Key Takeaways:
- AI is changing the way brands approach marketing and entertainment, with a focus on creating durable value and gravity rather than just capturing attention.
- Brands are launching studios and building entertainment teams to produce and own long-term cultural assets, rather than just advertising or creating content marketing.
- The goal is to create a "field" of meaning and continuity, rather than just a series of discrete nodes or moments of attention.
- Entertainment-led worlds operate on the principle of continuity, where people don’t just visit but inhabit a branded universe, creating a continuous field of meaning and behavior.
- Brands need to think in terms of fields, not nodes, and prioritize mental availability and recall over immediate conversion.
Introduction to AI and Brand Strategy
As AI creates infinite content, entertainment becomes a field that brands can own, creating gravity that no amount of automated distribution can replace. This is forcing a fundamental rethink of brand strategy, with the central question no longer being how brands capture attention, but where durable value actually lives. Gap’s recent creation of a Chief Entertainment Officer role and hiring of Pam Kaufman from Paramount is a prime example of this shift, with the company reorganizing how entertainment shows up inside the business.
The Shift from Nodes to Fields
Traditional marketing operates in nodes: ads, posts, spots, and placements. Each is discrete, competing for attention, and must justify itself in isolation. AI has only accelerated this logic, producing more nodes, faster, at lower cost, with diminishing returns. However, fields work differently. A field is not a moment; it’s an environment that persists and accumulates meaning over time. It doesn’t demand attention; it earns return. This difference matters not just strategically, but cognitively, as humans rely on familiarity and recall to evaluate brands.
The Role of Entertainment in Brand Strategy
Entertainment is becoming a key part of brand strategy, with brands launching studios and building entertainment teams to produce and own long-term cultural assets. This shift mirrors a broader trend in which AI and infrastructure are unlocking new forms of brand growth, from creator ecosystems to long-term audience engagement strategies. The goal is to create a "field" of meaning and continuity, rather than just a series of discrete nodes or moments of attention. Entertainment-led worlds operate on the principle of continuity, where people don’t just visit but inhabit a branded universe, creating a continuous field of meaning and behavior.
The Importance of Continuity
Continuity is key to creating durable value and gravity, rather than just capturing attention. This is why brands are focusing on building long-term cultural assets, rather than just creating content marketing or advertising. The success of the LEGO movies, for example, wasn’t just cultural, it was structural, creating a continuous field of meaning and behavior that businesses can orchestrate far more powerfully than any campaign stitched together from disconnected moments.
Lessons from Amazon and Apple
Amazon and Apple are often cited as examples of successful brand strategy, but not because they’re big. They matter for what their entertainment efforts do, not what they say about them. Fallout, Amazon’s television adaptation of the video game franchise, doesn’t function like an extended advertisement for Prime or commerce. Likewise, Apple TV+ doesn’t behave like a long-form hardware demo reel. In both cases, entertainment operates as a field that completes the emotional logic of the brand’s ecosystem.
The Risk of Overfitting and Enclosure
There’s a valuable concept from machine learning that applies directly to brand strategy: overfitting. A model is overfit when it performs perfectly on past data but fails in the real world. Brands can overfit too, when every experience is optimized relentlessly, every interaction tuned for conversion, every behavior predicted, every outcome sealed in advance. This can lead to a system that is brittle, precise, confident, and wrong the moment conditions change.
The Importance of Stewardship
Fields require stewardship, not extraction. The value of a field doesn’t come from keeping someone inside it indefinitely, but from giving them a coherent place to come back to, one that accumulates meaning over time. This is where many brands get it wrong, trying to manage moments people dip in and out of platforms, campaigns, and engagements, rather than designing environments people choose to inhabit across time.
The Future of AI and Brand Strategy
We’re still early in the development of AI and brand strategy, but the direction is clear. In an AI-driven economy of infinite nodes, AI and brand strategy are converging around fields as the primary source of value. Movies, television, documentaries, events, and experiences are no longer just marketing tactics, but how brands create persistence, memory, and meaning at scale. The goal is to create a field of meaning and continuity, rather than just a series of discrete nodes or moments of attention.
Conclusion
In conclusion, AI is changing the way brands approach marketing and entertainment, with a focus on creating durable value and gravity rather than just capturing attention. Brands are launching studios and building entertainment teams to produce and own long-term cultural assets, rather than just advertising or creating content marketing. The goal is to create a "field" of meaning and continuity, rather than just a series of discrete nodes or moments of attention. By prioritizing mental availability and recall, and focusing on continuity and stewardship, brands can create a continuous field of meaning and behavior that drives loyalty and value.
