Worlds is a brand world-building engine that I am currently developing using A.I, my experience as strategist, creative, and business builder, and the seemingly endless amounts of naivety / stupidity that lead me down rabbit holes like this. It will be available soon to use, keep a look out.

Let’s be real. Despite the hyperbole, building an enduring brand has never been harder. For marketers, strategists, creatives, and entrepreneurs…the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

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Markets are hyper-fragmented, the attention-wars rage on, and chasing ‘efficiency’, even in the face of accelerating slop, has unfortunately taken precedence (and budget!) to investing in longer term brand building. On top of that, LLM’s are challenging typical consumer journey and funnel models forcing marketers to re-think where and how brands show up beyond paid advertising.

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And yet, the fundamentals of effectiveness haven’t changed; reach, fame, distinctiveness, mental availability…balancing the long and short. The evidence behind modern brand growth is decades deep. What has changed is the task; no longer just about communications or “touchpoints” but about designing and orchestrating a holistic living brand operating system. A system that recognises people live in moments, episodes, and contexts, who come in and out of market unpredictably, enter categories through a myriad of ways on any typical day, and most of all, care very little about brands as they go about their daily lives. As the revolution roles in, and more and more of us seek refuge in the back-channels of a world in search some kind of "human-ness", 

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How a brand shows up in this kind of “Culture 3.0”, distinct, different…has never mattered more. In low attention environments via wide reaching exposures to paid advertising, but also in communities and chat groups, Reddit threads and Substacks, IRL and offline sub-cultures….the cozy "off-algo" places people are heading to en-mass seeking refuge in a world clinging retain a level of "human-ness". It's in these nodes of culture that brands with genuine intent can earn their way into peoples’ lives, building / refreshing memory structures in environments inherently built on trust. In these environments, people expect to feel, experience and sometimes even participate in a brands world before making a purchase decision.

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Up until this point, the role and effectiveness of brands “playing in culture” has been challenging; aesthetic mis-alignment, collaborative mismatches, a clash of commercial and creative agendas are just some of the issues. A wrong step and brands end up looking naff and pedestrian.

Worlds exists to bridge this gap. It’s an operating system for brand building in the modern context; combining cultural intelligence, marketing science and imaginative world-building into a practical, scalable process. My intention is that Worlds becomes a navigational blueprint that I hope will lead to better strategy, inspiring ideas, and ultimately, more effective creative output.