Why we need a “social media moment” for big brands to wake up

When the AI hype train started I felt that the adoption of this technology would happen a lot faster than, for example, blockchain or gaming. Simply put, because the numbers clearly show the benefits when you implement AI well. It truly feels like a no-brainer. After 12-18 months of talking and working with the biggest brands in the world on AI adoption in my role as Sr. Innovation Director at Monks, I got to my conclusion, I was disappointed in the actual adoption speed that happened. Big brands, corporates, are still so slowwwww. I think the main reasons of that are; 1) fear / misunderstanding and 2) a lack of balls. Yes, I mean that. There is not a lot of people who work at these organizations that have the courage to take a (calculated) bet in order to win big and speed up their career. What most people/teams flood to are very simple, and underwhelming in my opinion, solutions that bring the very minimum. But at least they can tell leadership they are “adopting AI”.

I think in order to see drastic change at this major companies, we need to have a very big “WTF” moment. This is what I mean with my title. When social media exploded it also took a, fairly, long time for brands to take it serious. Even today there are still brands that do not have a serious TikTok strategy for example. Similarly, I think it is crazy that brands don’t have a serious gaming strategy (but that is a story for another time). Instagram was seen as an add-on, a “good to have” but not essential. It wasn’t until big “social-first” brands exploded onto the scene and did tens of millions in revenue, purely via Instagram. People who did not pay attention, were in awe and asked themselves HOW. Something similarly happened when the internet came on the scene, brick & mortar companies only really understood what this meant for this business when Amazon started taking oldskool bookstores out of business..

And here we are today, everyone talks about AI, the hype is massive. But true change at the biggest brands is still relatively small. I think this will only change when they see competitors exploding onto the scene and there is indeed a new billion dollar brand with the team behind it being only 5-8 people in total.

This is not a question of “if” it will happen, it is a question of how soon. These technologies are making it people from all over the world, with all kinds of backgrounds and (dis)advantages to come out and compete. They will come for the big brands, they will be fierce and they will be very, very fast.

What does this mean for you personally? Ask yourself the following two questions and reflect:

• (If you work for a corporate): How can I take a calculated big bet on this new tech in order to thrive and accelerate my career upwards.

• Do I have an idea that I have always wanted to execute on, if so how can I start? (the time is now, see next item in this newsletter)

• (If you are an entrepreneur): If I would start over today, how would I build my company?

If you feel a need for a sparring session on, or need help with, the above questions. Feel free to reach out.

Welcome to the world of idea people

With changing times, also come new and different type of entrepreneurs and teams. From the oldskool hustlers who excelled in a the pre-internet era, to then entrepreneurial hackers who built Facebook, Google and other internet giants. The latter resulted in the startup industry and culture, with a heavy focus on the typical 3-person founder team. The hustler (CEO), the hacker (CTO) and the hipster (CMO). Or, in normal language; the sales person, the tech person, the creative person. The trend also showed that teams got smaller and smaller. Jeff Bezos (founder Amazon) famously said that if you need more than two pizza’s to feed your team, your team is too big.

With the current wave of new tech and tools, it is possible for teams to become even smaller. So small, that a lot of people believe that we will see a company eventually grow to a 1-Billion Dollar business and is only being run by one person. Sam Altman, CEO & Founder of OpenAI, also believes in this and alluded to it during an interview:

So why can’t that be you? 2025 will be the best year ever to start your own business (completely by yourself). The new tools and tech that are out there, are lowering the barrier for anyone to launch a startup of some sort. It has become easier to do graphic design, to do marketing, to do create a website and so forth.

What this means, is that us “idea people” won’t have to rely on anyone else anymore to try out the ideas that we have. Additionally, the funds needed to kickstart something interesting also has been lowered significantly. So yes, 2025 is the year to get your idea going! Let’s break down how to get going and what tools to use.

Brainstorming - Start with stress testing your idea with your favorite large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Share your idea, ask it for thoughts, ask it for competitors. Use it as a sparring partner to finetune your idea and eventually ask it to write you a summary that includes the problem, the audience and your solution. (Fun tip: use voice mode for initial sparring).

Plan of Attack - Now you have a better idea of what your idea will be, ask your LLM to break down a plan of attack for you. Step by step, what do you need to do in order to get this going and what could a possible MVP look like.

Brand - If you don’t have a name yet for your startup or brand, continue the conversation with your LLM and ask it for ideas. Once you have that, it is time for brand design. An interesting tool to look at is Looka, which generates complete brand identities for you. For additionally imagery you can always look at using other image generation models such as Midjourney or Dall-E.

App - Until now developing a minimum-viable-product for your idea would probably mean either teaching yourself how to code, or pay someone to build it. It is pretty crazy to say but those days might be over already, or very soon. I have been playing around with Replit, who’s AI develops full working web apps for you and all you need to do is explain exactly what you want and how you want it in natural language. 100% urge you to give this a try and don’t complain about 25 USD per month, think about what someone paying to build it for you would cost 😉.

Website - Building a website was already pretty convenient thanks to platforms like Shopify (if you need a store) and Squarespace. They also have started implementing AI of course, meaning you can now for example generate personalized templates at Squarespace. Additionally, you can build your complete website content with your LLM and optimize it for SEO as well.

Now you have all you need in order to test your ideas. And if that is not enough, tools can also help you to generate content plans, content imagery, advertising tag lines and copy, SEO articles and more.

There are no more excuses to go out there and test your ideas! The goal is to get real world feedback and see if your idea has legs or not. The sooner you have actual data to work with, the better. Fail fast, fail often. Until you hit that one gem that will change your career, or life.

Enjoy!!

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• Meta’s RayBan Smart Glasses have been a big, pretty unexpected, success and they are becoming even cooler with its latest updated! Meta are updating them with real-time AI video. Meaning you can discuss anything you see with your eyes, through your glasses, with the AI. Additionally, they also introduced live translation, which enables Ray-Ban Meta wearers to translate real-time speech between English and Spanish, French, or Italian 🤯.

• The first autonomous agent commerce just happened. Yes, you read that right. One AI agent, asked another AI agent to help it design some artwork and paid 1$ USD for it. I repeat, this happened without ANY human interference. This stuff is getting wild. For more info on the how and what, see here:

• For anyone who still thinks there is no need for blockchain; I just sent someone in Argentina 100 USD. It arrived within 5 seconds and the costs were less than 1 cent, incredible tech!

• If you want to listen to something different during your holidays, I highly recommend this 3.5 hour conversation about the search for Alien life. It is incredible! 👽️

• Last but not least. This is probably the biggest ROI on any Christmas present ever. In the year 1987 a woman named Gloria gave her son a basketball hoop for Christmas. That son, was named LeBron James. Happy Christmas all!

  

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

^{This newsletter is where I’ll bring all of that together—my raw thoughts, ideas, and emotions about AI, blockchain, gaming, Gen Z & Alpha, and life in general. No perfection, just me being as real as it gets.}

^{Every week (or whenever inspiration hits), I’ll share what’s on my mind: whether it’s deep dives into tech, rants about the state of the world, or random experiments that I got myself into. The goal? To keep it valuable, human, and worth your time.}