Provocations & Propositions

The State of Strategy, Addison Rae, and Cultural Value Systems

Addison Rae is the popstar of yesteryear resurrected in this moment — from the ubiquity that defines monoculture in a "new media" landscape and inspired by the pop-feel of Tigerbeat and MTV. The popstar has always been a Warholian character — Michael Jackson, Britney — the full embodiment of a concept. Unflinching Camp, serious and total in its commitment to its version of reality. It helps that she's built a team who are students of this era — including Mel Ottenberg, the editor-in-chief of Interview Magazine, and Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, from the school of Max Martin.

She's born from the modern 15 minutes of fame — a dancer who found fame on TikTok, posting seven to eight videos a day — but, unlike others who stumble into the fleeting spotlight in this disorientingly-fast media environment, Rae's operating like yesteryear's popstars. Rather than adopting a scarcity mindset and hopping onto the next viral moment, she has a five-year plan, so to speak. Often dismissed as powerless, many of these popstars had more control over their artistry than was known (like Mariah Carey and Janet), seeking out producers and collaborators to help them enact their visions. She has a mood, a vision of what she wants to evoke in people, in her audience. Her mood may be fun and frivolity, but she's transparent about her desires. Rather than forcing fans into the gamification of standom or playing to identity politics in a complex fashion, she moves lightly, self-aware of what she wants, what makes sense for her. She moves slowly — calmly — she knows that platforms' currents won't lead to the outcome she wants, her vision for her world.

Formerly, monoculture's North Star was decided upon by institutions who controlled cultural narratives; now, as the cliché goes, it's sprawling and decentralized. But Rae knows the nature of the landscape, emerging from the brief moment of nascent TikTok's centrality, where trends were fast but consistent in their form to a (dancing) degree. The product of modern mass culture, she understands the performance of it all — the eyes upon her, others' expectations and wants of her — but, more importantly, she's standing strong against this onslaught of content, doing what she feels is best for her — as she pleases — rather than trying to swim up the content stream, trying to find the spotlight in the next flash-in-the-pan trend. She's acting with agency, pointedly redirecting the attention and energy she's gained in one space into another, strategically capturing the lightning of her 15-minutes of fame in a bottle.

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Strategy and insights have gone the way of the ad industry — a community trapped in the echo chambers of LinkedIn and industry-awards. Performance prophets sharing well-designed decks and corporate jargon-laden explanations, over-readings of random happenings on the internet to claim one understands algorithms and culture — capitalistic god complexes.

The current purpose of strategy and insights work has become about the strategist or agency, their personal brand and ego rather than the work itself. A series of hot takes and bombastic strategic frameworks to capture attention of other peers without actually providing new strategic guidance. Everyone trying to recreate BRAT, believing they discovered something on the margins, all the while not understanding Charli's been here, operating in the margins for over a decade.

That BRAT didn't work because it was a genius marketing layup, but in spite of it. She was not the industry standard, never receiving her flowers by those in control of the industry. Rather than plotting, planning, and brand-bible-ing herself to death in order to fit into the market place, or fill the white space in the market, she operated with a sense of stubbornness, trust in her intuition and vision of what something should be, can become. It's the grit and texture of herself, sticking to her vision and her ok-ness with going against-the-grain that got her to BRAT.

But this is not how strategy operates now. Discussed in a reserved agency conference room, influenced by TikTok influencers (who are ironically influenced themselves by a social media team or agency's decision to include them in campaigns, or who are performing to get brand sponsorships themselves), and Slacked into a final Figma form, there's no space given to intuition or imagination. Rather, strategy is reflexive, operating like the Spiderman meme (you're doing this? I'm doing this!). This approach proposes strategy, but is void of strategic thinking. Rather it retroactive, strategies to capture the success of past events and moments. If strategy is a practice predicated on surviving into the future through challenge and evolution, then this is anti-strategy — focused on catching up with the past.

But this attention-economification of insights and strategy isn't the real problem — it's dominance of ego that becomes the ethical souring point. Rather than trying to sort out why something is happening — exploring cultural nuance to parse some sort of understanding and origins of a cultural sentiment — the industry's orientation is around who is winning the game itself, who's take gets the most eyes and who can have the hottest take. Who can best perform insightful-ness — claiming they understand culture so thoroughly they can not only predict it, but control it. When the point of this work is merely to secure more 'cool' projects and build one's personal brand, what purpose, if any, do these strategists actually serve their clients? Why are they needed? Is it ethically ok to further exhaust people's attention and resources for an ego-bump? For points on the stock market and likes?

Is anyone really thinking about anyone beyond themselves, their brand? Is there any empathy — a stepping outside of oneself into another's shoes — being exercised here? Is anyone thinking about the reality of daily life for the average person or are they gleefully trapped in a symbiotic echo chamber, its walls mirrors held up by colleagues, applause button hit on the LinkedIn feed.

When both companies and consultants are now equally looking for cultural clout and the spotlight — growth for growth's sake — what happens to the practice of strategy itself? What happens to its goals and priorities? What becomes the functional point and purpose when production and practice are so framed by clout-chasing?

Everything becomes reduced to a competition to see who can not only capture and mimic, but also create the next shiny new cultural objects, for the sake of saying one was there first. Rather than thinking about the service being provided — trying to do a good job — insights and strategy practices become tools to bolster the strategist or brand themselves, serving their end goal (attention? ego? money? fame?) to be the most culturally relevant. Trying to make a splash — spectacle and performing — rather than just providing better service. Proving one's relevancy becomes the modus operandi. The North Star.

Driven by this thirst for bombast and attention, the industry creates increasingly dire and ethically-dubious circumstances. It becomes a slippery slope when you use child psychiatric theory to hook consumers, advertising it as your edge, and proclaim bombastic insights to attract clients and make them feel uncool, distracting them from what their real role is: to provide value to their consumers. Do you really understand the roots of this rise in offline-ness if you post the very brand-heavy deck to all social platforms? Or are brands and consumers just pawns in case studies that are then sent to other brands as personal marketing material?

Strategy and insights have become our modern snake oil, an elixir that lures companies in with the promise of taking them to the next level, giving them competitive advantage. Swayed by the aesthetic filters, grand narratives, artistic treatments in over-the-top decks. But, in reality, these decks don't get brands to a stronger place, a niche space in the market. Rather they're tools for the strategists, agencies, and cool hunters themselves, means of competing amongst one another for who's the best magician, medium, tarot reader, fortune teller. Decks that dazzle with fantastical narratives, rather than giving actionable tactics that improve actual performance. Made to get attention rather than to be attentive to their clients' needs.

Strategy, I believe, should be about defining one's goals and intentions, and devising actions and methods to fortify, reinforce, and best communicate those principles and values. Actions taken with self-awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses, knowing what makes sense for you given these traits. It's a relationship between advisor and brand, brand and context, now and future — a negotiation between one's ambitions and limitations. It requires listening and nuance — knowing oneself and what makes sense and is feasible given these elements. And, most importantly, it's about evolution and growth: it's a challenge to imagine the world that has yet to come. Growth and action should never be for its own sake, to self-placate and pat oneself on the back. Strategy is an exercise: the challenge may cause some soreness, but, by breaking down tissue, it comes back stronger — strength training.

In an environment where the majority of brands' functions are to be a tool to achieve a desired aspirational lifestyle, perhaps this snake oil approach works. These brands aren't thinking of improving a customer's life or serving a vital purpose. Their goal is growth for growth's sake, to say they beat a competitor, to get the proper PR clippings. Superficial brands whose function becomes pointless beyond image — perhaps they deserve each other.

Created void of vital need, their products always falter because they aren't serving a real purpose or fulfilling a need. These brands need the smoke and mirrors that these kinds of strategists are so good at in order to survive.

Those who emerged from need, from the thought of how to improve someone's life, suffer and lose out in this clout-war. Which begs the question: are these strategists and insights researchers the true root of cultural rot, the reason why we're in a culture of two-dimensional sameness and pure spectacle? Is their exploitation of nascent culture for their own gains making impossible for culture to actually grow, find roots and unfurl into its full form? Content for content’s sake, their desire for growth and expansion fueled by internal competition is leaving us in a culture of sloppy sameness.

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In a culture lacking a collective value system to coalesce around and where language is so individualistic that words have lost their meaning — with no collectivity possible in order to even begin thinking about how to confront the future, what we want from it, and how to create it — could AI systems help define a universal value system, one that speaks to this moment and can loosely join us together to begin collectively walking forward into the future?

Using the basic ethical standards (i.e., you can't ask Claude or GPT for instructions on how to harm someone) trained into these systems as a starting point, insights gained from human interactions (our dialogue, questions, and feedback with AI systems) and synthesis of old and new information could be used to refine these principles into some sort of collective compass around which we can gather.

A rough sketch of values that can function as a loose umbrella for us to gather beneath, that can speak to the potential problems, ethical questions, and futures we face, known and unimagined. A moral update through which we can envision a collective future.