Brand storytelling was everywhere. Every agency, every brand, every conference was talking about the power of narrative. Telling your story. Finding your authentic voice. Creating content that engages.

And it was working. For a while.

But I kept noticing something. The brands generating the most genuine engagement weren’t the ones telling the best stories. They were the ones doing something real and then letting the story emerge from the action.

The insight I was reaching for in 2015: in a world where everyone is a storyteller, the scarce resource isn’t the story. It’s the thing worth telling a story about.

Do, don’t show.

Judith

I was at Verizon when I wrote that piece, around the time Verizon corporate purchased the entirety of Verizon Wireless. A year previously I received a message from the Wireless CCO that would alter the eventual course of Verizon’s advertising.

The Wireless CEO received letters from customers regularly, mostly complaints, occasionally something else. The CCO shared one with me. A woman named Judith had driven her car into a ravine off of Mulholland Drive. It was late, it was dark, and that road is famous for its blind curves. She was alone. Because she had switched from a competitor and their spotty service to Verizon and their much better service, she was able to reach 911.

I saw an opportunity to tell a real story, real news, and quickly contacted Judith. She was very excited to tell her story, and was open to being interviewed on camera. My team and I gathered the resources we had, made a prioritization list, and decided to go for it with this story as a pilot to prove the value of these types of stories. We made a mini-documentary about Judith and posted it on YouTube.

It got thousands of organic views without paid amplification. For a brand the size of Verizon, in 2014, that was meaningful. Real people finding a real story and sharing it because it was true.

Internally though the response was muted. The company had recently moved on from “Can you hear me now,” and there was a lot of internal discussion about what to do next. At the time, there was comfort in what had been working, the celebrity campaigns, the polished production. A mini-documentary about a customer in a ditch felt “not big enough.”

The three year gap

What followed wasn’t a dramatic moment of organizational conversion.

It was three years of quiet, persistent work. Bringing the evidence of that pilot forward, the insight we learned from that pilot and a few follow-ups working with real people, telling real stories. Building the internal case one stakeholder at a time. Communications was the first mover, as it was also with “Can you hear me now.” Marketing eventually picked up on the idea and ran with it.

That gap between first mover and mainstream adoption is where most good ideas die. Part of my role, the part that doesn’t show up in a job description, was influencing internal stakeholders on concepts the organization wasn’t ready for yet. Showing a different and better way.

Most of the real work of those three years wasn’t creating content. It was creating believers.

The strategy I had piloted with one mini-documentary about Judith became national television, a series of ads with real customers sharing their experiences.

Why this matters more now than it did in 2015

Ai has made brand storytelling essentially free. Anyone can generate a story in seconds. A brand narrative, a customer testimonial format, a thought leadership piece, all of it available at zero marginal cost.

Which means the 2015 insight has become urgent in a way it wasn’t then.

If everyone can tell a story, the story is no longer the differentiator. The thing worth telling a story about is the differentiator. The action. The proof. The Judith.

Brands that are leaning into AI for content production right now, generating more stories faster at lower cost, are scaling a commodity. They’re becoming more efficient at producing something that’s becoming less valuable.

The brands that will break through aren’t the ones with the best AI-generated content. They’re the ones doing something real enough that the story tells itself.

The question for your brand

What is your organization actually doing, not saying, not positioning, not narrativizing, that is genuinely worth a story?

Not a campaign. Not a content pillar. An action. Something that happened or is happening that a real person would tell another real person about because it mattered to them.

That’s your Judith. Find her. Document her. Let the story emerge from the truth of what you actually did.

Do, don’t show.

Bernays understood something that the following generational cycles watered down and siloed: creativity and communications aren’t separate. They’re “perfect proteins” when brought together. The outputs and assets are most successful when the cultural insight, the creative execution, and the strategic intent are operating and delivering as one unit.

Even before Bernays, creativity has been at this pivotal moment. The Renaissance workshop model (bottega), and the ideal of the multi-faceted artist like Leonardo da Vinci, who invented helicopters (aerial screw) and engineered self-supporting bridges between paintings, dissolved into individual disciplines and siloed guilds. Five hundred years later we’re rediscovering the workshop model (one-person-band really when you look at the creator economy) because the work requires greater depth-per-role, and a different way of working, again.

How the organizational swim lanes happened

The siloing of marketing, brand, communications, and creative wasn’t malicious. The structures of large organizations required…more structure. So we built swim lanes and divisions and departments and titles. It was logical as the cycles progressed, digital maturing being one key one.

Each function got its own leadership, its own budget, its own metrics, its own career path.

The problem: the swim lanes created an implicit hierarchy. Marketing became the business function closest to revenue, the most measurable, and in some cases the most valued by executive leadership. Communications became the reputation function, called in a crisis, expected to generate front page coverage, and invisible otherwise. Creative became a support function, the team you called when you needed something…created.

What we’ve lost

Before we identify the opportunity, let’s define what’s actually been lost since the “overlap era” when digital and metrics moved to the forefront (2000’s - now). The overlap era didn’t just reorganize the profession. It reoriented it. When every piece of content can be measured, the temptation is to optimize for what’s measurable. Click-through rates. Conversion rates. Engagement rates. Cost per acquisition.

Those metrics aren’t wrong. But they measure the downstream effect of creativity, not the creativity itself. And over time, optimizing for downstream metrics produces a specific kind of content: efficient, targeted, measurable, and gradually less interesting than the thing that made people care in the first place.

The brand that optimizes its way to a 3% improvement in click-through rate while its audience gradually stops feeling anything about it is winning the metric and losing the relationship.

Ai has accelerated this dynamic. When content production is essentially free and infinitely scalable, the temptation to produce more measurable content at lower cost is almost irresistible. I’ve seen it firsthand, Ai-generated imagery developed by internal (non-brand) teams that was technically “finished,” but felt immediately…wrong. Not wrong in a subtle way. Wrong in the way that anyone with real brand experience recognizes in half a second. The result at scale: more content, more metrics, less meaning, and less brand coherence.

What’s at risk is the creative power and resonance that existed before the swim lanes were built, the power that drove audiences and guided their decision making.

Why the disruption is actually an opportunity

As the adage goes, “don’t let a crisis go to waste,” I’ve updated that to “don’t let disruption go to waste.” Here’s the optimistic read.

The dissolution of the swim lanes, which is happening whether organizations planned for it or not, is creating something the siloed structure never could: a genuine reason to put creativity back at the center of the work. In our Ai era this is being labeled as “human taste.”

As the swim lanes dissolve, the integrated function that replaces them needs something to organize around. Metrics alone won’t do it…every function already has metrics. Technology alone won’t do it…everyone has the same tools. The only sustainable differentiator for an integrated marketing, communications, and creative function is the quality of the creative thinking at its center. The big idea has returned, but now it’s human, resonant, data-informed, insight-driven, and above all else, brand coherent.

That’s the whitespace. And it’s the biggest whitespace the profession has seen since Bernays was figuring out what to call the thing he was doing.

The skills the current disruption requires

Our new era requires a different kind of practitioner.

The specialist who does one thing extraordinarily well within a defined lane, or the generalist who does everything adequately, are both less valuable in an integrated function than the T-shaped role, deep in one thing, but also wide across others. A producer who can hold the whole thing together, but also jump into a NEW specialization if needed. In the NBA they call this “creating your own offence,” no matter the position, you might be called on to carry the team to victory.

This requires new skills most practitioners haven’t been asked to develop:

Cultural reading: The ability to understand what’s moving in the culture before it becomes obvious and connect it to what the brand or organization needs to say. This is pattern recognition applied to human behavior at scale.

Creative judgment: Not just the ability to make things, but the ability to know which things are worth making and why. In a world of infinite content production, judgment is the scarce resource.

Integrated thinking: The ability to hold marketing, communications, and creative logic simultaneously and make decisions that serve all three without compromising any of them. This is harder than it sounds. Most practitioners are trained to optimize for one function.

Metric literacy without metric dependency: Understanding what the numbers mean without letting them become the only thing that matters. The practitioner who can read the metrics and knows when to trust them and when to override them with judgment is significantly more valuable than the one who can only do one or the other.

What this looks like in practice

The integrated function that emerges from the swim lane dissolution doesn’t have a name yet, maybe “Brand” or “Brand Creative.” That’s partly what the team naming problem is about: the language hasn’t caught up with the cycle.

But the shape of it is becoming visible.

It looks like a team that gathers the cultural insight, the creative execution, the communications strategy, and invents a relevant measurement framework as one integrated practice rather than four separate functions. A team whose primary output isn’t content or campaigns or coverage, it’s the full-cycle idea that makes all of those things work.

It looks like leadership that values creative judgment as a strategic asset rather than solely a production capability. That understands the difference between the team that makes things and the team that knows what’s worth making.

And it looks like practitioners who have done the work to develop the integrated skills the new model requires. Who can read culture, make judgment calls, hold multiple functions simultaneously, and deliver the kind of work that metrics can measure but can’t generate.

The swim lanes are rapidly fading (cue Bob Dylan). The whitespace they’ve left behind is the most interesting creative and strategic territory the profession has seen in decades.

The question isn’t whether the whitespace exists. It’s whether you’re going to lean-in before your competition does.

Known Bugs

The optimistic case for creative centrality assumes organizations will actually invest in the integrated model rather than using the dissolution of swim lanes as an opportunity to reduce headcount and automate the production work. The risk is that the whitespace gets filled with Ai-generated content rather than human creative judgment, not because that’s strategically smarter but because it’s cheaper and faster to measure. The practitioners who will lean-into the whitespace are the ones who can make the business case for creative judgment as a revenue driver, not just a brand asset. If you can’t show the math, the whitespace goes to the algorithm.

He thought it might make an interesting story. He was right. But not for the reason we expected.

The real problem we were trying to solve

In cardiac care, one of the most important decisions a patient faces with their doctor is their treatment, which can include implanted therapies. As a brand communications team inside one of the world’s largest medical technology companies, our job is to create content that moves people toward that conversation with their doctors, with their families, and with themselves. But many times as we tried to address this directly, we ran into challenges. The topic was emotionally heavy, plus working within a regulatory environment meant we had to be very precise in how we discussed it.

For a brand-building campaign, not for a specific device or therapy promotion, we needed a sort of distance, a buffer, between the awareness of the therapy and the potential patient’s discussion with their medical provider.

We just didn’t know it yet.

The animal stories

We posted the first piece, back in 2023, a video story on youtube about how Medtronic technology is being used to protect and study wolves by monitoring their stress and heart health, and watched what happened.

The traction was immediate. People were watching it organically. They were engaged with a story about cardiac devices without the direct correlation to a human condition.

That’s when the insight became apparent. The animal was a proxy. A safe distance between a difficult topic and the people who needed to learn about it. Close enough to be relevant, these were real cardiac devices, real procedures, real outcomes, but with enough distance to feel approachable. Nobody’s afraid of the big bad wolf. Well, almost nobody.

We did a series. Bears. Apes. Anteaters. Each one a story about cardiac care, told through a creature that allowed the viewer to understand the technology without emotional burden. In fact the series was a celebration.

The constraint that became the strategy

Here’s where it matters from a Signal OS perspective.

When we brought this to legal and regulatory (as you do inside a regulated healthcare company) they had requirements and recommendations. As long as we kept within these guardrails, we could tell the story. Think of it like writing a poetic sonnet or a haiku: within the guardrails, beauty can take place.

The constraint was the concept.

This is something I’ve seen over and over inside complex organizations. The limitation that legal or regulatory (or leadership) puts on your idea isn’t always the obstacle. Sometimes it uncovers the insight you didn’t know you needed to make those limitations work in your favor.

What happened next

The series built momentum over a two year period. Steady traction, growing audience, genuine engagement from people who found the stories surprising and warm and worth sharing.

In 2023 this story was picked up by the Star Tribune. Then in 2025 the CBS Evening News covered the story (this time a clouded leopard was the star)…a genuine earned media result built on authentic storytelling. (Full credit to Boua Xiong and the Medtronic PR team who brought it home!)

The proxy held. All the way to earned media at scale.

The proxy principle, applied

Humans have understood the proxy principle instinctively for centuries. Marionettes and puppets across cultures were used to tell stories too difficult, too sacred, or too politically dangerous to tell directly. The puppet creates the distance. The audience does the rest.

Today’s audiences still, for all kinds of reasons, might not want to engage with something directly. In these cases, don’t force a direct conversation. Determine a proxy. Create enough distance between the solution and the decision where people can approach it without a response that shuts them down.

The proxy is an act of empathy. You’re meeting people where they actually are, not where you wish they were. And sometimes the thing that forces you to keep the distance is the best thing that could have happened to your idea.

The question for your work

What’s the difficult conversation your audience is avoiding?

What proxy exists // the unexpected angle, the sideways approach, the anteater // that creates just enough distance for them to engage?

Find that, and you’ve found your way in.

Edge Cases

The proxy principle works when the audience makes the connection themselves. The distance between the proxy and the real topic has to be close enough to be felt but far enough to lower the fear or rejection response. Get that distance wrong in either direction, too close and the fear returns, too far and the relevance disappears, and the proxy fails silently. You’ll get engagement on the animal story with no movement on the underlying decision. Worth testing the distance before you scale it.

In comparison, “Woke” began its emergence around 2010, but the movement didn’t last 70 years. It had a fifteen year lifecycle.

Similarly “Going Green” reached peak corporate adoption through the 1990s and 2000s, and collapsed into the greenwashing backlash before being replaced (mostly) by ESG around 2018. That’s a twenty-five year-ish lifecycle.

ESG entered mainstream consciousness around 2018. By 2023, major corporations were quietly removing it from their annual reports. Total lifecycle: eight years.

This is the new operating environment, and it’s accelerating.

A new movement or trend emerges (let’s call them “cultural cycles”), likely from either a reaction to a previous movement, a splinter, a reemergence or in some cases something entirely new. Resourced and active organizations and brands lean in and adopt them quickly. Some get it right. Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign in 2018 was a hit and his jerseys sold out overnight. Their positioning, audience, and commitment were all aligned. But wait…

Nike posted a sign at the 2026 Boston Marathon reading “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated.” It was removed within 24 hours. Competitors Adidas and Altra responded immediately with their own messaging. From launch to backlash to retreat, the cycle completed in days.

Same brand. Eight years apart. The running/athletic movement had shifted, becoming more inclusive than the brand measured (or monitored). Though the message was true to the brand, the audience had moved on.

Cycles, cycles everywhere

Companies can’t pivot as fast as people, especially when there are many simultaneous movements (and micro-movements). And the brands that once moved first can become quickly out of favor (American Eagle’s “has great jeans,” and GAP’s quick rebuttal).

The mechanisms compound. Communication moves ten times faster than it did fifteen years ago. Network effects mean adoption is exponential, not linear. And coordinated opposition, which used to take years to organize, now emerges nearly simultaneously through the same channels that spread the original language.

Each mechanism accelerates the others. The result is a cycle that’s compressing with every iteration.

The projection, if the current trajectory holds, in a major contemporary movement like ESG or Woke could complete its entire cycle (emergence, mainstream adoption, contestation, decline) in under two years. Some phases in weeks (see below for Ai “Slop”).

It’s a structural shift in how culture moves. And most brand and communications leaders aren’t yet attuned to the acceleration cycles of culture, still operating within historic timelines and older operating systems that can still (kinda) do the job, but poorly.

What this means for your decision-making window

In the 1990s and early 2000s you had real time. Movements emerged, you had time to study them, to evaluate alignment, time to develop strategy. You adopted when it felt safe. Opposition emerged slowly. You had room to respond. By the late 2000s, not so much.

In the current environment, by the time the language of the movement feels clearly mainstream (the moment it feels safe to adopt) the decline phase has likely already begun. Opposition doesn’t emerge years after adoption anymore. It emerges simultaneously.

The ESG example makes this concrete. Brands that adopted ESG language in 2021 did exactly what their process told them to do: they waited for clarity, evaluated alignment, adopted when it felt mainstream and safe. By 2023 they were retreating. Not because they made the wrong call, but because their decision-making process was calibrated to a cycle that no longer existed.

That is what it looks like to be one cycle behind. Or two.

Four stages. Shrinking fast.

Not all movements carry the same risk. The stage matters more than the language itself.

Emerging: From weeks to months old. Small but growing audience. Meaning is still contested even among supporters. Opposition hasn’t organized. The strategic question here isn’t whether to adopt. It’s whether this is worth watching.

Mainstream: From months to a couple of years old. Large audience, growing fast. Corporate adoption beginning. Opposition starting to form. This is where the decision gets real: does this align with what your brand actually stands for? Can you adopt it authentically, not just strategically?

Contested: One to three years later. Divided audience. Both support and opposition are organized and visible. Meaning is fracturing: different groups using the same language to mean different things. Adoption at this stage is a political choice. Know that going in.

Declining: The cycle is turning. Supporters quieter, opposition louder. Corporate retreat accelerating. The question shifts from whether to adopt to how to exit without looking like you were just chasing the trend to begin with.

The implication: you need to know which stage the cultural cycle is in before you make a move. And you need to accept that the time you have inside each stage is shrinking.

So how do you navigate a cycle you can’t fully predict? Start by knowing where you are within it.

Three things to do right now

1. Build real-time visibility (or close to it, depending on your brand). Quarterly trend reports are calibrated to a cycle that’s already obsolete. You need to know what movements are emerging, how fast they’re spreading, who’s adopting them, and whether opposition is organizing before they reach mainstream. This should be a marketing, brand, and communications focus.

2. Develop your framework before you need it. What values must your brand align with for you to consider adoption? What’s your threshold: emerging, mainstream, contested? What’s your exit strategy if the movement becomes radioactive? What’s your narrative for adoption, for shift, for retreat? Document this now, socialize it, align on it before you’re in the room facing a live decision.

3. Ground your brand purpose before you move fast. Here’s the counterintuitive part: speed without authentic grounding looks like trend-surfing opportunism. The brands that navigate this well aren’t the ones that predict perfectly, they’re the ones that know exactly what they stand for and can evaluate any emerging trend against that foundation quickly and authentically. Deep grounding is what makes fast movement credible.

   (PLUG: At Medtronic, the content and creative team and social team inserted ourselves into the Artemis Moon Mission conversation by creating a video about medical devices in space. The content was rooted in something true about who we are, not a trend we were chasing, but Artemis was a trend we could join with authenticity).

The bottom line

The Wide Awakes took 70 years. We’re heading toward cycles that complete in weeks and months.

This is your new operating environment. Not a crisis to avoid, but a system to understand.

The brands that will navigate it aren’t the ones with perfect prediction. They’re the ones that stay grounded, identify the smart opportunities (and act on them quickly), and communicate authentically through their brand (“brand resonance”).

Speed rooted in authenticity is the new stability (that’s the algorithm).

The cycles are collapsing. The question is whether your organization is calibrated to the way cycles exists now.

Source Code: Ever since I was an alt-punk teenager, I’ve been attuned to cultural patterns. Having chosen to be “on the outside” back then, you grow a skepticism for what is labeled as “popular.” You tend to question the reason for things, and as a teenager, often cynically. That skepticism is still running. :)

What is signalOS?

It lives in the decisions made under pressure, the campaigns that worked for reasons nobody fully understood, the moments where an unconventional instinct turned out to be exactly right.

signalOS is where I share my hard-earned learnings with you.

Not as theory. As operating experience. Real campaigns. Real budgets. Real decisions from inside some of the world’s most demanding organizations.

English undergrad dropout (1x). Art school (2x). Punk rock, making art, creative writing. 30 years later, VP of Communications at Medtronic. signalOS is the system built from creative instincts applied to a corporate career.

Let me teach it to you.

First post drops Tuesday May 13.

It’s about wolves. And anteaters. And one of the important things I’ve learned about brand communications in thirty years.

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