Make less, make it matter.

The report puts it plainly: as an industry we've "confused motion with meaning" and got frighteningly good at making things people scroll straight past. AI has made mediocrity free, so churning out more of it is just a faster race to the bottom. Better to do one thing brilliantly than ten nobody remembers.

Build the brand beyond marketing.

One point really stuck with us: if your leadership thinks building the brand is marketing's job, you've already lost. A brand is really made, or quietly ruined, in the product, the pricing, the service and every single hire. The trick isn't a cleverer campaign, it's getting the whole company to care as much as you do.

Cultivate what can't be copied.

From Apple to P&G, everyone kept circling the same thing: your taste, your point of view, and how you make people feel are about the only things a machine can't spit out on demand. In a world drowning in copies, being unmistakably you is the whole game.

“Value has been replaced by volume. We've confused motion with meaning, and become incredibly efficient at creating things people ignore.”

Leandro Barreto, CMO, Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing

“If we want to win, the key skill is absorbing change faster, swapping rigid, fixed plans for hedging against many possible outcomes.”

Alex Jenkins, Contagious

One number worth stealing

Drop your brand's sonic asset into the first two seconds of an ad and brand awareness can jump by up to 191%. It's from System1 and TikTok's Cannes talk, “4 Notes and No More.”