What marketers can learn from Ad Age’s Business of Brand Event
Ad Age’s Business of Brands conference in Chicago brought together brand leaders, agencies, and strategists to discuss the evolution of modern marketing. The conversations centered on culture, speed, risk, and the growing role of AI in campaign execution.
Here’s a summary of this year’s most important takeaways.
Culture Operates in Layers
One of the clearest signals from the event was that brands don’t speak to monolithic audiences. People exist across multiple cultures and subcultures, each with its own norms, beliefs, and communication styles.
For brands managing multiple subcultures, messaging needs to account for this complexity. Audiences desire personalization more than anything. But what resonates in one context may conflict with another. Successful brands recognize these tensions and build campaigns flexible enough to navigate them.
Podcasters and influencers are transforming the marketing landscape and emerging as a way to help brands integrate into specific cultures. When influencers have direct connections with their audiences, they function as credible truth-tellers rather than paid endorsers.
Brands can build cultural relevance through strategic presence in fashion, music, sports, and creative spaces—appearing in the moments and contexts where their audiences already gather.
Moments Build Loyalty
Across multiple sessions, speakers emphasized that being present in key cultural and consumer moments increases loyalty. These moments can range from large-scale activations to small touchpoints, recurring behaviors, or community interactions that reinforce relationships and drive sales.
The most important task for brands is to meet their audience where they are, connecting with them through curated and authentic content that resonates deeply.
In other words: make audiences laugh, shock them, or make them cry. The middle ground doesn’t break through. Humor, emotional resonance, and creative risk remain some of the most effective ways to create memorable moments.
Speed Requires Integration
The event also emphasized the importance of integrated agency teams working directly alongside in-house social and creative teams.
Now more than ever, the pace of social media demands daily standups and real-time collaboration. Agencies that can embed with brand teams and move at that speed maintain an advantage.
Levi’s recent campaign was a standout example. It included multiple formats—30-second spots, two 15-second versions, and long-form content with embedded Easter eggs that drove a deeper story for audiences to engage with. In this case, the strategy succeeded through tight coordination between brand, ad agency, and social teams.
Agencies Are Capability Accelerators
Beyond speed, brands are increasingly viewing agencies as partners that can introduce new capabilities their in-house teams lack. As brands demand more effective methods for marketing, they’re searching for agencies that can provide new skills, new tech, and new ways of operating.
The most valued media agency relationships combine deep brand understanding with specialized expertise in areas the brand hasn’t developed internally.
Brand leaders noted they’re gravitating toward agencies with clear strengths—teams that know exactly what they’re exceptional at and can bring ideas the brand hasn’t seen before.
Strategy and Business Alignment Remain Central
If there was a unifying message across the event, it was this: attention is expensive, and risk is now part of the job description.
Emerging brands with real budgets signal their commitment to growth and their willingness to invest in standing out. On the other hand, if you’re an established brand that plays it safe, you’ll find your brand quickly fading into the background.
Notably, AI added another layer to the conversation. Adoption in paid media is accelerating fast—from speeding up production cycles to uncovering new optimization opportunities. The resulting benefits include faster production times and more accurate consumer predictions. That said, the challenge comes as marketing teams balance both opportunity and risk while integrating AI deeper into their workflows.
What Brands Are Hiring For
Hiring trends painted a clear picture of where marketing is heading. CMO demand is particularly strong in B2B SaaS and tech companies, though these roles tend to be in-house rather than agency-side. CPG hiring has slowed significantly.
Product marketing has emerged as an area of growing investment, and strategy roles that connect campaign work to business objectives are becoming critical across all functions.
As social media accelerates word-of-mouth, brands need teams that can respond quickly when issues arise. Social response and reputation management capabilities are now essential rather than optional.
Overall, the conversations at Ad Age’s Business of Brands consistently returned to a central theme: execution speed, cultural fluency, and strategic clarity matter. Brands that want to build sustainable advantages must take calculated risks and work with agencies that can move at the pace culture demands.