# CEO-Led Brand Strategy in Volatile Markets

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-08-04

## Transcript

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People will challenge companies to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before, right?
All of a sudden in your feed on whatever platform that you're using, a brand showing up right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse, and you expect the same things from each of those parties.
You expect them to have a sense of humanity and awareness of what's going on in the world.
Companies didn't sign up for it.
It happened without them knowing.
That's Neil Arthur, CEO of ad agency Widen & Kennedy, most known for its breakthrough work with Nike.
I wanted to talk to Neil now, not only because of Nike's much-discussed activation around the World Cup, but because businesses everywhere are struggling with how to show up in a world of unprecedented volatility.
And no firm has had a better grasp of consumer sentiment than Wieden and Kennedy.
Neil also has a direct pipeline to CEOs across industries, and he shares how strategy and creativity have to reinforce each other right now in ways they never have before.
He also talks about why branding has become a CEO's job, not just a CMO's, how to think about the brand of AI.
Plus, we go behind the scenes on Nike's New York Knicks ad, as well as its World Cup throwdown with Adidas.
So to borrow a phrase, let's just do it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian.
I'm joined by Neil Arthur, CEO of Widening Kennedy.
Neil, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Bob.
It's great to be here.
So Wieden & Kennedy is known for a lot of things.
Among them, your sort of deft pulse on consumers.
And that's where I'd like to start.
Today's business environment, it's so tricky.
Like, stock prices are up, but so are oil prices.
AI is disrupting and exciting people.
Geopolitical issues are arguably at an affliction point.
There are a lot of serious, contentious trends.
And at the same time, marketing messages are tending toward the playful, the practical, sometimes dare I say the superficial.
And I'm just curious, like, what your sense is about why that is, how much of that is about where the consumer emotionally is right now versus where brands are.
I don't think there is a bunch of conversations in a boardroom that are like, it's serious out there, so let's make some jokes.
So just to clarify that that's not what's going on.
If I had to guess, I think you saw it in the pandemic, what was happening in the world was dire.
And then marketers showed up and it quickly became, what was the meme, right?
Of like sad piano music ads.
And I think people would probably prefer Escape more than they want to be reminded from.
brand X that times are our interest state.
Let's say that.
And so when you're in there talking with CEOs and leadership teams across all industries, because you guys do work for a broad range, like what kind of conversations are they having?
I mean, is the mood in there like fear and wait and see or optimism and go for it?
What are you feeling?
I don't really think there is like time for fear.
Like, you know.
Fear and stress probably just lend themselves to paralysis.
And it's certainly not time for that.
We're right now in a point of high prices generally in consumer goods.
A lot of clients are trying to figure out how to show up in a way that feels value forward and that feels like we're aware of the situation that the consumer's in.
And so you're dealing with those things rather than talking about these kind of existential.
issues and topics.
I think there's a prevailing sense of pragmatism where people are just trying to figure out what's the problem we're trying to solve and how do we solve it as quickly as possible.
With all the changes going on, you need to take risks.
But at the same time, it's kind of a tough moment to take risks.
And so, you know, like people talk about polarization, you know, like can brands appeal to everyone?
Is it better to pick a lane?
It's like, it almost feels like no matter where you go.
You're worried you're going to run into something.
I feel like the conversations now are less about brand ideology.
You know, what are the politics of brands and businesses?
And it's more about the practical nature of them.
I think there's been a lot of lessons learned about standing for certain value sets and principles.
And there's a lot of fear and anxiety around that because of the missteps that are kind of been, have been well publicized.
By no means am I saying that brands shouldn't stand for something.
It's actually just about what's the problem that we're dealing with and how do we solve it?
It's less about.
creative risk and some of those things.
I feel like those are for maybe higherfalutin times.
You know what I mean?
I think right now it's a street fight.
And everybody's just trying to figure out how to deal with the obstacles that are directly in front of them.
To me, part of what has always made Wieden and Kennedy distinctive, part of it, is your ability to tap.
people's emotions.
As you're talking about the environment right now, it sounds like utility in some ways is sort of the primary thing that businesses and brands are trying to get across.
Does that change the way you approach, you know, campaigns and what you're trying to do with folks?
Or does it just mean like getting to that emotion, you do it in a different way?
Yeah, it's the latter because it's an important distinction.
I wouldn't say that we are in a time of utility in terms of messaging and output.
The way that you do that can be really emotional, right?
So as Widening Kennedy, we still find tons of humanity and emotion in the problems that our clients are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and how to connect with consumers in a human way.
But the problem tends to be...
more straightforward or um more functional than it is um a lofty ideal i guess is what i would say in this moment in time why you guys are known for the sort of ultimate go for it campaign nike's just do it as a long time new york knicks fan i have to bring up the amazing post finals nike campaign courtesy of director josh safti a fan running through the streets as Billy Joel's New York State of Mind plays.
Is that the kind of thing that you like, you're planning ahead of time?
You know, do you have like options for whichever team wins or is it more sort of instinctive, reactive?
Great question.
You know, Nike being in the business of sport, we're always thinking about who's going to win, who's going to be in those moments.
And the goal is to show up for them.
in a meaningful way when you have a moment like that where the knicks are making a legendary run and i live in new york city and and i i'm a season ticket holder and boy was that electric you kind of get to these moments where you go oh this is going to be a fan you know it's one of those which is what we love about sports not just a moment in sport it's a moment that's transcendent and you kind of go okay if there's a way to have a meaningful contribution to this conversation about this legendary city and long beaten up team, you know, rising to the heights that they did, you got to take that shot.
And I think one of the keys for Nike always is authenticity.
So you get a guy like Safdie, you know, who's a long lifetime fan and you get to see the perspective of the team or the athlete through the lens of somebody who really knows sport.
So you get to a moment like that.
And obviously that makes us collectively why the Kennedy and Nike.
incredibly proud to be able to have that moment.
And it's the moment that we're responding to.
It's not just the creative output, you know.
When I went back to re-watch it in preparation for chatting with you, it made me think like, you know, if the Knicks had lost, like you could have done an emotional ad of a different sort, although with similar kind of feel, you know?
We go through all those scenarios because that's the beauty of having sport as the foundation for everything we do is.
Part of the themes are lost.
You know, that's the best part about sport is it's life writ large.
So I have to ask you about Nike's World Cup Rip the Script ad.
I've had other guests on the show bring it up, compare it to Adidas' own sort of cinematic effort.
Both brands had a slew of soccer stars.
You know that Adidas is going to try to...
do their own thing during this when you're preparing.
So how do you think about that?
Like what's going to be different about your goal with Nike versus Adidas's goal?
And maybe this is, you know, unique to Nike's culture, but Nike is never really focusing on what's going to happen competitively from another brand.
The questions are always just what's the best manifestation.
For an I can, you can get sidetracked by trying to figure out what the others are going to do and all those things that can complicate things unnecessarily.
And so you kind of start there by like, what's the truest thing that we can say right now?
This World Cup, we look at how do we engage all of the different communities within sport, right?
Holland has like an incredible fan base, you know, so there's like a whole facet of this that's around him and Bappe, et cetera, et cetera.
The different kind of cultures within sport.
Kim showing up as a noted soccer mom, you know, like, and so for us, it's like, how do you kind of feed and foster?
those communities.
I think in the past, you would have made one thing, put it out there and hope that as much of the world is washed as possible.
But now we feel like we have to start these little fires in a bunch of different places and then feed them continually throughout the events.
When you're talking about not focusing on the competitor, not focusing on Adidas, that's a conversation that you might have with other brands also.
Don't worry so much about the competition.
you know, identify who you are, what's the right message for you.
That's probably the biggest way that our business has changed, right?
Let's say 15 to 20 years ago, you focused on advertising as brand.
So you'd look at ads from another brand of another company and go, okay, this is their positioning.
What are we going to do?
And to your point, I guess, first of all, I strongly advise against getting too involved in what's going on competitively because basically you're just allowing other people to position you.
And, and I think the greatest gift or opportunity that we have as a company is the ability to kind of have conviction and focus on what you want to stand for.
And if you can do that and be super clear and then execute that better than other people, then you're winning.
No question.
And then, then I think about what's happened in a, in a modern sort of, you know, the modern world of marketing is that.
Advertising now is just a small portion of how your brand manifests itself.
With digital media, with influencers, with social media, etc.
The brand experience that you have as a company has exploded.
So now if I have a bad experience in store, that's out there.
If I have a call with customer service that I didn't enjoy, that's out there.
What we now have to do more than ever is to kind of sit with our clients and go, okay, what is this brand about in its entirety across every point of the company's sort of engagement with people?
We always joke, you kind of have to do everything down to the hold music because they're going to call company headquarters sometimes and they're going to get hold music.
And then you're going to have to go, well, what's that hold music say about us as a company?
How do we make sure that that brand shows up in a consistent way across every step?
And that means that's working a lot more with CEOs and then than we would have in the past, because I think the days of of kind of saying that the CMO is responsible for advertising and therefore brand are done.
I think a CEO today is actually responsible for the brand because they're in charge of the vast majority of consumer touch points.
I feel like sometimes CEOs don't really get creativity.
Like they say they want it.
I'm not talking about you.
I'm talking about traditionally viewed as non-creative industries.
Like they say they want creativity, but they don't really understand it.
Do you find that when you're talking to leaders?
I actually, and this is maybe a little heretical to say, but like, I think talking about creativity in a broad sense is problematic.
because it makes the conversation almost exclusive.
It's like it goes, well, this is for a group of people who have cool t-shirts and interesting handbags.
I think the conversation has to be much more to do with what, as a brand, do you want to stand for?
And when you do that, a CEO can engage.
We have clients that feel like the CEO shouldn't be involved because this is a creative conversation.
No way.
We're talking about what a company should stand for at its best.
A CEO should feel very comfortable in that conversation.
We're not going to, in most cases, talk to a CEO about the music on a spa.
We're talking to CEOs about what they believe and what they want to be and what they want to project to the world.
Talking about what we do as a purely creative endeavor, I think is problematic.
And I think it excludes people who we direly need in these conversations.
And so when you get to the point where, okay, this is what the brand is and how do we emotionally connect with the consumer, maybe the CEO doesn't need to be in the room for that.
Is that more about the music track or whatever?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, you know, does the CEO need to, this is one of the things I've always.
Talking to a CEO from a marketing average, don't feel like you need to know who the voiceover should be.
Don't feel like you need to know what happens on production.
I don't go on production myself, but you have tons to give in a conversation about the brand.
For a business like yours that built a reputation on sort of creative execution.
I mean, obviously you, you want to.
instill and continue that.
But if I'm hearing you right, it's the strategic relationship with the leadership, which you may always have had, but may not have been as obvious, right?
You're rebranding yourselves as something different than what people think of as a quote ad agency.
I think what Wyden and Kennedy has always done at its best is help companies understand and have confidence in who they are and how that shows up in the world.
We've kind of sat down with the leadership of a company and gone, who are you really?
And oftentimes it's very different than who you'd want to be.
What usually happens for us is we start the conversation and our client goes, well, this is who we'd like to be.
And we go, well, that's not who you are though.
What if we focused on who you are and what if we got more comfortable with that?
So a lot of times what happens is that we get companies at a point in time where they feel maybe, you know, like there's something happening competitively or something that's going on that makes them question who they are at their core.
And we go, oh, no, no, we think that thing is awesome.
We've become more of a creative and strategic partner across the business rather than just, hey, here, go make me a 30-second ad.
Advertising agencies can get confused by thinking that the goal is just to get attention.
Attention without connection to what the company and brand stands for and makes it distinctive means nothing.
For us, we're very adamant about making sure everything has intention and that intention is aligned to the company.
I don't think that's necessarily always the goal for marketing and advertising.
For a leader whose stress is not focusing on the competition, Neil certainly has a clear idea about what makes his business different from others.
So how do business leaders operate in a world where a brand campaign can go from launch to backlash overnight?
And what does he think about the brand of AI right now?
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Before the break, Widening Kennedy's Neil Arthur talked about working for Nike and the connection between creativity and strategy.
Now he talks about the brand of AI, what Gen Z is teaching us about the future, and why companies need to keep pace with a culture that's moving faster than ever.
Let's jump back in.
I find myself thinking about the conversations people have about AI right now.
I know you've said you don't really worry about AI taking over from humans.
Are there things you're seeing on the ground at White & Kennedy that give you that confidence?
Because there are plenty of creatives who seem anxious about how AI is unfolding.
It's one of those things, Bob, I'm sure if you played it in five years, you'd be like, well, that idiot.
But I guess my thing on it at the moment is we fully embrace it because what we see is more benefits than not.
The way that we're using AI.
and in conjunction with our clients is to scale our creativity more iterations than ever before, more quickly than ever before, more cheaply than ever before.
That's not at the expense of humanity in a creative idea.
There is nothing I see at this moment that makes me worried that the creative minds within Wieden Kennedy are at risk.
AI by nature goes to the norm.
It goes to the thing that it thinks that most people, because it's a large language model.
are going to value and appreciate.
Creativity, and particularly creativity at Widening Kennedy, is always about the exceptions.
It's always about finding the thing that you wouldn't expect that goes against the grain.
If anything, right now, it's allowing us to scale and it's providing us a source of inspiration for topics.
Like when we look at kind of what's going on in culture and how do we stay culturally attuned?
the conversation around AI may be one of the biggest cultural conversations to have.
There has been some backlash among consumers.
I mean, I've been told that there are advertisers who are sort of using AI more than they're talking about because they're worried about how, you know, consumers are going to respond to that.
Is that true?
Do you see that?
That sort of the public conversation about fear of AI and the sort of...
business actual execution with AI are kind of slightly different tracks?
What we've seen is that using AI for the sake of using AI and very early on seemed like a cool idea to some companies.
And there's been backlash against that.
I don't think anybody's excited to hear that company X made it an all AI ad and doesn't want humans anywhere around it.
That's not a thing that people are excited about.
So I think we're very much now in a more nuanced conversation.
Our personal thing is we never want to use it in a way that's going to replace something that a human could do.
But we are in favor of using it when it can create opportunities that we didn't have before.
And we've never said and will never say that like great news, our embrace of AI has allowed us to cut, you know, X number of jobs.
I asked you in the beginning about sort of the mindset of consumers.
Are brands approaching the next generation of consumers the right way?
Is there a right way?
We have to acknowledge that Gen Z and younger generations have more access to information than older generations had.
They don't go to the store and want to buy.
the hair product because they saw an ad on whatever network.
They have all of these different touch points.
What's fundamentally changing is the idea that you can just make an ad or back to school campaign and go, done, I did it.
I think you are in a full on 365 day 24 seven conversation.
And you need to figure out how your brand is going to show up in all of these different environments, as opposed to thinking about them as campaigns that you launch and are done with.
And by the way, we are now fully into a world in which a marketing calendar doesn't mean shit.
You need a team of people thinking every single second of the day about what it means to be your brand and how do you deliver on that premise every second of the day.
I mean, every time there's a new technology that hits in the advertising industry, like the first talk is like, oh, it's going to be cheaper.
You know, you're going to be able to reach more people in a more whatever focused way.
And as you're talking about, it's like nothing is easier.
You're doing more things than you ever were, right?
Like it doesn't get more efficient.
Maybe it gets more effective or maybe it's just because the media is so fragmented, you don't have a choice.
These tools, they increase the volume of stuff that you can put out.
They increase the frequency of things you can out.
But it's still automated.
It's not going to work, you know, because it's the dynamics that are changing, not your ability to make more stuff.
So the promise is always like, I can press the down funnel button and make a bunch of assets every day.
But that doesn't have any connection to what your company and brand stand for.
You're just making more stuff.
And making more stuff in the absence of a real intention can actually make the problem worse.
I'm not by any means denigrating the fact that there are new tools and ways to connect with audiences.
I'm just saying that if you don't have a clear intention and a clear sense of what your brand is, then those tools don't have any value.
I'm noticing as we talk that sometimes you use the word advertising, sometimes you use the word brand, sometimes you use the word marketing.
For you, is it all one thing?
Or are those things differentiated?
I live in a world where brand is the most important thing.
I think if you're not talking about your brand and all the things that come with that, who you are, what you're against, who you're striving to be, who you're not for, then the rest doesn't matter.
Then beneath that, marketing and then advertising is a smaller, much smaller subset.
are just ways to execute against a brand idea.
If you just talk about advertising the absence of brand, you end up just kind of creating either slop or stuff that gets attention, stunts, et cetera, that don't connect to capital B brand.
I mean, so much is changing in this world right now.
There is a lot of volatility that you have to manage through that you have to...
plan through or react to?
How do you think about dealing in an environment that is this volatile?
I think people think oftentimes that there's more events and more things and more, you know, volatile things happening.
It's the fact that you as a company are expected to have a perspective on this.
That's what's new.
And so now in real time, you're trying to figure out where are we on this?
And if you're not set up that way, if you don't have that ability to be aware and respond, inherent somewhere in your system, this is hard for people.
A lot of times people feel responsible for not changing a brand and what a company's values.
But we're in a time that requires these things.
You know, I think your values should be pretty consistent.
I think there's a baseline of things that are kind of foundational.
But like the way that you show up in the world should be pretty flexible.
Yeah, unless you're Cracker Barrel, in which case you can't change it.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's right.
We won't get too much into Cracker Barrel, Bob.
But what that signaled was a change in values.
And that's where you kind of have to kind of go, what's fixed and what's variable?
Yeah, or it was an exercise in like, actually, we don't really believe this new direction.
It's, as some people might say, just a branding as opposed to actually a strategic shift, right?
That's exactly right.
And if you see the biggest mistakes that get made, they get made from oftentimes a marketing notion of what a company wants to be rather than the overall sense of what the company believes.
It's important to understand why that's happening.
It's because before brand and marketing and advertising were all kind of synonymous and they were like a thin moat.
around a company, right?
But now in an era where there's more transparency than ever before because of digital and social media, people will challenge companies to understand what they believe on topics that they never would have before, right?
Something happens in the world and it starts with social media.
Like all of a sudden in your feed on whatever platform that you're using, a brand showing up.
right behind your best friend, right behind your spouse.
And it's all the same.
And you expect the same things from each of those parties.
You expect them to have a sense of humanity and awareness of what's going on in the world.
That's what happened.
Companies didn't sign up for it.
It happened without them knowing.
So all of a sudden, the expectation of them is the same as it would be for a family member, rather than for this nameless, faceless organization that I didn't really have a relationship to before.
The business you're in, the industry.
I mean, it's been through so many different kinds of crises.
For where you are now, what most keeps you up at night and what most excites you?
Well, let me start with what I'm excited about because I go to bed more with excitement than I do anxiety.
I believe in the value of creative people who think about things in a counterintuitive or subversive way.
That skill set.
And a collection of people who do that full time, being able to solve much bigger problems than we may have in the past is interesting as hell.
And so I feel like as creative people, we were typically brought in for a very specific thing.
And now we're brought in for much bigger problems.
And that's awesome.
What am I scared of?
If I'm being really honest, I look at the headlines I see.
about the diminishing value of creative perspectives.
And I think if this business decides to just chase tech and media, I think that that would be a tragedy of the greatest scale.
That companies and the world need, you know, it sounds trite, but it's true, creative thinking and creative people now more than ever.
And if we get rid of one of the really foundational places and industries where it's been a safe space for those people, I think that'd be like a disaster.
Hmm.
Well, yeah, Neil, this was great.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for doing it.
Thanks, Bob.
Such a pleasure.
Neil's championing of creative safe spaces is spot on and a great argument for why ad agencies should exist.
What strikes me most in Neil's comments is how the story we tell about a brand isn't a derivative of the business strategy.
Instead, it helps define that strategy.
In fact, sometimes good brand storytelling provides more clarity about where a business is going than quarterly earnings calls or investor pitches.
And businesses that don't have a clear brand story, they rarely have a cohesive and lasting strategic direction.
When Neil talks about intentionality and foundational values, what he's describing is a consistent framework for addressing unexpected disruptions and questions about risks and opportunities in a way everyone in the enterprise embraces.
In all apologies to Nike, the real takeaway in a world that's constantly shifting isn't to just do it, it's to know why you're doing it.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
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