Strategist & writer · brands, AI & commercial culture
Useful fictions for an age of machines.
I have worked in strategy for fifteen years. For the last ten I have been writing about what AI does to brands, to creative work, and to the people who make it. Written to be argued with.
Writing
WARC · 2026 · sample formatting
Scraps, Straws & Silicon
AI is not an apocalyptic threat to brands, nor a magic wand. It is the ultimate clarifying force — and it changes not just the environment of the decision, but the decision-maker itself.
For thirty years, every wave of technology has rearranged the room in which a brand is chosen. Search changed where the choice happened. Social changed who was in the conversation. Programmatic changed the speed. But the chooser stayed the same: a human being, inconsistent and distractible, doing the deciding. That is the assumption AI breaks.
Because now there is a second audience in the room. Alongside the messy, emotional, culturally-embedded human sits an unflappably logical, infinitely knowledgeable personal shopper — the agent, the recommendation engine, the model that has already formed a statistical opinion of what your brand stands for.
In a world of infinite content, consistency is no longer repetition — it’s recognisability under variation.
The machine is only ever holding up a mirror. If it can’t describe your brand cleanly, that is usually because you haven’t. Fickle brands make patchy training data; coherent ones become almost a platonic ideal of themselves.
The five shifts
- Guidelines → guardrails. From rules that forbid to systems that steer.
- Static assets → modular ingredients. Built to recombine, not to be filed.
- Tone of voice → character sheets. Design the brand the way you’d design a mind.
- Control → stewardship. The marketer as editor and curator, not author.
- Broadcast reach → delegated relevance. Being the brand the agent reaches for.
Where this goes wrong. Chase the machine too hard and you build something optimised and hollow. Automate the craft away and you lose the distinctiveness the model was learning from. And when everyone can generate “good enough,” good enough stops being good enough at all.
AI doesn’t replace brand building. It exposes whether you’ve done it properly in the first place.
A formatting sample showing how a full essay reads on the site. Every piece in the archive is set to the same template — paste the full text and it renders like this.
About
Oliver Feldwick is Chief Innovation Officer and Strategy Partner at The&Partnership, and AI & WPP Open lead for JLR Global. He has worked in strategy for fifteen years. In 2016 he wrote Unleashing Cyborg Creativity, and has spent the years since trying to make that argument work inside real agencies on real accounts.
He writes for WARC, Admap and Campaign. Along the way: an Admap Prize, an Atticus Award, an IPA Excellence Diploma distinction, and Adweek’s Agency All-Stars in 2025. He has led strategy and new business on JLR, Coca-Cola, Amazon Audible, NatWest, EA, Mars and Google, and built embedded in-house agency models at scale.
A working timeline
Shelf & Marginalia
Writers, games, records and programmes that have shaped how I think. Most of them turn up somewhere in the writing, usually without being credited.
Marginalia
Lexicon
The words I keep using. Some I coined, some I borrowed and put to work. Collected here so I do not have to define them twice.
The Matchbox Machine
In 1961 Donald Michie built a machine out of matchboxes and coloured beads that could learn to play a game. No code, just consequence. This is a version of it. You move first. The machine moves second, remembers every game it loses, and stops making the moves that lost. Give it a dozen games and it will stop losing. Most of what I write about is somewhere in here.