In this video, we are going to talk about the art direction, creative direction, and marketing of technology. And thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. There's a million things here we can do. We're going to zone in on one: visual worlds. How do you create a visual language for a modern brand? Where does that even play out? And then we're going to dive into Apple. Why I love to use them as an example is not just because they're iconic, but because people focus on the wrong things. Really, I feel like the best way to learn from them is to look at all of their different eras, and then map that to things you can learn about how you visually present a brand and orchestrate campaigns at different points in a brand's arc. We're going to go through some of their best campaigns. We're going to go through their different stages in history and then dive into a bunch of other really interesting brands: Cash App and how they've developed a new unique visual world around finance; what's happening with technology and media and how people present it; the era of artifacts and how brands are using product as marketing, even when they make completely different things. We'll cover Nothing. We're going to cover venture capital, TBPN, Teenage Engineering. I am super excited to make this video. I think that anyone who's a creative or anyone that works in technology and is a part of this ongoing complex taste discord there will really enjoy. Let's lock in.
So first, why listen to me about this? For those unfamiliar with my full arc, after my career as a designer, where I started in lifestyle brands, food and beverage, hospitality, I worked in technology for an extended period. I worked for defense companies on campaigns there for optics in the outdoor space. And then where I gained a lot of rungs in my career was working in marketing for consumer and commercial drones, from before they were regulated camera drones as we know them to when they were first sold into big box retail to their applications in the world we see them today. And from there, I was one of the partners that started a contract engineering firm that still exists and has 40-plus engineers, where we have everything from government security contracts to doing development for software, hardware, anything that touches autopilot or telemetry has been our specialty there. And it's funny because that's where so much of my expertise is, up until the last about decade, was what I've done the least content about because often when you're working, you want to do content about things you love, not necessarily the things that you're in deep on. But now, with the discourse where it is around technology, it's a perfect time to put some of that expertise into the zeitgeist and talk about some of these things.
Now, starting with Apple, if I was being generic, if this was a generic design video, I would talk about simplicity as power. Look at the text on this page. Look at the white space. Look how they photograph their product. Apple doesn't design minimal because it's trendy. They design minimal because it clarifies intelligence. That's what ChatGPT would say. Clarity signals intelligence. But this was a different era. This doesn't work for your average company anymore. That's not what you should learn from them. So many things have been pulled from this and inspire this. This Garamond font is a great example. I saw a note when the new National Design Institute put out this new website, an incredible-looking government website, and a lot of people being like, well, it looks so good because it's using Garamond. It's using a derivative of the Apple font. Instrument Serif is the, I think, generic Google Font version. And that's why it feels so credible. That's one of many reasons the design is. But everyone will always refer back to Apple as the minimalist king, as the font king. And that's not what we can learn from this. What we can learn is stages where you're at as a company.
Let's start with one of the most known Apple campaigns, Think Different. This is a campaign that's constantly referenced as one of the best marketing campaigns in history, where they put iconic people at the top of their fields and had them represent the Apple brand, someone who thinks different. This was an important part for Apple at this arc in its brand. Steve Jobs had just come back and needed the campaign to signify what they stand for. When we talk about the eras of Apple, I want you to map to whatever brand you work for or have, where it is inside its cycle of its life. For many brands, whether you've just started in a product or you're in the market but haven't really gotten that fit, that takeoff, what you're missing is you haven't developed a brand worth watching. This was Apple at that same time, where they had existed, they were in the market, but they weren't worth paying super close attention to. And if that attention was paid, they didn't know what that brand really stood for, or it stood for something far different than where they wanted to go. This is a common problem in many brands' arcs. And this is where something like an extremely strong campaign can begin to bridge the gap.
Now, in 1997, they leveraged the tools they had at the time. That was an era of monoculture, celebrity themes, where all these people were known by everybody. That's not the era that we're in today. And we've actually seen a company in an almost similar scenario, not quite the Steve Jobs coming back, but a company trying to give you a reason: why should I watch this brand? What do they stand for in a complicated space? Riff off this campaign. So this is Claude's campaign, Keep Thinking. It's a direct play on Think Different. It wants to encourage those same people in the new iterations of them, what they can do to be their own unique selves. But this is the biggest shift that we have in terms of how you think about creative direction, culture, celebrity, and who and how concepts represent your brand today, is there aren't famous figures in this. They're not going and getting Miles Davis or even the popular people of our time. Instead, it is in the hands of the people. They are showing you a version of you, a person with a garage band, a person out hiking, a person trying to tinker and solve. With nary a phone in sight, they're putting normal people in aspirational scenarios and using that as the thinking. That's a perspective shift I think everyone should be thinking about in this era, is that the individual in our world, where it's not 15 minutes of fame, everyone has years of micro fame. How do you put everyone front and center inside a campaign? That's an iteration on that.
Going into their second era I'll discuss here, the iconic product era, the iPod era. This iPod campaign, quite legendary, positioned the product, the artifact itself, as something that by its form factor could become prolific within the market. And this is another thing that a brand at a certain stage in its arc should think about.
I talked about the Claude Keep Thinking campaign. And if that got you thinking about how to actually put Claude to work, beyond just prompting it back and forth, then this free guide from HubSpot called the Claude Cowork Stack is worth checking out. So here's what's happening. Cowork is fundamentally different from regular AI flows. You've probably heard about it, but don't know how to actually use it. Right now, most marketers are copy-pasting context into AI one prompt or project at a time. Then their output is divorced from deliverables. You still have to go actually build the thing or complete the work. So Cowork flips that. You give Claude access to your actual files, your campaign data, your browser, and it works through the problem in the background while you do something else. HubSpot put together 12 prompts specifically engineered around this: local folder access, background processing, real file creation, not generic write-me-a-blog-post stuff. Think about entire campaign assets built out across channels. Deep research, done while you're working on something else. My favorite part is the marketing campaign builder. You drop in your brief and your brand assets, and Claude does the heavy lifting of what can happen across every channel. So go check out the free Claude Cowork Stack under the link in the description. And thanks to HubSpot for making this resource and sponsoring this video.
We are in a visual era, a packaging era. I saw a video from Casey Lewis, who does the after-school newsletter, the other week, where she was talking about how Gen Z was consuming things that look good on camera. There was an article written about this, data out there supporting it, which makes complete sense if you live on the internet, but it's a new concept for older people, for technology people. And we're in this era where your value proposition is based a lot on the aesthetics of your product. In almost any consumer good, in almost any piece of hardware, it has to be a flex in itself. You may have seen the video where I reviewed the Friend, the AI pendant, and a lot of it came to it was just a bad industrial design, right? Where if that was an industrial design, whether the product works or not, that signaled something that looked more akin to what Frank Ocean did with Homer, or had a cultural play,
We are in a visual era, a packaging era. I saw a video from Casey Lewis, who does the after-school newsletter, the other week, where she was talking about how Gen Z was consuming things that look good on camera. There was an article written about this, data out there supporting it, which makes complete sense if you live on the internet, but it's a new concept for older people, for technology people. And we're in this era where your value proposition is a lot based on the aesthetics of your product. In almost any consumer good, in almost any piece of hardware, it has to be a flex in itself. You may have seen the video where I reviewed the friend, the AI pendant, and a lot of it came to it was just a bad industrial design, right? Where if that was an industrial design, whether the product works or not, that signaled something that looked more akin to what Frank Ocean did with Homer, or had a cultural play, there's more of a chance for acceptance. You see this now in all these headphones beginning to look like earrings. It's how do you engineer the product into an artifact? But then campaigns like this, and the art direction, creative direction of it, have to accentuate that. They have to put the product out into the culture. You need to reinforce that visual language. And so it's a worthwhile thing to think about when you look at through lines of what am I going to do for my visual campaign, for my social media, for what I'm putting inside my ads? How do I continue these things? Do you have an iconic silhouette? Or do you have a unique look and feel? And if not, do you have a unique visual language for your products? Teenage Engineering has done a decent job of this, where you expect this look and feel that they have on everything, and they extend it into different universes, where you begin to recognize the sampler. They can live as much in the world of reggae as they can live in a medieval world. The colors, the combos, it feels a certain way. And in the marketing, their product form factors, this language can take over, but nothing near where Apple has gone. Perhaps one of the biggest plays on this would be the Rode lip gloss iPhone holder, where they were able to not just make the lip gloss with its slightly unique form factor into a marketing play, they are selling a product that is also the marketing. Nothing has been working hard on doing this in a competitive space to Apple, right? Because there's always going to be someone to position against no matter how big a company becomes. So they have been looking at how do they have this almost noisier visual language that counterpositions itself against the clean lines of Apple and all their clones, the dot matrix aesthetic.
But the campaign I think the most people can learn from, and the era of Apple that I think is actually the most impactful from an art direction perspective, is the shot on iPhone era. As part of my toolkit, when I work on creative strategy for brands, whether it's organic or for ads, I have a list of formats I know work psychologically inside of a piece of content. And one of them is what's called prove it. So for instance, if you're working on a product that has a 24 hours, and it doesn't wear off, how can you show a full 24 hours inside your video or your ad? How can you take someone on that journey? Prove that the 24 hours, they're in the harshest circumstances. Morphe is a brand I work with, is always doing this well, right? They have a setting spray for makeup. And on their stories, they are doing some super intense workout and Pilates classes in partnership with a studio, where they have the girls showing before and after you get a deep sweat or you get whatever in there, how the makeup stays on. Prove it is in their DNA. But shot on iPhone is one of the most interesting examples of this in that you want to prove that it takes good pictures, use the pictures in the campaigns. That's an easy line to cross. But then when you start to really think about it, wow, they can blow those up to the sides of buildings, you can put an iPhone image on a billboard. When you begin to look at this as it compounds over time, when sometimes it's relatively normal photos, and sometimes it's really artful, interesting photos, they're showing you the arc of the complete depth of possibility there. And they carried this over into full music videos shot on iPhone. It was prove it embodied, and obviously even better because you can actually turn it into the asset of the campaign. But for every brand that has a value proposition where you are selling a transformation, which is so many products, and Apple, for a lot of people, is basically selling in your hand that you have creativity at your fingertips, you have better photos, you can capture your life in an amazing way, how you show that transformation is one of the most effective techniques to bring into art direction. So if you're thinking about what is the visual theme for a shoot, what are we going to show, how are you doing that prove it? How is that happening within it? If you have a rain jacket, and you're taking it out inside the harshest conditions and showing that they're dry underneath, then how do you elevate that visually and conceptually on top of it? The root of that is going to be one of the most effective things you have in your toolkit for any level of creative work, is getting back to that core point of how you integrate the product is proving it. And there's obviously a million other ways you can do it in selling the lifestyle and concepts and themes and ideas and user journeys. When it comes back to it, at its root, what is going to be the most effective will likely be this.
And then I want to talk about the era we're in now because a lot of people do look at Apple. I remember thinking this myself too. I was one of the creators that was invited to Apple's WWDC last year. So I'm there. It's iJustine. It's Marquise Brownlee. It's Rachel from Lincoln Bio. Emily from Feed Me. And I'm watching all the things that are happening. I'm watching the campaigns and what they're rolling out. And it's all of us around F1, the F1 movie. Apple's extremely integrated into the F1 movie, right? And they have all the cinema they're integrated with because now they have their own Dune TV. And you begin to realize this is not, look at the era. It's like they don't want to compete inside this social media grind that the rest of us are on, inside the normal ad-buying grind. When you are at a level of which they are, you need to be so intertwined with culture at the highest level, with true monoculture action that represents the brand, right, which is Brad Pitt movies, which is the Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show sponsor multiple years in a row. If you look at what does a company that is a leader, what do they do to capture the premise that they're on top in that same way? That's a very different challenge than thinking about a campaign like Think Different. They have no need for that at this current point until they reach another inflection point like that, which maybe they get to at a certain time. But it's not the same. We can't expect the same marketing in companies at different points in their arc. And if you are working at a big business like that, and you are trying to get some interesting niche initiative or campaign off the ground, you have to really think, is this at enough scale that it aligns with the vision? If you are working at a Fortune 500 company, and you really want to be the one that gets them into streaming as a marketing engine, you want to do campaigns with these light personalities, that may not have the scale that's necessary to make an impact there. But if you were like, hey, we could do this with 100 streamers, if you can corner the market on something, the ambition level needs to rise with the level at which the company executes. It's a big reason why creatives who have more niche ideas struggle inside some of these larger scenarios.
Now I want to talk about building a visual world today. Who's doing it differently now? And one of the most interesting ones to me is Cash App. And they have their design and brand guidelines public, which I think is fun. But we're most interested in them as they are extremely counterpositioned, right? So you look at all the existing banking and finance infrastructure, the colors, the visuals, everything wants to promote safety, security, longevity, but it's from these institutions that people don't really trust, that aren't really built into their lives, that feel antiquated. And Cash App, from every piece of visual, is meant to feel integrated into its user's life. And they've built this design language around that. And so I was at the last Cash App event in New York too, where they were debuting their fall 25, all their new releases. And I was chatting with the design team there, and they were talking about the process with which they do that. And some of the concepts that really stood out to me in that conversation was the idea of having fun in the mundane. So basically,
And they have their design and brand guidelines public, which I think is fun. But we're most interested in them as they are extremely counter-positioned, right? So you look at all the existing banking and finance infrastructure, the colors, the visuals, everything wants to promote safety, security, longevity, but it's from these institutions that people don't really trust, that aren't really built into their lives, that feel antiquated. And Cash App, from every piece of visual, is meant to feel integrated into its user's life. And they've built this design language around that.
And so I was at the last Cash App event in New York too, where they were debuting their fall 25, all their new releases. And I was chatting with the design team there, and they were talking about the process with which they do that. And some of the concepts that really stood out to me in that conversation was the idea of having fun in the mundane. So there are all these little micro moments in your day. How do you have some joy in them? How do you make them personal? And in this fall release is when they were giving people the option to be able to choose from photos behind when they send people money. You could choose all these interesting graphics that you could send along with reimbursing somebody for dinner, etc. A little micro moment in there.
When the brand was talking about how they made all the items they had, they just gave all these different graphics, the ones that you see here inside these animations, everything from bread to croissants made of dollars to matcha to these slices of cake. And when they were talking about the process to come up with all this, they're saying that the design team's coming up with thousands and thousands of items, where they're looking at the data from the transactions people make. What do people actually buy? And that starts as their starting point. All these things people are purchasing, let's use those to create iconography. They're rooting it in the visual language of the user. And it's in mass, I said 1000s of items, and they're 3D scanning a lot of things in the real world. So they have these realistic things that they're able to then pull on to make graphics like what you see here.
And that visual language of the user is a really important thing to think about. As you look at what the visual language technology looks like, back to that theme I had discussing the Claude ad, it's no longer about this hero celebrity or this hero answer. It's about empowering that individual, about showing that you recognize their life. And as a marketing concept that technologists need to wrap their heads around, especially in this taste economy era, where everyone's, "Oh, I need to have this taste or that taste." What is the taste of your users? What are they consuming? How can you surprise them, delight them, educate them, mirror them, where you're showing them that you understand them back?
And Cash App has done this in a few ways that are interesting as well. One is the design of the card, right? This is an artifacts and carousel. They've actually collected the unique designs people have done where they can customize their own Cash App card, from MF Doom to Vape Nation, memes, all these funny sketches, the yin yang and the design, all the way to now there's a brat Charlie XCX card, right? But it's turned into something that means something to somebody, again, for a little transactional thing. These are fun. They're funny. And it's a moment inside their users' lives that another company doesn't own. They have it uniquely, just as unique as a metal card from Amex was, where everyone took it.
I love to point to them as someone doing it differently in a large established industry. And they've done this on social too. As you may have noticed, if you are on the Cash App social media, it's a wide array of content. Yeah. Yeah. As you see, look at the top here. Three of these last eight reels. I'm one of several creators that works for them. They have BK Coffee, skit creators. They have their racers, but they have a wide variety from a more business intellectual creator like myself to more skit creators to what they have in racing. They're building a world that mirrors all the different things around their users, where it's going to be a variety show versus just a singular brand ethos.
So if you're not familiar with the podcast, TBPN, they're an extremely popular podcast in technology. And they announced a rebrand recently. It's done by Area. And this brand identity is applied to their podcast in YouTube. You'll see it's in the Chyrons. They're doing a couple of things here I think are really interesting the brand should be aware of. One is they're using their brand identity to establish credibility and recognition, right? Which is what most brand identities are. People seem to have lost that. They'll think, "Oh, just having it be nice establishes credibility." For them, having it look like a news network that's been around forever, that operates at that level, that's unique on a YouTube feed. Again, I see this live streaming. It does not look like anyone else's podcast. There's a visual power there. It's done that well.
And then thinking about the applications. So obviously there's the Chyrons they have while they're talking, where they're able to call out different things that are going on and different colorways and looks, how it actually applies to social media. This is one of the biggest things we look at when you actually get into social. First, branded content like this doesn't work for everyone, but for podcasts or for media networks or for people that are making announcements, doing carousels, it matters. Don't over-design into this. But if you are participating in the culture and can do it at a high level, you should.
And this is something we looked at when we were doing the Brand Fathers pod and we were trying to get our identity redesigned. One of the things we were requesting is stuff like this, right? We want social graphics when we want to call out different events or news or things. And the designers just couldn't get what actually works on social. There's a dissonance there where you have a unique advantage you can take advantage of if you do understand it of, "I understand how visuals are cool. And I understand what works on social media. And I understand what people are trying to do with their content. And I can build identities and systems and design to push that." And this is something Area has done. I imagine it was collaborative with what TVPM is already working on to create that level of identity.
But this ties into this idea of artifacts. Creative direction and art direction now are more tied into the fabrication of things than ever, into we have to make some big blown-up thing or create some set for whatever video we're going to make. Or the product itself is so tied into how the content is made because of the virality of product. But the TVPN hats and jackets and polos have become part of the identity, right? You can only get them if you're a guest. They send them to people after they're on the show. But it's an artifact for the brand. That's an extension of the brand. It's a big part of the identity we look at now for such a product-driven, post-driven culture.
And I think brands, especially older technology brands, don't realize what their brands can mean to people over time. If you haven't seen the Lockheed Martin streetwear brand in Korea, where they have completely full selling lines. Perhaps the best example is Anduril, the defense tech company, making Game Boys out of the same metal that they use inside their rockets. Yeah. The same metal as attack drones. Creating the artifacts and lore is as much of creative direction, art direction, and marketing now as some of the initial value proposition stuff. The objects matter. And when they're whack, it's actually much worse. When it's the same generic thing with another piece of trash you have to throw away versus taking the time to make anything with a story.
After artifacts, I want to talk about the concept of rituals as well. So when I was still working in technology, one of the software companies that I worked at was funded by this company, Lux Capital. Yeah, six and a half million dollars seed from them. And I remember at the time they did a thing, they did a quarterly letter that they would send out about the things that they are focused on as a fund, what they're seeing, the conditions everyone should be aware of. And it became a regular thing that everyone who was privy to it wanted to be able to engage with it, read it, know what they were saying. Then they began releasing versions of this publicly as well. And you need to expect, what are these people's regular thoughts on technology?
I think rituals like that are really important for brands in this space in particular to consider, the way you see an Apple WWDC each year, even if you're only doing it the size that you're at. And another one I want to call out from them is they also have an event thing that they've done as well. You can function them online, but they have this risk
dollars seed from them. And I remember at the time they did a thing: they did a quarterly letter that they would send out about the things that they are focused on as a fund, what they're seeing, the conditions everyone should be aware of. And it became a regular thing that everyone who was privy to it wanted to be able to engage with it, read it, know what they were saying. Then they began releasing versions of this publicly as well. And you need to expect: what are these people's regular thoughts on technology? I think rituals like that are really important for brands in this space, in particular, to consider the way you see an Apple WWDC each year, even if you're only doing it the size that you're at. And another one I want to call out from them is they also have an event thing that they've done as well. You can find them online, but they basically have this risk gaming, scenario-based walkthroughs, strategic multi-hour scenarios you can work through with other people, salon experiences. They are taking their idea of venture capital, their idea of them marketing these scenarios happening in the world they have to think through from a fiscal perspective and how do their portfolio companies navigate them, and then putting scenarios out there of those same problems that people can actually go in and work and try to solve. I thought that was a really unique way to approach the marketing of venture capital because we're seeing a lot of that capital have to market way more now. And what I want to call out on this is A16Z. So Andreessen Horowitz rebranded this American dynamism rebrand you've likely seen. They hired some of the initial workers at TBPN who were understanding-savvy of new media, and they're doing things like this, putting out American dynamism carousels, right? Doing actual well-edited interview reels, carousels from insights from Sam Altman, using that new branding. They're navigating the modern language in a way that almost no other VC firm is. This one actually did well. These startups don't exist yet, right? And what's interesting about this is they're in the carousel game, right? The carousel game on Instagram right now, if you have credibility, is a great one. If you don't have credibility, you're just another carousel in the noise. You're literally putting stuff out there that no one's going to ever associate with you. That's why I put my face on all my carousels. At least I'm associated with it. But if you're A16Z, if you're someone who has that clout, ID Magazine is another example. ID Magazine is putting out a lot of publications that finally caught on that, oh, there's some social media we understand we're not going to get torched at. It's going to be carousels. A16Z has done this where it gives them immediate credit, right? Where you're like, wow, this is a thing I've heard of if I'm in that niche. There's content coming out here, and they're in that social conversation effectively. What I think is interesting is it's a few steps from right. And this is another big thing. We look at Apple in context. Everything for Apple is always perfect. Everything is always set up exactly right. They are the brand marquee of perfection as a brand value. Is it up to the standard? Was it Steve Jobs' standard or the standard they have now? But this is not where A16Z is. That's an important distinction because it's happening for a reason. They are trying. These are attempts. They are new at social. They are figuring it out. A lot of it is not good. It's several steps from right. But enough of it is good. They're putting wins on the board, and they're actually actively participating. And that's what most technology companies are missing now, especially established, especially VCs. They're so afraid to not have the perfect strategy. They're so afraid to have things flop. And this is an iterative scenario. You have to be in the arena. There is no way you can be out of the arena trying shit. You cannot have eight levels of approval. You cannot have the perfect campaign. You have to be iterating. You're not going to figure it out because every single brand has to have the combination of its account, its team, its fans, and each algorithm. You have to decipher that. There's no silver bullet. I'm one of the foremost experts in the world on brand social media after we've done thousands of brands in Cut30. And I will tell you, as that expert, that you cannot, I cannot, walk in and give you a silver bullet that will 100% succeed until we understand the interaction between your customers on social media, your brand on social media, and the content formats that are there and what's happening in the algorithm at any given time. It is a moving target. And by the time you do some fancy approved campaign, that target may already have moved again. So they're doing the exact right thing here. It's not the Steve Jobs era. It's the in-the-arena era, the imperfect era. That's one of the big things any technology company watching this, I would take away. So I know we've heard a lot of concepts here. I could yap about this for hours, honestly. Maybe we'll do more if you like more technology videos, if you want me to break down other companies or all things in there. I'm debating trying this more. I love to talk about tech. If it does resonate, it's something I would love to talk about significantly more. And if you are in this space, you're looking to learn these creative strategy toolkits, all of the various programs and newsletters I think that I have are down below. We are working with brands to train their teams. We're working with individual people all the time on working through these exact scenarios. As always, I appreciate y'all watching. We're going to keep doing new topics and new things. And I appreciate y'all bearing with it. Thank you.
about because often when you're working, you want to do content about things you love, not necessarily the things that you're in deep on. But now with the discourse where it is around technology, it's a perfect time to put some of that expertise into the zeitgeist and talk about some of these things. Now, starting with Apple, if I was being generic, if this was a generic design video, I would talk about simplicity as power. Look at the text on this page. Look at the white space. Look how they photograph their product. Apple doesn't design minimal because it's trendy. They design minimal
because it clarifies intelligence. That's what ChatGPT would say. Clarity signals intelligence. But this was a different era. This doesn't work for your average company anymore. That's not what you should learn from them. So many things have been pulled from this and inspire this. Like this Garamond font is a great example. I saw a note when the new National Design Institute put out this new website, an incredible looking government website. And a lot of people being like, well, it looks so good because it's using Garamond. It's using a derivative of the Apple font. Instrument serif
is the, I think, the generic Google font version. And that's why it feels so credible. That's one of many reasons the design is. But everyone will always refer back to Apple as the minimalist king, as the font king. And that's not what we can learn from this. What we can learn is stages where you're at as a company. Let's start with one of the most known Apple campaigns, Think Different. This is a campaign that's constantly referenced as one of the best marketing campaigns in history, where they put iconic people at the top of their fields and had them represent the Apple brand, someone who thinks
different. This was an important part for Apple at this arc in its brand. Steve Jobs had just come back and needed the campaign to signify what they stand for. When we talk about the eras of Apple, I want you to map to whatever brand you work for or have, where it is inside its cycle of its life. For many brands, whether you've just started in a product or you're in the market but haven't really gotten that fit, that takeoff, what you're missing is you haven't developed a brand worth watching. This was Apple at that same time, where they had existed, they were in the market, but they
weren't worth paying super close attention to. And if that attention was paid, they didn't know what that brand really stood for, or it stood for something kind of far different than where they wanted to go. This is a common problem in many brands' arcs. And this is where something like an extremely strong campaign can begin to bridge the gap. Now, in 1997, they leveraged the tools they had at the time. That was an era of monoculture, celebrity themes, where all these people were known by everybody. That's not the era that we're in today. And we've actually seen a company in an almost
similar scenario, not quite the Steve Jobs coming back, but a company trying to give you a reason, why should I watch this brand? What do they stand for in a complicated space? Riff off this campaign. So this is Claude's campaign. Keep thinking. It's a direct play on think different. It wants to encourage those same people in the new iterations of them what they can do to be their own unique selves. But this is the biggest shift that we have in terms of how you think about creative direction, culture, celebrity, and who and how concepts represent your brand to today, is there aren't
famous figures in this. They're not going and getting Miles Davis or even the popular people of our time. Instead, it is in the hands of the people. They are showing you a version of you, a person with a garage band, a person out hiking, a person trying to tinker and solve. With nary a phone in sight, they're putting normal people in aspirational scenarios and using that as the thinking. That's a perspective shift I think everyone should be thinking about in this era, is that the individual in our world where it's not 15 minutes of fame, everyone has years of micro fame, basically. How do you put everyone front and center inside a campaign? That's an iteration
on that. Going into their second era I'll discuss here, the iconic product era, the iPod era. This iPod campaign, quite legendary, and it positioned the product, the artifact itself, as something that by its form factor could become prolific within the market. And this is another thing that a brand at a certain stage in its arc should think about. I talked about the Claude Keep Thinking campaign. And if that got you thinking about how to actually put Claude to work, beyond just prompting it back and forth, then this free guide from HubSpot called the Claude Cowork Stack is worth checking out. So here's what's happening. Cowork is fundamentally different
from regular AI flows. You've probably heard about it, but don't know how to actually use it. Right now, most marketers are copy-pasting context into AI one prompt or project at a time. Then their output is device versus deliverables. You still have to go actually build the thing or complete the work. So Cowork flips that. You give Claude access to your actual files, your campaign data, your browser, and it works through the problem in the background while you do something else. HubSpot put together 12 prompts specifically engineered around this. Local folder access, background processing, real file creation, not like generic write-me-a-blog-post
stuff. Think about entire campaign assets built out across channels. Deep research. Done while you're working on something else. My favorite part is the marketing campaign builder. You drop in your brief and your brand assets, and Claude does the heavy lifting of what can happen across every channel. So go check out the free Claude Coworks stack under the link in the description. And thanks to HubSpot for making this resource and sponsoring this video. We are in a visual era, a packaging era. I saw a video from Casey Lewis, who does the after-school newsletter the other week, where she was talking about how Gen Z was consuming
things that look good on camera. There was an article written about this, like data out there supporting it, which makes complete sense if you live on the internet, but it's a new concept for older people, for technology people. And we're in this era where your value proposition is a lot based on the aesthetics of your product. In almost any consumer good, in almost any piece of hardware, it has to be a flex in itself. You may have saw the video where I reviewed the friend, the AI pendant, and a lot of it came to it was just a bad industrial design, right? Where if that was a industrial design, whether the product works or not, that signaled
something that looked more akin to what Frank Ocean did with Homer, or had a cultural play, there's more of a chance for acceptance. You see this now in all these headphones, beginning to look like earrings. It's how do you engineer the product into an artifact? But then campaigns like this, and the art direction, creative direction of it, have to accentuate that. They have to put the product out into the culture. You need to reinforce that visual language. And so it's a worthwhile thing to think about when you look at through lines of what am I going to do for my visual campaign, for my social media, for what I'm putting inside my ads? How do I continue
these things? Do you have an iconic silhouette? Or do you have a unique look and feel? And if not, do you have a unique visual language for your products? Teenage Engineering has done a decent job of this, where you kind of expect this look and feel that they have on everything, and they extend it into different universes, where you begin to recognize the sampler, you know that they can live as much in the world of reggae as they can live in a medieval world. The colors, the combos, it feels a certain way. And in the marketing, their product form factors, this language can kind of take
over, but nothing near where where Apple has gone. Perhaps one of the biggest plays on this would be the Rode lip gloss iPhone holder, where they were able to not just make the lip gloss with its slightly unique form factor into a marketing play, they are selling a product that is also the marketing. Nothing has been working hard on doing this in a competitive space to Apple, right? Because there's always going to be someone to position against no matter how big a company becomes. So they have been looking at how do they have this almost like noisier visual language that
counter positions itself against the clean lines of Apple and all their clones, the dot matrix aesthetic. But the campaign I think the most people can learn from and the era of Apple that I think is actually the most impactful from an art direction perspective is the shot on iPhone era. As part of my toolkit, when I work on creative strategy for brands, whether it's organic or for ads, I have a list of formats I know work psychologically inside of a piece of content. And one of them is what's called prove it. So for instance, if you're working on a product that has a 24 hours, and it doesn't
wear off, how can you show a full 24 hours like inside your video or your ad? How can you take someone on that journey? Prove that the 24 hours they're in the harshest circumstances. Morphe is a brand I work with is always doing this well, right? They allow us a setting spray for makeup. And they're on their stories. They are doing like some super intense workout and Pilates classes in partnership with a studio where they have the girls showing before and after you get a deep sweat or you get whatever in there, how the makeup stays on prove it is in their DNA. But shot on iPhone is one of the most
interesting examples of this in that you want to prove that it takes good pictures, use the pictures in the campaigns. That's an easy line to cross. But then when you start to really think about it, wow, they can blow those up to the sides of buildings, you can put an iPhone image on a billboard. When you begin to look at this as it compounds over time, when sometimes it's relatively normal photos, and sometimes it's really artful, interesting photos, they're showing you the arc of the complete depth of possibility there. And they carried this over into full music videos shot
on iPhone. It was prove it embodied and obviously even better because you can actually turn it into the asset of the campaign. But for every brand that has a value proposition where you are selling a transformation, which is so many products. And Apple for a lot of people is basically selling in your hand that you have creativity at your fingertips, you have better photos, you can capture your life in an amazing way. How you show that transformation is one of the most effective techniques to bring into art direction. So if you're thinking about what is the visual theme for a shoot, what are we going
to show? How are you doing that prove it? How is that happening within it? If you have a rain jacket, and you're taking it out inside the harshest conditions and showing that they're dry underneath, and then how do you elevate that visually and conceptually on top of it? The root of that is going to be one of the most effective things you have in your toolkit for any level of creative work is getting back to that core point of how you integrate the product is proving it. And there's obviously a million other ways you can do it and selling the lifestyle and concepts and themes and ideas and user journeys.
When it comes back to it, it's root, what is going to be the most effective will likely be this. And then I want to talk about the era we're in now because a lot of people do look at Apple. I remember thinking this myself too. I was one of the creators that was invited to Apple's WWDC last year. So I'm there. It's iJustine. It's Marquise Brownlee. It's Rachel from Lincoln Bio. Emily from Feed Me. And I'm watching all the things that are happening. I'm watching the campaigns and what they're rolling out. And it's all of us around F1, the F1 movie. Apple's like extremely integrated into the F1 movie, right? And they have all the cinema they're integrated with because
now they have their own Dune TV. And you begin to realize this is not, look at the era. It's like they don't want to compete inside this, the social media grind that the rest of us are on, inside the normal ad buying grind. When you are at a level of which they are, you need to be so intertwined with culture at the highest level, with true monoculture action that represents the brand, right, which is Brad Pitt movies, which is the Apple Music is a Super Bowl halftime show sponsor multiple years in a row. If you look at what does a company that is a leader, what do they do to capture the premise that they're on top in that same way? That's a very different challenge than
thinking about a campaign like Think Different. They have no need for that at this current point until they reach another inflection point like that, which maybe they get to at a certain time. But it's not the same. We can't expect the same marketing and companies at different points in their arc. And if you are working at a big business like that, and you are trying to get some like interesting niche initiative or campaign off the ground, you have to really think, is this at enough scale that it aligns with the vision? If you are working at a Fortune 500 company, and you really want to be the one that gets them into streaming as a marketing engine,
you want to do campaigns with these light personalities, that may not have the scale that's necessary to make an impact there. But if you were like, hey, we could do this with 100 streamers, if you can corner the market on something, the ambition level needs to rise with the level with which the company executes. It's a big reason why creatives who have more niche ideas struggle inside some of these larger scenarios. Now I want to talk about building a visual world today. Who's doing it differently now? And one of the most interesting ones to me is Cash App. And they have their design and brand guidelines public, which I think is fun. But we're most
interested in them as they are extremely counter positioned, right? So you look at all the existing banking and finance infrastructure, the colors, the visuals, everything wants to promote safety, security, longevity, but it's from these institutions that people don't really trust, that aren't really built into their lives that feel antiquated. And Cash App from every piece of visual is meant to feel integrated into its user's life. And they've built this design language around that. And so I was at the last Cash App event in New York too, where they were debuting their fall 25, like all their new releases. And I was chatting with the design team there,
and they were talking about the process with which they do that. And some of the concepts that really stood out to me in that conversation was the idea of like having fun in the mundane. So basically, there are all these little micro moments in your day, how do you have some joy in them? How do you make them personal? And in this fall release is when they were giving people the option to be able to choose from photos behind when they send people money. You could choose all these interesting graphics that you could send along with reimbursing somebody for dinner, etc. A little micro moment
in there. When the brand was talking about how they made all the items they had, they're basically, they just gave all these different graphics, the ones that you see here inside these animations, everything from bread to croissants made of dollars to matcha to like these slices of cake. And when they were talking about the process to come up with all this, they're basically saying that the design team's coming up with thousands and thousands of items, where they're looking at the data from the transactions people make, what do people actually buy? And that starts as basically their
starting point, all these things people are purchasing, let's use those to create iconography, they're rooting it in the visual language of the user. And it's in mass, I said 1000s of items, and they're 3d scanning a lot of things in the real world. So they have these kind of realistic things that they're able to then pull on to make graphics like what you see here. And that visual language of the user is a really important thing to think about. As you look at what the visual language technology looks like back to that theme I had discussing the Claude ad, it's no longer about this hero celebrity or this hero answer. It's about empowering that individual about showing
that you recognize their life. And as a marketing concept that technologists need to wrap their heads around, especially in this taste economy era, where everyone's like, Oh, I need to have this taste or that taste. What is the taste of your users? What are they consuming? How can you surprise them, delight them, educate them, mirror them, where you're showing them that you understand them back. And Cash App has done this in a few ways that are interesting as well. One is the design of the card, right? This is an artifacts and carousel. They've actually collected the unique designs
people have done where they can customize their own Cash App card from MF Doom to Vape Nation, memes, all these kind of funny sketches, the yin yang and the design all the way to like now there's a brat Charlie XCX card, right? But it's turned into something that like means something to somebody again for a little transactional thing. These are fun. They're funny. And it's a moment inside their users lives that another company doesn't own. They have it uniquely as just as unique as a metal card from Amex was where everyone took it. I love to point to them as someone doing it differently in a large established industry. And they've done this on social
too. As you may have noticed, if you are on the Cash App social media, it's a wide array of content. Yeah. Yeah. As you see, look at the top here. I'm three of these last eight reels. I'm one of several creators that works for them. They have BK Coffee, like skit creators. They have their racers, but they have a wide variety from a more business intellectual creator like myself to more like skit creators to what they have in racing. They're building a world that mirrors all the different things around their users where it's going to be a variety show versus just a singular brand ethos. So if you're not familiar with the podcast,
TBPN, they're an extremely popular podcast in technology. And they announced a rebrand recently. It's done by area. And this brand identity is applied to their podcast in YouTube. You'll see it's in the Chirons. They're doing a couple of things here. I think are really interesting. The brand should be aware of one is they're using their brand identity to establish credibility and recognition, right? Which is what most brand identities are. People seem to have lost that. They'll think, Oh, just having it be nice establishes credibility for them, having it look like a news network that's been around forever that operates at that level.
That's unique on a YouTube feed. Again, I see this live streaming. It does not look like anyone else's podcast. There's a visual power there. It's done that well. And then thinking about the applications. So obviously there's the Chirons they have while they're talking, where they're able to kind of call out different things that are going on and different colorways and looks, how it actually applies to social media. This is one of the biggest things we look at when you actually get into social. First, branded content like this doesn't work for everyone, but for podcasts or for media networks or for people that are making announcements,
doing carousels, it matters. Don't over design into this. But if you are participating in the culture and can do it at a high level, you should. And this is something we looked at when we were doing the brand father's pod and we're trying to get our identity redesigned. One of the things we were requesting is stuff like this, right? We want social graphics when we want to call out different events or news or things. And the designers just kind of couldn't get what actually works on social. There's a dissonance there where you have a unique advantage you can take advantage of if you do
understand it of, I understand how visuals are cool. And I understand what works on social media. And I understand what people are trying to do with their content. And I can build identities and systems and design to push that. And this is something Aria has done. I imagine it was collaborative with what TVPM is already working on to create that level of identity. But this ties into this idea of artifacts. Creative direction and art direction now are more tied into the fabrication of things than ever. Into we have to make some big blown up thing or create some set for whatever video we're
going to make. Or the product itself is so tied into how the content is made because of the virality of product. But the TVPN hats and jackets and polos have become part of the identity, right? You can only get them if you're a guest. They send them to people after they're on the show. But it's an artifact for the brand. That's an extension of the brand. It's a big part of the identity we look at now for such a product-driven, post-driven culture. And I think brands, especially older technology brands, don't realize what their brands can kind of mean to people over time. Like if you haven't seen
the Lockheed Martin streetwear brand in Korea, where they have a kind of completely, like full, complete selling lines. Perhaps the best example is Andrel, the defense tech company, making Game Boys out of the same metal that they use inside their rockets. Yeah. The same metal as attack drones. Creating the artifacts and lore is as much of creative direction, art direction, and marketing now as some of the initial value proposition stuff. The objects matter. And when they're whack, it's actually much worse. When it's the same generic thing with another piece of trash you
have to throw away versus taking the time to make anything with a story. After artifacts, I want to talk about the concept of rituals as well. So when I was still working in technology, one of the software companies that I worked at was funded by this company, Lux Capital. Yeah, six and a half million dollars seed from them. And I remember at the time they did a thing, they did a quarterly letter that they would send out about the things that they are focused on as a fund, what they're seeing, the conditions everyone should be aware of. And it became a regular thing that everyone who was kind
of pervy to it wanted to be able to engage with it, read it, know what they were saying. Then they began releasing versions of this publicly as well. And you need to expect, what are these people's regular thoughts on technology? I think rituals like that are really important for brands in this space in particular to consider the way you see an Apple WWDC each year, even if you're only doing it the size that you're at. And another one I want to call out from them is they also have like an event thing that they've done as well. You can function them online, but they basically have this risk
gaming like scenario based walkthroughs, like strategic multi-hour scenarios you can work through with other people, salon experiences. They are taking their idea of venture capital, their idea of them marketing, these scenarios happening in the world, they have to think through from a fiscal perspective and how do their portfolio companies navigate them and then putting scenarios out there of those same problems that people can actually go in and work and try to solve. I thought that was a really unique way to approach the marketing of venture capital because we're seeing a lot of that capital have to
market way more now. And what I want to call out on this is A16Z. So Andreessen Horowitz rebranded this American dynamism rebrand you've likely seen. They hired some of the initial workers at TVPN who were understanding savvy of new media and they're doing things like this, putting out American dynamism carousels, right? Doing actual well edited interview reels, carousels from insights from Sam Altman, using that new branding. They're navigating the modern language in a way that almost no other VC firm is. This one actually did well. These startups don't exist yet, right? And what's interesting about this is
they're in the carousel game, right? The carousel game on Instagram right now, if you have credibility, is a great one. If you don't have credibility, you're just another carousel in the noise. You're literally putting stuff out there that no one's going to ever associate with you. That's why I put my face on all my carousels. At least I'm associated with it. But if you're A16Z, if you're someone who has that cloud, like ID Magazine is another example. ID Magazine is putting out a lot of publications that finally caught on that, oh, there's some social media we understand we're not going to get torched at.
It's going to be carousels. A16Z has done this where it gives them immediate credit, right? Where you're like, wow, this is a thing I've heard of if I'm in that niche. There's content coming out here and they're in that social conversation effectively. What I think is interesting is it's a few steps from right. And this is another big thing. We look at Apple in context. Everything for Apple is always perfect. Everything is always set up exactly right. They are the brand marquee of perfection as a brand value. Is it up to the standard? Was it Steve Jobs' standard or the standard they have now? But this is not
where A16Z is. That's an important distinction because it's happening for a reason. They are trying. These are attempts. They are new at social. They are figuring it out. A lot of it is not good. It's several steps from right. But enough of it is good. They're putting wins on the board and they're actually actively participating. And that's what most technology companies are missing now, especially established, especially VCs. They're so afraid to not have the perfect strategy. They're so afraid to have things flop. And this is an iterative scenario. You have to be in the arena. There is no way you
can be out of the arena trying shit. You cannot have eight levels of approval. You cannot have the perfect campaign. You have to be iterating. You're not going to figure it out because every single brand has to have the combination of its account, its team, its fans, and each algorithm. You have to decipher that. There's no silver bullet. I'm one of the foremost experts in the world on brand social media after we've done thousands of brands in Cut30. And I will tell you as that expert that you cannot, I cannot walk in and give you a silver bullet that will 100% succeed until we understand
the interaction between your customers on social media, your brand on social media, and the content formats that are there and what's happening in the algorithm at any given time. It is a moving target. And by the time you do some fancy approved campaign, that target may already have moved again. So they're doing the exact right thing here. It's not the Steve Jobs era. It's the in the arena era, the imperfect era. That's with any technology company watching this. One of the big things I would take away. So I know we've heard a lot of concepts here. I could yap about this for hours, honestly. Maybe we'll do
more if you like more technology videos, if you want me to break down other companies or all things in there. I'm debating trying this more. I love to talk about tech. If it does resonate something, I would love to talk about significantly more. And if you are in this space, you're looking to learn these creative strategy toolkits, all of the various programs and newsletters, I think that I have are down below. We are working with brands to train their teams. We're working with individual people all the time on working through these exact scenarios. As always, I appreciate y'all watching. We're going to keep
doing new topics and new things. And I appreciate y'all bearing with it. Thank you.