The Long Game Is Back

Over the past few weeks, three disparate news items caught my attention.

• A centuries-old cheese signed with UTA.
• A natural grocery store made a cameo in Apple TV+’s Pluribus.
• Luxury hospitality executives started talking publicly about future audience strategy.

These stories come from different industries, with different budgets and instincts. To me, they point in the same direction.

Brand building isn’t suddenly becoming important again. It’s always been a competitive advantage. What changed was the industry’s focus. As digital channels became more measurable and more immediate, many brands shifted toward short-term tactics and attribution models. Brand was treated as a campaign rather than a long-term strategic asset.

Today’s marketing and economic environments are making that approach less sustainable. Audiences are harder to track, cultural influence is more diffuse, and performance tools can’t carry the full weight of growth on their own. Leaders who stayed committed to long-horizon, narrative-led brand work are now in a stronger position. Those that let that discipline slip are realizing they need to rebuild it.

This is the shift hiding in plain sight.

Brand Building Is Back (and It Never Should Have Left)

For almost two decades, measurement was the north star. If you could track it, you could optimize it. If you could optimize it, you could justify it.

So dashboards became the center of gravity. CPM, CTR, ROAS, CPA: the alphabet soup of performance.

Useful, yes. Necessary, often. But limiting if they become the whole picture. Dashboards tell you what’s happening now. Not what’s coming next.

And next is where brand lives.

The Cheese, the Grocery Store, and the Story

Let’s start with Parmigiano Reggiano.

A heritage product, one of the oldest, most consistent, most tightly protected foods in the world, just signed with UTA. Not an ad agency. Not a CPG specialist. A talent agency.

That’s not a marketing stunt. It’s a cultural strategy.

The consortium wants to move the cheese (literally) from chefs and foodie favorite into something closer to mainstream cultural currency. The Champagne of cheese, if you will. And they’re choosing to do it through story, talent, creators, and experiential moments where meaning gets shaped.

Then there’s Sprouts, which at the series creators’ behest was quietly, perfectly woven into Pluribus on Apple TV+. Not as a placement. Not as a paid slot. But as a piece of lived-in realism. The “this is where real people actually shop” emotional truth that makes a story feel grounded.

Meanwhile, luxury hospitality is confronting its own challenge. As Antonia Hock pointed out recently, too many luxury brands market only to their current audience, and ignore the one they’ll need next year or five years from now. The guest who isn’t ready for you yet will eventually be the guest who is. But only if you’ve told a consistent, compelling story that makes you part of their imagined future.

Different industries, same throughline:

Long-horizon, brand-building narrative is infrastructure again.

Digital Didn’t Change What People Want. It Changed What Marketers Could See.

For years now, marketing has optimized for what could be measured. The result was predictable:

• short-term tactics looked smarter than they were
• long-term signals looked softer than they actually are
• brand became a campaign instead of a strategy
• audiences became performance segments instead of communities

But a few things are converging right now:

• consumers are unplugging from algorithmic feeds
• younger demos are less trackable and more avoidant
• Gen X (highly online and highly affluent) is still chronically ignored
• cultural influence is more fragmented and paid media is less predictable
• publishers are scrambling to wean off Google
• brands like Notion are merging comms + social + creator into “Storytelling Teams”
• Turo is hiring a “Head of Earned Attention”

None of these are random. They’re symptoms of a system correcting itself.

When attribution becomes less reliable, and audiences scatter across spaces you can’t fully track, story becomes the connective tissue again.

Audience Building Is Brand Building

One of the most overlooked truths in marketing is simple but easy to ignore: your audience isn’t just who you have now. It’s who you’re going to need.

Every brand has a future audience that starts small, often with an unremarkable first touchpoint:

• Future fine-dining regulars start with a single special-occasion meal
• Future gold circle subscribers start in the mezzanine of a PAC
• Future villa guests start with a long weekend in a standard room
• Future natural-market shoppers start with one trip for a specific ingredient
• Future cheese connoisseurs start with whatever’s in the grocery aisle

These small moments matter because they bring someone into your world for the first time. What happens next is what turns a casual introduction into a future relationship. Brands that recognize the importance of these early touchpoints, and build on them with intention, create the conditions for long-term value.

Audience building is not the same thing as audience targeting.

• Targeting is tactical. It focuses on who’s ready right now.
• Audience building is strategic. It focuses on who isn’t ready yet.

Or as Jimmy Carr put it, in a surprisingly sturdy piece of life advice: “prioritize later.”

Marketers used to understand this instinctively. Digital optimization let them forget it.

The 7 Strategic Levers

Here are seven principles I believe will matter even more in this next era of marketing. They’re  the kinds of levers you choose when you’re thinking about long-term brand value, not just quarterly optimization:

1. Prioritize your future audience as well as your current one. The people who aren’t ready for you yet are still part of your brand’s future.

2. Define the job you need culture to do for your brand. Awareness, aspiration, familiarity, legitimacy – culture can do work paid media can’t.

3. Build a portfolio of cultural channels, not just media channels. Entertainment, partnerships, creators, rituals, place: they all matter.

4. Strengthen the narrative signals that create meaning over time. What you stand for needs to be true, visible, and repeated across touchpoints.

5. Let the real-business metrics guide the plan, not the media metrics. Benchmarks matter, but they aren’t the outcome. The brand exists to grow the business, not to outperform last quarter’s CPM.

6. Reconnect brand and performance so they compound, not compete. Performance works better when brand is healthy. Brand grows faster when performance is smart.

7. Spend real time on culture, not just in dashboards. Cultural signals – attention, emotion, behavior – sit outside standard attribution models. Doesn’t mean they’re not critical to your brand.

Leaders, ask yourself these questions.

What are we doing today to earn tomorrow’s audience?

How are we nurturing the long-horizon brand-building narrative beyond what can be measured?

If you can’t readily answer both, today’s an excellent day to task your teams with doing so.

A Closing Thought

Parmigiano Reggiano signing with UTA isn’t just clever. Sprouts showing up in Pluribus isn’t just realism. Notion rethinking its org chart isn’t just restructuring. They’re signals of where marketing is going:

• A return to story.
• A return to audience.
• A return to the long game.

Brand building was always the work.

Acknowledgments

In addition to the news items linked in above, several recent LinkedIn posts helped spark this piece. These include thoughtful insights from Antonia Hock, Sarah Evans, Jessica Bowlby, Rachel Colson, and Christoph Bakke. Their observations helped illuminate the broader pattern explored here.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash