orenmeetsworld

nothing is cool anymore

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Start with the signal

9 min read

Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Skim
  • Core thesis: Algorithmic feeds, radical transparency, low-friction consumption, and AI-driven iteration have made culture and brand output converge; premium brands can break through by educating capable consumers, building a distinct world across many voices and formats, and enforcing unusually high human standards.
  • Why it matters: The video offers a useful GTM and creative-strategy lens for avoiding generic AI-era positioning, especially where product differentiation alone is insufficient.
  • Best use: Use it as a provocation and checklist for reviewing whether Ken's products, content, and community have a real creative point of view rather than merely optimized, familiar execution.

Executive Summary

The speaker argues that the feeling that "nothing is cool anymore" is not simply nostalgia: commercial spaces, consumer brands, creator formats, advertising, and aesthetics increasingly converge into familiar, easily replicated templates. He calls this the "slop era," in which visibility and adequacy are abundant but distinctiveness decays quickly.

His causal model has four parts. Algorithms repeatedly place people into taste buckets; supply chains, ad libraries, and public strategy discourse make successful products and campaigns easy to clone; convenience and constant media consumption reduce boredom and experimentation; and AI generally produces safe, historically derived answers rather than genuinely new ideas. Even a genuinely original creative breakthrough is rapidly echoed by creators and brands until it loses force.

The response is not to abandon modern channels but to use them with more intention. The speaker says brands should assume consumers are highly informed, participate in their education, distribute a coherent brand world through founders, employees, experts, customers, and creators, and use the abundance of formats as experimentation capacity rather than as a reason to publish generic volume.

The strongest practical idea is that premium is created through accumulated signals and disciplined execution: narrative, craft, packaging, scarcity mechanics, coherent creative direction, human faces, real-world community, and a release standard that rejects merely acceptable work. The video is strategically useful but largely conceptual, with a hypothetical cashmere brand rather than a deeply operational implementation framework.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: Cultural and commercial sameness is driven first by algorithmic repetition: feeds optimize for familiar preferences and push audiences and creators into the same aesthetic and content buckets. | Evidence: The speaker cites travel and retail experiences that blur together—Le Labo, Aesop, Blank Street, similar hotels and coffee shops—and compares aggregation publishers such as Dazed, Hypebeast, Complex, GQ, and Outlander using similar darkened-image-plus-text news formats. | Implication: Ken should treat default platform-native aesthetics, formats, and hooks as a baseline competitors can match, not as defensible brand strategy. | Caveat: The argument is a qualitative diagnosis rather than a measured causal study; algorithmic systems can also surface niches when users deliberately seek them.
  • Claim: Transparency has turned winning tactics into a fast copycat economy across products, manufacturing, ads, and creator content. | Evidence: The speaker points to Alibaba knockoffs, ImportYeti manufacturer discovery, Meta's ad-transparency tools, and X/Twitter threads that publicly reverse-engineer brand and ecommerce playbooks. He says his "product versus brand" format was recreated by 50-plus creators. | Implication: Competitive advantage should reside in accumulated systems—taste, community, operating quality, proprietary access, and narrative continuity—not in a single visible ad, product feature, or content format. | Caveat: Reverse engineering can reveal tactics, but it does not automatically reproduce product quality, distribution, trust, or organizational execution.
  • Claim: AI intensifies homogenization because its default advice is competent, safe, and derived from prior patterns rather than risk-taking or novel direction. | Evidence: The speaker characterizes AI recommendations as iterative on prior successful recipes: useful and often wise, but generally not an independent source of a new idea. He contrasts this with putting a real human concept and human revision layer on top of AI-generated ad copy. | Implication: For AI-enabled products and GTM, Ken should make human taste, contrarian judgment, and editorial QA explicit parts of the workflow rather than positioning generic AI output as a premium experience. | Caveat: This is a warning about default use, not a claim that AI cannot support originality; the material limitation is allowing generated first drafts to become final output.
  • Claim: Premium pricing is not simply downstream of better materials or margins; it is justified by a stack of mutually reinforcing signals. | Evidence: Examples include the physical weight of packaging, waitlists, named colorways, craft stories, and the broader world around the product. The sponsored HubSpot segment frames these as mechanisms by which similar products can sustain radically different prices. | Implication: Ken should evaluate premium positioning as a full-system design problem: every touchpoint must substantiate the price and the narrative, rather than relying on a feature list or a visual identity alone. | Caveat: Signals can raise perceived value, but they cannot sustain a premium business if the product, service, or customer experience fails the promise.
  • Claim: Brands should assume their addressable consumers are unusually educated and should participate in educating them instead of relying on opaque or simplistic persuasion. | Evidence: The speaker argues that YouTube, creator expertise, Google AI summaries, and ChatGPT have made consumers more informed about categories from marketing to cashmere, leather, and technical materials. His cashmere example assumes buyers already understand wool and care about what they wear. | Implication: Ken can earn authority by exposing reasoning, tradeoffs, mechanisms, and expert perspectives—particularly valuable for technical agent systems where buyers need help understanding architecture, risk, and operational value. | Caveat: Consumer knowledge varies sharply by category and segment; education should be calibrated to the actual buying audience rather than treated as universally high.
  • Claim: A distinct brand world should be distributed through many credible people and formats, unified by creative direction rather than managed as one corporate social account. | Evidence: The speaker recommends involving founders, employees, factory workers, subject experts, customers, and aligned creators; using formats from blogs and carousels to long-form video and ads; and coordinating them through a shared visual and narrative system. His hypothetical "cashmere villa" uses a fictional bar, interviews, merchandise, Easter eggs, and standardized cameras to create continuity. | Implication: Ken should design a contributor ecosystem around his work—operators, users, technical experts, partners, and founders—with reusable editorial constraints that make distributed content reinforce one identifiable world. | Caveat: Content scale without a real through-line merely produces more slop, and paid creator participation can undermine credibility if it is visibly inauthentic.
  • Claim: In a market where tools make mediocre output cheap, a strict standard of excellence and visible human care become the core differentiators. | Evidence: The speaker calls this the "era of the try hard": reject work that is merely good enough, give direct feedback, workshop it, retain human voices and faces, and create real-life participation through communities, meetups, run clubs, founder circles, or brand trips. | Implication: Ken should establish explicit quality gates for product releases, agent outputs, messaging, and community experiences, then protect them even when automation makes it easy to publish faster. | Caveat: Higher standards require real management capacity and can slow output; the standard must be paired with a clear definition of what quality means for the brand.

Detailed Brief

The speaker's "soft lives" explanation for lower cultural risk-taking

  • Claims: Constant access to phones, streaming, social feeds, delivery services, remote work, and on-demand goods has displaced boredom and the unstructured activity from which hobbies, experimentation, and stranger ideas can emerge.; Online systems also reward grievance-aligned content, allowing people to find continual validation for preexisting frustrations and creating performative controversy.
  • Evidence: The speaker contrasts current always-on consumption with his high-school experience of limited texting and more time spent reading, record hunting, pursuing hobbies, or doing unplanned activities.; He uses the Starbucks-sponsored Coachella trip involving creators including Brand Flakes and Victoria Paris as an example: a small number of potentially sincere objections can become dozens of monetized outrage posts because outrage earns attention and, on some platforms, direct compensation.
  • Caveats: The "soft lives" framing is culturally and politically loaded, and it risks minimizing economic precarity, unequal access to leisure, and legitimate criticism of large brands.; The claim that controversy is mostly opportunistic is speculative in the absence of data about creators' motivations.
  • Implications: Avoid confusing online attention or criticism with durable market truth; distinguish sincere user feedback from incentive-driven pile-ons.; Create environments in which contributors can explore, make decisions, and develop taste outside the immediate pressure to mimic high-performing content.

Attention abundance creates both a higher idea bar and a distribution opportunity

  • Claims: The speaker believes people in intellectually oriented feeds now encounter a higher frequency of sophisticated writers and thinkers than prior generations encountered through traditional publishing.; This creates a split: capable people can become desensitized and feel their work is dull by comparison, while others can gain attention through appearance, trend-following, or entertainment without corresponding substance.; At the same time, new media lowers former gatekeeping: anyone willing to repeatedly create can potentially find an audience.
  • Evidence: He references creator and Substack ecosystems, including Desk to Stock collaborations and thinkers he names as Agus, Eugene, Ghost in the Sam, and himself, as examples of a high-volume intellectual-content feed.; He contrasts this with waiting for a magazine such as The New Yorker to contain one exceptional article, and says traditional advertising attention is being displaced by phone-based media consumption.
  • Caveats: The video does not provide evidence that audience quality, retention, or commercial value necessarily rises with the volume of intellectual content.; Accessible distribution does not eliminate the need for operational resources, credibility, or differentiation.
  • Implications: Ken should neither be intimidated by the apparent quality ceiling of the feed nor equate reach with expertise; use repeated publishing to refine a distinct thesis that is tied to demonstrable operating work.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Slop era: The speaker's label for an environment where algorithmic repetition, copying, convenience, and AI make most cultural and commercial output feel generic.
  • Copycat economy: The rapid replication of visible product, manufacturing, advertising, and content tactics enabled by public data, supply-chain discovery, and strategy-sharing.
  • Educated consumer: A buyer assumed to have access to category knowledge, expert creators, search, and AI answers, requiring brands to demonstrate substance rather than exploit information asymmetry.
  • World building: Constructing a brand's lived narrative through founders, employees, experts, customers, creators, settings, and recurring experiences rather than isolated product messages.
  • Creative direction through-line: The unifying idea, visual system, editorial choices, and recurring details that make distributed brand content recognizable as one coherent world.
  • Standard of excellence: A management and editorial discipline of rejecting adequate work, giving feedback, and preserving quality when automation and copying lower the cost of output.
  • Era of the try hard: The speaker's assertion that visible effort, care, and human judgment are now differentiators because many competitors settle for automated or derivative work.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Run a "derivative-risk" audit on current positioning, creative, and product messaging: identify every element that could be copied from a public ad library, prompt, or competitor landing page within a week.
  • Define a human-review gate for AI-assisted outputs, including a named owner who verifies factual accuracy, specific voice, novelty, and whether the output adds a genuine point of view.
  • Build a contributor map for the brand: select credible operator, customer, expert, and partner voices; define what each can reveal that the central brand account cannot.
  • Write a concise creative-direction brief with non-negotiable narrative, visual, and editorial constraints before scaling content production.
  • Measure community efforts by repeat participation, contribution quality, and relationship depth—not only reach or creator-post volume.
  • Treat public criticism as a triage problem: separately log product-valid feedback, reputational risk, and likely engagement-driven commentary before responding.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: nothing is cool anymore
  • Transcript words: 7255
  • Duration seconds: 1401
  • Timestamp note: No timestamps or chapters were provided; the supplied transcript contains repeated passages, especially in the latter half.
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Full transcript 5746 words · 32 min read
0:00

Do you ever get the sinking feeling that nothing is cool anymore? All the streetwear brands have designs that look vaguely alike. All the creators are using the same styles and the same fonts and the same hooks. YouTube copies the same thumbnails. Go to a boutique hotel that has the same things in the minibar. The boutique hotel could be in any city. Coffee shops are the same. Go shopping in New York, and it feels like Chicago, like San Francisco, like Milan. It's just another Le Labo, another Aesop, another Blank Street. Everything is experiencing cultural fatigue. And in this video, we're going to talk about it. And thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video.

0:34

I'm going to break down the reasons why this is happening. There are four distinct reasons that made almost everything intrinsically uncool. And in this era that I'll call the slop era, for lack of a better term, how can you make something premium? How can you make a premium brand? Whether that's a brand where you're selling your own products or services, or thinking about your own personal brand, how do you stand out in this weird, uncool world that we're in? Because if you've felt this, even an inkling, you see what's happening. You feel almost dejected by it. And I think there's a pretty distinct roadmap for breaking through. Let's lock in.

0:59

So on this topic of nothing being cool, I travel a lot. And in the last year, I've been all over the U.S. And you have that downtown experience, where you're in an airport, you're in a place. Hotels all look the same. The coffee shops. Everything seems like a copy. It begins to happen internationally, and in a lot of the major hubs too. And sure, you can go off the beaten path and find whatever. But everything feels homogenized. But this summer, I was in places that were distinctly not that. I just got back from a month where I was in Antibes. I was in Nice. I went to seven Grecian islands. I was in Puglia, Venice, Athens. Places that don't feel like that.

1:30

That have really carved out their own world, their own aesthetic. Sometimes grimy. Sometimes complicated. Sometimes antiquated. But that still feel distinctly them. And it got me thinking profoundly about why those places are the way they are. And in our algorithmic world, how can we create things that are more authentic in that way? So I've mapped this out here today on a board we can use to talk about this. And we'll start in on the reasons why nothing is cool anymore. And the first is the most obvious. It's algorithmic. We are all seeing the same feed. The way the social media feeds work is that if you like a certain amount of things, it shows you more of that.

1:57

And it's more popular. So, for instance, I made a video about visiting Venice and the things I like and dislike in Venice. If you are considering an Italy trip and have looked at one piece of content, you're likely going to be shown that video and multiple other Venice videos. They'll show up on your Explore page. You like a certain type of carousel, you see more of those. And so what happens is you're being put into buckets by the algorithms, which show you the same stuff that sits in the back of your subconscious. And you go to the same places. You see the same things. And the same thing happens in mood boards, right? You go onto Pinterest.

2:19

You're seeing the same Pinterest, the same cosmos, looking at the same popular boards, going down the same rabbit holes as every other designer. And everything becomes a derivative. And we see this a lot because of how it functions. So this graphic here from Substack shows all of these aggregation pages, right? They show news with text over it. You get a slightly darkened photo, in most cases, with text over it. It's the default way we consume. And what you'll notice is Dazed, Hypebeast, Complex, GQ, Outlander. All of these, while they might have some distinct perspective, are basically making the same exact content. It doesn't matter who you're consuming it from.

2:38

You're simply consuming it. Nothing feels special. And if you participate in that economy, you can get views. But the views don't matter. They're homogenized across everything. And if you do make something special, something unique, it echoes out across the ecosphere, right? Go search product versus brand videos, one of my trademark series on Instagram and TikTok. And you will see 50-plus creators who recreated the same concept, right? It echoes out across the internet. You're not going to get mad at it. It's part of how the internet works. But anything good becomes an echo. Immediately, it gets repeated, repeated, repeated, with a decay in its efficacy.

3:10

So even if you do have that breakthrough idea that's interesting, that's cool, that's normal, as soon as it gets adopted, it gets done to death faster and faster. And then from a brand perspective, that copycat concept moves further. It's one of the tenets here of why things aren't cool. Because it's become so easy to copy, right? Alibaba and manufacturing is actually a big proponent of this. If you like anything, there's someone probably knocking it off on Alibaba. Now it's at the point where someone will say, oh, that creator of that brand, they're just selling an Alibaba product. When in fact, the Alibaba listing just copied that product because it knows it's popular.

3:30

Now people think it's a default. And this came because there's so much transparency around these things. You can go on ImportYeti and find any manufacturer. You can make a duplicate of pretty much anything that you see out there with more ease than ever in history. And the same thing happened with advertising, right? Ad transparency. So as soon as Meta introduced their ad transparency tool, where you could see what advertisements people were running, all of a sudden this has become the fodder. Every marketer will go look at the top 50 brands and be like, now Grüns is popular. What's in Grüns' ad account? And they copy those ad styles.

3:51

They become more ads, and everything begins to look the same. We talked already about creators who just duplicate popular formats, right? One of the things that I thought was interesting about how things are deeply uncool now is the callout culture, right? So the Coachella Starbucks trip is a good example of this. There were multiple creators, Brand Flakes, Victoria Paris, a few others, who went to Coachella with Starbucks. Now there were a few posts calling them out for this. Brand Flakes in particular, you support small businesses. How dare you go with Starbucks, or whatever? So someone has an enraged post.

4:09

The first people that have this enraged post may actually be mad. They may have been a superfan who was so passionate about his stance on small business that they saw the Starbucks deal and they were sick to their stomach. They were viscerally mad. Maybe that happened. Maybe it's not a rage economy thing. But in all likelihood, we'll give it the benefit of the doubt. But what happens next is people saw that it's successful, right? Okay, maybe someone's mad about that. But what people will notice is, oh, that got views. I should get mad about that. So then you'll see people pile on an angry take. So now there's 50 creators, 100 creators, who got mad at this brand deal.

4:34

It generates way more attention and negativity than those creators deserve. And guess what? They're being paid for it. The economy incentivizes that. TikTok says if those videos are over a minute, they will reward them with dollars. Facebook gives the same. Attention in general creates this economy. And of those, say, 100 videos that were made about that, let's say four were truly actually mad about this subject. It would have offended them personally. The other 96 are all just latching on for the dollars or the views, compounding an issue that didn't exist, and getting everyone riled up over something that doesn't really matter.

4:56

And I guarantee of those 100, 80 of them were at a Starbucks in the last month, shopped at a Zara, went to a Target, whatever you want to get mad about. The controversy they generate does not align with their values. And that disalignment and the functional incentive of money creates this uncool culture around even critique. And then we have X. Any strategy that you want for branding or for e-com, X has it. People are breaking it down. They are sharing the sauce. Everything is working in public. Either they're breaking down their own strategy, or someone's breaking down whoever's popular strategies.

5:15

It is a goldmine for people that do any kind of brand building or content building. Everyone's sharing all the tricks on that social network for whatever reason. And that's led to this entire copycat economy where you can very quickly replicate what's working on anything from manufacturing to content to advertising to brand strategy extremely fast, which means everything feels derivative. Everything is good, and nothing stands out. Now you multiply that by a more controversial one, which is soft lives, because people now have soft lives. What do I mean by that? First, there's no boredom, right? You're bored. around even critique. And then we have X.

5:37

Any strategy that you want for branding or for e-com, X has it. People are breaking it down. They are sharing the sauce. Everything is working in public. Either they're breaking down their own strategy, or someone's breaking down whoever's popular strategies. It is a goldmine for people that do any kind of brand building or content building. Everyone's sharing all the tricks on that social network for whatever reason. And that's led to this entire copycat economy where you can very quickly replicate what's working on anything from manufacturing to content to advertising to brand strategy extremely fast, which means everything feels derivative.

5:57

Everything is good, and nothing stands out. Now you multiply that by a more controversial one, which is soft lives, because people now have soft lives. What do I mean by that? First, there's no boredom, right? You're bored, you're on your phone, or you're on YouTube. There's content to consume at all times. You have a hand computer on you at all times, which means you never get bored. It is hard to fathom how different life was. When I was in high school, people had cell phones a little bit. And if you did, I had 100 text messages a month. I would text my girlfriend at the time, and it would immediately go over. It would be a day, and I was over the text message limit.

6:28

We had the beginning of Facebook, but people consumed way less. We were just bored more. What are we going to do? And we would go do stupid stuff, or read, or go record hunting, or be into our hobbies, or whatever. And so in this world now, there is very little boredom. And the boredom they have is spent consuming rather than coming up with a thing to do, which leads to this soft life. Delivery, the same thing. People don't have to leave their house to get almost any package of anything from Amazon, any food. There are way more soft jobs.

6:55

Believe it or not, no matter how much you hate your job, things were significantly harder than the behind-the-desk or remote work jobs that we have now. As bad as you may think it is, it was considerably worse. And the expectations of work were significantly higher. It has fallen across the board. In this weird era we're in now, post-pandemic, with the remote aspect, with the AI aspect, people are unsure around it. It feels awkward, but it was significantly harder, and people are getting used to this lower standard. And then, in addition, we have this solidarity complex online where the algorithm rewards the things that you are upset about.

7:07

You think you do work hard and you work too hard? You think you shouldn't have to deal with AI? You think that you are judged for your gender or your background or your age or whatever it is? If you believe that, the internet will show you content that supports it. So you begin to build up this complex in your own head, rewarded by the internet, that makes you feel justified in whatever you believe, whether it's wrong or right. And then, at the same time, in the US at least, there's so much money. People can't comprehend how much more money there is. 7 to 8.8% of the US population, 1 in 14 adults, are worth more than a million dollars.

7:26

And if that seems like a lot, it's because it's so much more than when I was young, even adjusting for inflation, et cetera. This is like three times the amount when I was in high school. There has been this magnificent wealth transfer from the top people down to one growing class of one level below, basically this widely expanded upper middle class.

7:32

There's still plenty of people that don't have that money, don't have those resources, but now there are so many more people, an incomprehensible amount of people, 23 to 23.8 millionaires in the US, that are able to acquire so much and do so many things and spend so much and justify all these small brands, all these services that spin up this whole entire new economy of serving this much wider class of wealth that people don't like to talk about because all they want to talk about is the K-shaped economy, et cetera, but has a significant impact on all of the building that we've seen around and these soft lives that have developed where more people have more money than ever.

7:34

And you add onto this the AI component, right? And the most important part here is that everything becomes endlessly iterative. What I mean by that, I mean that if you ask advice, and a lot of business people are doing this or chatting with AI all the time, it's merely iterative on what came before. It is basing its suggestions on things that worked prior. It is giving you a good answer, a wise answer. It is not giving you an idea. It's not giving you something new. Everything is iterative based on the knowledge that it is trained on or what it knows about you.

7:53

So there's just much less intriguing things when the majority of answers we have come from recipes that happened prior. The advice it gives you is safe. The advice it gives you isn't take a big risk, isn't try something new and unique. Every piece of AI solution is giving you good enough. And you add all this together, and what happens is anything that scales, anything that's doing well, scales from familiarity. And so you'll see the world around you begin to morph, where you see the blank street coffees and the Le Labos and the hundreds of things that look exactly like them.

8:10

But your hotels, your products, your beverages, the tons of energy drinks and waters and no-sugar gummies, how many do we need? And they all look vaguely alike. And it all comes from these economies that I described here prior. The algorithms feeding people the same thing, how easy it is to copycat, the soft lives that lead people to quickly and easily consume this stuff, and the AI that keeps telling them to keep doing it. And it comes across in how we travel, etc. And this leads to a problem, right? Because this impacts the majority of people, whether they like it or not, are caught within this soft beige world.

8:32

And it creates a huge gap to the people that have ideas and the people that are smart. So we're going to talk about this, and I'm going to get into how do you build a brand across this. So you will see, if you do have original ideas or you want to have original ideas, you are now presented with so many incredible thinkers in your algorithm. I use this as an example of one of the many creators that do Desk to Stock collabs, which I've done before, where they cherry-pick all these people who are visual and sociology-design-led thought leaders and collab with them on their account. And everyone on there is very smart and very interesting.

8:49

I am by far the dumbest, least interesting of the people they collaborate with. And so now we're presented with all these critical thinkers. If you are in the critical thinking algorithm, if you get hit with Agus's content, Eugene's, my sociology stuff, Ghost in the Sam, a bunch of these people, if you're in the smart-takes algorithm, and then you're reading the same thing with the people who are producing at that level on Substack, you are engaging with more high-volume, better ideas being produced faster than ever before in history. You used to have to wait for a magazine, go through the New Yorker, find the one good article, and then be like, wow, that was impressive.

9:05

Where now you're given the best ideas in your face every day if you're in that algorithm. What that leads to is you are now presented with a constant stream of just significantly better thinkers who are getting in reps at making this content and refining their ideas that make that gap wider. And so it breaks people into three categories. Anything that's not amazing becomes dull to smart people. They get desensitized. I'm sure it happens to a lot of you watching this video. Then there are people that can get attention in this economy for whatever reason. And for a lot of people, it's unwarranted, right?

9:32

If you're good-looking and you're willing to make content, you can get a lot of attention on the internet. If you're willing to be a jester, if you're willing to follow trends really closely, if you copy other people's videos, people then equate attention to their identity when they're really mid, and they get this inflated opinion of themselves. And you get this big imposter syndrome gap where all these people that could have those big ideas feel, because they're seeing so many amazing creators or amazing things that are out there, amazing writers who have so much success, and they see this mid layer out there, they go, well, why would I even attempt it?

9:44

So now we've established why this is happening. I feel all of this preface is really important. And people talk about this. I had this come up in my videos a lot where people would be like, it starts at minute 16. It's like, if you don't have the context of why things are happening, the tactics are useless to you. Everyone wants the answers without the understanding. And the understanding is critical to actually act on the answers. Just a reminder there. So now what do we do? What do you do to actually make something that stands out? What do you need to understand? So first I want to dive into a foundational principle.

10:14

big ideas feel because they're seeing so many amazing creators or amazing things that are out there. Amazing writers who have so much success, and they see this mid layer out there. They go, well, why would I even attempt it? So now we've established why this is happening. I feel all of this preface is really important. And people talk about this. I had this come up in my videos a lot where people be like, it starts at minute 16. It's like, if you don't have the context of why things are happening, the tactics are kind of useless to you. Everyone wants the answers without the understanding. And the understanding is critical to actually act on the answers.

10:41

Just a reminder there. So now what do we do? What do you do to actually make something that stands out? What do you need to understand? So first I want to dive into a foundational principle. To understand how to build a premium brand, it starts with how to justify premium prices. Many people assume the price is downstream of the product. You have better materials. You have better margins. Then you charge more. But the brands that actually charge a premium stack signals. The weight of the packaging in your hand, how they use the waitlist, the named colorway, the story of the craft, the world they build around it. All of this adds up in what people are willing to pay.

11:19

So if you've ever wondered how some brands charge five times more for essentially the same thing, and you want to reverse engineer some of those exact moves for your own business, I suggest you check out HubSpot's free playbook for 60 tactics brands use to justify premium pricing. Instead of just abstract theory, it organizes everything by category, budget, and difficulty. It breaks down what actually works in practice, covering things like the six psychological triggers that premium pricing runs on, and which most brands are currently leaving on the table.

11:30

The tactics themselves, with real brand examples, so you can see who did it and roughly what it cost to pull them off. My personal favorite section is the decision framework, which matches tactics to your product type and budget. If you sell anything and you've always wondered why the competitor with the worst product charges double, this is the reverse engineering of that. You can grab it for free at the link in the description below. And thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video.

11:46

So as we transition from the factors of why nothing feels as interesting anymore to how to actually build a premium brand in this era, I want to share some background because this is something that I'm working on every day. So for those of you that don't know, before I was a creator, I was an SVP of marketing. I was a VP of product. I worked in companies across CPG, consumer electronics, outdoors, and more on structuring these types of brands. But now I'm a couple years removed from that. And now I work with lots of brands. And in particular now in my role at Darkroom, where I spearhead the creative teams, we are looking at creative strategy for growth.

11:59

What works in ad accounts? What works in performance marketing? What works with creator and influencer and overall narrative? And then that is getting relentlessly tested in the ad account across the dozens of brands that we work with every single day. And so the thought that is always in the back of my head is how much of this can we solve with the advertising and the campaigns themselves versus how much of this comes down to the brand and their position and how they're established in the market, and what are the tradeoffs there.

12:08

And my goal as I do this work is, when you look at a lot of people talking about brand application online, I want to be able to speak to a creative premium brand, both from the creator side of actually working with a number of these brands, creating content on the internet and understanding, and then also from the tactical side of having to live in creating performing ads, creator campaigns, and concepts every single day across multiple categories. And that framework has given me a lot to think about at a macro level, a trend level, of what works for brands in 2026. Let's get into the details.

12:16

All right, four concepts to understand to build a premium brand in this slop era. The first is we are dealing with educated consumers. Your average person who is consuming anyone in the 40th percentile and above has more education about everything they're consuming, every product decision they have, what media they are reading, what creator they're choosing to follow, than ever. What do I mean by that? First, intellectual influence. People are teaching more than ever. Most people who have watched my YouTube about marketing know more about marketing casually than people who have degrees in it. I'm not saying that lightly.

12:36

There's so much tactical information that is out there. And that's the case for pretty much everything. You want to learn about cashmere or leather or the viola or whatever it is. There are so many amazing creators giving people so much information that has gone into their brains. They've consumed it. They know about way more than ever across a wide variety of topics. Plus the answers are at their fingertips. You want to learn about it. You go on YouTube or you just ask Google now. Google's not a search. It's an AI summary, or you ask ChatGPT and you get better, more relevant information to you than ever before. And you have to know that's who you're talking to, right?

12:58

You can go make your ad account or do whatever and try and fool boomers on Facebook and fool the weak and the dumb. That will only go so far. You're just going to contribute to the slop era. But if you want to rise above it, assume a level of education and participate in that education economy. Then we have the new media shift. Another important concept here. We have supercharged consumption. What do I mean by that? Everyone used to consume, okay, you have your couple hours of TV or your Netflix, go to some movies, read some magazines or a newspaper, whatever. Now we are consuming so much media so quickly every day.

13:23

YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagrams, browsing, Substacks, emails, et cetera. We are a machine of processing info. Our brains get more than ever. We actually retain a lot of it just sitting in the back. And all that new media, everything that's happening there, is being taken from traditional media. Anytime someone watches the advertisement on TV, they're looking at their phone instead. Anytime someone sees a banner app pop up on whatever news site they're reading, they're clicking out of it or they turn their ad blocker on or they leave the page. Any of that traditional media advertising is being taken into this new world or it is dying or both.

13:49

And what's nice about this new supercharged world is anyone can win. You start talking on camera. You now have, what, thousands and thousands of people who've changed their lives via yapping. You cannot get away from people telling their story about that. From becoming whatever kind of creator, a faceless account, curating. Anyone from across the world doing whatever who wants to put in the reps can win at that in some way. Which was not the case. The gatekeeping of what it took to reach people with traditional media was huge. So embracing that new media shift in whatever storytelling you have is just a given.

14:14

It has to be done inside that era because you have leveraged attention that simply didn't exist before. But then if you want to do it, you want to be able to engage in that as a brand. You need to use that to show your positions. What do I mean by that? First is the concept of world building, which I have entire videos on. But what does that really mean? You need to show the things that are happening in your brand world through the characters in the story that present it. The founders, the employees, the customers, the creators you choose to employ, the influencers, and people that make content as creators that engage with it in any way.

14:35

That is the story of your brand world. So you don't just have one organic social account to build in this era. That is the least effective channel versus having all of these separate channels who are telling that story and enabling them and saying we're going to incentivize people to make content. We're going to help, and we're going to work together in a group. We're going to curate it. We're going to work together to see what kind of world can we build, is the default for building a premium brand in this slop era. And we'll get to how do you have that not be shitty in a second. And then with that comes content scale.

15:00

You have not one big brand film to tell your story or to introduce yourself to the world or whatever it is. You have infinite shots on goal and infinite formats: blogs, carousels, YouTube long form, founder videos, whatever it is, advertisements. You have so many formats to choose from to be able to get your story to win. And what any brand that stands out or comes across as premium is they're going to find the right one for them. They're not going to say this is the default that everyone else does. They're going to find their unique take on whatever one of those are. And there's now a wider swath of that than ever. You can find the thing that perfectly represents you.

15:27

And what ties all these together, what separates it from, I'm just another person posting about X or Y or I'm finding I'm putting out a thousand ads. And then with that comes content scale. You have not one big brand film to tell your story or to introduce yourself to the world, or whatever it is. You have infinite shots on goal and infinite formats: blogs, carousels, YouTube long form, founder videos, advertisements, whatever it is. You have so many formats to choose from to be able to get your story to win. And what any brand that stands out or comes across as premium is, they're going to find the right one for them.

15:44

They're not going to say this is the default that everyone else does. They're going to find their unique take on whatever one of those those are. And there's now a wider swath of that than ever. You can find the thing that perfectly represents you. And what ties all these together, what separates it from, I'm just another person posting about X or Y, or I'm putting out a thousand ads, is that creative direction element, right? It's that uniqueness in this world of everyone's mood board looking the same. What do you do that is different? And you will find people will find, whether it's simple ideas or aesthetic styles or craft, differentiates it.

16:03

This is the era of the idea person in a way that it never was before. And if you want to apply that tactically, and this is one of the least tactical. I have all my videos. I break down exactly this format, this post, this whatever. This is more high level. I just want you to get the ideas. There's a million videos about craft a marketing campaign or whatever that I have. You can act on this. But if you assume, let's break this down. If you assume you have an educated consumer, I have people that understand you're selling cashmere. I assume I have people that know wool.

16:27

They're learning about materials that are more educated than ever and caring what they put on their bodies. I assume that. I know that if I want to reach them through GQ articles or advertising in magazines or whatever, there's no way that's going to be successful. And I begin to build my world. I have people that are in the factory that are making content. I, as the founder, am making content. I have an expert on wool that I've pulled in. I have a couple of creators who tell really amazing stories about that, who I'm incentivized to help grow this brand. We're all putting out a bunch of interesting content, but I have a creative direction idea.

16:52

I've created the cashmere villa in wherever it was near my factory, where we have a fictional bar. We sit down and do interviews and bring everyone together. And we built a series around this. We sent out the merchandise and swag from it. And this editing style all has these Easter eggs inside of it that connected all together. Again, just an example. But all of a sudden you've now taken all of this toolkit and said, I'm adding a creative direction element on top of it. I'm adding some level of interest, or, hey, we're actually going to distribute every one of those people.

17:19

We're going to get a certain camera and style and look when they document, so it all looks the same. We're going to invest in sending that out. There are things that cost money. There are things that are based on ideas. But it's about adding a creative direction through line. And this brings us to the last point on this. Having a standard of excellence. Because in this world, in the soft life world where people don't want to do a lot of work, or you can just copy someone else's video, or AI can write the basic ad copy, you have a choice. How do I institute from day one of whatever I'm building personally or for a brand or in my work, a standard of excellence?

17:46

If it's not great, if it doesn't live up to what I do, I'm not going to release it. And the amount of work that's done in a day and what I hold my employees to, I'm not just going to give in easily and be like, oh yeah, take it off for the day, or that was good enough. I'm going to always do the hard thing and be like, hey, this is how we need to improve this. This is the standard that I want to hit. This is why this is important to our brand. And explain it and workshop it and feedback it and build it up. That standard of excellence is everything in the slop era, where you can produce a mid of almost anything.

18:07

You holding the line on the standard for you and your brand is the most important thing. This is the era of the try hard. This is a separate video, and trying hard and caring is the differentiator. And what's important is that human element, right? Most brands who succeed in this era are going to have a lot of AI copy in their ads, etc. Did you take the time to go back through that with a human touch and fix all the things? That's the only human element that you need. Did you go say, hey, I'm going to actually go put a real human idea on top of what we're doing for this campaign versus copying what someone else did or spitting something out of whatever GPT you're using?

18:34

Do I have real voices and faces and people that represent this brand? Do I bring those people together inside of communities, whether it's the Run Club or the Meetup or the Founder Inner Circle or whatever it is, the brand trip? Do I have the ways to get those people in real life and build an experience around it, adding the human element on top of it? But anything that stands out that gets built in this new era is going to have those factors. They're going to understand their consumer is educated. They're going to understand this new media shift. They're going to show their position and world build it and creative direct it.

19:04

And they're going to have a standard of excellence. And just like any period in time where things begin to feel the same, and right now they do, every brand feels the same. It feels like we're really in a slop era. Nothing quite feels cool. Everyone seems over it. Every time there's one of these shifts, there's a bunch of personal brands, creators, brands, services, media entities, creatives that basically blossom out of it. That arise from that into whatever the next thing is. And I just want to highly encourage you that at any time in history, if you take any of this to heart, this is the time to act on whatever that is, whatever your version of it is.

19:30

To know these things, to fight for them, to be ahead of it. If some of these ideas are brand new to you and you want to dive into creative strategy for the first time, I've got a free several-day course that breaks down the fundamentals like ad strategy and organic strategy, etc. And get you to learn a bunch of those terms if that's interesting to you, I will link down here below. As always, thank you so much for watching. I just want you to get the ideas. There's a million videos about like craft a marketing campaign or whatever that I have. You can act on this. But if you assume, let's break this down.

19:44

If you assume you have an educated consumer, I have people that understand you're selling cashmere. I assume I have people that know wool. They're learning about materials that are more educated than ever and caring what they put on their bodies. I assume that. I know that if I want to reach them through GQ articles or advertising in magazines or whatever, there's no way that's going to be successful. And I begin to build my world. I have people that are in the factory that are making content. I, as the founder, are making content. I have an expert on wool that I've pulled in.

20:07

I have a couple of creators who tell really amazing stories about that, who I'm incentivized to help grow this brand. We're all putting out a bunch of interesting content, but I have a creative direction idea. I've created the cashmere villa in wherever it was near my factory where we have a fictional bar. We sit down and do interviews and bring everyone together. And we built a series around this. We sent out the merchandise and swag from it. And this editing style all has these Easter eggs inside of it that connected all together. Again, just an example.

20:30

But all of a sudden you've now taken all of this toolkit and said, I'm adding a creative direction element on top of it. I'm adding some level of interest or, hey, we're actually going to distribute every one of those people. We're going to get a certain camera and style and look when they document. So it all looks the same. We're going to invest in kind of sending that out. There's things that cost money. There's things that are based on ideas. But it's about adding a creative direction through Lime. And this brings us to the last point on this. Having a standard of excellence. Because in this world, in the soft life world where people don't want to do a lot of work,

20:57

or you can just copy someone else's video, or AI can write the basic ad copy, you basically have a choice. How do I institute from day one of whatever I'm building personally or for a brand or in my work, a standard of excellence? If it's not great, if it doesn't live up to what I do, I'm not going to release it. And the amount of work that's done in a day and what I hold my employees to, I'm not just going to give in easily and be like, oh yeah, take it off for the day or that was good enough. I'm going to always do the hard thing and be like, hey, this is how we need to improve this. This is the standard that I want to hit. This is why this is important to our brand.

21:23

And explain it and workshop it and feedback it and build it up. That standard of excellence is basically everything in the slop era where you can produce a mid of almost anything. You holding the line on the standard for you and your brand is the most important thing. This is the era of the try hard. This is a separate video and a trying hard and caring is the differentiator. And what's important is that human element, right? Most brands who succeed in this era are going to have a lot of AI copy in their ads, etc. Did you take the time to go back through that with a human touch and fix all the things? That's the only human element that you need.

21:52

Did you go say, hey, I'm going to actually go put a real human idea on top of what we're doing for this campaign versus copying what someone else did or spitting something out of whatever GPT you're using? Do I have real voices and faces and people that represent this brand? Do I bring those people together inside of communities, whether it's our the Run Club or the Meetup or the Founder Inner Circle or the whatever it is, the brand trip? Do I have the ways to get those people in real life and build an experience around it, adding the human element on top of it? But anything that stands out that gets built in this new era is going to have those factors.

22:22

They're going to understand their consumers educated. They're going to understand this new media shift. They're going to show their position and world build it and creative direct it. And they're going to have a standard of excellence. And just like any period in time where things begin to feel the same, and right now they do, every brand feels the same. It feels like we're really in a slop era. Nothing quite feels cool. Everyone seems over it. Every time there's one of these shifts, there's a bunch of personal brands, creators, brands, services, media entities, creatives that basically blossom out of it. That arise from that into whatever the next thing is.

22:50

And I just want to highly encourage you that at any time in history, if you take any of this to heart, this is the time to act on whatever that is, whatever your version of it is. To know these things, to fight for them, to be ahead of it. If some of these ideas are brand new to you and you want to dive into creative strategy for the first time, I've got a free several day course that breaks down the fundamentals like ad strategy and organic strategy, etc. And get you to learn a bunch of those terms if that's interesting to you, I will link down here below. As always, thank you so much for watching.

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