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The first iteration of Brand New World was a very specific look at how AI is changing how brands and marketers work. Now were back to talk about brand culture more broadly. Of course that will involve AI from time to time, but Ill also be digging into sports, entertainment, music, comedy, and everywhere else brands squeeze their way into pop culture. Everyone says they hate advertising, but everyone loves at least one brand. Brand New World is here to talk about why. That means Ill be popping up in your feed once every month as part of the Fast Company Podcast Network. Okay, here’s what you’ll hear on the first episode of season two. Apple’s big (creative) year For those who dont know or are unfamiliar, the Cannes Lions International 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 brandfrom social platforms to sports stars and celebritiesis there. This year, ahead of the festival that kicks off June 16, 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 Apples 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. Youll know their work for major brands like Geico, UPS, the new Axe work with Pete Davidson, and much more. More importantly, shes always up for some hot take banter about the work and culture around advertising and brands. Paul told me when she was rewatching a lot of Apples 2024 work, she kept thinking about whether any of it would fit into her top 5 list of Apples all-time work. Is there anything this year that would dislodge something else that I’ve loved for a long time? she says. I would say the thing that got closest to me was Someday, which is beautifully done and really powerful. Listen to the podcast to hear us break down our top 5 lists of all-time Apple ads. Driving brand entertainment 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. Thats 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 documentary, but an excellent piece of brand entertainment, produced in partnership with WhatsApp. This episode I was excited to chat with Metas head of global consumer marketing Eshan Ponnadurai to talk about the process behind the doc, as well as the role it plays in the brands overall strategy. Esh has worked on major brands from Ford and P&G, to Uber, YouTube and Google. Hes got a long history of finding compelling and authentic brand stories to tell in unique ways. Here, we find out what The Seat takes from past successful work, particularly WhatsApps award-winning doc work We Are Ayenda, and its Giannis Antetokounmpo film Ugo: A Homecoming Story, as well as the precedent it sets for the future. The primary thing was knowing what people are going to be interested in, says Ponnadurai. How did you get to this driver? Why him? What’s his story? That’s the hook. That’s what people are tuning in for. And then organically, how does WhatsApp play a role here? So I think the balance is always (between) what is the right story and what people are interested in, and where the product naturally fits. The danger sometimes can be the inverse: We wanna sell you something, where’s the story?
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E-Commerce
As the founder and board chair of the tech nonprofit Products That Count, Ive had a front-row seat to AIs domination of the tech world over the past couple of years. A few years ago, just a sliver of the thousands of submissions our organization evaluates for our awards program were AI-based; this year, more than 90% of our nearly 10,000 submissions were for AI products. This exponential growth has made one thing painfully clear: AI has already become table stakes. In 2023, generative AI was the hot new buzzword; last year, agentic AI was the new kid on the blockand this trend is only going to continue. Just look at the product development cycles today for clues: AI skips pilots and goes straight to deployment. First movers are outpaced; OpenAI, Mistral, and Perplexity can no longer keep up with the pace of innovation organically, so theyve started to buy speed by making acquisitions. With AI no longer a differentiator, what matters is not just that you have AI but how youre using it. What separates the winners from the losers here isnt speed to launchits become clear that this is a futile race. Instead, what really determines whether a product will have sticking power today is how the AI is used in its context. As one committee member commented in reviewing this years awards program nominees: Its not about the data. Its about what you can do with it. The right weapon Just like picking your weapon for battle, the winning AI product is whatever is the most strategically advantaged in that fight. Here are the three major strategic traits that have emerged from evaluating thousands of AI products over the last few years. These traits show what winning AI products today are doing differently from their competitors, giving them the edge in an increasingly crowded field: 1. They have strategically superior moatsbuilt on data, personalization and customer intuition The right data, not MORE data, is the real moat. – Google Cloud Product Lead Varun Krovvidi (2025 awards committee) In the era of open APIs and fast followers, only the most thoughtfully designed products will be able to claim any lasting territory. Todays winners in AI wont just move fast; theyll think strategically and build moats that are based on true value. The name of the game here is personalization, but not the personalization we think we know. Next-gen personalization will go far beyond extracting ad recommendations from search history, or suggesting your next binge watch. The next winning formula in personalization knows users deeply, and knows not just their tastes, but also how they prefer to consume information, how they prioritize, what data theyre comfortable sharing. As Krovvidi said, Were seeing AI products use AI-driven feedback loops across diverse functions. This also means that AI will be used to understand the customer in a way that has never been done before. Just as Apple in the 2010s wrote the rulebook for what a personalized product should look like, we are now facing the next Apple-style revolution in good user design. True personalization is now a verticalized play, not a horizontal one. And successful personalization in this verticalized fashion is based on two core pillars: unique, high-quality data (not quantity, but connected insights on user preferences) and context-aware preferences (not just what users want, but how and where they want it). Combine these, and you get the next-gen disruptors. 2. They leverage ecosystems and interoperability as their competitive advantage Interconnectedness is what sets apart the winners from the rest in todays AI era. Whether its interoperable AI agents that hook into each other and collaborate to add greater value, or a niche tool thats highly specialized to plug into a technical and entrenched ecosystem and complete microlevel changes, the best AI products today are not just keenly aware of their contexttheyre explicitly designed to operate within them.This means designing products with not just an awareness of but an active optimization towards the existing infrastructure around them, acting as connective tissue rather than mass. The mantra here is 1+1=3. Superior AI tools today dont just offer value in a vacuum, they find ways to collaborate with other toolseven other AI agentswhere the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. 3. Theyre serious about privacynot UX ethics lip service & compliance theater Trust, privacy, and human-centric design are now essential building blocks of any great product.– Nicolas Rousseau, Chief Digital Engineering & Manufacturing Officer, Capgemini (2025 awards committee)If we thought privacy and ethics mattered previously, that goes double (or triple) in the era of AI. In the best of the best AI products, privacy is now the default mode. Opt-out is now opt-in. Superior AI products today assume users want control over their data, encryption, and anonymizing. We see an increasing number of product strategies centered on privacy-preserving architectures and decentralized intelligence, added Rousseau. From platforms that drive healthcare equity through remote monitoring to fintech solutions that democratize access to Capital, tech for good is no longer an afterthought but a competitive advantage. The great AI products are the most strategically and thoughtfully built If AI has started to feel like a fast-fashion race, the products that will win the day are those that keep focused on building quality over quantity and filling a genuine vertical end-to-end. The speed of evolution today means that the winning teams are not just cranking out the newest model and shipping it. Theyre taking stock of the ecosystem, building highly personalized and valuable tools that play nice with each other, and putting a premium on ethical design.
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E-Commerce
If you think drones are noisy in flight, try building and testing them. During a visit last month to the drone startup Zipline’s factory in South San Francisco, California, industrial noise welled up in corners of the facilitythe roar of a wind tunnel, the rhythmic clack of a test rig simulating motor casing wear, and other mechanical sounds in a symphony of engineering. Zipline has to subject its delivery drones to that kind of abuse because its been building them in-house since 2016a strategy management sees as wiser than relying on outsourced manufacturing. Zipline has intentionally designed ourselves as a very vertically integrated company, says Eric Watson, head of systems engineering. The companys facility, located just below the flight path of jets departing San Francisco International Airport, combines warehouse, assembly, and testing space. [Photo: Rob Pegoraro] That, Watson says, lets the company iterate rapidly and frequently. We can quickly get the design engineer who built the thing to look at it, he tells Fast Company. And then we can update the test, update the drawing, whatever needs to happen. Founded in 2014, Zipline (one of Fast Companys picks for 2024s Most Innovative Companies) began delivering medical supplies in Rwanda in 2016. Today, it bills itself as the largest commercial drone delivery service. The live display on its site counts more than 1.5 million deliveries to date; over a two-hour period on Saturday, that counter showed another 48 had been completed. (For comparison, Wing, the drone-delivery service owned by Googles parent company Alphabet, says its made more than 450,000 residential deliveries.) In the U.S., Zipline offers Walmart customers the option of drone deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Pea Ridge, Arkansas. (404 Media found that Zipline had recently supplied the Pea Ridge mayor with talking points that then ran almost verbatim in a blog post on the companys own site) [Photo: Rob Pegoraro] Zipline makes two battery-electric drone designs. It describes its older Platform 1 aircraft (or P1) as optimized for deliveries of up to 4 pounds to enterprise, business, and government customers over distances up to about 60 miles from a Zipline-operated delivery hub. The newer Platform 2 (P2) is built for home delivery from third-party sites, able to carry twice as much payload but with a service radius of only 10 miles. And where P1 drops its payload via parachute, P2 spools it down under a 300-foot winch in a cargo compartment that has its own fans to guide its descent to a precise spot on the ground. Watson described the adoption of that winch architecture as a lesson learned about the difficulty of trying to keep a drone hovering directly over a delivery point in the wind: We now move the aircraft upwind. That setup also keeps the whir of a Platform 2s five combined rotors 300 feet away from people on the ground, where the company says that noise is nearly inaudible. P2 drones depart from and return to the underside of a landing dock, nestling a connector at the top of their fuselage into the well of that contraption. During my visit, the factorys operations looked focused on P2. Racks of that aircrafts laughably light carbon fiber assemblies of wings and rotor nacelles sat in one corner of the building (I easily picked one up), test stations for components scattered around, and at a series of assembly stands in the middle, workers performed such tasks as attaching a P2 drones two redundant system boards. [Photo: Rob Pegoraro] Amid signs warning of the dangers of testing hardware with spinning propeller bladesone outside a closed door warned of a high-risk test area with extremely loud noise levels and moving equipmentthere were moments of whimsy and warmth. The first Platform 2 models required two to three days of work, but the company can now crank out three a day. We have made a ton of progress with our Platform 2 manufacturing, Watson says. Later this year we should be producing an aircraft every hour. Zipline, however, doesnt fabricate every single component itself. Beyond standardized parts such as fasteners, it has its own network of suppliers building subsystemsfor instance, the carbon fiber airframesto its specifications. The way that we have trended over time is bringing more things in house, Watson sys. [Photo: Rob Pegoraro] Labels on some incoming boxes noting their origins in China or Vietnam provided a reminder that this company remains exposed to President Donald Trumps tariffsif much less than drone services relying on consumer drones built in China. We do have a global supply chain, Watson says, adding that Ziplines vertical integration does allow us quite a bit of flexibility in suppliers. The entire field of drone delivery has exhibited some of the same problems of too-soon hype as other tech frontiers. Amazons highly publicized venture into drone delivery has made legitimate advances but remains vaporware for almost all of the retail giants customers. The business model also remains unclear. Privately-held Zipline doesnt disclose revenue, per-delivery costs, or headcount, although funding that Crunchbase puts at $821 million does give it a long runway to work with. Zipline also has the advantage of having secured Federal Aviation Administration authorization in September of 2023 to operate drones beyond an operators visual line of sight (BVLOS), with automatic broadcasting of their location to other aircraft and altitude limits in place. In a January 2023 report, the consulting firm McKinsey emphasized the importance of BVLOS operation in letting drone-delivery services cut per-trip costs from what it estimated at $13.50 with one operator assigned to a drone to $1.50 to $2 with one operator supervising 20 at a time. In October, a subsequent McKinsey post highlighted a vast potential market$5 billion by 2035, with approximately 1.5 billion annual deliveries expectedbut warned that a customer survey it ordered up had revealed relatively low interest in drone delivery among U.S. customers. That survey found that 53% of U.S. respondents said they were willing to switch to drone delivery, but only 37% were willing to pay a premium. Both shares were the lowest observed in the six countries surveyed: Brazil, China, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. That suggests that while the hardware and software of drone-delivery operations will need further iteration, the sales pitch itself remains in flight and may not land for a while.
Category:
E-Commerce
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