Your tasks this week:
1. Be ambitious: Have ambition for the work that you’re doing, if you don’t who will?
2. Kindness is a superpower: Be nice. Everyone is doing their best.
3. Preparation is not a little thing it’s everything: Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Prepare before the thing that needs doing. Always.
4. Take intentional breaks: Take a few moments to inhale for 7 seconds-hold for 4 seconds-exhale for 7. Do this 3x in the morning, afternoon, and evening.
5. Keep blood flowing: Get to the gym 💪 or get to a workout class 🤸♂️or run a few miles 🏃♂️ Get (and keep) those vibes high. 💫 (It’s a form of resilience against the tidal waves)
“God laid down this law, saying: if you want some good, get it for yourself.” - Epictetus, Discourses, 1.29.4
ONE BRAND STRATEGY THING I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT
Brands should stop doing big planning cycles with big creative ideas, but instead build an incremental creative test and learn path towards doing their BIG IDEA. We’re no longer in a linear only communications ecosystem, and brands are leaving value on the table by planning like it’s still the 1990s.
Give this 100 second clip a listen as Eugene is speaking to a super power every brands should consider when it comes to 2026 brand creative that can get even more famous.
The tl;dr that I think can speak to the future of agencies & brand building (or right freaking now)
“Back is what the brand strategy plan for that brand now and how is it different than we traditionally used to plan. [We] first off is [need to] leave behind that idea of the like the big Ad, I think that's that's the first thing is like why a lot of these ad agencies are struggling is they still think about it like that.”
“Of interesting conversations [I am having] about what it means to bottom up brand build and inductively brand build rather than deductively. So rather than you spend months on developing a strategy, a persona and then 12 months from now you might get something out into the real world. Test propositions through creator marketing, test propositions through performance marketing and stuff that works in those contexts. Start to bring that upwards into a little bit more creative marketing, then maybe owned marketing and then you build the brand platform up against that. So you build it up through.”
^^That right there is how the smartest companies in the world are doing it^^.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You are in a constant dialogue with what is and what was, and the closer you can tune in to that discussion, the better you can serve the work before you.” - Rick Rubin
RECENT MOODS
Go forth.
Stay safe.
Ride the wave.
-Mitch