Standing Still Is a Bet Too

Nobody knows how brand content gets made five years from now. Not me. Not the people selling the tools. Not the people refusing them.

But you can reason about what has to be true by then. And once you’ve done that, you have to decide where to stand.

I’ve been listening to Jensen Huang on the Acquired podcast. He gets asked about the bet-the-company moments in Nvidia’s history, and he pushes back on the framing. None of them felt like gambles from the inside. The reasoning came first. By the time the chips went in, he’d already worked out what the future needed to look like for the bet to pay.

Two lines stuck.

“You want to position yourself near opportunities. You don’t have to be that perfect. You want to position yourself near the tree.”

And on building for markets that don’t exist yet:

“It’s our way of saying there’s no market yet, but we believe there will be one.”

Position. Not prediction. Get close to where it lands.

Here’s what I think has to be true by 2031.

AI will have stopped being a debate. It’ll be a normal part of a working day, like email, like the cloud, like the thing you argued about once and now can’t remember arguing about.

The need for brand content will have grown. More channels, more markets, more versions, more speed. I think it grows a lot. I can’t prove the number and I’m not going to pretend to.

And how we work now will not be how we work then. Looking at the industry as it operates today and planning from that is planning from the rear-view mirror.

So that’s the tree. Our job is to stand near it.

For us, standing near it has meant learning the tools properly. Not the demo. The plumbing. Building our own software, training our own models, running experiments nobody asked for, so that when a client asks what’s possible, the answer comes from a year of doing it rather than a conference talk.

We don’t lean into AI for the shortcut. We don’t lean into it to save money. We lean into it because we believe it’s where the work is going, and if we can steer even somewhat close to that, we stay useful to the people who hire us.

That’s the whole strategy. Be useful to clients in a world that doesn’t exist yet.

One thing we were never worried about. Losing the craft.

Craft doesn’t disappear when the tools change. It moves. It’s in the eye, the taste, the hundred small calls that make a picture feel right. There’s room for it in every form the work takes, and there always has been.

But it has to be given room to evolve too. A lot of what the tools make right now is slop. Fair. So was most of what came out of the first digital cameras, and the first desktop publishing, and the first web. The tool arrives before the people who know what to do with it.

Somewhere there’s a kid who’ll pick this up without our hang-ups and make something none of us saw coming. New frontiers. I’d rather be standing close enough to see it.

Let’s be straight about what it’s cost, because a bet with no cost isn’t a bet.

Hardware. A year and more of experimenting and building tools, a lot of time that didn’t bill. And clients. Some of the people we work with are wary of AI being used at all, and it’s been a divisive choice. We don’t use it on everything, a lot of what we do doesn’t need it, but the choice itself has risked relationships. It’s cost us some. It’s brought us others.

Fashion has been the hardest. Luxury trades on the hand, and right now a lot of houses would rather not be near the question at all, whether or not we’d ever propose using it on their work. Some have stepped back. A few have come to us for the same reason the others left.

That’s what positioning costs. You give up some of the ground you’re on to get near the ground you think is coming.

What I’d say to anyone running a studio, a photography business, a small team.

You’re placing this bet whether you mean to or not. Standing still is a position. It’s a bet that 2031 looks like now.

Reason it through. What has to be true? Then get near it. Learn enough to have an opinion that’s yours. Tinker. Build small things. Be wrong on your own time rather than on a client’s.

If you’re on the brand side, the question is different. Ask the studios, vendors or talent you hire where they’re standing. Not whether they use AI. What they think has to be true in five years, and what they’ve done about it. The answer tells you more than a capabilities deck ever will.

You won’t be perfect. You don’t have to be. Stand near the tree.

Where do you think the work is in five years? And what have you done, or decided not to do, to get near it? I’d like to know.