In the final post of his series on branding in the age of AI, Bill Sparks asks the practical question the first seven built toward: who's actually doing this well? From Nike to a neighborhood bakery, the answer looks surprisingly consistent.

The agency-of-record era that ran for a century is coming apart. In part seven of his branding series, Bill Sparks tracks what the industry's biggest players are doing as the ground shifts, and what it means for anyone trying to keep a brand's story straight.

Part six of Bill Sparks' series on the evolution of branding. Can a machine tell your brand's story? Bill separates the AI that is quietly making marketing better from the AI that keeps embarrassing the companies that trust it in the open.

Bill Sparks on why handing your story to your customers is the hardest brand strategy to pull off, and the loyalty it earns that no ad budget can buy.

Bill Sparks looks at how creator partnerships became a $44 billion channel, and the tradeoff every brand faces: the authenticity that makes a creator worth hiring is the same thing you can't fully control.

Bill Sparks on how a handful of brands became publishers, why owning an audience beats renting one, and where most companies go wrong.

Companies have never had more ways to reach us, or been trusted less. Bill Sparks on how brands lost the public's trust, and what the smart ones are doing to earn it back.

Bill Sparks opens a new series on how the old branding playbook broke — and what's replacing it.

Bill Sparks asks whether the AI boom is a bubble waiting to pop — and lays out what the hyperscalers pouring hundreds of billions into infrastructure still have to prove before the checks stop clearing.

Bill Sparks steps inside the CAA Vault where Hollywood's most powerful agency scans its own clients down to the smallest change of expression.

Bill Sparks on how Name, Image, and Likeness management has become another skill young athletes need to master on their way to the big leagues.

Bill Sparks on what the 2026 World Cup's early engagement numbers reveal about the gap between sponsorship rights and actual relevance.

Bill Sparks's Cold Read on the reskilling problem: 78 million net new jobs are coming by 2030, but only for the companies fast enough to teach their people how to claim them.

Bill Sparks examines decades of peer-reviewed research on dispositional job satisfaction — and asks whether your most expensive hiring mistakes were detectable before the offer letter went out.

Bill Sparks on the $2 billion deepfake problem — and why the fix isn't better software, but a simple discipline: never take a face or a voice as proof.

Bill Sparks examines why so many business plans fail despite careful preparation — and why the failures follow patterns founders can anticipate.

Bill Sparks reaches back six hundred years to show that every accusation aimed at AI today — "no skill," "no soul," "just pressing a button" — has been leveled at every significant creative technology since the Renaissance.

Bill Sparks examines the electric air taxi that's almost here — Joby Aviation is months from FAA certification, seven minutes from JFK to Midtown. The flight happened. What comes next is the harder part.

Foreign intelligence services are storing terabytes of encrypted corporate data that was captured as it moved across the internet. In a few years, they’ll be able to read it.

Courts have ruled that training AI on legally obtained works of art is fair use. The big question is, how will this impact the future of the creator economy?