My Brand/Tech Ins & Outs for 2026

Hyper-themed events, analog, personal brands & "endings"

Happy holidays, readers, and welcome to the last edition of On Brand for 2025! Hope you’re swirling a candy cane around in your cappuccino and hitting cmd+Q on allll your work apps for another few days.

But wait, before we get into hot takes! ✋🏼 As I plan content for the year ahead, I’d love to hear from you about what you want to see more of in 2026.

Please take the 2-minute survey! :)

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Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter:

• My brand/tech ins & outs for 2026

• The three major themes that are shaping how I’m thinking about brand in 2026

• Why people are freaking out about “storytelling” and wisdom from my network

• How to market the future when the future is hard to picture

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All the major creative reports dropped this month—Pinterest Predicts, Canva’s Design Trends (in its second year), Adobe’s Creative Trends Forecast, and Red Antler’s State of Brand—and they’re all saying the same thing in different ways: we want 2026 to feel a lot more human.

After years of enduring (and perhaps partaking in) AI hype, it feels like we’re finally taking a collective out-breath. “AI-powered” and all the empty jargon that comes with it is past its peak. I’m not saying AI is any less prevalent in business strategy—but attitudes are shifting. Trend reports aren’t about hyping what’s newest or shiniest anymore or AI capabilities that exist for the hell of it. Instead, trend reports show us turning back to what feels real, messy, and familiar.

From Red Antler’s 2025 State of Brand

I can’t tell the future (no one can—according to Pinterest, most consumers can’t envision a future beyond 24 months; more on that concerning stat in a moment). But this tracks with what I’ve been writing about all year. When anything can be generated, proof of humanity/realness rises in value. When everyone has access to the same tools, taste becomes the differentiator. When content is infinite, attention becomes all the more finite—and the more you need to work for it, through specificity, intention, and craft.

My brand/tech ins & outs for 2026

3 ideas shaping how I think about brand in 2026

These three themes are shaping how I’m thinking about brand in 2026:

1. SHOW YOUR WORK

We want mess, not slop. “Proof-of-reality” entered the lexicon this year—proving your creative wasn’t AI-generated, taking pains to take audiences through the process, revealing behind the scenes. Next year, audiences will demand that even more.

As AI content floods every channel, not just social media (see: Disney x Sora agreement), audiences are developing finely tuned bullshit detectors. We’re hungry for evidence that there’s a real person on the other end.

This is a real opportunity. Show the messy middle, not just the polished launch. Publish the strategy doc, not just the campaign. Have a perspective instead of corporate-nice copy that could have been written by anyone anything.

If you want to stand out, be willing to be seen working, thinking, and occasionally getting it wrong. Your rough cut might be more valuable than your final edit. Personal brands and founder brands will keep outranking corporate accounts. Process is the new product.

And visually, the whole Notes app aesthetic is turning into a full-on design movement, making what’s digital feel more tangible. Pinterest and Canva both spotted this: Pinterest searches for DIY, scrapbook styles, and editorial aesthetics are way up; Canva searches for “zine,” “Substack,” and “moodboard” rose 85-90% year over year. People want content that feels like someone’s camera roll, not a brand’s content calendar.

From Canva’s 2026 Design Trends report

2. GO SLOW TO GO FAST

Maybe in response to the endless display of ego in government and social media, we want things to feel a little more moral, a little more wholesome. In hand, there’s a growing awareness that we’re burning out on content that’s overstimulating—content that moves too fast, demands too much, keeps us addicted to the scroll.

People are collecting old TVs and VHS tapes so they can show their kids movies the old way—with an intentional start and a definite stop, without all the streaming noise no one asked for. Because it’s overwhelming, we’re craving a slower pace. We want to rewind. We’re craving endings, completion, closure; more on this below.

How all these themes converge, I’m not sure, but people want things they can hold onto, things they can believe in. Things that feel intentional, or that nod to a simpler time. Physical things that aren’t competing with 427 other tabs. Zines, postcards, newspapers (sticker packs that would make Mrs. Grossman proud?). This is not about more landfill core swag (enough water bottles and tote bags already ✋🏼). This, too, is about communicating what you stand for through craft, process, and quality.

And slow often denotes quality. Selvedge denim from a 100-year-old loom. Soy sauce brewed for three years. A tiny handwritten note. How can the same principle apply to B2B? Slowing down might be the fastest way to stand out when everyone else is optimizing for volume.

3. SPECIFICITY

Don’t. Be. Generic. “AI-powered” is dead. “All-in-one” is dead. Networking dinners? Not quite dead, but maybe on the brink. The networking event had a resurgence post-Covid (people still, desperately, want connection) but now they have too many demands on their time and too many invitations—you need IRL, but you need to make IRL worth it; you need to make it fun. How? Get hyper-specific.

I’m talking about super-themed events. I’m calling it now—this is the next wave of brands moving to Substack and AI companies opening coffee shops. The best marketing teams in 2026 will not be hosting yet another happy hour. Instead, they’ll be inviting you to gatherings with extremely specific themes (which will make for excellent opportunities for the analog stuff that’s also back on the rise). Creative séances. Book clubs. You can get really cute with it—give your product launch a baby shower or throw a birthday party. Hell, host a funeral for your old roadmap, all-black attire, Costco sheet cake and all. (IG is your spot for ideas.)

Think about how you can bring “specificity” to all your channels, and don’t be afraid to be weird—you’ll actually give people something to talk about. May “surprise and delight” be your mantra.

Is 2026 all about “storytelling”?

Earlier this month I started on a post about how we’re seeing “storytelling” popping up everywhere and what this means for marketing going into 2026. Then that WSJ article dropped (“Companies are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’”) and LinkedIn had a very demure, very mindful moment where literally everyone had something to say about it. 🙄 So I scrapped my piece—my main working theory at this point is that everyone’s been using LLMs to write their marketing JDs and AI just loves romantic words like “storyteller” (the modern equivalent of rockstar/ninja/guru 🥴). But regardless of the origin, companies are paying it mind, and I wanted my network’s POV on what we should take from this trend:

From Kevin Branscum, former head of brand at Typeform: “Marketing has always been about storytelling!! But the pendulum swung too far toward efficiency, measurement, and the mirage of ‘performance’—where attribution and digital tools promised certainty—and people (read: leadership, boards) lost sight of its original purpose. I think we’re just starting to see the pendulum swing back.”

From Rachel Kim, fractional CMO & consultant at OpenAI (and my favorite former boss): “As you know, I’ve been banging the drum about storytelling for over a decade. But I’m really glad to see this get more recognition, and more companies finally seeing why the investment is justified. What I worry about is if companies will actually do the long term investment necessary for storytelling to move from a ‘flavor of the day’ into something more permanent. … As brand leaders, we need to continue to educate our business counterparts about why you can’t just tell a story once and be done with it, stories need to be repeated, told in different mediums and ultimately embraced by all, not just one person in one function.

I believe teams that fully invest in storytelling will get an outsized advantage...  but many will silo this and not have broader internal adoption and they will fail... (I can’t wait to see the stupid founder LinkedIn post 6 months from now that goes like ‘We tried to invest in storytelling and our pipeline didn’t grow.’)

So here’s my 2026 “IN” for storytelling: Integrate storytelling in every function. Not just marketing, from growth to product to employer branding. A singular mandate, everyone must answer “How does this align with our story for the market?” Build it into every brief, every campaign, every asset, every feature. Does this align with our story? Yes? Ship it! No? Don’t.”

And from Jess Ellis, head of brand at Attentive: “On my IN list is Reputation. Many of us work for companies in crowded spaces, navigating ups and downs of favorability, brand health, and revenue success. All this plus the expectation to shout about AI within our products while customers tend to still favor working with implementation and success teams who help them scale and grow via human relationships. With platforms like Reddit gaining in use and trust, shaping company/brand reputation in both B2B and B2C spaces will be a key unlock in 2026.”

How to market the future when the future is hard to picture

Switching gears now—remember that stat from above? One of the main things that’s stuck with me from Pinterest Predicts 2026 is their proclamation that the five-year plan is dead; that most consumers can’t envision a future beyond 24 months. This poses a challenge to us as brand strategists: How do you market the future when no one can picture it?

You don’t have to look far for more proof that this is the case. Claude’s recent brand work is warm, human—and totally reliant on analog aesthetics. Soft lighting. Handwritten notes. The visual language of a pre-digital world. ChatGPT’s campaigns also lean heavily on nostalgic framings of human creativity and connection.

That’s not a Cybertruck whose engine they’re fixing

Even the companies building artificial intelligence (the thing being touted as our inevitable future) can’t paint a picture of what comes next without relying on retro aesthetics.

Even AI companies can’t imagine the future

I think strategist Jasmine Bina’s take on our cultural inability to process endings is spot-on. In her essay “Death is Our Missing Technology,” she argues that modern culture feels stuck because we’ve lost the capacity to let things die. Everything just... continues. Everything’s a reboot. Trends circle back before we even register they’re over. Even fleeting social media posts live forever in algorithmic purgatory, resurfacing weeks later. Things go on without closure, “so much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words—like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait—to hold what we refuse to bury.”

Amidst cute predictions like “Throwback Kid,” “Pen Pals,” and “Khaki Coded,” Pinterest’s consumer research documents a cultural mood: exhausted, uncertain, seeking safety and familiarity. Accordingly, Pinterest is positioning itself as “the perfect place for people to escape overstimulation through trends that don’t create social comparison or FOMO” (Pinterest Global Head of Trends and Insights, Sydney Stanback).

So are these trends… or coping mechanisms?

How do we give consumers what they crave when what they crave is closure? When nostalgia alone doesn’t cut it? Maybe we need more “out” lists. Give your campaigns a definite conclusion (AKA don’t kill Duo just to revive him a few weeks later). Give people the satisfaction of resolution.

In a culture that doesn’t share a collective vision for the future, in a culture drowning in infinite scroll, I’ll be thinking more about how “nostalgia is evolving into ‘reclamation,”—a fusion of “past with the present to brace for a future unknown.”

Because “brace for a future unknown” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps we’re not selling ~transformation~ anymore. For now, it might be about stability, specificity—and proof that someone real is on the other end. 🤷🏼‍♀️

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