“Community” is on every marketer's deck right now, but most brands are just renaming their audience strategy. Here’s a more honest – and more hopeful – way to think about audience, fandom and community in a post‑mass‑reach, AI‑everywhere world.
Everyone’s suddenly obsessed with “community”. For SXSW, the most popular topic submitted this year wasn't AI – it was community and human connection, with organizers saying that "in an AI-saturated world, proposals show a renewed emphasis on the power of connection and what it means to be human."
Every deck, every pitch, every brand update seems to have it somewhere near the top. But if everyone’s “building a community”, why does so much of it feel empty and one-directional?
If you care about how brands show up around big cultural moments, this summer’s World Cup is going to be a stress test. Not just for creative work, but for how well we understand what football actually provides people with in 2026.
Rich Hewes
Creativity used to be about chasing ideas worth talking about. Now, as tech eats the word “innovation,” Wayne Deakin and Jeff Bowerman argue that real progress still comes from wandering minds, bold experiments, and work that actually moves people.
Hannah Bowler
