Author: haniah

Brand is becoming much more important for private equity and private credit firms.

When interest rates were low and money was flowing, good quality private markets firms could easily raise money from LPs.

But now that interest rates are high and rising – and now that there is a lot of noise around private equity and private credit returns, LPs are much more selective.

And a big part of that selection comes down to brand. If you work at an LP and invest with a GP with a strong brand that everyone knows, you will usually feel a lot safer than investing in a GP which does not have a good brand.

Speak with us at Simba the Black Dog about developing your brand.

AI cuts the cost of developing and deploying creative campaigns.

This allows you to try more creative campaigns – and find one that works exceptionally well for your brand.

Most the world’s best brands found the campaign approach that works for them over decades – and after trying a lot of different campaigns. This includes A Diamond is Forever (De Beers), Got Milk (California Milk Processor Board), Just Do It (Nike).

By dramatically cutting the cost of getting creative into the world, AI allows brands to run multiple creative campaigns at once. You can then keep trying creative approaches until you find one that turns your brand into an ultra-high return brand. It allows you to create a successful brand without needing to rely on luck.

Creating a branded video game can be an ultra-high return investment for brands.

If you are trying to reach audiences who game, this can be a highly effective strategy.

People play their favourite video games thousands of times – and over years.

This medium has been largely limited so far to large brands like CocaCola, Burger King, and Burberry.

AI has reduced costs of building games by more than a factor of 10 – making this advertising channel accessible to many more brands.

There is a big early-mover advantage in this – as brands who take advantage of this development early by releasing video games early will lock in market share. In a year or two, there will be much more competition.

“Storytelling” has become a buzzword – and a bit of a confused word in advertising.

By Storytelling here, I narrowly mean telling stories – where there are people who want to do something and face some obstacle to achieving it.

Stories work with humans. I don’t think anyone fully understands it – but we don’t need to. Stories are an excellent way to pass along information. We are good at keeping our attention when someone is telling us a story, at understanding the story, at remembering the story, and at recalling things from the story later.

AI is going to make the world much more complicated. Over the next few years we will find ourselves living in a world of many more products, and of many more complex products. The many more products will mean that there are a lot more things out there trying to get our limited attention. And the more complex products will mean it will take longer for us to “get” each new product- trying to get your head around things like companies trying to sell us AI agents, or understanding if new preventative health checks for serious diseases are worth doing, or working out things like whether you should sell your house and buy in a new area that will become a lot more valuable because of driverless cars is really difficult. It’s even more complicated at work – things like trying to decide whether to buy systems that are sold as being able to take over some human work, or deciding whether to now build in-house software for more of your business because software development costs have fallen so much, or whether to buy new machines for your facilities while not knowing whether new technology will mean that those machines will be out-of-date in a year or two – these things are incredibly difficult.

When things are too difficult to understand, most people generally do nothing.

For companies (and for humanity) this is not ideal. For companies, if they can’t sell their products, they will grow slowly or fail. For humanity, it means that we waste a lot of time – as there are things out there that could improve the world but we are not adopting because we can’t understand them.

This is where storytelling comes in. It lets companies get their message across. It gets the message across in a way that people hear (without getting bored and switching off halfway through the message), in a way that people understand (rather than the message going in one ear and out the other), in a way that people remember (rather than some fact that is completely forgotten), and in a way that people remember (for example when they are in a situation the next time, they automatically remember this story about the product that could help them in these situations).

To work out the right story to tell, brands need to get to the heart of their product – to be able to see past all the complexity and completely understand what their product does for the consumer. This is much more difficult than it sounds. They then need to understand their customers and create the right story that will resonate with them – and will resonate with them in the right way where they will be able to get the value of the product and will take action to buy and use the product.

Apples’ 1984 ad is an excellent example of how to do this. Nike is famously good at this. Most of the consumer work I have done has been story-telling based. This came very naturally when TV ads were the main medium. And it always seems a little like magic how stories can take something complex and boring to most of us – like the biochemical mechanics of what a pharmaceutical product does or the relative risk-reward profile of a financial product – and make it attention grabbing, fun and often funny. This type of storytelling has reduced a little as primary media for many brands has changed from 30 second TV ads to digital/social.

As competition and complexity increases thanks to AI, we will find ourselves in a new golden age of storytelling.

The upshot for companies and creatives. It’s time to think more about storytelling for your brands. This is important for all brands – but it’s especially important if you need to communicate.

At the beginning of the internet, there were just websites.

Then Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms came along. And advertising moved there.

Advertising moved to their large platforms – with their excellent targeting and tools – allowing brands to efficiently advertise at scale.

The platforms are still the bulk of digital advertising – but off-platform advertising (like in the 1990s) is coming back.

Off-platform advertising includes newsletters, podcasts and direct advertising on websites. It also includes content that goes on platforms – but where you pay the creator directly – like sponsorship of YouTube videos. Anything where you are not paying the platform.

Podcasts – there are now over half a billion podcast listeners globally, and half the US population over the age of 12 listens to at least one podcast a month (eMarketer). Revenue is expected to go from $30bn last year to $130bn by 2030 (Horizon Grand View Research).

Newsletters – smaller but growing. $11bn last year, projected at 18bn for 2027 (statistica).

Influencers – gone from $2bn in 2016 to $24bn in 2024 (statistica). Estimated to reach $48bn by 2027 (dash).

I’m not sure why the platforms are not more aggressively getting involved. It might partly be because of new regulations. It might just be that competition is higher and it’s now less profitable for them that it used to be. And it might be that they will get more involved in the future.

The opportunity for brands is finding new ways to reach their audience. The ROI on this advertising can be excellent in many cases. The difficulty is that it can take more work to find the right places to advertise, and then to negotiate terms.

For smaller brands, off-platform advertising offers a massive opportunity. For the largest brands, they can be a valuable addition to the brand’s advertising mix.