Campaigns Are Dead. Long Live the Feed.
If the old marketing model was built around the campaign, the new one is built around the feed. And while campaigns are carefully constructed, feeds are messy, in-progress, and always-on.
That shift has profound implications. It requires new muscles: agility, voice consistency, and cultural fluency. It also changes what success looks like. Instead of optimizing for a single moment of impact, brands must now optimize for presence, interaction, and iteration.
Barstool Sports exemplifies this. Their brand isn’t built on quarterly campaigns—it’s built on constant output from personalities who are fully embedded in the culture they speak to. Every podcast, tweet, and TikTok contributes to a real-time brand narrative. It’s chaotic, unfiltered, and often controversial. But it’s also incredibly sticky.
This doesn’t mean traditional marketing is obsolete. There’s still a place for thoughtful storytelling and well-designed assets. But it does mean those elements must live within a broader content ecosystem that includes scrappy, fast, and frequent posts across platforms. You don’t win the feed by waiting.
In the creator economy, content isn’t a campaign asset—it’s a heartbeat. And that heartbeat needs to be consistent if you want your audience to stay connected.
Rethinking the Brand Org Chart for the Creator Era
All of this begs the question: if your company wants to act more like a creator, what needs to change on the inside?
The short answer: a lot.
For one, internal teams need new roles and new rhythms. Brands should be hiring creator-minded talent in-house—not just outsourcing to agencies or influencers. Think content strategists who can think in series, social media leads who understand trends in real time, and leadership who see communication as part of the job, not a delegated task.
Approval processes also need to evolve. In a feed-driven world, speed often trumps perfection. If every Instagram caption requires a six-person review chain, your brand will be too slow to matter. The companies who are thriving are the ones who have built systems to empower real-time publishing—within a clear, flexible brand framework.
This also means rethinking voice. Rather than enforcing a single, static tone, brands need to embrace a constellation of voices: founders, employees, creators, and customers. The brand becomes a host, not a narrator.
And finally, this shift requires a cultural reset. It asks brands to stop treating content as risk and start treating it as relationship. To view imperfection not as a liability, but as a sign of honesty. To trust that people connect more with transparency than polish.
The Bottom Line: What If Your Brand Acted Like a Person?
The creator economy isn’t a trend. It’s a mirror. And what it reflects is a new expectation: that brands be accessible, consistent, and human. It’s not enough to sponsor the conversation. You have to join it.
This doesn’t mean every brand needs a TikTok mascot or a podcast. But it does mean every brand needs to rethink how it communicates, who it empowers, and what kind of presence it wants to have.
Because in the creator era, attention isn’t given to the most polished. It’s given to the most present. And trust doesn’t come from authority. It comes from familiarity.
So, what would shift if your brand thought more like a person than a platform? What stories would you tell if you weren’t afraid to be informal? What could change if you built content like a show—serialized, intimate, imperfect—rather than a slideshow?
It’s time to stop managing the message and start being the message.
Explore more macrotrend insights at Watson's trend hub — and imagine what your brand could become if you embraced the creator within.
