The Subthread

Register for free to continue reading Register Here Already have an account? Sign in Guiding Agencies With Values The AI Threat Everyone’s Getting Wrong Why On’s Former Creative Chief Builds Teams That Are Designed to Disagree Why OpenAI’s Creative Director Is Giving the Brand Away The New Media Hire: Why Agencies Now Want Mathematicians, Not Marketers Story Doers, Not Storytellers: How Ben & Jerry’s CMO Makes Brand Activism Pay

Register for free to continue reading Register Here Already have an account? Sign in The AI Threat Everyone’s Getting Wrong Why Brands Are Built Backstage Why On’s Former Creative Chief Builds Teams That Are Designed to Disagree Why OpenAI’s Creative Director Is Giving the Brand Away The New Media Hire: Why Agencies Now Want Mathematicians, Not Marketers Story Doers, Not Storytellers: How Ben & Jerry’s CMO Makes Brand Activism Pay

“I build teams that are built to disagree,” Laurence Stoffel says, explaining how she creates environments and cultures where innovation can thrive. “The chances of innovation and truly great design will always be greater than with a team that agrees,” she tells The Subthread. The former global head of group creative at On spent a decade at the forefront of one of the world’s fastest-growing sportswear brands.

Creative teams have traditionally been the gatekeepers of a brand. They make the work, set the rules and decide what gets approved. But at OpenAI, Shannon Jager is trying to loosen that grip. As the company’s creative director, she is building a brand system designed to be used by people across the organization, rather than one controlled entirely by the creative team.

Media agencies have never recruited from a single degree background. But as the discipline becomes more technical and data-driven, some agencies are putting greater weight on quantitative skills when they decide who to hire. Gupta Media, a Boston-based performance-marketing agency whose clients include Amazon, Disney, Fender and Sony Music, has changed the way it recruits graduates and who it recruits.

Ben & Jerry’s chief marketing officer Jay Curley opened his Paradigms talk with a direct assessment of the political climate. Society, particularly in the US and Western Europe, is facing a moment in which “authoritarianism is on the rise.” It is an unusually public statement for a CMO. But it is perhaps less surprising coming from Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream brand that has made activism part of its identity since the 1980s.

There is a specific kind of magic that only happens when the lights go down, the curtains draw open, or the whistle blows and a collective hush settles over the crowd. In a world increasingly dominated by screens and parasocial relationships, the live experience remains our most potent form of human connection. But we have to address the heartbreak in the room. Live experiences are now expensive and exclusionary.

This year, OpenAI claimed one of its models had cracked a piece of a 90-year-old maths problem in under four days – a feat that had eluded human mathematicians for decades. It’s a useful reminder of what AI can do at the frontier. But that is not the AI most of advertising is meeting. The AI reshaping our industry does something far more ordinary: it has made competent creative work remarkably easy to produce. For agencies under pressure to do more with less, that looks like a gift. It may not be.

This year, OpenAI claimed one of its models had cracked a piece of a 90-year-old maths problem in under four days – a feat that had eluded human mathematicians for decades. It’s a useful reminder of what AI can do at the frontier. But that is not the AI most of advertising is meeting. The AI reshaping our industry does something far more ordinary: it has made competent creative work remarkably easy to produce. For agencies under pressure to do more with less, that looks like a gift. It may not be.

As audiences spend more time in virtual spaces, brands face the growing challenge of connecting with consumers in real life. Online competition is intensifying, audiences are spreading across different platforms, and AI is producing more content than we can keep up with. In this environment, bringing an audience together in person creates a kind of connection that is difficult to replicate through a screen.