting priorities every two weeks and stepping back quarterly to assess what was working, what wasn’t, and where we needed to adapt. 

That rhythm allowed us to keep momentum while creating space to listen, learn, and course-correct. It taught me that transformation isn’t linear. It requires resilience, clarity, and a steady hand when things feel unsettled. 

3. Bringing people along is harder than being right 

One of the hardest lessons I learned was that being right about what needs to change doesn’t mean you’ve gotten how to change it right. There were moments when I underestimated the intention behind past decisions, even if they no longer served where we needed to go. 

That forced me to slow down in a different way—by asking better questions. By bringing in advisors. By taking the time to understand not just the strategy, but the emotional connection people had to it. 

There were moments when the most important thing I could do wasn’t explain the strategy, but acknowledge the uncertainty. Naming what I didn’t have fully figured out created space for others to contribute what they saw. Vulnerability didn’t slow us down — it sharpened us. 

And humility didn’t weaken my leadership. It strengthened it. 

4. Leadership sits at the intersection of clarity and connection 

A quarter into the year, we were building our annual plan, and the urgency was real. I took control to create clarity, but I didn’t explain why that was necessary at that moment. For a team used to building things together, it felt abrupt. 

Once I articulated my intention, everything shifted. People understood the need for speed. Trust deepened. Clarity builds connection faster than control or consensus ever could. 

That shift also required rethinking hierarchy—not by removing accountability, but unnecessary barriers to insight. When people felt safe challenging ideas, better thinking surfaced faster. The best signals often came from the people closest to the work. 

Great leaders know when to step in and when to step back. Connection and clarity aren’t opposites. They’re partners. 

5. Letting go doesn’t mean losing accountability 

As your scope of responsibility grows as CEO, so does what you have to let go of. Leading at this level required trusting my team, their teams, and the systems we were putting in place. 

That didn’t mean relinquishing accountability, but evolving how I defined control. I don’t need to hold every lever. I’ve learned to be more discerning about where my presence creates momentum and where it might unintentionally slow things down. 

Leadership at scale isn’t about holding tighter. It’s about trusting deeper. 

6. A curious culture leads to better ideas

If there’s one constant that carried me through this year, it was curiosity. Surrounding myself with people whose strengths outpace my own has been one of the most important decisions I’ve made as CEO. It sharpened the work and raised the bar for all of us. 

Curiosity isn’t passive. It’s the willingness to engage, challenge, and contribute, even when it feels uncomfortable. 

7. Leading doesn’t mean having all of the answers

Clarity doesn’t come from having all the answers, but from creating the conditions where the best answers can surface. My first year as CEO was a master class in courage, clarity, and connection. It deepened my belief that leadership isn’t about control, but trust; it isn’t about perfection, but presence. 

In a time of rapid change, empathy and understanding aren’t just strategic advantages; they allow progress to endure. 

Leadership isn’t about knowing every step of the road ahead. It’s about building a community willing to move forward with intention—one decision, one conversation, and one morning walk at a time.

This article is part of ADWEEK’s Marketing Vanguard program and was written in collaboration with one of its members.

A few years ago, I invited an intern to join a group of us for dinner with another company we were working closely with. 

I was excited to expose her to this side of corporate America in her first-ever business meal, and when dinner ended and it was only our team around, I eagerly asked her to rate the night. 

She was blunt: “It was long. Sometimes you all talked about interesting stuff. And other points you talked about things that do not matter. At all.” 

She was right. Last year during TV Upfronts week, the typical business dinner I attended was four and a half hours. With a good tailwind, that’s the same amount of time it takes to fly from the West Coast to the East Coast.

At least on that flight, you’re going somewhere!

We need to end the long, drawn-out, overly formal business dinner. Because while I absolutely believe in the value of spending time outside the office with prospective partners, current partners, teammates, agencies, and more—frankly, I’d rather do it over quesadillas.

Here’s how to make it better.

90 minutes—no more 

It’s diminishing returns after that. As both the dinner inviter and dinner invitee—share your expectations around timing with one another in advance and again at the start of the meal. 

Curate a list of restaurants that set you up for success 

This starts with a table where one, unified conversation can be had. Because we’ve all felt the avalanche of despair when small talk with the person next to you runs dry and you glance longingly at the other end of the table that enviably seems to be a total party. There are two restaurants in Los Angeles—Fia in Santa Monica and The Strand House in Manhattan Beach—that my team and I like because they have private rooms with the perfect large square table that lends itself to a singular group conversation. It’s by design that we researched and discovered these spots and continue to frequent them. 

I also wasn’t kidding about casual food

The default shouldn’t be Michelin-star dining, elaborate tasting menus, or the much overplayed small plates premise with a never-ending parade of food that is shared.

Let’s be honest—does anyone really enjoy sharing in these settings? We all work hard and on top of our 9-to-5, committed to an after-hours hang by saying yes to a business dinner. The absolute least we can do to reward ourselves is our very own entrée. 

And does it have to be dinner?

Of course not! Breakfast, lunch, coffee or early evening drinks. I recently went for a hot chocolate with a partner of ours. 10/10. 

And who says it must involve food or alcohol? 

Sporting events and the golf course have long been substitutes for the business dinner. What else can we add to this list? If the pandemic taught us about the benefits of a walk-and-talk one-on-one, why not make that the activity. I know what you’re thinking: you can’t take 12 people on a walk. Good. That’s the point. I guarantee more ‘real talk’ will be shared in this setting and with a better end result. 

Or consider a musical or play. If you catch up while walking to the theater, during intermission, and on your way out of the theater, that is likely enough time to discuss the business issues at hand. And you get to take in some culture!

If it has to be a long dinner, put a personality in charge

Curb Your Enthusiasm fans will recall the episode centered around Larry being a good “middler,” the person who sits in the middle of a big table and has a vital job: keep conversation flowing. 

At one especially long business dinner I attended, the “middler” was great and posed to the table the absolute best sports trivia question I’ve ever heard. (Name the nine sports figures that graced the cover of these four magazines: Life, People, Newsweek, Time)

It got everyone talking and working together. Which genuinely kept spirits up and distracted us from the fact that we were going on minute 97 waiting for our salt-encrusted entire bone-in fish—to share, of course.  

I have some go-to out-of-left-field questions I’ll ask during lulls. Like name a classic movie you’re embarrassed to admit you’ve never seen. My answer is The Shawshank Redemption. And at this point in my life, I’m not sure I’ll ever watch it since it elicits such a response from people when I disclose that.

I’m hopeful that shorter, curated points of connection (and quesadillas) can lead to talking about—in the words of my sage intern—more “interesting stuff.”

I just paid 53 clients of my agency, Acadia, their share of the six figure sum in rebates we received for media purchased in 2025.

Not all of Acadia’s clients were repaid; they had to qualify based on a rubric that includes timing of the buy, amount spent, the date the client was onboarded, among other factors.

But I did this to make a statement at a time when an uncomfortable portion of agency margin is coming from pocketing media rebates that belong to our clients. 

Industry studies estimate that rebates and “non-transparent incentives” represent 3% to 10% of total spend on digital media globally, which now exceeds $600 billion. That sizes the rebate economy at $40 billion, roughly equal to the U.S. linear TV market. 

Rebates, however, are earned by client spending volume—and should go back to them, or at the very least be disclosed to them transparently. 

The silent rebate economy

As media fees have compressed over the past decade, rebates have quietly become a backdoor margin engine which that agencies have become structurally dependent on. 

Agencies aggregate millions to billions of dollars in client media spend and deploy that capital across platforms and publishers. In return for that scale, publishers often extend rebates, incentives, or volume-based credits. 

Industry benchmarks put average agency operating margins at 8% to 12%. Yet rebate income can account for 10% to 30% of total agency profit. 

At the holding company level, that can add up to several hundred million dollars a year. Even a mid-sized agency managing $500 million in billings could generate as much as $25 million a year in rebate-driven margin.

Publishers are allowed to offer rebates; it’s good business practice. What’s bad business practice at best is when agencies keep those givebacks as profit—without disclosing them to clients. 

That’s not optimization. It’s appropriation.

Opaque by design

Clients often don’t know this is happening, because the system is intentionally opaque.

Contracts are vague. Language is “commercially flexible.” Procurement teams focus on fees, not incentives. Marketers assume their agencies are acting in their best interest. And few clients ever ask publishers directly whether their spend is part of a rebate pool.

But clients can’t afford to have their rebates pocketed by agencies. They are under relentless pressure to prove ROI and justify every incremental dollar spent. 

Agencies can’t afford it, either. We face unprecedented credibility challenges, and our future depends on trust, transparency, and true partnership. 

We must change

I’m calling on the industry to once and for all move away from the rebate system. Here’s how we can do it:

Brands demand their share. Marketers must ask: Are my agency dollars contributing to any rebate, incentive, or volume-based benefit? If so, where does that value go? The only acceptable answer is, “back to you.” 

Contract language gets tighter. Contracts should explicitly state that client funds may not be included in any rebate or incentive pool without full transparency—and that any such benefit must be returned to the client on a pro rata basis. Brands should also reserve the right to verify this directly with publishers.

Agencies honor their role. Agencies exist to serve clients, not arbitrage them. As stewards of client capital, we’re fiduciaries in the same way financial advisers are. Any reward we get for spending clients’ money needs to go back to those clients. 

We return to fair, honest, and open compensation. The fact that some agencies would fold without rebate profit isn’t justification; it’s an indictment. It means both the client’s payment and the agency’s models are broken. That’s the vexing, underlying problem we need to finally confront head-on. 

Some will claim it’s hopelessly complicated to untangle individual client totals from pooled investments. Don’t believe them. We have the analytical power; all it takes is the will to do what’s right. 

The rebate economy didn’t emerge overnight, and it won’t disappear instantly. But as marketers demand accountability and regulators scrutinize media practices, the days of hidden profit pools are numbered.

We can lead change, or be forced into it.

CES, Davos, and the messaging in the Super Bowl ads this year made it clear: AI is no longer a capability story. It is an operating model story. 

These are 10 trends I see converging now, drawn from hundreds of conversations with CMOs and their teams, product and tech leaders.

1. Work identity will break before org charts do

AI is eroding the middle layers of marketing faster than most leaders admit. The damage will not show up as mass layoffs immediately, but as role confusion, eroding confidence, and quiet disengagement among product marketers, strategists, creatives, media planners, and analysts.

You can see the tension in how brands are talking about “AI-first” work while still rewarding old signals of seniority such as headcount managed, decks shipped, or meetings attended. When an AI agent can draft a launch narrative, pressure test positioning, and spin 10 campaign variants before lunch, the question is not “will people be replaced?” but “what does human expertise mean now?” 

2. Artificial Intelligence is no longer abstract, but planning still is

In conversations at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, the undertone was less awe and more urgency. AI capability is compounding, regardless of disagreements among technologists about the timeline to artificial general intelligence. 

Yet, marketing organizations are still planning as if change is incremental, a tooling upgrade, another martech stack update, or a set of training. Meanwhile, AI systems are already outperforming humans on speed, scale, creativity, and synthesis in many domains. Many people are overestimating how much time they have left to adapt. 

3. Brands will inherit ethical risk without asking for it

As AI interfaces feel more human, marketing becomes the first point of ethical exposure. Legal frameworks will lag, but brand accountability will not. 

The clearest way to see this is to watch what happens when monetization collides with trust inside a conversational interface. 

OpenAI’s February 2026 rollout of ads in ChatGPT marks a pivotal shift in the AI trust contract, forcing people to distinguish between organic and sponsored AI recommendations.

Marketing will be the function held accountable when customers ask what is organic, what is paid, and whether AI is serving their interests or just the brand’s.

4. Most companies will stall in the middle of AI maturity

This year, marketers and their organizations will rush to declare “Mission Accomplished.”

Tools will multiply, yet workflows, incentive structures, decision rights, and true productivity will remain unchanged. 

This is where AI-native competitors will quietly widen the gap. They do not “use AI more,” but organize around it. They treat autonomy, data flows, and decision latency as competitive advantages.

5. AI-native creative will flood the market and devalue good ideas

Content volume, speed, and variation are becoming close to free, meaning “good enough” creative collapses in value. What becomes scarce is taste, direction, restraint, cultural relevancy and the ability to create something that does not look like it came from the same statistical blender as everyone else.

Just look at the immediate and unsurprising industry debate around Svedka’s AI-generated Super Bowl ad.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI does not kill creativity. It kills the pricing power of good ideas. 

6. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and GEO will disrupt discovery arbitrage

AI-mediated answers are increasingly replacing search-driven discovery. 

The last six months produced hard evidence that marketers can no longer treat search click-through as stable, predictable and repeatable. Analysis of Google AI Overviews showed significant CTR declines for queries where AI summaries appear, and the broader message is clear that fewer clicks are fewer opportunities to “win the first page listing,” and more value accruing to being the source the model cites, not the page that ranks third.

7. Smart Marketers will shift from discrete AI tools to connected workflows

“AI in the stack” is the wrong mental model. The shift is toward coordinated systems that plan, execute, and optimize campaigns with limited human intervention unless desired.

Humans supervise. Agents operate.

If you run marketing like a relay race between specialized teams, you will be outperformed by organizations that run it like a control room overseeing Agentic-AI workflows. 

8. Leadership quality will become the largest performance variable

As AI scales execution, leadership judgment becomes the primary differentiator. 

You can see this emerging in how leaders talk about monetization and trust. At Davos, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis publicly emphasized that Google has “no plans” for ads in Gemini, explicitly framing advertising in AI assistants as a trust risk. 

Whether you agree or not, leadership strength is going to be evaluated based on what trade-offs are you willing to make, and how fast is what will determine whether you win in the AI Era or not. 

9. CMOs will be forced into fewer, harder strategic bets

Boards and CEOs will push CMOs into sharper choices such as build versus buy, optimization versus differentiation, pilots versus transformation, where humans stay essential versus where automation becomes default.

The era of hedging with endless experiments is ending, because experimentation is no longer a strategy, and there won’t be enough resources or patience for it. Strategy and brand differentiation will matter again because everything else is rapidly commoditizing. 

10. Jagged AI capabilities will create new, invisible failure modes

AI will work brilliantly in some contexts and fail unpredictably in others. Over-trust and under-trust will coexist inside the same organization and often within the same team. The most dangerous failures will not be obvious. They will be quiet, inconsistent, and driven by misplaced confidence.

Some brands have started leaning into human-ness as a deliberate contrast to synthetic sameness, tapping into rising skepticism and fatigue. That too is a mistake, as those leaders won’t take advantage of AI capabilities that will advantage their teams.

For 15 minutes on Sunday, more than 130 million people were on the edge of their seats, watching Bad Bunny transform the Super Bowl 60 Halftime Show into the biggest party of the year, all while speaking and singing entirely in Spanish.

The Puerto Rican artist filled Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco, California with visual and sonic references of his homeland, from images of sugarcane fields, a cornerstone in Puerto Rico’s economy until the 20th century, to a real wedding that portrayed a variety of moments traditional of a Latin celebration.

Contrary to expectations, the artist refrained from overtly promoting specific brands, instead focusing on elevating Puerto Rican culture and Latino community on one of the most important stages in advertising.

Wearing a collared shirt and tie carrying the No. 64 designed by the Spanish brand Zara and launching a new custom sneaker with Adidas, the BadBo 1.0 in white, the artist did make some subtle nods to brand partners in his performance. 

But more than anything, his halftime show sold millions of viewers on Puerto Rico itself, defining its history, creativity, and identity in a way that emotionally connected with a global audience.  

Voy a llevarte pa’ PR

Bad Bunny anchored his performance with reggaetón hits like “Yo Perreo Sola,” “Safaera,” and “Voy a Llevarte pa PR” in his iconic casita, where Latin artists including Cardi B, Jessica Alba, Pedro Pascal, Karol G, and others joined the celebration.

To the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of “Titi Me Preguntó,” he launched a visual journey celebrating numerous moments of daily Caribbean life, from street food vendors to domino games and women getting their nails done at the salon.

“You’re listening to music from Puerto Rico,” he said in Spanish while standing in the casita, a set piece reflecting rural life on the island, which has become a centerpiece of his latest tour, transitioning into a section that paid tribute to key songs that helped elevate reggaetón to a mainstream musical genre.

The economic impact of Puerto Rican culture had already manifested from his concert residency on the island, generating an estimated $400 million for the country. But with this celebration of his homeland experienced by millions, Bad Bunny’s halftime show was a lesson in cultural storytelling marketers can learn from.

Despite the party, his portrayal of Puerto Rico didn’t shy away from the island’s challenges, like the energy crisis caused by decades of underinvestment in the power grid and the imposition of Americanization, both recurring themes in his work. His performance addressed these issues directly, as he performed from light poles while singing “El Apagón,” and as Ricky Martin, one of the first Puerto Ricans to break into the Anglo market, performed “Lo que le pasó a Hawáii,” a song that critiques the island’s colonial status.

In this way, the halftime show reimagined Puerto Rico as the author of its own story: a place shaped by colonial violence and resource extraction, but driven by an uncompromising cultural lineage that continues to influence the world beyond the island’s coastline.

From PR to the globe 

In an unexpected moment, Lady Gaga took center stage amid a real wedding, performing a salsa-infused version of “Die with a Smile,” before joining Bad Bunny to dance to the hit “Baile Inolvidable.” Wearing an ensemble in the light blue associated with Puerto Rican independence and a red flor de maga, the island’s national flower, the artist’s appearance bridged Puerto Rican and American culture and stood as an allegory for Bad Bunny’s transcendence on the global stage. 

Acknowledging New York City as the original epicenter of salsa, the artist performed “NuevaYol” while dancers moved through bodegas, barber shops, and everyday community scenes, including a representation of “Toñitas,” one of the few remaining Puerto Rican Social Clubs in the city — spaces that have been fundamental to the identity of many Latino immigrants in the United States.

This scenery follows Bad Bunny’s appearance in the Grammys last week when he declared “ICE out.” That political message continued as he handed his Grammy for Album of the Year to a child watching the historic moment with their family on television.

To the rhythms of plena, accompanied by the local group Pleneros de la Cresta, Bad Bunny closed the show with a parade of flags representing every country in the Americas, calling out each nation by name. 

The imagery woven throughout his performance bring together cultural affirmation for Puerto Ricans while serving as a point of recognition for broader Latin American audiences and an educational entry point for viewers unfamiliar with the island’s history.

By placing Puerto Rican musical genres at the center of the narrative, Bad Bunny demonstrated these rhythms as exportable cultural assets. When he said “We’re still here” in Spanish, he affirmed the continent’s cultural and linguistic diversity on a national stage. 

Nonetheless, the world’s most-watched entertainment stage also became a showcase for Puerto Rico, using every element to project the island as a recognizable and authentic identity to millions of viewers.