For decades, media agencies sat at the centre of the advertising ecosystem. They connected brands to audiences, turned budgets into plans and converted access into advantage. Their value came from knowing where to buy, when to buy, and how to buy efficiently.

That model is now being reshaped from multiple directions.

What used to be a relatively stable system of relationships, inventory, and negotiation has become a far more fragmented and opaque environment. The old logic of media buying is still alive, but it is no longer enough.

The next frontier isn’t just about buying media better. It is about building media that people actually want to engage with.

What is a media agency anyway?

At its simplest, a media agency is the bridge between brands and the media ecosystem. Today this means planning campaigns, securing inventory, and optimising spend across channels. Media agencies were the translators of the market: they knew how to turn business objectives into media outcomes.

But that role was built for a world where access mattered more than architecture. If you had the relationships, the scale, and the buying power; you could unlock reach. The agency was the broker between advertisers and the outlets, platforms, or publishers that held attention.

Today, that is changing. Media agencies are still central, but the nature of the centre is shifting. They are no longer just buying access to audiences. Increasingly, they are being asked to navigate platforms, algorithms, fragmented formats, and disappearing signals. Margins are tight, and winning new business increasingly means taking on commercial losses, which serves no one.

The job isn’t getting easier, it’s getting harder.

The scale of the market makes that shift especially important. Media buying remains one of the largest pools of capital in marketing, and media agencies now account for roughly 30% of global holding company revenue, as well as around two-thirds of large agency group growth over the past decade (source).

The three forces reshaping media

Three structural forces are putting pressure on the traditional agency model: economics, platforms, and fragmentation.

Economics

Advertising is being squeezed by consumer behaviour. More people are paying to avoid ads altogether, through subscription models and ad-free tiers across streaming, music, and content platforms. The better digital advertising gets at targeting people, the more it seems to accelerate the desire to escape it.

There is also a darker economic issue: waste. The industry is not just dealing with declining attention, but with ad fraud, opaque supply chains, and weak visibility into where money actually goes. Recent reporting put global losses from invalid traffic at $63 billion last year - a reminder that digital media is often less transparent than it appears. In other words, the market is not only harder to reach, but also harder to trust.

Platforms

The second force is platform automation. Media buying is increasingly mediated by self-serve interfaces, machine learning, and black-box optimisation systems. The platforms own the inventory, the data and much of the logic that determines what works.

Like trading floors to algorithmic markets: once it was access and instinct, now its shared systems running the same playbook. The edge no longer comes from access, but from what you build on top.

That shifts power away from agencies and toward the infrastructure providers themselves. The agency no longer controls the process in the same way. It operates inside systems it does not own, using tools it cannot fully inspect. The result is a world where buying becomes less relational and more algorithmic.

Fragmentation

The third force is fragmentation. Audiences are spread across walled gardens, retail media networks, creator ecosystems, streaming environments, apps, communities and emerging interfaces like LLMs. There is no single map anymore, only overlapping surfaces and shifting signals.

At the same time, signal loss, privacy changes, and ad blockers make it harder to know what is actually working. The result is a market that is more distributed but less legible.

Commodification and consolidation

Put those forces together and a clear pattern emerges: media buying is being commodified.

When platforms automate the process, when supply is fragmented, and when transparency declines, the traditional value of the agency compresses. The work becomes more interchangeable. The moat gets thinner.

That also creates a deeper power shift. Agencies increasingly look like tenants inside someone else’s operating system. The platforms control the inventory, the rules and the feedback loop. The agency operates within it.

That creates a strange paradox. The more the industry pursues efficiency, the more it risks becoming interchangeable. The more it automates, the more it standardises. And when everyone has access to the same tools, the same bidding logic, and the same optimisation layers, the advantage migrates away from execution and toward strategy, creativity and design.

From media buying to media building

But there is still one advantage platforms cannot neatly scale: creativity in where and how brands show up. The remaining edge is taste, relationships, and the ability to connect the dots so brands feel alive in culture. That is the craft.

If media buying used to be about building plans from available inventory, media building starts with a more ambitious question: what if the best media strategy is not to buy more media, but to build something people choose to engage with?

It’s the difference between renting billboards on a road and building the destination people choose to travel to. One is exposure. The other is gravity.

That shift changes the job entirely. Instead of renting attention, brands start creating surfaces for it to gather around. Instead of stitching together placements, they build ecosystems. Instead of treating media as a cost, they treat it as a capability.

This is a return to fundamentals, but in a new form. The future is more strategic and more architectural in nature.

We’re already seeing the first signs of this in work that refuses to stay in a single lane. It blurs content and branding, sponsorship and IP, licensing and distribution, social and creators, audience and community.

When a brand creates a red thread across touch-points and builds experiences people genuinely want to step into - whether that’s taking part in unique real world events, listening to a co-created podcast with Monocle, taking a deep-dive with Bloomberg, watching a show with ITV, or hitting a new goal on Strava, it stops looking like media buying, and starts looking like media building…

What media building looks like

Media building is less about line items and more about systems. It combines owned assets, partnerships, and designed distribution into something more durable than a campaign.

Owned surfaces

Brands are already investing more in media surfaces they control directly: newsletters, podcasts, video channels, communities, apps, and utility-driven products. These are not just content vehicles; they are assets that compound over time.

A campaign expires. A media surface can keep growing.

Partnership ecosystems

Media building also means orchestrating partnerships with domain experts, creators, publishers, and cultural operators. The agency role shifts from buyer to ecosystem designer. The question is no longer just which media owner to buy from, but which collaborators to bring together and how to make them stronger as a network.

This is a more strategic, more creative, and more collaborative model. It values alignment over arbitrage.

Designed distribution

Distribution still matters, but it becomes something you design rather than simply purchase. Good media building considers how content travels, where it is seeded, who amplifies it, and what makes it valuable enough to spread.

Paid media still has a role, but it becomes one layer in a broader system. It is the accelerant, not the architecture.

The new role of the agency

The agency of the future will not be defined by how efficiently it can buy impressions. It will be defined by how well it can design attention systems.

That means a different set of capabilities:

• Editorial and creative thinking

• Partnership orchestration

• Product and platform awareness

• Data fluency across fragmented environments

• The ability to connect brand strategy with cultural momentum

In this model, the agency is less like a broker and more like an architect. It does not just place messages into the market. It helps shape the environments in which those messages become meaningful.

Campaigns to systems

The traditional campaign model is built for bursts. It assumes attention can be won, activated and then moved on from.

But the modern media environment rewards persistence, utility, and repeated engagement. Systems compound. Campaigns fade.

That is why the next frontier matters. The industry is moving from campaigns by algorithm to impact by design. From buying access to building relevance. From renting attention to creating new surfaces for it to gather around.

The brands and agencies that understand this shift early will not just perform better in the existing system. They will help define the next one.

Thanks for reading. What do you think? Drop a comment and let’s talk about it.

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More content is now created every 48 hours than the first 100 years of cinema.

That should feel like progress right? But it doesn’t. Because one of the clearest signals of what’s happening next is a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Admittedly it’s not an award-winning performance, but in the world of AI and production it’s had a profound impact.

Will (or a very bad version of him) and a plate full of spaghetti were at odds, with hilarious outcomes. It was like watching a wax version of Will attempting to eat spaghetti while the universe forgot how mouths, spaghetti, and physics are supposed to work. However, it fast became the benchmark for AI generated content with each iteration improving over time.

The most recent output, about two years later was good enough to fool most viewers. Here was Will Smith, his hands, mouth and spaghetti working in perfect unison, while sipping on OJ. The sonics from slurp to bite were orchestrated to deliver a believable output. While it still isn’t perfect, it’s not far off.

The catch? We’ve downgraded our instincts from ‘that’s unusable’ to ‘that’ll do.’
Not because standards improved… but because the system rewards ‘good enough’ at scale. And in today’s world, scale wins.

Spaghetti compilation from 2023 - 2025

Production, Rewritten

What used to be a well-known sequence: script, casting, shooting, editing and distribution all played out over months and years is quietly becoming something else.

Now it looks like prompting, generating, refining and deploying. A process that can be done in days, sometimes hours. No studio needed just software and judgement.

While craft has not disappeared, the dependency on it has. And increasingly, that software is getting better at an alarming rate. Tools like Runway Gen-3, Pika and Sora are collapsing what used to be entire production pipelines into a single interface.

What once required crews, now requires prompts.

And it doesn’t stop with studios. We’re seeing acts of creative rebellion where fandoms and frustrated moviegoers take the edit into their own hands, reworking iconic moments into something entirely different. Imagined film trailers are all the rage, with output often being indistinguishable from the real thing.

From alternate cuts where Thanos wipes out everyone in Infinity War, to reimagined endings of Titanic where Jack and Rose both make it out alive. The big platforms have been forced to act.

Read on: YouTube has started to ban popular channels that created fake AI movie trailers

The Land Grab

This isn’t just one race, it’s several, with multiple players.

• The Model Makers: competing to own the cost and capability of imagination.

• The Production Replacers: collapsing editing, VFX, and generation into a single, continuous workflow.

• The Interface Layer: the quiet kingmakers.

Because once creation becomes instant, intuitive and habitual, it stops feeling like production. Instead, it feels like thinking out loud.

And when production becomes easy, execution is no longer the differentiator. The value shifts away from simply making things toward choosing what to make, from craft to perspective, and from scale to meaning. The real advantage is no longer in creating, but in deciding what’s actually worth creating.

Where Humans Still Win

Yes, AI undoubtedly removes friction, it’s brilliant for speed and slightly dangerous for meaning.

But culture has never really been built on ease. It’s built on tension. and on things that almost didn’t work. On decisions that cost something: budgets, judgement, failure, and those impromptu moments from talent and directors that no one could plan.

Real production still carries outputs machines struggle to fake. Proof that something actually happened, in the real world, in your neighbourhood. The buzz of a live shoot and the economic ripple it creates. Constraint that shapes identity and intent that says someone cared enough to do it properly.

And that choice, increasingly, is the point.

Because audiences don’t attach to perfection. They attach to friction, to imperfection and to the moments that feel unplanned, slightly off and human.

🔗 The Moment That Wasn’t in the Script

The Risk / The Opportunity

In a world of infinite content generation, we risk building content without consequence. Things that look right, feel right, perform right… but don’t belong to anything. With no spine, no memory and no ownership. Just perfectly formed noise in an infinite sea of noise, often fleeting and forgettable.

The ones who understand this won’t just make content, they’ll create meaning. Where every output feeds something bigger than itself. Where every iteration strengthens recognition, where audiences don’t just watch… they return, because they’re invested. Worlds they can step into and eventually, buy into.

The Signal

Production isn’t disappearing, but its role is undoubtedly shifting, quickly.

For directors, producers, commissioners, this isn’t a threat to craft. It’s a shift in where the value sits. Because when anything can be made quickly and cheaply, the question is no longer “Can we produce this?” It’s “Should this exist?”

Craft still matters, more than ever. But now it has to do more than impress, it has to justify itself, signal intent, and prove something needed to be made properly.

It’s a bit like photography after the smartphone. When everyone got a camera, taking a picture stopped being the skill. Knowing what to capture, and why, became the difference.

None of this is entirely new. But in a world of infinite output, effort becomes meaning. The future isn’t less production, it’s more intentional production and that can only be a good thing.

We’ve seen a few signals from the past few months that suggest something has shifted.

The creator economy isn’t an emerging category anymore. It’s hardening into infrastructure with capital, governance, and operating models that look a lot like legacy media… but rewired around individuals and algorithmic media.

Here’s what that looks like…

Creators Are Turning Personal Brands Into Companies

Steven Bartlett isn’t just monetising a podcast, he’s raised what’s likely one of the largest creator‑economy deals to date with an eight-figure round at £345M ($425m) valuation.

The capital will scale what Bartlett calls “the Disney of the creator economy,” a vertically integrated holding company housing content (FlightCast), creative services (FlightStory), and investment (FlightFund) under one roof.

This isn’t a media deal in the traditional sense. It’s a platform play. Bartlett retains over 90% ownership while building infrastructure that other creators (Trevor Noah, Davina McCall, Paul C. Brunson) can plug into. It mirrors what Chernin, CAA, and Disney itself did across decades, compressed into a single funding cycle.

The signal? The top creators are no longer just talent - they’re becoming the studio, the distribution layer and the IP engine all at once.

Read: Behind The $425 Million Bet That Steven Bartlett Can Build A ‘Disney’ For Creators

As Scale Shifts the Stakes Towards 1.1B Creators by 2032

MiDiA forecasts a 76% surge in global creators, reaching 1.1B by 2032, as AI tools and video platforms redraw the creative value chain. The video creator value chain already hit $8.7B in 2024, with AI tool revenues almost doubling to $215.5M and creator software on track to overtake hardware within two years.

The signal? MiDiA puts hard numbers behind the hype: creators aren’t a niche; they’re an incoming billion‑person labour class, with AI as the core accelerant.

​Read: New MIDiA report forecasts one billion creators by 2032 as AI reshapes the creative value chain

And Creator IP Becomes a Serious, Investable Asset Class

The Chernin Group has taken a minority stake in Goalhanger, the UK podcast network behind The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Football, joining the board in the process.

Goalhanger has grown into a multi‑show, multi‑host IP engine. External investment is earmarked for expansion into video, live events and international markets, not just more audio ad slots.

The signal? Creator‑anchored podcast networks are being valued like full‑stack media businesses, with institutional capital buying in.

Read: Chernin Group Takes Stake in ‘The Rest Is’ Podcast Firm Goalhanger

Creator Collectives Professionalise Into Media Groups

Arcade, the company behind the Sidemen, has brought in former YouTube EMEA partner development MD Pete Cory as Chairman.

The Sidemen universe spans 100M+ YouTube subscribers, Netflix formats, live events, DTC products and a subscription platform. The new chairman’s remit is to formalise this into a scalable, professionally governed media operation.

The signal? Creator collectives are looking like ‘proper’ media groups now that they’re hiring industry leadership to run them.

Read: The Sidemen Management Outfit Arcade Appoints Former YouTube Exec Pete Cory As Chairman

While AI Twins Push the Commercialisation of Identity

TikTok star Khaby Lame has sold his core company in an all‑stock deal valued at an eye watering $975M, authorising the creation of an AI‑powered digital twin built from his image, voice and behavioural data. Not bad for someone who never talks!

The digital twin is designed to front campaigns, content and appearances in multiple languages and markets, without Khaby’s physical presence - effectively decoupling output from his time. The acquiring group is projecting multi‑billion‑dollar revenue potential.

The signal? Khaby Lame’s AI “digital twin” deal shows where the edge of the creator economy really is: turning human presence into a licensable, endlessly scalable asset.

Read: TikTok Star Khaby Lame Sells His Core Company In Deal Worth $975 Million

Ad Budgets Quietly Rewire Around Creator Media

IAB projects creator‑media ad spend will hit $37B in 2025, up 26% year‑on‑year and growing roughly four times faster than the overall media industry.

Nearly half of advertisers now classify creators as a “must‑buy” channel, ranking just behind search and social, rather than treating them under the line item of marketing experiments.

The signal? Creator media has quietly become a core budget line, growing multiple times faster than the rest of digital advertising.

Read: Creator Economy Ad Spend to Reach $37 Billion in 2025, Growing 4x Faster than Total Media Industry, According to IAB

Driving a Gold Rush Into Creator Tools and Platforms

Business Insider tracks ~13 creator‑economy startups raising around $2B collectively, with the largest rounds going to AI‑native content and editing tools such as Synthesia, ElevenLabs and similar plays.

The investment pattern is clear: capital is betting that the real leverage is in enabling millions of mid‑tier creators to operate like studios via automation and optimisation.

The signal? The biggest cheques aren’t only going to creators; they’re going to the tools, AI engines, and platforms that make a billion‑creator world operable.

Read: These 13 creator economy startups pulled in about $2 billion in funding this year

And Top Creators Get Investing Too

MrBeast’s is taking a page out of the Ryan Reynolds / Gwyneth Paltrow playbook.

His management company, Night Media, has launched a venture fund backed by creators, investing in consumer brands, fintech, and creator‑economy tooling that can benefit from their audience reach.

Deals into startups like Lolli and Pearpop illustrate the model: creators take equity early, then use their distribution and cultural capital to help those companies grow.

The signal? Some of the most sophisticated creator businesses are now deploying capital, not just raising it, turning attention into a source of deal flow and upside.

Read: MrBeast’s management company, Night Media, has a new venture fund that’s backed by creators

What this all signals

Across these eight moves, a pattern emerges:

• Scale: A creator base moving toward 1.1B people, accelerated by AI and video.

• Structure: Holding companies. Boards. Funds. Governance.

• Capital: Nine-figure valuations. Institutional minority stakes. Infrastructure plays.

• Behaviour: $37B+ in ad spend. Creators treated as core media allocation.

Together, this signals that the creator economy has crossed a line: Creators are no longer just endpoints in the media ecosystem - they’re becoming the operating system that capital, brands, and platforms are wiring themselves into.

Thanks for reading - we’ll keep connecting the dots across brands, media, and culture in future pieces so subscribe to stay close.

With the backdrop of the Winter Olympics and their work to outfit the army of volunteers and organising staff (as we covered here), Salomon have launched their new brand platform - Shaping New Futures.

This isn’t a one-off campaign. It’s a long term operating system with a beautifully consistent red thread running through every component: from the hero film to documentaries, media partnerships, real-world events, and through social.

Let’s take a look…

Salomon x BBDO x Unveil x Loveboat

The hero spot, “Shaping New Futures,” is a short, punchy film that lives in an infinite white space, a metaphor for possibility and the blank canvas of what comes next. We follow a runner moving between urban and wild, tech and nature, performance and expression, while the VO reframes the future of sport as something emotional and imaginative, not just measured in seconds.​​

Behind the scenes, creative agency BBDO Paris, studio Unveil, and production company Loveboat blended live action with AI-generated imagery to build a surreal, shifting world that feels designed as much as it’s filmed.

Is this the best application of AI in advertising we’ve seen yet?

Crucially, the AI isn’t a gimmick here - it’s aligned with the visual language for “new realities from nothing,” mirroring the campaign’s thesis that the future is as much imagined as it is engineered.

🔗 Read more here: UNVEIL & Loveboat Unveil “New Futures” Film for Salomon

Salomon x Dazed Media

If the hero film is the promise, the Nowness documentary is the proof.

Shot at Salomon’s Annecy Design Center, filmmaker Catherine Hyland goes inside the process to show designers, engineers, and athletes collaborating in real time – testing, iterating, and literally shaping new disciplines with the Alps as their lab.​​

The film sits in that space between design, craft and art. The “dialogue between nature and industry” is the visual metaphor throughout, making innovation feel human, situated and grounded.

Dazed picks up the baton by spotlighting several of the creatives featured, extending the story into fashion and culture editorial.

🔗 Dazed – Mini-doc feature

Salomon x Highsnobiety

Across social, we see the work is amplified through Highsnobiety. For this campaign, they are a media partner providing scale and credibility with audiences at the intersection of fashion and culture.

Through editorial, Shaping New Futures becomes a character study. One piece zooms out on the broader platform - Salomon using its first Winter Games partnership to tell a story about volunteers, creators, and “shapers in motion,” not just medal winners.

🔗 Highsnobiety – Salomon Is Shaping New Futures

Another dives into next-gen athletes like Cole Richardson and Alisa Sidorova, treating them as multi-hyphenate creatives whose skiing is as much about expression, environment, and community, as it is about performance.

🔗 Highsnobiety – Meet the Athletes Shaping New Futures

Salomon x IRL activations in Milan

In Milan, the platform leaves the screen and hits the street.

Shaping New Futures experience
In partnership with We Are Ona, Salomon built an immersive experience that translates its innovation culture into a spatial, sensorial environment fusing design, food, and culture to make the brand feel like a host, not just a sponsor.

New Shapers Run 2026
A 10km run through Milan, positioned as a way “to engage citizens and enthusiasts in a unique experience in the spirit of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026”.

With creators and run clubs involved, and unique perks for any Olympics volunteers taking part, there was a ton of content on socials. Here’s an example of the coverage, in partnership with Complex:

The consistent thread: the future of sport is participatory and shared - everyone becomes a “shaper” - not just pros or Olympians.

Salomon x 'Shapers'

Salomon spins the platform into a flexible storytelling format: Shapers In Motion. This pairs creators and change-makers – athletes, artists, designers, cultural voices – to explore how they’re shaping their corner of the future, on and off the mountain.​

It does a few useful jobs:

• Makes “Shaper” a recurring character you can return to, not a one-off tagline.

• Shifts the narrative into talent-led, creator-native content that works on Instagram, TikTok, and publisher channels.

• Creates a coherent structure you can drop into different cities, sports, and scenes without reinventing the format each time.

Always-On Layer with ‘Shaping The Week’

To keep the platform warm, Salomon runs Shaping The Week, a weekly news-style content series spotlighting opening ceremonies, culture moments, and community stories. It shows up in the feed, reframing the brand as an active voice on sport and culture, not just an advertiser.

This is where the platform starts to feel like an editorial lens: “Is this shaping a new future?” becomes the filter for what they post, share, and celebrate.

🔗 Shaping The Week – LinkedIn post

What this signals

Shaping New Futures is exactly how a brand platform should work in the modern age. In just three words, it says a lot about what Salomon values. Our interpretation: self determination, autonomy and responsibility to imagine, invent and innovate. Powerful.

The magic goes further than just a slogan. It provides a flexible structure to reinforce those values across a fragmented media landscape, without breaking the idea. The brand is showing us how that consistent red thread comes to life as a living ecosystem - across ads, long or short form video, events, or cultural media partners.

In particular, we give the brand top marks for stretching the platform in ways to support talent-led storytelling and community activations. From volunteers at the Winter Games, to on-the-ground run challenges, to social-first video content, the brand’s work with “shapers” is a coherent mechanism for ensuring ‘participation’ with real people is built in - not an after-thought.

As a last point, we also admire the restrained use of AI in the hero ad - it’s used with intent, and fits the purpose. Instead of being bolted on for hype, the choice serves both the narrative of imagination and possibility, and the creative direction of the work.

Shaping New Futures shows strong promise. The next evolution might be seeing how the platform stretches into more unexpected contexts - places where innovation, creativity and exploration intersect beyond sport.

For a brand built around shaping the future, it would be fascinating to see just how far that lens could stretch…

🔗 For now, go deeper with Salomon global creative director, Nick Parkinson: Why SALOMON Is Promising “the Magic of the Mountain” Wherever You Wear It

Thanks for reading - if you enjoyed this and want to see more, hit the like button, and subscribe to stay close.

Following on from our apparel-focused part one, we’re back with the next instalment.

One of the most interesting creative threads at Milano‑Cortina is how brands are moving into the liminal spaces of the Games: recovery, mental health, sleep, downtime and yes, even laundry.

Nike ACG x Hyperice

Hyperice and Nike ACG have built a custom, non-retail Normatec Elite system in ACG orange for Nike-signed Olympians. It’s designed for “recovery in transition”, the forgotten minutes on flights, transfers and between venues, and sits inside Nike’s activation houses across Italy.

🔗 Read more: Hyperice and Nike ACG Debut Exclusive Normatec for Winter Olympics

P&G Champions Clubhouse

This physical activation spans both the Milan Olympic Village and Cortina Paralympic Village, offering athletes a mix of wellness, grooming, laundry and relaxation experiences.

Every athlete receives a welcome kit with brands such as First Aid Beauty, Oral‑B, SK‑II, Dash and Lenor, while village laundries hero P&G’s brands as part of the everyday athlete routine.

It’s an activation that embeds into the fabric of village life, not just into ad breaks.

🔗 See more: The P&G Champions Clubhouse welcomed more than 800 Olympic athletes from nearly 40 countries

Corona’s Cero Stress Zones

Corona Cero has extended its TIME CERO platform from Paris 2024 into Milano‑Cortina by building nature‑filled “Cero Stress Zones” (Zero Stress) across the Olympic Villages.

@phebebekkerSound bath class in the Olympic village?! #olympics #milanocortina2026 #olympicvillage #coronacero

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These spaces, complete with relaxation workshops such as breathing and sound bath sessions and a plant shop where athletes can bring greenery back to their rooms, are designed as post-competition retreats and a physical embodiment of the brand’s relaxation-first positioning.

🔗 Read more: LinkedIn recap from Joao Zattar, Global Marketing Director or sponsored coverage with Highsnobiety here.

Athlete365 Mind Zone x Powerade

Through the International Olympic Committee’s Athlete365 platform, Powerade rolled out Mind Zones in every Olympic Village.

First rolled out during Paris 2024, they were back bringing calm spaces for athletes to decompress, practise mindfulness and access confidential mental‑health support, with private consultation pods being a new addition for Milano‑Cortina.

Activations like these do point to a shift: mental health space (for better or worse) is now branded sponsor terrain.

As a side (and in the direction of worse), the inclusion of the Powerade drink in this official video is jarring. We get why it’s there (distinctive brand assets and all that) but it just feels a little heavy handed.

Training + Recovery with Technogym

As they’ve done for the last ten Olympic Games, Technogym installed state-of-the-art gym facilities across six villages and 22 training centres. With 1,000+ pieces of equipment serving more than 3,500 athletes, this is a serious investment in the invisible engine room of the Games.

See a clip here of their gyms full of Olympians - can you imagine?! Next level.

The brand also showcased its heritage and latest technology in its “Casa Italia” pop-up, alongside a handful of athlete-led ads that feel a little generic and dated. Alas, when your products are trusted by Olympians, perhaps that says enough.

🔗 Watch one of their spots here. Or don’t. I wouldn’t blame you.

Casa Airbnb + Athlete Travel Grant

As an official sponsor of the Games, Airbnb stakes its claim as the brand of “feeling at home”. 'Casa Airbnb' translates that into physical form, a pop-up at the intersection of tourism, cultural belonging and the wider Olympic narrative.

Athletes, teams, fans, delegations, tourists - they all need a place to stay and somewhere to sleep.

Airbnb embodies their brand promise through Athlete Travel Grants, supporting athletes to cover stays while training and competing internationally. It’s a nice fit and they tell the story well in the longer form documentary (with lots of cuts on social).

🔗 Watch: Airbnb’s Bring It Home documentary

What this signals

The new premium real estate is the invisible hours around the competition: training, recovery, sleep, logistics, mental wellbeing. Brands that design for those moments earn deeper, more credible roles in the Olympic story.

For anyone working in media or partnerships, that’s the opportunity: map the in‑between moments your audience actually lives in, and treat them as your next canvas.

Thanks for reading - if you enjoyed this and want to see more, hit the like button, and subscribe to stay close.

Milano-Cortina 2026 was the first Winter Olympics where the most interesting brand activations weren’t ads that interrupted, but deeper integrations that moved brands from placement to presence.

Across the Games, collaborations pushed beyond logo accreditation and hero set pieces. Every surface became storytelling territory, from thermal layers and transport to recovery lounges and mountain-side athlete hubs.

Brands didn’t just buy media, they embedded themselves into the in between moments of the Games, turning downtime into utility and proximity into cultural presence.

This is part one of a series exploring the smartest creative activations emerging from Milano-Cortina.

We begin with apparel and with Milan, one of the world’s fashion capitals at the centre of the Games, clothing has become more than uniform. From Salomon’s 18,000-strong volunteer kit system to Nike ACG’s branded alpine train, we unpack what these executions signal about the next chapter of sports partnerships.

In future editions, we’ll explore how brands are approaching recovery and rest, broadcast and promotion, out-of-home, and what official sponsorship truly unlocks in 2026.

Apparel is the billboard

The most visible canvas at any Winter Games isn’t a billboard, it’s the outerwear – kitting out volunteers, teams and athletes in ways that blend performance, identity, and storytelling.

Salomon x Team26

Salomon has outfitted more than 18,000 volunteers and organising staff with a 17-piece technical kit, part of a 400,000-piece programme developed over 18 months with the Milano-Cortina team.

Split across “city” and “mountain” environments, the system works as high-performance gear while projecting a unified visual language. The result: a roaming billboard network powered by people.

Nike ACG: From Air Milano to All Conditions Express

The big story out of the games is Nike leveraging Milano-Cortina to relaunch their All Conditions Gear brand, through product innovation, partnerships and experiential.

The Therma-FIT Air Milano Jacket features inflatable baffles that allow athletes to adjust warmth in real time. Check out the collab with Dazed in more detail here.

Beyond product, ACG has staged a broader narrative moment: eagle-themed team gear, recovery kits, and the “All Conditions Express” - a fully branded train running from Milan into the Orobic Alps that turns transit into immersion. Keen runners can even win tickets to board it through a Strava challenge.

National uniforms as soft power

Ralph Lauren for Team USA

Like many brands at sporting events, Ralph Lauren is leaning heavily into storytelling with athletes. Here’s a hero montage but there’s much more across social media.

Armani for Team Italy

Armani turned their store into a pre-Olympics party with a fashion show, music, drinks, performances, nearby out-of-home ads, and projections onto the building.

They were also front-and-centre at the opening ceremony, bringing the fashion runway to the games in a performance dedicated to the late Giorgio Armani.

Stéphane Ashpool for Team France

The blend of high fashion, streetwear and performance is… chef’s kiss.

See go deeper here with Stéphane Ashpool, founder of Pigalle and artistic director to Team France.

Lululemon for Team Canada

We see Lululemon take the cinematic approach. Looks epic.

Adidas for Team GB

More of a personal, lo-fi approach on this one.

Moncler for Team Brazil

The brand returns to the Winter Olympics for the first time since they outfitted the French ski team in 1968.

They also launched an exhibition in Milan, showcasing their performance gear.

The podium shot is just the launch asset. Everything is carefully designed and amplified to tell a story and to drive conversation.

The aesthetic outlives the event. The flame goes out and the product cycle continues.

Read: Check out more looks here.

No layers are off-limits

Skims x Team USA

Custom base layers and sleepwear for Team USA.

@amberglenniceskaterTeam USA @skims haul #SkimsPartner

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FIGS x Team USA

This one was not on our bingo card - specific medical team uniforms is wild.

And more

• J.Crew x Team USA mountain life and après-ski collection

• Dagsmejan x Swiss national ice hockey team sleepwear

Base layers. Uniforms for everyone. Lifestyle apparel for the in-between moments. Sleepwear. Every part of the team’s 24 hours has become a brand surface.

What this signals

What we’re seeing at Milano-Cortina isn’t just better outerwear - it’s a redefinition of what clothing does inside a global event ecosystem.

It performs on the mountain, photographs in the mixed zone, tells stories through videos with athletes, and scales in retail.

At Milano-Cortina, clothing isn’t just worn. It works both as product and as media, carrying the story across environments, audiences, and moments.

Thanks for reading - we’ve got much more to bring you in this space so subscribe to stay close.

Doordash x 50 Cent

DoorDash, the US food delivery service, partners with 50 Cent, in a series of humorous ads playing into his love of ‘beef’. Nice.

This is what long-tail celeb relevance looks like in the creator era. By actively engaging and remixing his persona, he’s enabled ‘troll’ behaviour and ‘beef’ from rap mythology (both often controversial) to work as brand-safe comedy and commercial storytelling.

Celebs who endure are the ones who treat identity like intellectual property. Someone really needs to write a book on 50’s career - this new era as a social media personality meets TV mogul needs to be studied.

Müller x Art Attack x Ladbible

Müller, the yogurt brand, partners with Ladbible to bring back the UK 90s childhood classic, Art Attack.

This is nostalgia marketing evolved - not just referencing it superficially but actively rebooting it by reconstructing the original experience, with modern distribution.

Smart play using a retro IP to relaunch a retro flavour. See more here.

Kiehl’s x Ikon Pass

Kiehl’s Skincare has partnered with Ikon Pass - the US multi-resort ski season pass - launching a range of pop-ups with a variety of North American resorts.

Whether it’s for access, perks, or loyalty, travel programs are becoming valuable media entities, unlocking scale and access to key audiences.

Beats By Dre x IShowSpeed

Beats By Dre has partnered with arguably the biggest creator on the planet, IShowSpeed.

Interesting tension between the retro kung-fu aesthetic (likely need to be 30+ to really appreciate) and the talent’s audience (kids/teens today?) - but as the most well known face on Youtube, we think it works.

Have you ever considered that the main way you interface with information is through video? Except for reading this of course!

The first regular TV show was broadcast in 1936 (thanks BBC) and since then evolved through colour, channels, formats and quality. Fast forward through the growth of the internet, and Youtube launched in 2005 - today, over 2.6 billion people around the world use it every month. Instagram introduced video in 2013. Tiktok blew up in 2018.

Video has long been on the road to becoming the default way of interacting with content as it makes up around over 80% of global internet traffic.

Television is no longer a format or a screen - it’s simply a mode of attention. Anything that sustains watchability, episodic relevance, and cultural conversation now behaves like TV. Ads, creator content, trailers, podcasts, livestreams and memes all compete in the same feed, under the same rules: hold attention or disappear.

See here for more: Why Everything is Television

YouTube has quietly become the new centre of gravity for television itself - It now leads total TV and streaming consumption in the US, increasingly watched on actual TVs, while also dominating podcasts, live sport, and creator-led formats. This isn’t internet video growing up - it’s TV being rebuilt from the inside out, by creators who act as studios, talent, and showrunners all at once.

See here for more: The relentless rise of YouTube (paywall)

MrBeast isn’t making 'social videos' anymore - he’s making TV. The Sidemen have built Sunday night appointment viewing on YouTube that feels closer to a series drop than a vlog. And when YouTube starts streaming NFL games, the lines blur completely.

And it goes both ways. Broadcasters like Channel 4 and BBC are uploading full episodes and creating new IP for YouTube to meet audiences where they are.

See here for more: How YouTube and its creator economy took over TV

What is a podcast anyway these days?! The reality is that they’re chat shows with better distribution - a format co-opted by creators today as they have some of the lowest barriers to entry. Camera, lights and microphones. Now, they’re distributed in different formats (audio only vs. video) as well as cut up into short-form video (which are trailers? ads? or just another way to consume the content?)

See here for more: How podcasters are taking over TV

Lionsgate turning to TikTok fan editors is the clearest admission yet that distribution now shapes creativity. Studios are conceding that attention is no longer something they can manufacture top-down. The best trailers, scenes, and story arcs are being discovered after release, through remix, meme, and algorithmic repetition on TikTok.

See here for more: Why Lionsgate Hired TikTok Fan Editors to Market Movies

Disney chops up High School Musical into 52 separate clips on Tiktok - and it’s pulled in ~35 million views in record time. Engage, and the algo does the work of resurfacing similar content, and before you know it, you’re crying out for a new film. Our take: the data on engagement with each one of the 52 clips is a valuable data source which could be fed back into script development, trailer edits, or marketing.

See here for more: Disney’s 52-part TikTok experiment

What this signals

In a fragmented algorithmic media landscape, control is an illusion. The real advantage comes from building ideas that signal clearly, move freely, and invite others to carry them forward. That’s what TV looks like now.

Not a format, schedule, or screen - but a loop. Make, circulate, remix, repeat.

That requires seeing video differently. Not as a finished asset or a 'spot', but as a system in motion - something designed to fragment, recombine, and evolve in public. Value no longer sits in the first impression, but in what survives repetition and remixing.

Hot off the press, you can see Uber Eats exploring this idea (in a very literal way) for their 2026 Superbowl spot. More here.

Thanks for reading - there’s a lot to unpack here so we’ll explore these implications in more depth in upcoming articles. Subscribe to stay close.

Collabs, Evolved

How many brands could really stretch from natural history discourse to serious kitchen goods without dropping the (poké)ball?

The kids that were shaped by Gameboys and trading cards, grew up and got jobs. They got more cultured and the toys that excite them now are fancy pots and pans.

Natural History Museum collab

Pokémon has launched a fully sold out pop-up with the Natural History Museum. Over a long 3 month run, it’s framed around a ‘proper’ theme - Pokécology - where you can browse displays of the pocket monsters in their natural habitats, shop limited edition NHM x Pokémon merch, and collect an exclusive oversized trading card.

​This is Pokémon playing in the same space as fashion houses or craft brands: limited access, object culture, and education-meets-fandom.

There’s absolutely no shortage of creator content on Youtube and socials. You can check it out here: Pokémon x Natural History Museum Reveal ‘Pokécology’ theme and products for sold-out Pop-Up, running 26 January - 19 April 2026

Le Creuset collab

Le Creuset is literally turning high‑ticket, intergenerational kitchenware into a Pokémon collection: cast-iron pots in Pikachu yellow, character-colour sets, and specialty tableware built around Poké Balls.

Check out more here: Pokémon Le Creuset revealed

This is the adultification of nostalgic fandom. Perhaps we’ll see more in grown up spaces like museums, cookware, homeware, finance, travel - they’re all ripe for IP that once lived in domain of kids, and I for one, am here for it.

Anthropic Going Big in 2026

AI continues to be a force of nature, and with the competitive landscape heating up, we saw AI brands launch their first big ad campaigns last year. Now, Anthropic are coming out of the gates this year, and it’s clear - they’re not messing around.

Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.

Ahh these are brilliant - worth watching the whole set. Clearly inspired by the infamous Apple vs. PC ads, but brought into the 21st century and neatly taking down competitors that are optimising for engagement and ad-driven monetisation (in itself, a topic for another time!).

Looking ahead, Anthropic’s safety-first stance, and Claud’s ‘keep thinking’ positioning may just pay dividends as these tools permeate society. I keep coming back to the signal of ‘trust’ - it’s a powerful lever in an age of information overload. Also, the Apple “think different” vs. Microsoft parallel is hard to ignore - especially with OpenAI’s affiliation to the latter.

It’s not a two-horse race (Google will have plenty to say), but framing it this way is powerful: a choice between attention brokers… or a thinking partner. Very nicely done.

“Official Thinking Partner” as a new sponsorship archetype

The through-line continues. Where most tech brands frame themselves as the ‘technology partner’ in sponsorships, Anthropic’s deal with Williams F1 carves out a more philosophical space - AI as the brain, not just the sponsor.

This is a conscious move from logo spam to positioning as cognitive infrastructure - and in a place already thick with tech brands (Google/McLaren, Oracle/Red Bull, IBM/Ferrari), this is a really compelling way to bring out a differentiated positioning.

Read more about this on LinkedIn.

So there you have it - two very different approaches to collaboration.

In an age where brands are constantly looking to reinvent themselves for younger audiences (see Jaguar), it’s refreshing to see one that can still bring the OGs on the journey - stretching their IP in new ways just to show us that a Pokémon can learn new moves.

And on the other hand, we have a challenger tech brand in a fiercely competitive space. The super-power here is absolute clarity on what their brand stands for - and we see that come to life in their advertising and sponsorships in a smart way.

Thanks for reading - we’ll keep unpacking what these shifts like these mean for brands, media, and culture in future pieces so subscribe to stay close.

Today, that idea feels incomplete.

The medium is everywhere. Content is cheap. Distribution is more accessible than ever. AI is getting more capable every day and generates outputs in seconds. Media formats are converging - as almost everything becomes digital and increasingly defaults to short-form episodic video. Messages travel faster, wider, and cheaper than ever - and yet they seem to land with diminishing impact.

What’s changed isn’t just how media is made, but how meaning is assigned.

In such a noisy environment, where we’re exposed to more media than any other point in human history, we believe that the medium is now augmented through collaboration - the partnerships and associations that brands create - and the message is a signal.

Or more simply, who you choose to work with can increasingly say more than what you choose to say. Not just to audiences, but to culture - to competitors, creators, consumers, and the people deciding whether a message is worth paying attention to.

Brand and media partnerships are no longer just distribution tactics. They’re a form of expression.

When brands collaborate with media owners, publishers, creators or other brands, they’re co-signing something: values, taste, ambition, credibility. They’re borrowing cultural gravity, lending legitimacy, or staking a position. Sometimes the signal is subtle. Sometimes it’s loud. But it’s always legible.

And in a world of abundance, legibility matters.

As media models evolve, power shifts, and roles blur, creativity alone is no longer the differentiator. Execution is table stakes. Reach is commoditised. Novelty is fleeting. What cuts through is judgement - the ability to choose well, align intentionally, and resist the temptation to do more simply because you can.

This is where craft re-enters the conversation. Not craft as polish, but craft as restraint. Not creativity as output, but creativity as decision-making.

The strongest collaborations don’t feel opportunistic or transactional. They feel inevitable in hindsight. They respect context. They understand that alignment creates meaning, while convenience creates noise.

In that sense, the old adage still holds - but with a shift. The medium is no longer the only message.

CO/SIGNALS exists to explore this shift. To look at brand and media partnerships not as line items or tactics, but as signals - clues about how brands see themselves and how they want to be seen. To pay attention to the collaborations that endure, not because they’re loud, but because they’re considered.

So, we seek to understand how the most interesting work today rarely sits in a single lane, as the lines blur between content and branding, sponsorship and IP, licensing and distribution, social and creators, audience and community.

We’re looking at media not just as a buying function, but as the engine that has funded culture, journalism, and entertainment for decades - and how that engine is being disrupted and rebuilt.

We’re fascinated by the work happening between the lines - no longer happening neatly inside boxes labelled media, creative, publisher, platform, or agency, but somewhere in between them.

We’re also exploring the human skills that don’t scale neatly but increasingly define what cuts through: craft, empathy, taste, and judgement. And we’ll look at how those collide with platforms, automation, and AI - not in a dystopian way, but in a practical one. What changes? What gets harder? What becomes more valuable?

This isn’t a Substack about hot takes or hype cycles. It’s a place to slow down, look closely at real examples, and try to make sense of how media, creativity, and collaboration are actually evolving - often in messy, imperfect, interesting ways.

If you work in marketing, media, publishing, or creative industries, this is for you. If you’re curious about how brands co-sign culture, how brand collaborations and partnerships really work, and why craft still matters in a world obsessed with efficiency, it’s for you too.

We don’t have all the answers but we think the questions are worth asking - and so we welcome you to join us as we dive between the lines and decipher these signals.