This month’s episode of Brand New World was largely created during Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, which was held in New York City in mid-September. 

So, we’re bringing you my interview with Bozoma Saint-John, former chief marketing or brand officer at companies including Netflix, Uber, and Beats by Dre—who also just happens to star on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She’s also the cohost of NBC’s newest reality show On Brand with Jimmy Fallon, where 10 everyday people compete to have their advertising ideas actually used by major brands like Samsung, Dunkin', Southwest, Captain Morgan, and Therabody. 

But first, I had the chance to tap into my inner pizza nerd and talk to founder Tom Gozney about content and design as pillars of his brand’s success, how he’s working to maintain the brand’s culture amid international expansion, and more. (WHICH BRAND?)

Pizza and reality TV? Let’s gooooo.

You know Dick’s Sporting Goods as one of America’s largest and most successful sports retailers. It has used that status to help create an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries over the past decade, including the Emmy-winning docs We Could Be King (2014) and The Turnaround (2024). But in August, Dick's took things to a new level, officially launching an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios. In this episode, I talk to Dick’s chief marketing officer Emily Silver about why now is the perfect time for an in-house studio, the evolution of the brand’s entertainment strategy, how the company measures success for these projects, and where it all goes from here. 

Before that, I wanted to put what Dick’s is doing into some context. So I called up Zac Ryder, co-founder and chief creative officer at Modern Arts—the agency that helped WhatsApp produce the Netflix doc The Seat, which we talked about back in Episode 1 of this season. Zac and I nerd out on the evolution of brand entertainment, then break down our picks for the "Best Brand Entertainment of the Past Decade."

Tools for Humanity CMO John Patroulis talks about the brand strategy behind World, The Orb, and being human in the AI age.

Here are some deets fresh off the Croisette from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—basically the ad industry’s Oscars but also the global epicenter of brand culture—that happened in mid-June. Brands, marketers, ad agencies, tech companies, platforms, people from entertainment and sports, and anyone and everyone part of the brand world ecosystem were there.

To make sense of it all, or at least a good portion of it, I called up Tim Nudd, creativity editor at Ad Age and a journalist who’s been covering and commenting on this industry for longer than almost anyone. In a conversation that included inside scoops, gossip, and good stories, Nudd and I talked about what impressed him most, what surprised him, and what he’s hearing we can expect from major brands heading into the second half of the year.

Then, I really wanted to find out how Expensify landed the real estate on Brad Pitt’s chest for the new blockbuster film F1. Expensify’s chief financial officer Ryan Schaffer, and Hannes Ciatti, founder and head creative at ad agency Alto, gave me the inside story of how the brand got such a prominent role, including a scene in which they shoot an Expensify commercial in the film. This is getting under the hood on 1,000-horsepower product placement.

The first iteration of Brand New World was a very specific look at how AI is changing how brands and marketers work. Now we’re back to talk about brand culture more broadly. Of course that will involve AI from time to time, but I’ll also be digging into sports, entertainment, music, comedy, and everywhere else brands squeeze their way into pop culture.
For those who don’t know or are unfamiliar, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is part awards show, part industry conference, and probably the biggest annual gathering of brands, marketers, entertainment folks, tech folks, and media on the planet. Anything and anyone that touches a brand—from social platforms, to sports stars to celebrities—is there.

This year, ahead of the festival that kicks off June 16th, Apple has been named the Creative Marketer of the Year. Now, Apple is an iconic marketer, an all-time, first ballot Hall of Famer. But in my opinion, 2024 has been a bit of a mixed bag. So why is this Apple's year?

To discuss where this past year fits in the pantheon of Apple’s greatest hits, I called up Elizabeth Paul. A strategist by trade, Paul is the chief brand officer at award-winning ad shop The Martin Agency. You’ll know their work for major brands like Geico, UPS, the new Axe work with Pete Davidson, and much more. More importantly, she’s always up for some hot take banter about the work and culture around advertising and brands.

Last month, a new doc called The Seat debuted on Netflix about how Mercedes’ Formula One team decided on a successor for racing legend Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton had announced his departure, so the racing giant was forced to strategize its next move quickly and discreetly. That’s where WhatsApp comes in. The entire process of evaluating and naming young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over the messaging app. “The Seat” is not only a feature doc, but an excellent piece of brand entertainment, produced in partnership with WhatsApp.

This episode I was excited to chat with Meta’s head of global consumer marketing Eshan Ponnadurai to talk about the process behind the doc, as well as the role it plays in the brand’s overall strategy. Esh has worked on major brands from Ford and P&G, to Uber, YouTube and Google. He’s got a long history of finding compelling and authentic brand stories to tell in unique ways.

Generative AI has taken the brand world by storm. But how is the planet’s best-known AI company building its own brand? Like everything to do with AI, the brand aspect of this category is evolving and changing seemingly week to week. There’s newer brands like Anthropic, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, alongside established giants’ own sub-brands like Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant, and on and on.With about 400 million users, and almost constant news coverage, OpenAI may be the best known purely AI company.In episode seven of Fast Company’s Brand New World podcast, host Jeff Beer talks to OpenAI’s chief marketing officer Kate Rouch about the strategy behind their Super Bowl ad, how the company defines its brand values, and why, despite helpful lessons from the last 30 years of tech, new precedents will still be set for the AI brand category.

In episode six, host Jeff Beer is at Google’s world headquarters in Mountain View, CA to talk to chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill. We dig into the brand’s overall GenAI strategy, not only for how they’re working as a marketing organization, but also how they’re marketing Google's own AI tools like Gemini.We also chat about how Lorraine and her team are balancing between third-party tools like Brandtech Group’s Pencil Pro, and WPP’s One, and the company’s own proprietary tools.Of course, we get into the lessons learned over the reaction to Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympic ad for Gemini last summer, but also how the ultimate goal for AI’s impact on the brand’s marketing is to come up with an idea in the morning, and see it out in the world that afternoon.

Sephora is compelling for any number of reasons, and one is it’s been a leader in the beauty industry working with GenAI and broader AI technology.A McKinsey piece reported earlier this year that Gen AI could add up $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone.As consumer brands go, the beauty industry has been ahead of the curve on AI, with companies like Sephora, L’Oreal, Dior, Estee Lauder, P&G, all creating AI-powered tools for customers to use as early as 2017.In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Sephora’s US CMO Zena Arnold, and Vlad Kuznetsov, the company’s Chief Information Officer, to get a peek under the hood for a glimpse at how one of the most powerful brands in an incredibly influential consumer industry is thinking about Gen AI right now.

This past December, Coca-Cola released a set of holiday ads made entirely from generative AI. They asked three different studios to create their own interpretations of the 1995 Coke holiday spot called “Holidays Are Coming” using AI video-generation models, including Leonardo, Luma, and Runway. The brand got three unique adaptations from studios Silverside AI, the Wild Card, and Jason Zada’s Secret Level.

Even though the AI ads were supposed to be a reimagining of Coke’s holiday ads from the '90s, which is a pretty innocuous concept, the backlash was intense. The reactions were passionate and numerous enough to get coverage from The New York Times, USA Today, NBS News, and more. Despite the backlash, the ads were effective and these new AI ads also got the job done. Coke is confident that its early experimentation is not only fun, but a meaningful investment that—despite the negative reviews in the short term—is setting the company up for long-term marketing success.

In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola's global vice president for generative AI, about the companies' approach to using AI, creative risk-taking, and those holiday ads.

If GenAI is the biggest technological advancement since the internet itself, then the creative possibilities are or will be pretty much endless. From a brand marketing and advertising perspective, we are still very early days, but there needs to be those willing and able to push the envelope, test boundaries, make mistakes, learn lessons, and evolve from there. Yet how far should the boundaries of brand content be pushed? 

In this episode, I look for some answers by talking to two founders of boutique creative shop Food Arts & Technology, industry legends creative technologist Iain Tait and designer Richard Turley. I also sat down with Jason Zada, founder of AI-focused production studio Secret Level, who has worked with major brands like Coke on utilizing these new tools. 

There are so many different perspectives on how this tech will and should be used creatively. Here you’ll get a glimpse into the perspective of people trying their best to push the tech and their own creativity for brands.