Newsletter from August 5, 2026

Marketing Has 3 Bosses Now

Who do you cater to?

Benjamin Diedering

sent: August 5, 2026

Subject: Marketing Has 3 Bosses Now

Hello,

Every time I walk into a brand call, I can feel it in the first five minutes. Someone in the room wants the big campaign – the one with the media spend and the hero video. Someone else wants the story, the ‘why we exist’ piece that makes people feel something. And someone, usually the youngest person on the call, is quietly hoping none of it looks like an ad at all.

Nobody’s wrong. That’s the part that took me a while to get. Marketing doesn’t answer to one boss anymore, it answers to three, and I’ve started building every project I produce around all three at once instead of picking my favorite.

THE THREE BOSSES

The Gen X exec wants the campaign. Big media buy, a clear hero moment, something that reaches the whole market at once. This is the instinct that built Nike’s entire history, and it still works. Nike’s ‘So Win’ spot this year, a 60-second cinematic Super Bowl ad built around women athletes, was pure campaign logic: one huge moment, timed to the biggest shared screen in the country.

The millennial wants the story. The ‘why we exist,’ the founder’s voice, the thing that makes you feel connected to the brand and not just aware of it. This is Liquid Death’s whole operating system: a $1.4B water brand built less on ads and more on a persona so consistent it reads like a character you follow, not a product you buy.

The Gen Z on the team wants culture. Not an ad. A thing people already talk about that the brand happens to be inside of. Duolingo’s ‘Death of Duo’ stunt is the cleanest version of this I’ve seen: they killed their own mascot, let the internet run the joke for two weeks, and picked up more daily active users that quarter than in any quarter in company history. No media buy. Just a bit the internet wanted to be part of.

PICKING ONE ISN’T ENOUGH

Run campaign only, and you reach everyone and connect with no one. A flashy moment with nothing underneath it. Run story only, and people love you, feel something, and forget to actually buy. Run culture only, and you get one great viral week and nothing that keeps anyone around after the trend moves on.

I’ve watched all three of these fail solo more times than I can count producing for clients. The brands that actually scale don’t choose. They run all three at once and let each one cover the others’ blind spot.

PROOF IT WORKS

Clinique basically wrote the campaign-first playbook: decades of clinical, hero-product, big-media marketing. This year they ran their first-ever creator-led campaign, ‘Unstoppable Together,’ casting Olympian Tara Davis-Woodhall and her husband, Paralympian Hunter Woodhall, a couple with 7.7 million combined followers, more reach than Clinique’s own accounts. It’s still a campaign. It still has a hero product pairing at the center. But it’s wrapped in a real relationship story, and it’s built to move through culture the way a creator post does, not the way a TV spot does. Same brand, same DNA, all three levers pulled at once.

WHAT THIS MEANS

You don’t need three departments to run three plays. You need to know which one is your default and stop stopping there. If you’re campaign-brained, ask what’s the human story inside your next launch, and where does it live outside a polished ad. If you’re story-brained, ask what’s the one clear moment you’re building toward that actually asks people to act. If you’re culture-brained (living for the viral clip), ask what you’re doing to make sure the people who found you today are still around in six months.

Every project I take on at BDX Media, I run through this same check before we shoot anything: what’s the campaign moment, what’s the story underneath it, and what’s the version of this that doesn’t feel like marketing at all. Miss one, and you’ve built something that only works on one type of person in the room.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The reason this split exists isn’t generational politics, it’s that attention itself split three ways. People still respond to a big, well-timed moment. People still want to feel connected to who they’re buying from. And a huge share of the audience, especially the youngest one, has been trained by years of social media to tune out anything that smells like an ad on sight.

You’re not choosing which audience to write off anymore. You’re choosing whether your marketing is built wide enough to hold all three at the same time. The brands doing it (Nike, Duolingo, even a legacy name like Clinique) aren’t doing anything mysterious. They just stopped treating campaign, story, and culture like three different strategies, and started treating them like three parts of the same one.

WHAT’S HOT

Hope you liked today’s letter, lots of info I hope you learn from.

See you next week.
-Benni

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