Issue Two

Jack: Fashion magazines are what got me into this industry. Growing up in suburban California, my lifeline to culture was through the pages of i-D, Vogue Italia, Purple— I was obsessed with what I now know as art direction: the idea that entire worlds could be built through a handful of static images.

That kind of work barely exists now. Social media flattened everything; print can’t afford to make it, and brands aren’t incentivized to. Conversion beats storytelling every time: cheap assets, quick returns, and a watchful eye on the dashboard.

A few months ago, I was driving through the city when I saw a huge billboard of Timothée Chalamet crouched in a field beside the Cash App logo. It stopped me. I had no idea what it meant—Timothée, a fintech company, a field—but it stayed in my head. Then I started seeing people talk about it online. Many of them were far removed from the advertising industry.

Around the same time, I noticed Spotify’s new out-of-home campaign—a striking, tasteful image of two men in a push-up position, facing each other. It felt edgy, intimate—like a Tillmans poster torn off a gallery wall and slapped onto the street, but with a small yellow Spotify logo tucked tastefully in the corner. Over the next few weeks, more images appeared around the city: a pink cowboy hat, a white alligator, two young London men who looked suspiciously like another set of brothers about to go on tour that summer.

Then came another wave of billboards—Nadia Lee Cohen, Cole Bennett, Tyler, the Creator. No headlines, no calls to action. Just faces paired with the simplest visual cues: an Instagram logo, a posting icon, half a Reels symbol cut off at the edge.

All of these showing up in such a short period got me thinking. These ads sell nothing—no features, no funnels, no hooks. They don’t even invite. They’re not traditional top-of-funnel plays; they feel more like poetic education—mini editorials building context, tone, identity. Cash App aligning with culture. Spotify reminding people it’s about fandom. Instagram quietly reclaiming creativity.

Less advertisement than affirmation—a reminder of who they are, not what they sell.

A brandetorial is an ad that behaves like an editorial. In the same way a fashion editorial builds a world around a look, a brandetorial builds a world around a brand.

Jack: There’s clearly a reason this shift is happening, and I’m curious how you see it. Why are brands trying to rebuild meaning—and why through this kind of work?

Jack: Yeah, I think what caught my eye about these brandetorials is that they operate outside the funnel entirely. Even so-called top-of-funnel work still exists to educate or convert—it’s meant to push you somewhere. These don’t; they sit above it. They build context and emotion in a way the algorithm can’t. For people who know the brands, the cues are obvious. For everyone else, they register as beautiful, slightly confusing images—and that’s the point.

Jack: Meta isn’t really running a funnel anymore—it’s a tube. Everything is optimized to move you from exposure to conversion in as few steps as possible, even if it strips out any sense of identity or belief along the way. In that kind of system, brands can’t expect to build meaning if they stay inside it. The algorithm doesn’t build belief; it engineers behavior.

And in a never-ending attention economy, it seems so simple to say, but I really think the only way forward is to engage with people outside their feeds in the real world. That’s the last place a brand can earn attention, instead of buying it. And once you earn attention, you start earning loyalty.

Jack: What scares me is how easy this new “Meta tube” will make conversion—at least at first. We’ve seen this before. During Covid, we learned how quickly conviction disappears when performance starts to work for brands. The second the numbers spike, aspirational content becomes optional. Top of funnel is always the first thing to go—it’s expensive, abstract, and nearly impossible to measure. But the moment you strip it out, a brand's soul goes with it.

Nike’s still trying to rebuild after leaning too far into discounts and digital promotions—watching its brand power erode even as sales data looked fine. It’s proof that you can’t performance your way into meaning.

i’d like to think brands learned that lesson, but I doubt it. This new tool will be too tempting: cheap, efficient, perfectly optimized. For a while, it’ll even look like it’s working. But for many, it’ll mark the beginning of the end. Without a full funnel, you’re just a product in rotation—not a brand with gravity. And most don’t have enough stored equity or goodwill to find their way back once they tip too far in. By then, no one will remember what they stood for—or why they should care.

Jack: Yeah, and that’s exactly the danger. It’s not just that Meta’s system could dilute creative quality; it’s that it might make the rest of the funnel feel unnecessary. That’s the trap—when the numbers start to look good, the instinct will be to hand everything over. But the moment you do, you stop building the pieces that actually make brands last: awareness and desire.

Loyalty and advocacy die in there too. The algorithm can’t create belief; it can only mirror behavior. The brands that survive will build cults—tight circles of people who feel ownership, not targeting. They’ll be rewarded with access, connection, and small privileges that make staying close worth it. That’s what keeps people talking.

Brands need that because word of mouth still kills every ad format ever invented. You can’t automate love.

Jack: Look, some brands fall into a necessity category that barely need advertising to convince people they need the product—painkillers, dental floss, batteries. But that list is shorter than you think. These are products with few real competitors that don’t rely on intangibles to sell.

Now think about your favorite water brand. The fact that you have one at all already proves brand matters.

Jack: Ok, you mentioned toothpaste, which seems like such a mundane, utilitarian object, yet brand plays heavily into that decision too. And yes, I adamantly believe even these brands should care about brandetorial creative—especially now that we’re less and less exposed to the toothpaste shelf at the pharmacy and more likely to reorder through Amazon. Look at your ads—you’re probably being served a new-age toothpaste promising something different from Sensodyne or Colgate. When these challenger brands appear, it becomes more important than ever for legacy brands to stake their claim and defend their equity.

I like toothpaste as an example because if you boil it down, it’s not that different from perfume. Both rely on variation, sensory detail, and ritual—the primordial soup of great brand-building. Take me: I buy Aquafresh Extreme Clean because my ex-girlfriend used it. It was always in my house, and I developed some sort of emotional attachment to it. That’s brand connection in its purest form—memory, association, comfort. It means I’m highly unlikely to switch unless someone aggressively sells me something better or they discontinue it.

Jack: If everyone reading this thought about why they use their toothpaste, I’d bet half could name an emotional reason. Maybe it’s the one your parents used. Maybe it reminds you of childhood mornings or the first apartment you lived in alone. Maybe you like the taste. Whatever it is, there’s attachment there—even if you’ve never noticed it before. And now that you have, you’ll think of it every time you buy it. That’s how brand awareness becomes loyalty.

This is where top of funnel comes in. If Colgate launched a campaign connecting its product to memory and emotion—showing that even something as small as toothpaste can hold meaning—and managed to make even half its audience conscious of that link, it would instantly create advocates in a category that forgets it needs them.

So yes, almost every brand needs top-of-funnel. Most still ignore it. —and the billion-brand economy we’re living in—will make it non-negotiable. If they don’t, they’ll disappear.

Jack: Most of what we’ve talked about in this issue has been big brands—Spotify, Instagram, Nike, Colgate—the ones with the freedom to experiment and pay for Timothée Chalamet. But if I’m saying every brand needs top of funnel, what does that mean for smaller ones—the brands without the same resources or reach? How do they build real equity outside the Meta tube?

Jack: Ya, you know I hate the word community. Nobody wants brands to build them a community—it’s depressing, and people have caught on. It’s a hollow, candy-coated buzzword that only worked for a minute after lockdown, when everyone was desperate for connection and didn’t care where it came from. But we’ve been back in the world for years now. We’ve rebuilt our own circles; we don’t need brands to fabricate them.

Jack: The only reason the term still lingers is because it has two much stronger cousins that actually work—and people keep mixing them up with community: cult followings and cultural integration.

Cult followings come from brands that stand for something so clear that people self-select into them. They obsess over them; they wear the logo like a badge of knowledge. Arc’teryx is a perfect example—it built its world on ruthless precision: technical mastery, performance, authenticity. It became a status symbol by accident. The climbers never left, but suddenly everyone else wanted in.

Then there’s Bandit Running, which didn’t try to invent a running culture—it joined one. Founded in Brooklyn by runners, the brand tapped into the emotional side of running: rhythm, flow, connection. It came up alongside the rise of city run clubs, where running stopped being about competition and started being about ritual—social, emotional, even aesthetic. Bandit understood that alignment and built around it. They showed up in the right places, collaborated with the right crews, and made gear that reflected how people were actually running. Instead of trying to buy a community, they earned credibility within one.

Jack: Don’t be lazy. Invest in your brand and creative. Don’t over-rely on the algorithm. Think beyond your screens, and bring emotion in whenever you can. Not so hard, right? If brands can do that, they’ll be fine. This is just another tool in the arsenal—helpful, but not the answer.