Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising

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This week on Inspiring Futures, we sit down with Justin Herber.
He's a chief brand officer, consultant, and former screenwriter whose career has moved between Hollywood and the brand world. 
Justin got his start working for Michael Bay, spent five years helping scale Tom's, won a writing assignment to adapt Mario Puzo's final novel for television, built Hot Wheels into the number one boys' toy brand on YouTube, and led Tractor Beverage Company from a proof of concept to a national challenger.
Justin thinks about brands the way showrunners think about television: start with a theme, build a world, and design systems that keep generating stories over time. Here are three ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.
Start with theme, not positioning.
Most brand strategy starts with how you're different from the competition. Justin starts with the deeper tension the brand exists to explore — the same way a great TV show is built on a dramatic question, not a plot summary.
"We didn't just pitch plot, we pitched theme. Succession is about generational power struggle. Breaking Bad is about moral decay. That's how I build brands too — what are we doing beyond product? What's the deeper theme that we're exploring?"
Build story engines, not stories.
Justin doesn't make one great piece of content and hope it travels. 
He builds repeatable systems that keep generating stories — the way a show format can run for seasons. 
At Hot Wheels, that meant a scalable content format. At Tom's, it meant employee giving trips that turned every team member into an advocate.
"A showrunner is like a chief brand officer. You're setting the conditions that teams can align to, creating the world you're playing in, and building the frameworks that keep you on message and moving the plot forward."
Belief systems aren't messaging — they're operating systems.
At Tractor, the belief in a cleaner food system wasn't a campaign line. 
It shaped supply chain decisions, partnerships, a foundation dedicating 1% of revenue to helping farmers go organic, and an employer brand built around soil health education. 
His test for whether a belief system is real is simple.
"If you take away the belief system from the company and the company still exists, you never had a belief system."

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Gigi spent seven years at Google before leaving to start a research company.
Pai isn't any old research company; it specializes in the creation of "digital twins". 
These are digital replicas based on real consumers.
Pai interviews these consumers and builds digital versions of them. The real respondents get paid every time their digital twin is used, and the real consumers are interviewed regularly so the digital twin can be constantly updated.
Gigi imagines a world where every marketer has their digital twins available to them 24/7, so they can be questioned as part of the overall workflow, vs. a separate and time-consuming exercise. 
In the conversation, we cover a ton of ground 

The "Say/Do" Gap
The core business problem is not a lack of data. It is the gap between what people say in research and what they actually do in the market. That is framed as the founding problem Pi is trying to solve. 
Grounding in Truth 
Digital twins only work if they are grounded in real, high-quality data: interviews, category context, and purchase history. Without that, the whole machine turns into a cardboard dragon. 
The AI Needs to Apply Moderator Craft 
The AI interviewer who interviews the real respondents needs to replicate “the best interviewer we know” by probing, challenging, and reading for inconsistency. 
Research Reports Come Alive 
Instead of letting segmentations and old research rot in decks, turn them into something teams can query, simulate with, and use in day-to-day decisions. Static deck becomes a living customer base. 
The Challenges 
Bias, drift, memory limits, and context windows are real challenges that need to be solved.

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Elle is the perfect person to talk to if you want an understanding of strategy inside organizations. 
She started her work life selling punk fashions in London's Camden Market, but found her way into adland, landing strategy roles at Karmarama and BBH in London. 
Elle then moved over to the US with BBH, then onto BBDO- where she led the agency's pitch for the global Ford account. 
Her client experience includes time at EA, PayPal, Ford, and she's currently at McCaffe.
Our conversation talked about her experience and her learnings on the agency side, and what it takes to bring strategy into an organization- how to operationalize it. Which often means handing it over to others to make it their own and action it in their own way. 
We also talked about removing the term brand from every deck.

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Japan has one of the world’s deepest running cultures and at the center of it sits Ekiden: the long-distance relay that becomes a national obsession every winter. 
In this episode, I’m joined by Jeremy Kuhles, a translator, writer, and runner who’s made it his mission to share Japanese running culture with the world through creative storytelling. Jeremy has lived in Japan for two decades and is immersing himself from the inside, training alongside the Tamagawa University women’s Ekiden team and running with RETO Running Club under Hakone Ekiden legend Daichi Kamino. 

We get into what Ekiden actually is, why it’s “beyond a race,” and why the outside world often collapses the entire culture into one event: Hakone Ekiden. Jeremy explains why that’s a problem, how it funnels talent geographically, and how it shapes the career path for runners across Japan. 

We also go where the conversation usually doesn’t: women’s Ekiden. Jeremy shares what he’s hearing directly from athletes, and why greater parity and awareness matter when sponsorship, media attention, and money disproportionately flow to the men despite equal work and sacrifice. 
About Jeremy Kuhles
Jeremy is a translator, writer, and runner focused on bridging the language and cultural gap between Japan’s distance-running world and a global audience through interviews, essays, and social storytelling.

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John is an ECD at Digitas and the author of a new book, "Zombie Brands."
In our conversation, we talked about his book and the why, what, and how behind the rise of the Zombie Brand.
Some of John's quotes from our chat.
On the state of advertising:
"No one went to, no one got into advertising to make a banner ad. No one got into advertising to make a Facebook ad."

On the shift from craft to quantity:
"The bragging rights have been we're working with Ridley Scott on this 60-second Super Bowl spot. Now it was we're spending five cents."

On viral marketing's false lessons:
"We spent zero in paid media and just gamed the system to draw lots of attention to this stunt that doesn't really have much to do with the brand itself... I think it was actually terrible for the industry in terms of the lessons taken away."On performance marketing:
"I think a lot of this is hamsters on a wheel. I don't see the evidence that all this activity is leading to growth."

On the attention span myth:
"If people really did have no attention span, like every planes would be crashing all over the place... You just said no one pays attention anymore and then you watched like 37 hours of TV."

On the zombie brand concept:
"Zombies are not quite human, right? They kind of seem human, but they're not. They're hollowed out. They all kind of look alike. They all sound alike. They all grunt kind of the same few phrases. And yeah, they sort of maniacally roam the earth like looking for clicks."

On Starbucks destroying its brand:
"The whole brand, when I worked on Starbucks at Ogilvy, find the brand as fostering connections between human beings. It wasn't about coffee at all... they've completely killed the goose."

On the data-driven optimization problem:
"They had beta tested their way into basically a big subscribe button. That's all it was. It was a button for people who already had made up their mind to subscribe."

On short-term thinking and performance marketing:
"You're robbing future Peter to pay present Paul. I might not want you now, but maybe I do in a year, maybe I do in years."

https://zombie-brands.com/books/zombie-brands