Amalia: So, I think it’s important to start this with a note on how Jack and I came to anemone.
It began with a shared interest—and careers – in the brand world. We both see brand as one of the clearest ways culture takes shape. It’s where ideas are packaged, desire becomes aesthetic, and taste goes public.
But anemone didn’t come from agreement alone. It came from an ongoing conversation between two distinct vantage points: Jack as a creative, me as a strategist. Our perspectives don’t always match— but contrast is what makes our dialogue interesting.
Through these conversations, we started to notice a gap in the industry. Creatives tend to talk to creatives. Strategists talk to strategists. Rarely is there real crossover. And when that’s missing, you lose perspective - you miss the kind of dialogue that helps make sense of what’s happening across brand and culture.
anemone exists to open up that space. To connect dots, challenge assumptions, and make room for the kinds of conversations we felt were missing.
Jack: Amalia’s brain works differently from mine. But we’re often circling the same questions—just from different angles. That’s where anemone came from: a bunch of unfinished conversations we couldn’t stop having.
This isn’t a recap of industry news or a tidy back-and-forth with a bow on it. It’s us trying to get to the bottom of things—slowly, sometimes stubbornly, but always with the goal of understanding how brand and culture shape each other.
We’ll see where the conversation takes us.
Amalia: So, to kick off our first conversation, we’re looking at why the disconnect between creative and strategy exists.
Jack: I think part of it is structural—how teams are built, how budgets are split, how timelines move. Strategy tends to show up first, in the abstract. Creative enters later, once the shape of a thing has already been decided. The process encourages separation. You’re rarely in the same room at the right time.
But there’s ego in it too. Strategy positions itself as the rational mind—logic, rigor, clarity. Creative is the feeling, the vision, the taste. And when those identities calcify, they stop being useful. You get strategy that’s afraid of intuition. Creative that’s allergic to structure. Each side begins speaking its own language until they stop listening to the other.
I don’t think it’s malicious. Just a byproduct of how brands have been built over the past two decades—more fragmented, more specialized, more focused on speed. Agency structures reinforce this by separating teams physically and culturally—creatives in one room, strategists in another—with different KPIs, workflows, and incentives. But the work suffers when they don’t speak. You lose tension. You lose coherence. You get ideas that look good but say nothing—or frameworks that sound smart but feel dead on arrival.
Jack: What falls apart when those silos hold? What gets misread, or just missed?
The incentives are not just different, they’re opposed. By the time creative begins, the brief is already too rigid and any sharp edges that make an idea distinct and give it bite are gone.
Amalia: A good strategist is a creative one. A successful creative must think strategically. Honestly, the separation between “creative” and “strategist” can be misleading. I think the most effective people in these roles operate with both mindsets. They may lead with different strengths, but they’re shaping the same outcome. These skill sets aren’t mutually exclusive. A strategist shouldn’t hinder creative risk - they should enable it. Their role is to create the conditions for the creative team to explore new ideas without jeopardizing the business. It’s not about boxing creativity in, but building a structure that allows it to thrive.
When these roles operate in silos, the result is often creative work that misses the mark—either because it fails to resonate with the brand’s audience, straying from what the data reveals about their needs and behaviors, or because it’s been watered down by a corporate hierarchy trying to force it to “hit KPIs” it was never designed for, until it loses impact. But when strategy and creativity work in partnership, they sharpen one another. Strategy grounds creative in reality—anchoring ideas in cultural insight, brand truth, and audience needs. Creative pushes strategy beyond the obvious—transforming analysis into something that surprises and stirs emotion. Together, they make the work stronger: more original, more effective, and more attuned to the brand, the audience, and the moment. That’s why strategy and creative need to work hand in hand from day one—shaping ideas in tandem—rather than defaulting to a back-and-forth approval process between teams.
Amalia: Before we continue, I think it’s worth outlining what a creative director and a strategist actually do. Jack, want to start?
Jack: Sure! A Creative Director defines the creative vision of a brand and ensures that this vision is clearly and consistently represented across every touchpoint—campaigns, retail, packaging, digital, social, product, and more. The job is to take the brand’s core codes and translate them into a coherent system of expression.
You’re not executing every asset yourself. You’re designing the framework that connects everything. That means setting the standard, shaping the narrative, and building the right team—writers, designers, directors, developers—so that every output aligns with the same central idea.
Good creative direction creates alignment. Every part of the brand feels connected. Messaging, design, and product decisions reinforce each other. Teams know how to execute without second-guessing.
Without it, brands feel fragmented. Teams work in isolation. Creative becomes inconsistent or reactive. And over time, the brand starts to lose meaning.
Creative direction solves for that. It brings cohesion, clarity, and context. It makes the brand make sense.
Jack: Now flipping it to you—strategy used to be more of an interest, but it seems like it’s taken the lead lately. How’d you get into it, and what does being a brand strategist actually mean to you?
Amalia: What draws me to strategy is ultimately a fascination with people - their stories, their decisions, and the patterns that quietly define them.
As we’ve both said, brands are reflections of culture and zeitgeist. Understanding what people consume - and why - is deeply sociological and psychological. Our stories are shaped not just by the things we buy, but by what we read, watch, listen to, talk about, and engage with. There’s a constant exchange between internal desires and external influences, and it all plays a role in who we become.
For me, brand strategy is about zooming in on those details—dissecting the cultural and emotional context behind people’s behavior—and then zooming out to help shape how a brand moves through the world. It’s about uncovering what drives people and translating their stories into strategic insight - so brands connect with the right audience and hold meaning in their lives. Done well, strategy toggles between the individual and the macro. It becomes the connective tissue between customer data, creative, marketing, and business growth.
At Gallatin, I studied how technology influences consumer behavior and culture, which gave me a pretty open path to explore these intersections. Through a mix of experiences - fashion editorial, digital marketing, VC, partnerships, and now working at a creative communications agency—I started to realise that the common thread in the work I was drawn to was strategy.
At my current agency, being quite small, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with founders and brands across various disciplines - and over time, strategy has become a natural focus for me. I wanted to start anemone because I kept noticing these gaps in how brands are built, discussed, and understood - especially between the creative and commercial teams. anemone is meant to be a space where I can dive deeper into those disconnects. Not as someone claiming expertise, but as someone asking questions.
Amalia: Why do you think creative and strategy don’t talk to each other more—when we’re working on the same problems?
Strategy strips away risk before anything exists. Creative enters too late—by then, the brief is rigid and the bite is gone.
Jack: Because the system rewards different outcomes at different stages. Strategy is rewarded for removing uncertainty before anything exists: aligning stakeholders, securing budgets, building frameworks that sell the idea. Creative is judged only once something enters the world — whether it sparks attention, builds memory, drives sales, or moves culture. The incentives are not just different, they’re opposed. Research and approvals strip away anything debatable. Cost pressures favor what’s easy to reproduce. Audience testing reduces ideas to what feels safest. By the time creative begins, the brief is already too rigid, and any sharp edges that make an idea distinct and give it bite are gone. Look at Sabato’s Gucci, neutered by caution. Or Pharrell at Vuitton, installed as an engine for mass approval. Two different aesthetics, both shaped by systems designed to smooth risk. It’s ultimately poor architecture, and once those structures are built, they always win.
Jack: We didn’t want to write a trend report or a think piece. We wanted to talk. What do you think this format makes possible that others don’t?
Amalia: I find good conversations tend to lead somewhere unexpected—often into ideas that are overlooked or underexplored. That kind of discovery is harder to access in more structured, report-style writing. Beyond anemone being born from our own ongoing conversations, I think there’s a broader need for more thoughtful, open-minded discourse in a world that rewards narrow opinions and quick takes. Dialogue fosters understanding—not just defending a premise or staking out a position.
Maybe that’s why newsletters have seen such a resurgence in recent years. They’re personal, anecdotal, and unfiltered—rooted in a real person’s point of view.
I found myself having these conversations in my day-to-day, yet my media diet was more sporadic and less thought-through. So I’m also using anemone as an opportunity to unpack my own thinking on a deeper and more considered level.
That’s why anemone is built around dialogue. Its conversational format gives us room to explore ideas with nuance, contradiction, and curiosity. There will, of course, be moments of more report-style writing—especially from my side—but those are entry points for discussion, not declarations of truth. Because it’s in the back-and-forth—in the fluidity of real exchange—that the overlooked tends to surface, and the more interesting stuff starts to take shape.
Amalia: So let’s be specific. What kinds of questions do we want to ask here? What makes a “good” Anemone conversation?
Jack: I think the best questions are the ones that feel a little unfinished—the ones we circle around in our own heads but haven’t quite landed yet. They usually sit somewhere in the disconnect between how things actually work and how we talk about them. The goal with anemone isn’t to rehash headlines or tie everything up neatly—it’s to pause on the tensions that haven’t really been unpacked. Less “what’s the hot take,” and more “what’s actually going on here?” Or at least… what might be going on here.
A good anemone conversation should feel like that. We’re not trying to give you the right answer. Think of it more like a working theory—part reflection, part hypothesis. As things play out, we’ll probably be wrong about a lot of it. But that’s sort of the point. It’s two people coming from opposite sides of the industry, trying to make sense of the same thing from different angles.