The generation that grew up with an iPad — because parents in 2012 had no idea what they were handing their children — is now between 16 and 22. Working in your agencies. Buying your products. Your target audience.

And everyone’s treating them like a malfunction.

“They have no attention span anymore.”

No. They have a very precise attention span for things they find relevant — and zero tolerance for everything else. That’s not a deficit. That’s a higher quality standard. And it’s about to become your problem.

The Myth of the Broken Attention Span

The “8-second attention span” statistic that gets cited in every marketing conference deck — the one that supposedly proves Gen Z can’t focus — was from a 2015 Microsoft study that has since been widely disputed and was never specifically about Gen Z. It measured time-to-task-switching on screens, not cognitive attention capacity.

This generation watches long-form content at rates that would surprise most brand managers. Joe Rogan’s podcast regularly runs 3-4 hours. His audience skews young. MrBeast videos run 20-40 minutes and generate hundreds of millions of views from the same demographic everyone claims can’t focus. Critical Role — people watching other people play Dungeons & Dragons — runs 4+ hours per episode and has built a fanbase devoted enough to fund a $9 million Kickstarter.

This is not a generation with a broken attention span. This is a generation with a broken tolerance for content that doesn’t earn their attention.

What Changed and Why It Matters

The iPad generation grew up in a content environment with an effectively infinite supply of things competing for their attention. YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Twitch, Discord, Reddit — every one of them algorithmically optimised to serve the next thing the moment the current thing stops being compelling.

What that environment produced is not shorter attention spans. It produced faster and more accurate filtering. This generation learned — through thousands of hours of practice — to identify within the first two seconds whether something is worth their time. They’re not impatient. They’re efficient.

The two-second window isn’t a bug. It’s a skill they’ve developed through more repetitions than any previous generation.

And most brand content fails that two-second test. Not because the brand is bad. Because the content was built on assumptions about how audiences engage that are fifteen years out of date.

The Brief That's Still Being Written for Someone Else

A brand writes a brief. The brief includes audience insights — demographics, psychographics, maybe some cultural references. The creative team develops concepts. The work gets made.

And somewhere in that process, the assumptions about how the audience receives content are based on research that predates the content environment this audience actually lives in.

The brief is written for someone who reads linearly. Who has patience for setup. Who will sit through thirty seconds of brand before getting to the point. Who encounters content in defined moments — watching TV, reading a magazine, sitting at a desktop computer.

This audience doesn’t exist anymore. Or more precisely: it exists, but it’s not 16-22.

What Actually Earns Attention

The hook is the content. Not the setup for the content. The thing itself, immediately. MrBeast’s videos start with the most dramatic element within the first ten seconds. Whether or not that’s your brand’s aesthetic, the structural principle applies universally.

Earned intimacy over produced polish. High production value reads as corporate, not premium. What reads as premium is specificity, honesty, and the sense that something real is being said. The creator who admits uncertainty outperforms the brand that projects perfection.

Participation over broadcast. The content formats this generation spends the most time with — gaming streams, podcast conversations, comment-driven YouTube — all involve some form of participation or the feeling of participation.

Specificity over universality. Generic brand statements about broadly positive things — community, progress, together — register as noise. The more specific, the more it signals that someone actually thought about this.

What This Means for Briefs

The brief needs to change before the creative does. The “how will people encounter this content” section needs to be honest: not “our target audience is on Instagram” but “our target audience is on Instagram while simultaneously receiving notifications from six other apps, having just watched forty minutes of algorithmically optimised content, and with a thumb that has a well-developed sense of when something is worth stopping for.”

That’s a different brief. It produces different work.

In five years, the iPad Kids will be 21-27. Core career-starting demographic. Significant purchasing power. The most important cohort for brand loyalty establishment — because the brands people adopt in their early twenties tend to persist.

Your Target Audience Has Left the Chat

The brands that keep writing briefs for an audience that reads linearly and waits patiently will keep making work that disappears in two seconds.

I’ve sat through approximately four hundred of those briefs. They described the target audience as “digitally savvy millennials” while the actual target audience was on TikTok making fun of exactly that kind of brief. The irony was not lost on me.

Neither was the invoice.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

“Vibe marketing” is having a moment. The premise: you define the emotional tone and brand context, AI handles the production. Founders and small teams operate at agency speed. Big brands move faster than their org charts should allow. Everyone wins.

Except for the part where most of the content produced this way sounds exactly alike.

What Vibe Marketing Actually Is

The term is borrowed from vibe coding — a software development approach where you describe what you want at a high level and let AI handle the implementation. Applied to marketing: you bring the brand intuition, the cultural awareness, the sense of what feels right. AI brings the production capacity.

In theory, this is a genuine evolution. The constraint on good marketing was never ideas — it was the cost and time of production. If AI removes that constraint, the value of good ideas and good judgment increases.

In practice, most vibe marketing looks like this: someone opens ChatGPT, types “write me five Instagram captions for a coffee brand that’s modern and authentic,” gets five captions, picks the one that sounds least like a robot, posts it.

The result is content that is generic, fluent, and completely interchangeable with the output of every other coffee brand that ran the same prompt.

The Actual Problem

Vibe marketing has a premise that sounds right but contains a hidden assumption that breaks it.

The premise: if you bring a clear brand vibe, AI can execute it at scale.

The hidden assumption: you have a clear brand vibe.

Most brands don’t. Or more precisely: most brands have a described vibe — documented in brand guidelines, expressed in adjective lists, captured in “our brand is like a knowledgeable friend” positioning statements — but they don’t have an operational vibe. They don’t have the specific vocabulary choices, the structural patterns, the specific references that are in and the ones that are out.

A described vibe produces average output when fed into AI. An operational vibe — specific, defined, tested against real examples — produces output that actually sounds like something.

What Vibe Marketing Reveals About Your Brand

The quality of your AI output is a mirror for the quality of your brand definition.

If your AI content sounds generic, your brand is generic. Not because your product is bad or your team isn’t talented — because you haven’t done the work of making your brand specific enough to be distinct.

Before AI, you could produce content that felt distinctive because skilled human writers would bring their own voice to your vague brief. That human layer was masking a brand definition problem. AI removes the human layer and shows you exactly how well-defined your brand actually is.

For some brands, the output is revealing. For others, it’s devastating.

The Efficiency Paradox

If you can produce ten pieces of content in the time it used to take to produce one — which is approximately what vibe marketing enables — you’re publishing ten times as much. If that content is generic, you’re publishing ten times as much generic content.

Generic content at scale doesn’t cancel out. It compounds. Every piece reinforces the audience’s sense that this brand has nothing specific to say. It trains them to expect nothing. It makes it harder, not easier, to cut through when you do have something worth saying.

The brands winning with AI-assisted content production aren’t winning because they’re producing more. They’re winning because they had something specific before they scaled it.

What Creative Direction Actually Means Now

Vibe marketing was supposed to democratise creative production. And it has — the production cost of content has dropped dramatically.

What it hasn’t democratised is creative judgment. The ability to evaluate whether something is good. To know when AI output is close but wrong in a specific way. To brief AI in a way that produces output worth using.

This is what creative direction means now. Not “I have great ideas.” The ability to work in the space between what you want and what the machine produces — to close that gap through precise specification, iterative refinement, and judgment about when you’ve arrived.

How to Actually Do This Well

Build an operational brand voice document, not an aspirational one. An aspirational brand voice document describes what you want to sound like. An operational one gives examples of what you do sound like and what you don’t, with annotations explaining why. It’s usable as an AI brief, not just a creative inspiration document.

Develop a testing protocol for AI output. Would this be immediately recognisable as your brand without the logo? Does it contain phrases that could have been written for any brand in your category? Is there anything in it that only you would say? If the answers are no, no, and no — it needs more work.

Treat your AI output as a first draft, not a final product. The brands doing this well are using AI to eliminate blank-page paralysis and produce raw material. The creative work still happens. It’s just happening on a different kind of input.

B*tch Don’t K*ll my Vibe

I’ve sat through the pitch where an agency presented their “AI-powered creative process” — and every example in the deck looked identical to the last three pitches from three different agencies using the same tool. Nobody in the room said anything. The client nodded. The pitch was won. The work that followed was perfectly adequate and completely forgettable. That’s not an AI problem. That’s a vibe problem. And it was there before the AI.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

Mastercard. Target. Skyy Vodka. Citi. Nissan. PepsiCo. All gone. Out of NYC Pride sponsorship, out of the parades, out of visibility. 37% of Americans have observed a measurable brand pullback from Pride in 2026. Tampa Pride announced a one-year hiatus because corporations dropped their sponsorships en masse. Pittsburgh Pride expects 30-40% of the sponsorship income it received a few years ago.

But here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud: the same brands that disappeared from the parade are still targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Just quietly. Lower visibility. Less visible to anyone who isn’t the target audience. They want the revenue. They just don’t want to be in the photo.

Schrödinger’s brand courage. Simultaneously in and out.

How We Got Here

What started as a backlash reaction in 2023 — Bud Light, Target, coordinated boycotts — is now structurally embedded in brand strategy. The Bud Light situation cost the brand roughly $1.4 billion in lost sales in 2023 alone. Target’s stock dropped 12% in the weeks following their Pride collection controversy. For publicly traded companies with quarterly reporting obligations, those numbers have a way of shaping future decisions.

Brands are now modelling not just ROI but explicitly “backlash exposure”: how likely is this campaign to attract coordinated harassment, disinformation, or political pressure? That’s a new calculation field that didn’t exist three years ago. And it has a name in some boardrooms: “political risk assessment for brand activations.”

The math is bleak but rational from a shareholder value perspective: Pride sponsorship costs money, attracts attention, and — in the current climate — comes with measurable downside risk. Retargeting the same audience through programmatic ads costs less, generates less visibility, and carries essentially zero backlash risk because nobody takes screenshots of an ad served at 2am.

This is what brand cowardice looks like when it’s been optimised for efficiency.

The Brands Doing the Opposite

Apple. Pride Collection on the homepage. Clear framing. No apology. They’ve done this every year for over a decade and they’re not stopping because the political climate shifted.

Abercrombie & Fitch. Pride is the first thing you see when you open their website. Not a banner. The homepage.

Ben & Jerry’s. Still loud. Still specific. Still making actual political statements rather than vague gestures toward “inclusion.”

What do these brands have in common? They’ve built their positioning around specific values over years — not as a seasonal activation but as a consistent brand posture. That consistency is now their competitive advantage because it’s credible in a way that a one-time June sponsorship never was.

The brands that are pulling back mostly never had that consistency. They were doing Pride because it was popular. Now it’s less popular in certain quarters, and they’re leaving because they were never really there.

What "Backlash Exposure" Does to Creative Strategy

Here’s what’s genuinely new and genuinely concerning: the introduction of backlash risk modelling into creative decision-making processes changes what gets made.

When legal, compliance, and risk teams have a formal seat at the creative table — which they increasingly do — the output shifts. Not dramatically. Subtly. Ideas get softened. Edges get removed. The brief gets rewritten to “generally supportive of inclusion” rather than specifically, visibly supportive of a community.

This is the mechanism by which courage leaves brand work. Not through one big decision. Through a hundred small ones, each individually defensible, collectively producing work that stands for nothing.

Every Creative Director reading this has been in that room. The brief that started as something real and ended as something safe. The campaign that lost its edge somewhere between the first review and the final approval. The work that by the time it ran, nobody recognised anymore.

The Pride pullback of 2026 is that process applied at scale, with institutional backing.

The Strategic Case for Consistency

Edelman’s Trust Barometer has documented for years that consumers — particularly younger consumers — increasingly make purchase decisions based on brand values alignment. 58% of consumers buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values. 60% want CEOs to speak out on social issues.

The LGBTQ+ community and their allies represent a significant consumer segment with above-average brand loyalty to companies that have demonstrated consistent support. Abandoning visible support doesn’t make a brand neutral in the eyes of this segment. It makes the brand a brand that left.

And brand memory works asymmetrically. Negative brand experiences — including watching a brand you supported walk away under pressure — are encoded more deeply and retained longer than positive ones.

What This Means for the Agencies and CDs Working on These Briefs

When a client pulls back from a Pride activation — or waters down a campaign to the point of meaninglessness — the agency and the creative team are left holding work they know is compromised. Sometimes you fight for it. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes the brief never even gets written because someone upstream already made the call.

The question for everyone in a creative role right now isn’t just about Pride. It’s about what you do when the client’s risk calculus produces briefs that contradict the brand values you’ve been briefed to express. Is the brand you’re working for willing to stand behind a position when it costs something? Because if the answer is no, then the “values” in the brand guidelines aren’t values. They’re aspirational copy that applies until it doesn’t.

Courage, Billed Monthly

I’ve watched brands spend six figures on Pride activations in June and quietly pull their sponsorships by July when the quarterly numbers came in.

At some point the pattern stops being surprising and starts being the expected behaviour. Which is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve written this week.

Or the most accurate. Probably both.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

Every conversation about AI and marketing careers eventually arrives at the same place: a vague sense of threat, followed by reassurance, followed by a list of “skills that will remain valuable.”

The reassurance is mostly true. The list is mostly wrong.

The Wrong Question

“Which marketing jobs will disappear because of AI?”

This is the question people are asking. It’s the wrong question because it frames the situation as binary — job exists or doesn’t exist — when what’s actually happening is more granular and more interesting.

The right question: which specific capabilities within marketing roles are being devalued, and which are becoming more valuable? And what does that mean for how you invest your professional development time right now?

Those are answerable questions. The answers are uncomfortable but specific.

What's Being Devalued

Execution skills that AI can replicate at lower cost and higher speed are being devalued. This is happening now, not in five years.

Template-based copywriting. If your value proposition includes writing social copy, email subject lines, product descriptions, or ad variations — and if your process involves applying a format to a brief — AI does this faster and cheaper. Not better in every case, but well enough and at a cost structure that changes the economics.

Brief summarisation and report formatting. Junior roles that involve synthesising information from multiple sources into structured documents are being automated. The task isn’t disappearing — the human involvement in it is decreasing.

First-draft production. The expectation that a first draft requires significant human time is eroding. This changes what “senior” means in a team context, because the leverage of being able to produce a fast first draft is worth less when AI can do it in thirty seconds.

Channel-specific execution. Knowing how to format content for specific platforms, write platform-native copy, or adapt creative assets — these were skills that justified roles. They still matter but they’re less scarce.

What's Becoming More Valuable

Judgment. The ability to evaluate whether something is good. Not technically correct — actually good. Resonant, specific, true. AI produces output. Judgment determines whether that output is worth using.

Cultural reading. The ability to understand what a moment means culturally, what the correct brand posture in that moment is, and what the risks are of getting it wrong. AI systems — trained on past data — systematically underperform on this for current events.

Brief writing. The quality of AI output is directly limited by the quality of the brief it receives. Writing a brief that produces genuinely good AI output is a skill. It’s becoming more valuable as AI output becomes cheaper — because the bottleneck shifts from production to specification.

System thinking. Understanding how campaigns, channels, and audiences interact at a systems level. AI can optimise within defined parameters. It can’t define the parameters or evaluate whether they’re the right ones.

Client and stakeholder management. This remains a human skill. It’s not being automated. It’s becoming a larger proportion of the value that agencies and in-house teams deliver.

The Data Behind the Discomfort

EMarketer’s 2026 marketing technology report: 46% of marketers are now using AI to scale creative production. 33% use AI across creative, media, and measurement simultaneously. And those same teams report believing that up to 30% of their total marketing budget is wasted — because nobody can clearly attribute what’s working.

AI has enabled teams to produce more, faster. And the teams producing more, faster, have less clarity about what any of it is doing. The output has scaled. The understanding hasn’t.

This is the actual crisis in marketing right now. Not that AI is taking jobs. That AI is enabling the production of large volumes of content without a corresponding increase in the judgment required to evaluate whether that content is working, why, and what to do differently.

What to Do About It

Invest in developing taste, not just skills. Taste is the foundation of judgment. Make a habit of looking at campaigns you didn’t make and writing down specifically why they work or don’t. Not “I like it” — why, at a structural level, it succeeds or fails.

Learn to write briefs for AI, not just for humans. The brief that produces good AI output needs to be more explicit about tone, more specific about what to avoid, more precise about context. Practice this. It has a learning curve. People who develop it early will have a significant advantage.

Develop a point of view. In an environment where execution is cheap and abundant, perspective is scarce. Start now.

AI Didn't Take Your Job. Your Job Description Did.

I’ve watched an entire generation of junior marketers get hired for their ability to produce content fast — and then watched that same ability become a commodity within eighteen months of widespread AI adoption. Nobody warned them. Nobody updated the job descriptions. And the senior leaders who built those roles are now in meetings discussing “AI strategy” while their junior teams quietly wonder if they’re being replaced by the tools they were just told to adopt. The least we can do is be honest about what’s happening.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

There’s a moment in every successful brand story that’s unavoidable. The moment where the thing that made you big starts to cap your ceiling.

Duolingo is right in the middle of it.

In April 2026, CMO Manu Orssaud told Business Insider the company’s output — once “80% unhinged, 20% wholesome” — will now become more balanced. More measured. Less chaos.

For a brand that literally built its identity on internet madness, that’s a remarkable statement. For anyone who understands brand management, it’s an instructive one.

What Duolingo built — and why it worked

Duolingo did something over the last six years that most brands fail to do: develop a real personality. Not a described personality. A lived one.

The green owl became one of the decade’s most recognisable internet characters. Not through classic advertising — through consistent, escalating, sometimes completely unhinged social media storytelling. The owl that threatens. The owl that suffers. The owl that makes morally questionable decisions to enforce learning goals.

The results were real. Duolingo became the world’s most recognised language learning app. Market value grew by over 6 billion dollars during the chaos-strategy years. Over 100 million active users.

And that’s exactly where the problem starts.

The scaling paradox of brand personality

Orssaud explained the dilemma himself: “There isn’t that much room to grow in terms of audience and impressions we can drive from our own account.”

Honest statement. One more brands should make.

What he’s saying: the chaos strategy has reached its natural growth limit. The type of attention that deranged owl content generates attracts a specific type of audience — and that audience is largely already there.

To grow further — new age groups, new markets, new use cases — Duolingo needs a personality that works more broadly. Less niche. Less internet-specific. More universal.

Logical. And still risky.

Why brand pivots so often fail

Here’s what typically happens when a brand changes its personality:

The existing audience feels betrayed. They identified with the old personality — that was their reason for staying. When it shifts, they lose their reason.

The new audience doesn’t see the change. For them, Duolingo is still “that app with the crazy owl.” Brand reputation is inert. It doesn’t change because a CMO gives an interview.

And management interprets the absence of growth as a sign the new personality isn’t working — when it’s actually just the latency of perception change.

The result: brands that pivot often get punished from both sides. Too new for the old fans, too old for the new ones.

What Duolingo is getting right — and why the risk remains

The positive first: this move comes from a position of strength, not weakness. They’re not pivoting because the old strategy failed. They’re pivoting because it’s reached its potential. Right moment.

The change is gradual, not abrupt. “80% unhinged, 20% wholesome” becomes something more balanced — not “0% unhinged, 100% corporate.” That’s smart. Evolution rather than revolution.

The risk remains: brand personality works as a whole. “Less chaos” doesn’t automatically mean “more trust.” It can also mean “less memorable.”

The critical question — for Duolingo and every brand in a similar position: what is the core that remains when the execution layer changes?

For Duolingo, that’s probably: we take language learning seriously but not ourselves too much. Whether that survives without the chaotic owl will become clear in the next 18 months.

Range vs. signature

A strong brand signature is an enormous advantage in the build phase. It makes you recognisable. It gives people a reason to like or reject you — both are fine. Indifference is death.

But it’s also a trap. Every signature has a ceiling. At some point, the people that signature appeals to have found you. Everyone else never will.

The brands that last — Apple, Nike, Red Bull — have range. A clear brand core that stays recognisable, but execution flexibility that serves different audiences, contexts, moments. Nike sounds different in an Olympic spot than in a sneaker drop. Both are unmistakably Nike.

A strong identity with the ability to express itself in multiple forms. Not a single signature. That’s the goal.

Three questions worth asking after this

What do people who haven’t found you yet recognise you by? Not your existing audience — they already know you. What’s the first thing someone understands on first encounter? If the answer is narrow and niche, you have a scaling problem that isn’t visible yet.

What’s left when you remove the most specific execution layer? For Duolingo: what remains when you take away the chaos owl? If the answer is “nothing,” that’s a critical signal. The execution layer is the brand — and that’s dangerous.

Have you explicitly defined what can change and what cannot? Which elements of your brand personality are core — unchangeable, because they constitute the identity? Which are execution — changeable, because they’re one of many possible expressions of the core? Without this distinction, all changes will either be too big or too small.

My humble look at what comes next

I think Duolingo will navigate this well. Not because it’s being managed perfectly — but because the brand substance beneath it is strong enough. The owl can get quieter. The idea behind it is robust.

What interests me: how many other brands will read this wrong?

The easy misinterpretation: “Even Duolingo dialed back the chaos, so we should also become tamer.” Wrong lesson. The right lesson: Duolingo spent six years consistently developing a real personality, grew with it until it reached its ceiling, and is now evolving from a position of strength.

Brands that don’t yet have a real personality shouldn’t be thinking about evolution. Think about identity first.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

There’s a question I’d like to ask in every brand strategy meeting but usually don’t, because it sounds too direct:

What happens between your campaigns?

Big idea. Big launch. Media pressure. Awareness peak. And then?

Usually: silence. Maybe a few social posts. A newsletter that comes too rarely. And the next campaign flighting starts from scratch.

That used to be a complete strategy. Today it’s the first step — and all the others are missing.

Why the campaign model no longer works alone

The classic campaign model was built for a media world where attention was scarce and predictable. TV primetime, print ads, billboard seasons. You buy attention, you lose it, you buy it again.

In a fragmented, algorithmically driven environment, that logic doesn’t hold as a standalone strategy anymore.

Brand loyalty forms differently now. Not through repeated exposure to a campaign — through continuous relevance. A brand’s ability to remain part of daily life beyond the campaign period.

The difference between a brand someone knows and a brand someone returns to lies exactly there: in the in-between.

What community actually means — and what it doesn't

Before we go further: community isn’t a synonym for Instagram followers. It’s not a Discord server nobody enters. It’s not a “Join our community” button on the website.

Real brand community is the infrastructure that maintains brand loyalty between purchase decisions. The system that ensures your audience doesn’t just look up during a campaign — but regularly returns to the brand because there’s a reason to.

According to Wynter’s 2026 B2B Buyer Research, 84% of B2B buyers now use AI tools for vendor discovery — up from 24% twelve months earlier. The first encounter with your brand increasingly happens not through a campaign but through an AI-generated context. And what the AI says about you is shaped by your presence over time. Not a one-time media burst.

The campaign model optimises for a moment. Community optimises for reputation over time.

Two examples that show what it looks like when you actually mean it

Nike Run Club

Not an app. A community infrastructure embedded into the daily lives of millions of runners.

Every time someone completes a run, Nike is there. Not as advertising. As a service. As a companion. Part of the routine.

That’s radical brand strategy disguised as a product. The big campaigns — the athlete spots, the cultural moments — land on an audience that already has Nike in their daily life. No warm-up needed. The foundation is already there.

Nike customers who use Run Club have a significantly higher lifetime value than those reached only through campaigns. The community isn’t the marketing channel. It’s the loyalty mechanism.

Red Bull Media House

Red Bull has built something most brands don’t even consider possible: their own media infrastructure.

Red Bull Media House produces content that — without brand markers — could come from a real sports outlet. Red Bull TV. Magazines. Events that become cultural moments. Athletes who lead communities that belong to Red Bull.

Red Bull doesn’t need an advertising campaign to stay relevant. They’re permanently embedded in the culture of their categories. Campaigns amplify that presence. They don’t create it.

Both examples have something in common: the community infrastructure was built for years before it delivered obvious returns. That’s the uncomfortable part.

Why most brands don't do it — even though they know they should

No brand strategist will tell you community building is unimportant. They’ll nod. They’ll agree. And then they’ll plan the annual budget for campaign flighting again.

Three real reasons:

Time horizon vs. reporting rhythm. Community building pays off in years. Marketing budgets are evaluated in quarters. Anyone responsible for a quarterly result doesn’t invest in something that pays off in three years.

Unclear attribution. A campaign has ROAS. Community has brand health scores, NPS, a feeling. Those are real metrics — they’re just harder to communicate than “We achieved 3x ROAS.” And what can’t be measured doesn’t get budgeted.

Wrong understanding of what community is. Many brands interpret it as another channel. A Discord here, a loyalty programme there. Community isn’t a channel. It’s a relationship architecture. And relationship architecture requires real value — not engagement tricks.

Three things you can actually do now

Identify the ritual. Every successful community is based on a recurring moment that confirms belonging. Nike Run Club: the completed run. Red Bull: the event calendar. What could the ritual be for your brand? Not a one-time event — a recurrence.

Build something that works without a campaign. The test is simple: if there were no media budget tomorrow, would your audience still have a reason to stay in contact with you? If the answer is no, you haven’t made community concrete yet.

Treat content as a service, not advertising. Service content solves a problem, answers a question, gives something back. Advertising content communicates what the brand thinks is great about itself. Your audience knows the difference. Usually better than you do.

The sober truth about time horizons

Nike Run Club has existed since 2006. Red Bull Media House was founded in the early 2000s. The returns we see today are the result of two decades of consistent infrastructure.

That doesn’t mean you have to wait 20 years. But community is not a quarterly project.

The brands that will have a real competitive advantage through community in the next five years have already started. Not this year. Not with the next budget cycle.

It’s not too late. But it gets later every time you wait for another quarterly report.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

On March 12, 2026, Disney+ rolled out a feature that looks, at first glance, like a reflex. A TikTok feed. Vertical videos. Swipe mechanic. Nothing we haven’t seen before.

Then you read more carefully. And you realise this isn’t a reflex. It’s a strategic repositioning of the entire product — and a signal that goes far beyond Disney.

What Verts is — and what it isn't

Verts is a new vertical video feed in the Disney+ mobile app. A dedicated icon in the navigation bar. Swipeable. Scenes and moments from the Disney catalogue — 100 years of storytelling, distilled into short vertical clips. From there, directly to the Watchlist or into full playback.

Disney tested the feature on ESPN first, since August 2025. The engagement data apparently convinced them. Global expansion is planned.

What it isn’t: a social media play. Disney isn’t competing with TikTok for user-generated content dominance. What Disney is doing is more fundamental — they’re integrating the behavioural pattern of vertical scrolling into their own content infrastructure. Coming to where the thumbs already are.

EVP of Product Management Erin Teague put it plainly: “The most important thing is to meet people where they are.” Gen Z and Gen Alpha expect this. Portrait format, mobile-first, no barrier to entry.

Why this is strategic, not reactive

Disney isn’t the first streaming company to introduce vertical video. Netflix launched something similar last year. The difference lies in strategic depth.

At CES 2026, Disney announced what Verts is meant to be long-term: a “must-visit daily destination.” Not a feature. A behavioural change goal. Disney+ doesn’t want to be the streaming subscription you open weekly. It wants to be embedded in your daily media consumption.

That’s a direct answer to a fundamental problem: streaming platforms have an engagement problem. Users open them when they actively want to watch something — not as a passive discovery platform. TikTok, Reels, and Shorts have thoroughly conditioned passive discovery behaviour. Most streaming platforms have had nothing to counter it.

Verts is Disney’s answer.

Even more interesting: Disney has already announced that Verts will include creator content. And that they’re working with OpenAI’s Sora on AI-generated content flowing into the platform. Three layers: archive content, creator content, AI-generated content — all in a vertical feed designed to establish discovery as a daily habit.

Why everyone else will follow

After the ESPN success and the Disney+ launch, the question isn’t whether other platforms will introduce similar features. The question is when and with what depth.

Netflix has already started. Amazon Prime probably isn’t far behind. Apple TV+ has an interface design problem that Verts will address sooner or later.

Something I haven’t seen in the industry before: the major streaming platforms will all become vertical video destinations. Which means the difference between a “streaming service” and a “social media platform” will shrink for the user.

For brands and content creators, that’s a shift with real implications.

What this means for Creative Directors

Vertical has been “a format you should also be doing” for years. On most brand checklists. Produced with varying degrees of seriousness. Usually: the horizontally produced content gets cropped and called the “vertical version.”

That hasn’t worked and won’t work.

Vertical isn’t a format. It’s an interface. And the interface determines how stories are told, how attention is earned, how information is processed.

The differences are fundamental.

Attention economy. In a horizontal format, you typically have a second to earn attention. In a vertical feed with swipe mechanics, you have less. The first frame must work — not well, immediately.

Framing and composition. Horizontal storytelling thinks in landscapes and tableaus. Vertical storytelling thinks in faces, movements, details. The best vertical creators haven’t adapted horizontal cameras to vertical frames. They’ve found stories that live in this format.

Text and graphics. In a vertical format with subtitles, overlays, and motion graphics, the Z-axis is the content. The visual language is fundamentally different. Approaching this with horizontal thinking produces overloaded compromises.

Audio design. A growing percentage of vertical content is consumed with sound — not because users switch it on, but because the content is designed audio-first. A design decision, not a production given.

The uncomfortable truth about "vertical first" in agencies

Most agencies say “Vertical First” and mean “Vertical Also.”

“Vertical First” means the vertical thinking starts in the concept phase. Storyboards conceived in 9:16. Casting, location choices, camera movements developed from the start for the vertical interface.

“Vertical Also” means someone stands next to the horizontal shoot with a second phone and makes “vertical cuts” at the end.

The first produces content that lives in the vertical interface. The second produces compromises.

With Verts — and similar features on all major platforms — the difference between these two approaches will become increasingly visible. Not to the creative teams. To the algorithms, the engagement data, and ultimately to the clients who see which content performs and which doesn’t.

What the next 18 months look like

Brand budget allocations will shift significantly toward vertical, mobile-first content production. Not because brand managers suddenly become TikTok-affine. Because performance data from Verts, Netflix, Reels, and Shorts will make increasingly clear which formats drive discovery.

Three consequences for agencies and Creative Directors:

Vertical production must be established as a standalone competency. Not a sub-service of the video team. Its own creative discipline with its own workflow, its own talent, its own aesthetic.

Brand guidelines must have a vertical section. What does your brand look like in a vertical feed? What works? What feels out of place? Not a production question — a brand management question.

Pitches will change. Clients will increasingly want to see vertical creative concepts as primary ideas, not add-ons. Those who can’t deliver will lose pitches.

Why this matters more than most people think

Disney+ Verts isn’t interesting because Disney did something new. It’s interesting because Disney — a company historically slow to respond to interface changes — is treating this as a strategic priority.

When the world’s largest media company decides vertical video is important enough to redesign the core navigation of its app, that’s a signal no agency and no brand strategy can ignore.

Not a trend. An interface change. And interface changes change how stories are told.

But what do I know.

— Dominik

There’s a sentence I’ve heard more times in the last twelve months than any other in agency meetings: “We’re using AI now.” Usually followed by a brief pause — as if the statement itself were a strategy. As if having the tool was the same as having a plan.

It’s not.

The question nobody asks out loud — because it’s uncomfortable — is this: has anyone actually explained to the AI who you are? What you sound like? What you would never say?

Usually not. And that explains a lot.

The numbers nobody wants to hear

Envive’s 2026 brand voice study found that 60% of marketing materials fail to conform to their own brand guidelines. 81% of companies struggle with off-brand content — despite having documented guidelines. That was the state of things before AI writing tools became standard.

Since then, the problem hasn’t been solved. It’s been accelerated.

85% of marketers now use AI writing tools for content production. Those tools are fast. They’re also completely indifferent to your brand voice — unless you’ve built the infrastructure to constrain them.

What teams using AI at scale consistently report: visual brand consistency holds up. Verbal consistency collapses. The logos look right. The words sound generic.

Not an AI problem. A briefing problem.

What actually happens when you let an unbriefed AI loose on your brand

Imagine you hire a new copywriter. Day one. No style guide, no examples, no guardrails. You say: “Just write something good.”

They write what they think is good. Based on everything they’ve ever read. Based on their assumptions about your industry, your category, your tone. Not based on you.

That’s exactly what happens with AI. Just faster. And at greater scale.

Feed a generic prompt to a generic model and you get generic output. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the system working correctly — with the wrong input.

The result: content that sounds like “the industry.” Like the average of your category. Like everything except your specific brand.

Average gets noticed. Just not in the way you want.

The real problem: voice guidelines are aspirational documents

Most brand voice guides exist as PDFs. Forty pages. Tone descriptions, adjective lists, “we sound like a smart friend” sentences. Well-intentioned. Practically useless.

They describe how the brand should sound. They don’t explain how to execute that in daily production.

The brands maintaining voice consistency at scale don’t have better copywriters. They have better systems. Their voice isn’t a document — it’s an operational infrastructure. Documented, structured, enforceable across every person and every tool producing content.

Worth noting: according to Erlin data from 2026 — 500+ brands — 68% of AI citations about a brand come not from the brand’s own website but from third-party sources. Which means the voice consistency you invest in on your own content covers less than a third of how AI actually describes you. The rest is shaped by everything others write about you.

Your briefing problem is bigger than you thought.

What a proper AI brief actually contains

A good AI brief isn’t a prompt. It’s infrastructure. Five things that actually move the needle:

Vocabulary control. What words do you use? Which ones never? Not “avoid jargon” — a concrete list. We say ‘client’, not ‘user’. We say ‘build’, not ‘develop’. We never say ‘solutions’.

Structural patterns. How are your sentences built? Show the AI examples with commentary. This sounds like us — short opener, concrete statement, no filler. This doesn’t — passive, abstract, no point of view.

On-brand vs. off-brand comparisons. Take real texts. Your best social post. Your worst newsletter. Show the AI both with an explanation of why one works. This is the most valuable training you can give.

Context rules. Your voice sounds different in an Instagram caption than in a pitch deck. Same character, different situations. Define those variants explicitly.

Hard stops. What is the AI never allowed to do? Brand-specific limits: never name our competitors. No medical claims. Never use stock-photo description language.

Prompt engineering vs. brand briefing

These aren’t the same thing — and confusing them is where most teams lose.

Prompt engineering is task-specific. Write me a caption for this image. It solves one problem for one moment.

Brand briefing is systemic. It defines who the brand is, how it speaks, what it never says — and gets embedded as context in every prompt. The infrastructure beneath every individual task.

Most teams invest in prompt engineering and skip brand briefing entirely. The result: well-crafted prompts that still produce generic output. Because the brand context is missing.

Build solid brand briefing once — then simple prompts work. Skip it, and you can optimise prompts indefinitely without fixing the actual problem.

What this means if you're a Creative Director

Your job is no longer just “generate creative concepts.” Increasingly, it’s “build the infrastructure that ensures creative consistency at machine scale.”

Different competency. One most creative educations don’t teach. And one that will separate the agencies that can scale over the next three years from those drowning in quality chaos.

The starting point is simpler than it sounds. Take your five best pieces of copy from the last twelve months. Take your five worst. Explain — to someone who doesn’t know your brand — why the good ones are good and the bad ones aren’t. Write that down.

That’s your first AI brand brief. Not forty pages. Five best, five worst, and the language you use to explain the difference.

One last uncomfortable truth

AI doesn’t make bad briefing more visible. It makes it faster. If your brand voice was inconsistent before, with AI it will be inconsistent and fast.

And if your brand voice was clear and strong? Then AI is a genuine lever. The system works.

The technology isn’t the problem. The briefing is the problem. It always was. AI has just made it impossible to ignore.

But what do I know.

— Dominik