“I haven’t seen an ad man in a board meeting in 20 years. No one gives a f*** what they think anymore.”
That was Scott Galloway’s recent provocation. While he praised Anthropic’s brilliant Super Bowl ad as a potential “1984 Apple ad moment” for the AI revolution, he ultimately dismissed it as a temporary “blip” for the ad industry, arguing that tech, utility, and algorithms have permanently defeated brand and creativity.
But have we really entered a post-brand era?
To answer that, we’re dedicating a special two-part series of The Rabbit Hole Experience to tackling Scott’s challenge! 🕳️🐇
To kick off Part 1, I went straight to the source. I sat down with Ty Gates, Communications Director at Mother - the very agency behind that Anthropic ad (and recently named Ad Age’s Indie Global Ad Network of the Year! 🏆).
We used the massive cultural footprint of Mother’s work for Anthropic to explore how the ad world can fight back - not by fighting tech, but by learning from it. As Ty points out in the clip below, advertising has a speed problem. We need to stop taking 9 months to launch campaigns while tech companies ship new code every day.
Along with the need for speed, we went down a few other great rabbit holes:
☝ Business Value over Cannes Lions: Why agencies lost their seat in the boardroom, and how they can win it back by speaking the language of conversions instead of just vanity metrics.
🤘 The “Anthropic Effect”: Why the tech VC narrative of “AI replacing humans” is wrong, and how creatives are using it to execute at the speed of culture.
🤟 The Death of the “Push” Ad: Why traditional deception-based advertising is dead, and how modern brands are winning through authentic branded entertainment.
