The DTC Podcast
The DTC Podcast

The New Fundamentals of Brand Strategy (While Shipping Hundreds of Ads a Week), With Eugene Healey

3h ago41:417,949 words

The Podafi briefing · AI analysis

Decentralize creative approvals and build remixable asset suites

4 min brief · 3 takeaways · Based on this episode’s transcript

The 30-second brief

TL;DR
  • 01Media fragmentation requires conceiving creative ideas within their specific delivery context rather than using linear campaigns.
  • 02Decentralize daily creative approvals to junior teams using qualitative pattern guides instead of rigid brand books.
  • 03Provide partners with flexible asset suites for cultural remixing instead of forcing strict, branded meme formats.

The big picture

Fragmented media and high-volume ad production break traditional executive-led brand approvals. Marketers face a tension between maintaining strict brand control and enabling the contextual creative needed for modern platforms. The solution involves decentralizing approvals to junior teams using qualitative pattern guides and providing flexible asset suites for partner remixing.

Useful for: Brand operators and creative leaders managing high-volume ad production across fragmented media channels.

Synthesis of podcast conversations. Speaker claims are not independently verified.

01Brand guidelines

Contextual assets replace rigid brand books

Eugene Healey argues traditional 80-page brand books fail for distributed media. Instead of strict rules, brands need flexible asset suites that travel into influencer contexts. These maintain coherence through qualitative team judgment and shared language rather than automated compliance or rigid visual rulebooks.

Why it matters. Rigid guidelines stifle partner creativity. Flexible asset suites enable authentic integration, improving reception across diverse media environments while maintaining core brand identity.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Audit your current brand book. Identify core visual and verbal assets that partners can freely remix within their own native content formats.

The catch. Providing too many assets without clear qualitative boundaries can lead to brand dilution or off-message executions that confuse consumers.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

“you can't give them a brand guideline you can't give them a brand book like what you need to be able to do is give them a suite of assets that can travel into their context”
Read the source transcript ↗

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Healey notes that giving partners a massive brand book is useless. Brands must provide asset suites that travel into independent contexts, relying on team debate and accumulated brand knowledge to judge if creative feels right.

02Creative operations

Decentralize approvals to sustain creative velocity

Healey explains that high creative volume requires shifting from sovereign, executive-led approvals to qualitative systems. Junior and mid-level staff handle day-to-day approvals using a shared language to monitor brand patterns, replacing rigid rulebooks and preventing bottlenecks that destroy creative velocity.

Why it matters. Bottlenecks at the executive level destroy creative velocity. Empowering junior teams prevents missed market moments while maintaining brand consistency through pattern recognition.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Replace lengthy brand guidelines with qualitative pattern guides. Train mid-level marketers to approve daily output by evaluating if new assets strengthen the overall brand pattern.

The catch. Decentralization fails without clear qualitative boundaries. Junior teams need explicit training on brand discernment to avoid approving off-brand assets or AI-generated slop.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

“it's also sovereign military model of creative approvals because you know we are trying to very tightly control the associations that the market holds of us so everyone differs responsibility run it up the chain”
Read the source transcript ↗

From the transcript

“the people that were are now the more junior in your organization are the ones that are responsible for brand in a way that on the senior people were beforehand”
Read the source transcript ↗

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Healey states that high creative output requires junior and mid-level staff to handle day-to-day approvals using qualitative systems to monitor patterns, replacing linear sovereign models.

03Cultural integration

Design formats for cultural remixing

Healey advises brands to stop forcing branded memes and instead design formats for community remixing. He highlights Gap's work using 90s nostalgia and new artists to create dance covers that the community actively reinterprets, sharing and mutating the format organically.

Why it matters. Consumers share and mutate formats, not corporate memes. Designing for remixing builds organic distribution and drives awareness among younger demographics without relying solely on paid media.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Identify one cultural format your audience already engages with. Create a campaign asset that provides the visual or audio structure for them to add their own context.

The catch. Remixing requires surrendering some brand control. If your brand relies on strict message consistency, open formats may generate off-brand associations that conflict with core positioning.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

“a meme is an environment in which like the original author is destroyed the author becomes the format itself but that format is then endlessly mutated and re-contextualized”
Read the source transcript ↗

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Healey explains that culture is an endless series of remixes. He points to Gap's dance cover campaigns, which provided elements for the community to reinterpret, driving increases in awareness and preference.

From listening to doing

Take one idea into the week

Suggested experiments, not proven results. Choose what fits your brand.

Test contextual asset suites with partners

  1. 01Select a small group of partners currently using your rigid brand guidelines.
  2. 02Provide them with a flexible suite of core visual and verbal assets instead of a strict rulebook.
  3. 03Allow them to integrate the assets into their native content formats without requiring pre-approval for minor deviations.

Measure: Compare engagement rate and cost per acquisition against the control group using standard brand guidelines.

Guardrail: Monitor brand sentiment and comment sections. Stop the test if partners generate content that violates core safety policies or receives significant negative consumer feedback.

Context & limitations
  • Healey's observations on Gap's performance are based on Tracksuit data, which measures awareness and preference, not direct incremental revenue or profit.
  • The shift to orchestration requires significant internal training; simply removing executive approvals without qualitative guidelines will likely degrade brand consistency.
  • Healey owns equity in Tracksuit, which he references when discussing its data and AI search capabilities.

Listen to the conversation

0:000:00
Original episode description

Brand strategist Eugene Healey on DTC marketing at high creative volume: why creative is the new targeting, why brand books fail with creators, and how teams approve hundreds of ads a week.How do you keep a DTC brand coherent when you're shipping that much creative? Eugene says the fundamentals of brand still hold. The job around them has moved from controlling every campaign to orchestrating hund...

Transcript

EN

The media environment and the cultural environment have changed so violently ...

Everyone was talking about how creators of the future of marketing create as a not the future of marketing, but they represent increasingly what the future of marketing looks like which is that

“Someone sends something with AI and then someone will use AI to review that and get an AI response and creating these slopp grenades”

The way that most brands come to market right now is mediated through armies of third parties media is now the variable We're having to go out to all these independent media companies at themselves all have their own brands Kind of give them a brand guideline. You can't give them a brand book This episode is brought to you by triple will the AI operating system for e-commerce Just a quick gut check for brand owners and media buyers have you started your black Friday cyber monday planning yet

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The brand is a mosaic creative is now targeting maybe it always was the medium as always is the message

Slop grenades are everywhere

“Welcome back to the ddc podcast man. I've really been enjoying your content as of late. Have you been enjoying making it a lot?”

It's been I think my the aperture for what I've been making has been really broad over the past two years I think just recognizing that I could use the platform as a way of interrogating whatever it was that I was thinking about with whether it had anything to do with brand or not But over the last I reckon three months I've been able to focus back in on the things that I'm really really interested in and

You know, I actually have a team now that I can use to augment with more research We can add production to it like it's getting to a stage that I would actually say most of the things that are coming out I'm actually really proud of It's like well if you just take a moment if you're if you're listening to this podcast in real time right now go to

EUG brand-strat huge brand-strat on Instagram and make sure you're following Eugene because Every time one of your videos comes out. I'm I'm sure to watch it We may have talked about it in the podcast back in the day, but I had I had a I was in the belly of the beast in University in the in a postmodern film you know film degree and you know all of these things about semiotics and

the way people generate meaning and all of the stuff that you speak about in your content is stuff that I kind of studied way too long ago So it's so cool to see it super relevant in in culture now talk to me about why you decided to turn what what you've been speaking about for years into a course

It was always the plan in a way in that you know

the first Ten also years of my career was split between teaching and strategy so I worked as an agency strategist and at the same time I taught first as a tutor and then as a session lecturer at the University of Melbourne in marketing and brand management and for this particular turn it was just about bringing those two things together

“I think what I found also is with the scale of my platform the questions”

that people come to you in my strategy studio always end up eventually being the same everyone is dealing with the same problems which is that the fundamentals that they've been given the what and the why like there's nothing wrong with them they haven't changed all of the problems right now exist in the how the media environment and the cultural environment has changed so violently brand building has gotten so complex I was joking about this before with

the CMO that I met yesterday you know if you told you know if you plocked a CMO from 20 or 30 years ago and you're just like you know or you went back in time you're like hey

By the way all you're going to do is manage one quarterly campaign and there'...

and just make sure that the creative is good compared to what the role is now the revenue expectations the platform expectations the level of fragmentation the expectation on how everything is going to be platform native all of the different forms of technology the fact that the audiences themselves are so culturally fragmented too like all of these problems are the things that continually come up and so I decided that I was going to build a structured learning program that addressed all of these

things in a way that is delivered like the type the best type of education that you got while you're at university and give me the central thesis of the new fundamentals of brand the central thesis of the new fundamentals of brand is that while the fundamentals of brand have not changed we need strong favorable brand associations consistently delivered trained into the minds of the audience

“so that when they're in market they remember you and they remember you for the right reasons”

we need distinctive brand assets et cetera none of that stuff has changed but the media environment and the cultural environment have changed so violently that there is a new fundamental set of skills around what I call shifting from the control mindset ruthlessly control every campaign every execution tone style form to the orchestration mindset where we have hundreds or even thousands of autonomous pieces of output operating circulating at once how do we build to coherent associations

when we no longer actually control all of those outputs the term that was that came back to me it's word I do a long time ago but a team member recently brought it up with salience just the idea of like

right person right place right message and it's like that's always been the goal of advertising

and you see you know the landscape has fractured in all these ways but also technology has enabled and actually requires you in a lot of cases to think about person to person avatar to avatar salience

“in how you put it like I think about end drama and what a big impact that's made on the meta”

landscape essentially of this idea of you know never turning ads off and having you know publishing dozens or hundreds of ads a week basically that are all speaking to different salient moments to different avatars and different times how how do you make sense of salience in in today's environment I just think like we're talking about media right like what what we are talking about the central problem in creativity right now is media it used to you know this is the conversation

happening it can this year everyone's talking about how creators of the future of marketing you know creators are not the future of marketing but they represent increasingly what the future of marketing looks like which is that the task of figuring out how to get in front of the audience has become the central problem before it used to be we had a stable media environment in which you could reliably reach the vast majority of your targets relatively simply and so media is our creative was the

key variable now the media environment is unstable and dynamic so media is the key variable and then what what you're talking about with end drama and role of this targeting stuff is that like this is why we talk about creative and media and creative being the new targeting like creative has to be conceived within the context of distribution that is the major step change is that whatever the idea is has to be thought in the context of how that idea is actually going to be

delivered um if you are still developing things in that very linear segmented campaign driven mindset

like your 5 to 10 years behind yeah it's it's funny I always think about the just the media

environment and the metaphor that comes to mind is like Walter Cronkite like back in the day Walter Cronkite was able to sort of tell you what the world was and it's funny like you look at you know how much of that was was state media at that time you don't even know and now it's the same thing creating meaning is you know whether it's political uh or whether it's uh commercial it's it's fragmented in the same way it's like this the same metaphor holds true from the way

it was with with the news and the way people create meaning about the world now it's just it's

“the exact same thing on the commercial side yeah and I think news is actually a really good way of”

looking at it because it's we're not just talking about marketing communications here we're also talking about influence so everything has fragmented into what I call the creator model um and I think I'm not talking about this literally just as creators but what I'm talking about is the fragmentation

of institutional trust into individual trust so the only reason that creators work in the first place

is that over the last 10 years we have seen the extraordinary decline in trust in institutions if you look at Edelman's trust brometer across media NGOs governments and big business basically you can see this line just going down down down every single year but we still want somewhere to place our trust and increasingly instead of having that come top down via institutions they're

Coming bottom up via individuals so it's not Walter Cronkite who is seen as a...

who's attached to an institution but it is a Tucker Carlson or a Hassan Pico or a Taylor Lorenz or Akala Scanlan all of these different figures that have very very individual so what some may say radical points of view um that build communities around that highly individual audio in video syncratic point of view so news is a matter of taste I wanted to call back on a few things that we talked about on the first podcast in in 2024 just under two years ago now you were

talking a lot about a little bit about the death of the middle which is a theme that you've kind of continued on and you're specifically named Everlane as as one of the sort of companies that is in that messy middle and they recently sold to Sheen what do you what do you see like what you see that acquisition of being indicative in the space I just think that the look if we want to talk specifically here about brand narratives you know in consumer societies brands function

as our sort of accumulated compensatory vessels and fantasies for our desires hopes fears anxieties

and so in each era and each epoch there will be certain brand narratives that are more powerful

and resonant than in others during that particular era let's call that the era of the millennial brand this idea of a generation of of people who are coming into wealth but not enough to enjoy the prosperity that their parents offered they were provided access to rent access to a particular premium lifestyle through these products that were all aspirational middle in nature they were not conventional luxury brands nor were they you know the cost codes the jellettes evolved they

were they were aspirational but accessible and that tension point was where a huge number of

“brands were successful brands were created the challenge there I think that we have experienced not”

only media fragmentation and the way that these brands communicate has changed quite significantly which we spoke about back in 2024 I think like we're now two years later in a society that no longer believes in aspiration in the same way like if I do think there I do think there is a defining temperament shift between the millennial generation and the generation that came afterwards which is as I said millennials were alive to witness the setting sun of the golden age of

capitalism and some of them did manage to abscond with quite extraordinary wealth when you think about the tech boom whereas for the generation that came after the sun had already set and now I think when you look at the economy that many young people seem to find themselves in although many many admittedly millennials as well the economic narrative right now is casino economy everything is either gambling or fraud right like the the inshitter creation the inshitterification of

everything but basically the idea is that there is no structured orderly way that you are going to

be able to get to art not even it wasn't even like a wealthy life now it's a just a good life the ability to be even somewhat comfortable is going to require you to take a big bet and so that makes it harder and harder for brands like airplane or things that lived in that aspirational middle which we're all about it's a little bit nicer than today you know like tomorrow can be better than today take incremental steps forward those narratives just don't fly anymore

to the same extent in a society where the middle increasingly does not exist where everything lives at its extremes it makes sense and that was ever lanes lane right where they were they were sort of saying you know they were being very transparent in their supply chains it was a slightly

“more ethical version of what she and is and she and absorbed them so I guess that's a sign I think”

that's that's a sign where one of your predictions was pretty accurate I think where it's like the that absorption into that that into she and really speaks to it one area that I think what I'd hold you to of one of your predictions where you said you predicted a mass unplug and offline becoming a

luxury good but this year just recently you wrote that an analog that this analog revival never

happened and it was simulation all along what what happened to the analog revival you know what like if that that that prediction I think was talking more about the idea that offline was increasingly becoming a luxury good and I do feel that that narrative really took hold certainly you can see it in the way that luxury itself is positioning these days that increasingly moving into experiential if you go if you go to the UK experiential is the only form of marketing spend that's increasing this year

“so I think like there is a sense that a digital environment created a sort of ice rink”

ice skating rink which made it very hard to build in during brand associations almost I think

Onion angelic was talking about it's like showing up too much on social media...

a luxury brand can make you look desperate so I think that there was some elements of that that

were correct where my thinking evolved was in probably taking stock more of the institutional and systemic perspective and recognizing that while there what there has been an extraordinary push a revival in interest in analog artifacts the strategist Nick Susie has been doing all of the stuff showing about how like music hardware has become fashion accessory again like there's a sense of tactility that we're looking for a aesthetic revival interest in all of these things

is not the same as an analog revival or an analog revolution in that if you're still running your life on door dash and Venmo and Chatchee BT if your banking stack is incredibly digital if cash is disappearing from the economy if we have a complete lack of funding and infrastructure for

third spaces or affordable healthcare or childcare which means that our cities themselves are

literally less diverse if we're spending less time together if we don't have all of these pieces

“of analog infrastructure then it will always remain a filter that that is what I think changed for”

me interesting so and it still could be coming we could still like there could be still a more of a back like because we're kind of like deepening into a lot of our digital tiles ties so that the backlash could still be coming down the road I think look I you know I actually yesterday I was doing a Snapchat conference presenting some of the research from my good friend Leah Karam who owns a behavioral science consultancy and London cult minds go she just

done this you know this big longitudinal study with Snapchat called the great the great brand reset where she was analyzing house sentiments towards media and social media we're changing what she found is that there's been this extraordinary inflection point between around 2021 2021 2022 in the attitudes and behaviours that people are exhibiting towards their media consumption online

like basically saying that increasingly people are moving into private social spaces and they're

asking the majority of their brand interactions to be private they're moving away from the big follow-up feeds into smaller closer connections most of them are using social for messaging these days you know the guardian published this stat earlier this year that active posting is down

“from 61 to 49% so I think like what you're seeing is just a bifurcation in that a lot of these”

like meta and tech talks for instance are i called them social entertainment platforms they have chat functions they have things that can be shareable but primarily they are entertainment and this is not controversial statement tech talk openly calls itself an entertainment platform soccer burgers previously referred to meta as the platform so the digital consumption of content so I think increasingly that just like those environments are becoming not really social at all

there instead just becoming like highly interest driven entertainment environments and they are like brands are advertising as such on them there are still I think true social media environments where the fundamental metric is connection snapchat reddit and actually Pinterest connection and expression the true premise of social media I think is still alive on them and the context in which you're advertising is a little bit different it's not this kind of like public policy and

all the time but I do think there's a bifurcation and use of behaviors and how people are starting to use these platforms that is changing this episode is brought to you by focal the AI asset management platform for creative teams everyone working in ddc uses an lm now but almost everyone uses it in their own silo your media buyer and your creative strategists each have their own chats and neither knows what the other knows in creative that can get expensive real fast

brands winning on meta and tiktok are shipping dozens of new ads a month across different angles

“and formats because that's what the algorithm rewards keeping that pace only works if the whole”

team knows what's winning try pulling up last black Friday's ads and figuring out which ones actually drove sales most teams I talk to end up digging through drive slack and a pile of spreadsheets focal ties add performance to the creative itself across every ad it ever ran in you can find any asset in seconds with AI search and run your whole production process from brief to approval in the same platform brands using focal ship four times more creative

with the same head count and get from brief to live ad 50% faster AI is already taking over the slow parts of creative work like tagging reporting and drafting briefs but an agent is only as good as the context it can access with focal mcp your whole team and the AI tools they use work from the same creative memory everything you've tested and what actually won so the next brief starts from what already worked for your brand and you can make more of what sells

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I'm one of the things we talk about on this podcast all the time is a creativ...

velocity and I realize more I talk to people in the broader marketing world that what my agency pilot

“house and what we talk about on ddc is really a very narrow a really narrow point of the broader”

marketing world but when it comes to things like your course how does your course talk about the necessity for creative velocity variation volume on a platform like meta so I don't talk specifically about platforms like I'm you know I'm a brand strategist by trade so like we definitely talk about creative velocity but more in the context of what is the internal system that you need to be able to build to deliver that and I mean that from a approvals point of view the old

way that you know let's call it the campaign mindset is two parts like I said it's linear we do strategy then we do creative then we figure out where that creative goes we do media but it's also sovereign military model of creative approvals because you know we are trying to very tightly control the associations that the market holds of us so everyone differs responsibility run it up the chain right we go through steering committees and exact presentations and

border approvals etc you know we have a friend that works from major financial company with the CEO wants to approve every radio ad that works in environments with relatively little creative output the courses basically about what happens when the expectations are amplified up to infinity what are the systems and and these are I call them qualitative systems because they're really about developing muscle where senior people are the ones that are approving the overall pattern but

it's actually juniors and mid levels that are responsible for the day-to-day approvals that is a huge step change that the people that were are now the more junior in your organization are the ones

“that are responsible for brand in a way that on the senior people were beforehand so you need to be”

able to provide a language to be able to build and monitor and strengthen this pattern over time with the extraordinary demands of creative output that we have today and the the tool lurking right beside every one of those 24 year olds is usually like a disconnected like it's not even

built always into the brand Bible of the brand like they're using a frontier AI and people's discernment

with those AI's is is a big challenge I was just a Toby Toby from Shopify just yesterday tweeted out about how he's seeing organizations who will ship you know someone send something with AI and then someone will use AI to review that and get an AI response and creating these things he's calling Slop grenades so having human discernment at all levels of your chain on the marketing team seems more critical than than ever when you have the temptation to to ship Slop and the look

and the challenge is the tools that we have been provided to date have been static brand guidelines right a brand Bible or a brand book sorry yeah we're going to strategy up front five to ten strategy slides but then there's just 80 pages of how much white space around the logo in what context can the show up versus that when we make sure it's in this context first that but that all stems from the idea that the brand is the person that is delivering that communication so hey let's make

sure that everyone in this company is delivering to this particular guideline the reality is

that the way that most brands come to market right now is mediated through armies of third parties whether that be creative influences or curators or gatekeepers whether it be through a brand collaboration or partnership or a community activation like as I said media is now the variable we're having to go out to all of these independent media companies that themselves all have their own brands you can't give them a brand guideline you can't give them a brand book like what you

need to be able to do is give them a suite of assets that can travel into their context and still make sense within that thing like system one has done a really great job of showing all the types of distinctive brand assets that work well on social but we can't assess things when those pieces of creative come back to us they can't be assessed according to a brand guideline or a brand book like there is as I said potentially infinite autonomous ways that a brand

might be displayed in context if you want a brand book the brand book is going to have to be like 20,000 pages long and even then like that doesn't rely on any judgment it's just saying like is this right according to these particular design guidelines so that as I said the skill is a qualitative skill whether it's the discernment of the judgment this feels right and what one of the

things it's like big in the course is that the answer is never going to be able we're not going to be

able to come to it like you know a lesbian at hey we need to follow the 6040 rule here or there's a future demand is 95 or five it's like it's actually all in the conversation that you're willing to

“be able to have with your team about why this does or does not feel right like I think I come”

come from coming from academia and also coming from like a debate background as understanding like the value is always in the debate and the ability to build that judgment like that is accumulated brand knowledge that over time becomes instinct and intuition but you have to be able to create

Environments that help everybody build that muscle because otherwise it's jus...

worked at the company for 40 years and she has every bit of accumulated information and she knows

everything and it's crazy how many companies have that one person that one person needs to be more people they stay with the volume of creative output that is required can that one person be AI to me it just blows my mind the amount of companies might mine included where everyone has their own AI account but we don't have a team account so we're not like all the all the things that we're learning and developing are kind of in silos and then the slack messages that we send to each other

but but I'm wondering like when it comes to creating these these brand tones or or whatever they are now brand zeitgeist or whatever can that be the job of an AI to help give people discernment or does it have to be human I think that AI can support in that the one thing that it is really

“good at is pattern recognition so yes you should have some kind of tool that holds the accumulated”

brand knowledge and you can interface with it but you can interface with and as you said you're talking about this issue before about these slopp grenades you know one of my friends has been

throwing around this word mate proxy basically people that just send things unedited on unedited

and you know as in many instances unread as well like that's a huge problem right because then what's the point of the human in the process at all like the and creative has incredibly nuanced right because at the same time like we're not just talking about messaging here that is on brand offer it also has to be compelling like I think the I think the idea of using AI particularly for copywriting creative production is quite extraordinary to me because even if you can save

money there guys media is still really freaking expensive it's as expensive as it's ever been it's getting more expensive than ever like can you really afford to to uh script on the one thing that is actually going to deliver that outsized return I understand yes the creative velocity is an issue and this certainly like the the extraordinary expectations for creative but all of that stuff even meta says right it can't just be repeats of the same thing in different fonts we need actual

genuine creative diversity that requires a certain level of creativity that a pattern recognition machine cannot provide and the other piece to that I was just in a mastermind group with a bunch of nine figure founders and they were they were talking about how it's also the cheapest it's ever been to hire an Oscar nominated screenwriter you know in in his off-hours to do your writing and if they can handle a screen an air and so are can screenplay or something they can handle

“your UGC script but you know what I mean like I think your point to you're paying more and more”

for media um so you might as well be putting your best foot forward and then the other fact is that that human talent is is quite attainable at this time as well so I might as well use it yeah absolutely yeah um you posted this week and it's something it reminds me of when you were on with uh Aves last time and she was talking about uh cooperating with culture rather than co-opting it and to me that fits in a little bit with a video you made recently about advising

brands not to make memes but to sort of like integrate and sort of become the meme and you pointed to gap how gap has done that well can you maybe elucidate that for the audience a little bit okay so we exist in a culture that is highly processed and highly mimetic in that um memes are the dominant language through which culture is like shared and spread and I don't just mean that in terms of like a word jacks and stuff what I mean is like uh a meme is an environment in which

like the original author is destroyed the author becomes the format itself but that format is then

“endlessly mutated and re-contextualized a copy of like that's what meme means right like to”

copy um and that is what our culture is now is an endless series of takes and takes and takes on takes like that was the the example that it gives basically like you don't find out about the new cat's eye video through cat's eye or their publisher you find out about it through someone doing a take of a take on a podcast where they're breaking down some particular piece of the video like all those bits of culture come hyper-process so understanding that this is the language through

culture through which culture is spread a lot of brands think the answer is like um make memes like

uh to participate in this or like you know comment on somebody else's memes or comment on someone else's page that that is participating in uh meme or mimetic culture I think the answer is that again it goes back to this idea of brands that have to be able to travel it's you have to be able to think of your brand in terms of distribution what are the elements that you are giving over that are able to be remixed by yourself but they're also potentially by other people and gap is such

a fantastic example of this because of and you know I have to call out the work that invisible dynamics is doing because um that's the uh studio that is working with gap to produce all of these

Pieces of creative and what they're done is they're effectively brought back ...

with all of these artists but that dance covers at the same time and they're bringing in all of

“these pieces of new talent and they're but they're remixed with the arts so it's always an old”

song or older song something from like the 90s or 2000s etc so it's playing on that gap 90s nostalgia but at the same time they've got a new artist or like someone new and hot that's singing

or dancing along to it and the choreography is always quite extraordinary as well so it's giving

all of these elements over that they know are going to be commented on and remixed and reappropriated into other people like the cats I get denim gap ad from last year was a really extraordinary piece of work that was reinterpreted by the communities over and over and over again it's actually how I found out about the cats I gap ad in the first place I found that about it through somebody else doing a dance cover of it yeah and you know like I I looked at the tracksuit data like

gap has been like was doing really well like the particularly among young people like in their 20s and 30s like really really extraordinary not only increases in awareness but like all the way through preference and consideration too you talked a little bit about tracksuit

the platform that you your partners in on our last podcast how's that platform going and maybe

what are some of the the the the evolutions of of what that's become look at tracksuit is increasingly moving to a brand tracking platform that is queryable so where the insights that you have been provided you know previously like how are you tracking on these associations how are you doing from awareness through the preference and now becoming like many things like many other things a conversation that you can have so you can extract some insights from it and they also just bought

hall which is an AI search branching company so rather than just being able to see how your brand is doing because tracksuit polls it has like live customer data now you're also going to be able to understand how it's showing up within the context of AI search like one of machines how how machine legible is your brand effectively like those are the the major changes that have happened over the past couple of years and also I now own equity in tracksuit too that's a cool transparency

full transparency yeah that's awesome seems like a good partnership um it wouldn't be a podcast if I didn't bring up Sydney Sweeney I just I just message you the other day on a post that you'd

“made I was looking forward I think it was a story so it had already gone and I I'm loved even”

make you comment on it because you you really what perfectly articulate articulated like what a sort of callous act of of rage baiting really like how that ad it seems to the the the betting ad whatever company it's it's for the no big ad just seems perfectly designed to rage bait and it's done extremely well the it's like the amount of headlines that are going on to this day from that that ad are incredible what what was your take on on that ad I moved through phases the

look first off I think the ad is incredibly boring right if taken at face value it's an incredibly boring ad it's not terribly creative um she's done it to us before I think a year ago it was exactly the same thing you know now the sex and the sensationalism has been dialed up further the first you Jennings I dialed down yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the potential you Jennings were dialed down but I think like that if we can acknowledge that like the the naked purpose of this was rage bait

I by first instinct was we've seen it before why are we not inoculated you know every other time when we catch a virus the first time we are usually more resistant to the infection the second time

around where are we never known yeah where I've been coming to over the last couple of days is that

“we allow ourselves to be rage baited because it lets everybody else have a take and that's what”

people really want to have so we let Sydney Swiny rage bait us because she's part of a media ecosystem that then allows everyone else to write their take on women in sports or gambling or addiction or this or you know I saw someone use it as a jumping off point the other day it's quite extraordinary to say you know where where all these people that when I saw someone the other day use it as a jumping off point to talk about trans women in sport and oh you weren't saying anything

when men pretending to be women were trying to get into the sport like everyone is allowed to have a take on this because Sydney Swiny has such universally defined character flaws it's almost like Trump and it was really reminded me of what Michelle Wolf said at the White House correspondence but dinner back in 2018 when she was talking to all of these people he said you claim to hate him but I think he actually helped you he helped you sell your books and your panel shows you know

TVs and your movies etc and it feels the same with this which is that we actually allow ourselves to be rage baited because we get something out of it and so Sydney Swiny is actually it's it's it's it's a check on us as a society if we really wanted this stuff to go away if we were really

Outraged by it all we were had to do was ignore it if it was ignored deemed a...

put in the drawer then we would you know if we weren't talking about it we wouldn't be talking

about it right but there is a compulsive need to have a take that like that is you know if it's quite meta like my take on the text really because it was it's a it's a very naked rage bait and media campaign that has absolutely achieved its goals because it knew that we couldn't

“help ourselves and this is her brand now right this is like I think her movies is kind of”

since then have not done extremely well but her brand is like her the annual rage bait she gets she gets drafted up into for for ads which is like what's it going to be next year Super Bowl I love it yeah so look I mean yeah probably look at couple things one is I think the the most interesting story out of all of this is that she is an investor in this company which is you know after years of having other people use her body for their own surplus she's like well

I guess in this instance I should at least get to be my own pimple and so I think that's actually the interesting story that that comes out of all of this but yeah for me what the really interesting thing is is again like we know what's about to happen but we engage in it anyway because it allows us to fulfill our own aims and goals as part of it all right plug the course here where we've got a couple thousand uh D to C brand founders CMO's uh e-commerce directors

listening to this podcast talk to me a little bit like I think you had some neat methodology you're background in academics talk to me about like how the the philosophy with which you put this course together as a learning experience because I think there's something interesting there the course is designed to replicate what you would get from the best uni experience that you had not the bad ones the good ones and trust me I taught a lot of bad uni classes as well as some

good ones in that it's online but it is live sessions they are recorded as well in which you do get some interaction with myself as the teacher as well as um as well as with your cohort you are also placed into studio groups of five to six people that are in your time zone and you meet them fortnight later critique one another's work and advance the thinking you're given readings that are not you know we give you readings that are like five pages each week but then we also give

your podcast with a bunch of different brand leaders so we're talking with people like Jackie Jantos from the CEO of Hinge we're talking to Charlie Smith who's the chief brand officer of nothing like we've got some really really exciting brand leaders so you can listen to them on your commute that take the course concepts into the real world with brand leaders that are building stuff today not sound like dusty apple case study from 20 years ago and so there are

all of these different elements that are really there to and then we've got you know Q&A's one on ones and drop in time as well you can like have conversations with us and like what you're wrestling with too so it's meant to be a quite it's not a passive course the lessons out ones are you know the the call lesson of the courses that brand these days is all in the doing not just in the strategy itself and so the lessons of the course are ones that you

“actively do not just passively watch that's what we really believe great education is and”

since myself my business partner is a service designer and a learning designer as well and then we also have a teaching assistant too so it replicates and I as the lecturer so replicates like a university subject how I've seen that does that pedagogy designed basically through my education career that is the the way that we want those lessons to actually be learned I think that's uh it's much more compelling than just watching a bunch of videos and yeah I've worked in education and

produce courses and things like the people also buy courses and they that's like job done they'll buy a course as of course that isn't interactive in the way this one is and they'll be like okay I've consumed even if they don't ever watch it it's like that's sort of like scratched the

itch for them they've bought the course and so I've always been more interested in educational

things that are yeah that are that have this group aspect to them that have this real time aspect to them I my friends I cut 30 have done a really good job I think with uh with the creative course that they've that they've done so I'm eager to see how this one does you sold out your first tranche of seats for this one right yeah yeah so early bird seats now sold out we've got about we're sitting in around 50% remaining so far super cool well this podcast we're going to

rush this one out in the next couple weeks to give people a chance to check it out you can go to

“the new fundamentals dot co if you want to work with Eugene on figuring out how you can orchestrate”

coherence out of chaos thanks for coming back on the podcast today you do just a lot of fun and

all as always go follow huge brand strat did you ever mean that as like a true is that like a

trumpian phrase ever like huge it's huge brand strat probably not a in the same way that we develop

Handles that we never think are going to get to the size and scale well now I...

I think it's I think it's kind of a silly handle to be honest but it's a brand asset so what I'm

“going to do so go follow huge brand strat alright man have a great rest of your day and we'll talk to”

you again soon thanks yeah thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber

to our newsletter you can do that right now at direct to consumer all one word dot co I'm Eric Dick

“and this has been the deities he podcast we'll see you next time holiday starts early on Walmart”

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