Brand New World

The World Cup is just about to kick off and, of course, Nike was going to go big. Last week, the brand rolled out a chaotic and fun six-minute meta whirlwind through a Hollywood set of … a World Cup commercial shoot. The collection of global soccer stars, celebrities, and other cultural icons is pretty insane, but not unprecedented for the Swoosh company.   In this episode, hosts Jeff Beer and Gra...

What started as lipreading breakdowns of baseball’s most chaotic moments became a new kind of sports media business—one built on passion, personality, and pure fun. Jomboy Media has transformed viral content into profits and rapid growth, with a Major League Baseball partnership that gives the company access to the league’s IP and sponsorship opportunities (while preserving editorial independence)...

When Oscar-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet recently dropped Adidas’s new blockbuster World Cup spot, a five-minute epic story, on his Instagram, it sent shockwaves through the soccer world.    Not only because it stars Team USA's Trinity Rodman, Jude Bellingham of Real Madrid and Team England, and Spanish teen sensation Lamine Yamal of FC Barcelona. And not only because it's another big-budget b...

Late last year, Ford launched its first new global brand strategy in over a decade. "Ready. Set. Ford." hit the U.S. last September and is gradually rolling out in Europe, Canada, and South America throughout this year.    Leading the charge is Ford’s Global chief marketing officer Lisa Materazzo, who joined the company in 2023, after 20 years at Toyota, where she led marketing for the Lexus and S...

On April 6, Coca-Cola reheated its famed 1971 "Hilltop" strategy and launched its yearlong, nationwide campaign to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a three-minute video called “Drink in America.”Much like "Hilltop" more than 50 years ago, this is an incredibly idealized version of America. It feels especially weird amid intense partisan politics, an increasingly unpopular president, and...

In a culture obsessed with overnight virality, some brands are winning by moving slower—and smarter. In this panel, you’ll hear from marketing execs from Austin-based favorites Yeti and Huckberry about the power of patience in brand building. Rather than chasing trends or gaming algorithms, both companies have invested in community, storytelling, and product integrity—earning loyalty the old-fashi...

First things first—Brand New World is going from one episode per month to two! One episode will be hosted by Jeff Beer with his Fast Company colleague and Gen Z wizard Grace Snelling, for what we call "The Old Man and the Z." And the second episode each month will feature an interview with a brand, marketing, or advertising executive on work that we’re excited about.   This week’s episode is the n...

This month’s episode is all about the big game – but it’s got nothing to do with football. That’s right, it’s the most magical time of year for brands, that rare and brief three-or-so hour moment when people actually want to see commercials. Every marketer’s Xanadu.  Yep, it’s the Super Bowl. Fast Company reporter – and Brand New World's Gen Z consigliere – Grace Snelling is here to breakdown pick...

Since George Felix joined Chili’s as chief marketing officer in 2022, the brand’s marketing budget has gone from $32 million in FY 2022 to $137 million in 2025. As a result of that investment, Chili’s has gone viral on TikTok thanks to videos showing off the stretchiness of its mozzarella sticks, pulling in more than 200 million views on that platform, and selling more than 29 million of its Tripl...

Brands spend billions on trying to attract and retain audiences—they pay for the data about certain types of people, then pay more to create work for all these different audiences.    Data is big business for marketers, but what is it and what’s it all for? Demographic data, psychographic data, behavioral data, transactional data, geographic data . . . all of these are meant to parse and categoriz...

In this episode of Brand New World, host Jeff Beer breaks down one of the biggest brand entertainment deals to date: AB InBev’s wide-ranging partnership with Netflix. This unprecedented move will put global beer brands like Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, and Corona directly into Netflix programming and its growing live sports slate.   Is this the future of brand-funded entertainment that au...

This month’s episode of Brand New World was largely created during Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, which was held in New York City in mid-September.    So, we’re bringing you my interview with Bozoma Saint-John, former chief marketing or brand officer at companies including Netflix, Uber, and Beats by Dre—who also just happens to star on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She’s also the coh...

You know Dick’s Sporting Goods as one of America’s largest and most successful sports retailers. It has used that status to help create an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries over the past decade, including the Emmy-winning docs We Could Be King (2014) and The Turnaround (2024). But in August, Dick's took things to a new level, officially lau...

Tools for Humanity CMO John Patroulis talks about the brand strategy behind World, The Orb, and being human in the AI age.

Here are some deets fresh off the Croisette from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—basically the ad industry’s Oscars but also the global epicenter of brand culture—that happened in mid-June. Brands, marketers, ad agencies, tech companies, platforms, people from entertainment and sports, and anyone and everyone part of the brand world ecosystem were there. To make sense of it a...

The first iteration of Brand New World was a very specific look at how AI is changing how brands and marketers work. Now we’re back to talk about brand culture more broadly. Of course that will involve AI from time to time, but I’ll also be digging into sports, entertainment, music, comedy, and everywhere else brands squeeze their way into pop culture. For those who don’t know or are unfamiliar, t...

Generative AI has taken the brand world by storm. But how is the planet’s best-known AI company building its own brand? Like everything to do with AI, the brand aspect of this category is evolving and changing seemingly week to week. There’s newer brands like Anthropic, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, alongside established giants’ own sub-brands like Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, Amazon’s Rufus AI...

In episode six, host Jeff Beer is at Google’s world headquarters in Mountain View, CA to talk to chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill. We dig into the brand’s overall GenAI strategy, not only for how they’re working as a marketing organization, but also how they’re marketing Google's own AI tools like Gemini. We also chat about how Lorraine and her team are balancing between third-party tools...

Sephora is compelling for any number of reasons, and one is it’s been a leader in the beauty industry working with GenAI and broader AI technology. A McKinsey piece reported earlier this year that Gen AI could add up $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone. As consumer brands go, the beauty industry has been ahead of the curve on AI, with co...

This past December, Coca-Cola released a set of holiday ads made entirely from generative AI. They asked three different studios to create their own interpretations of the 1995 Coke holiday spot called “Holidays Are Coming” using AI video-generation models, including Leonardo, Luma, and Runway. The brand got three unique adaptations from studios Silverside AI, the Wild Card, and Jason Zada’s Secre...

If GenAI is the biggest technological advancement since the internet itself, then the creative possibilities are or will be pretty much endless. From a brand marketing and advertising perspective, we are still very early days, but there needs to be those willing and able to push the envelope, test boundaries, make mistakes, learn lessons, and evolve from there. Yet how far should the boundaries of...

To paraphrase a great philosopher, brand ideas are like small intestines – everybody has one. But could you build something with that idea in less than an hour? In this episode, we meet with David Jones,founder and CEO of The Brandtech Group, a $4 billion company which invested heavily in integrating AI into marketing and advertising services by acquiring leading companies like Pencil and Jellyfis...

David Droga is a legendary advertising creative and executive. He’s also CEO of Accenture Song, one of the largest advertising and marketing services firms on the planet.  For those two reasons, we kick off Brand New World with Droga at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Why there and then? It’s the world’s biggest convergence of media, marketing, entertainment, technology, and brands,...

AI is everywhere, and no more is the hype as big and ambiguous than across an industry known for both chasing and utilizing new technology: advertising and marketing. In a recent chapter of the book ‘Our AI Journey,’ released in March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that artificial general intelligence will be a reality in the next five years or so and, as a result, ‘will replace 95% of what marketers...