Uh oh, the "direct response vs brand" debate is trending on X again...

I'm going to share my thoughts on this, updated for Q4 2026. AI capabilities have been accelerating all year. The cultural landscape is more fractured than ever. What does "brand" mean in this environment?

Before we get into it, I want to share a bit about one of my favorite online eCom communities. Foxwell Founders was launched by Andrew and Gracie Foxwell back in 2017. A few weeks ago, I spoke at their live event in NYC, along with Barry Hott and Joanna Wallace (you can see all the talks here).

It was one of the best eCom events I've been to. I literally left the event at the end of the day, went back to my room and started implementing what I learned.

But Foxwell Founders isn't just events. I'm part of their very active Slack community with 600+ members. Membership also gets you access to online events where some of the best minds in media buying and creative strategy share real, up to date, actionable insights.

You can find more info on Foxwell Founders here, and you can watch my talk on BFCM offer strategy here.

I also need to shout out their two podcasts (AI DTC WTF and Scalability School). At this point, they are the only DTC-focused pods I listen to regularly.

Before we can talk about the value of brand, we have to confront something that very few want to admit:

Most Of Today's Big Brands Were Founded >20 Years Ago

When we talk about "big brands" today, we're usually talking about dinosaurs. Nike, Coach, Coca Cola, Lululemon...all founded before the year 2000.

Yes, the "secret ingredient" to brand building is time. But several factors make it nearly impossible for any brand "planted" after the year 2010 to grow into something substantial, with mass cultural awareness and multiple billions in annual revenue.

It's not just social media, fractured culture and a loss of shared norms. It's the financialization of everything.

Financial optimization eliminates the "waste" that allows brands to create cultural magic. It forces brands to overexpose themselves too soon. And it has shifted the brand/retailer relationship from symbiosis to combat.

The most valuable consumer brands founded in the past 20 years are almost all technology companies: TikTok, Open AI & Anthropic, Uber, Stripe.

Tesla is actually the "big brand" with the most tangible consumer product (cars). And it illustrates another sad societal phenomenon–political controversy is the only way to cut through today's media ecosystem to win mass awareness.

Let's compare that to some of the most well known "traditional" consumer brands founded in the past 20 years: Skims, Alo Yoga, Vuori, Shein, White Claw.

To win mass awareness as a physical goods brand, you either need to invent a new category (hard seltzer), set a new floor for pricing in a category (Shein) or position yourself as a status symbol (Skims, Alo, Vuori).

None of these three paths is easy, but building a status symbol requires the least up-front capital and category/domain knowledge. Which is why it was so popular...and is now all but useless.

Which brings us to another uncomfortable truth that no one wants to confront...

The Past 20 Years Have Been A "Status Boom"–That's Gone Now

"Creating a status symbol" was an arbitrage opportunity 20 years ago. It has mostly been competed away.

The macro was incredible: a generation (millennials) who were raised in the mall era to view consumption as self-expression, and who were told "you can be anything you want to be if you put your mind to it".

Technology democratized "tastemaking", but "larping" is the "posing" of the millennial generation–verboten in one generation, widely accepted and even encouraged in the next.

This created artificial barriers to entry for brand development. It was certainly more democratized, but some amount of knowledge and/or access to capital was required. And there was still an early mover advantage in paid digital media.

You could run a profitable seven figure brand on SEO traffic alone. You could blitzscale a mid sneaker brand to the moon on Meta ads, backed by VC dollars. You could build a brand off one shit viral product and a seven figure IG following, then sell it to Coty for $600 million.

In 2026, nearly all the juice has been squeezed out of this lemon.

Consumers are broke and tired. Gen Z is distrustful of brands and authority figures, even as they desperately yearn for mentorship and meaning. VC firms realized that physical goods don't have the same scale economics as software.

And everyone has a brand, even if it's just a "personal brand".

If you want to launch a consumer business with a chance of surviving for more than two or three years, your product actually needs to be good. Different. Better than the alternatives.

And achieving that requires deep domain expertise and capital to fund research. Look at Popsmith. They really did make the world's best popcorn popper. And it took years of R&D.

Or the SharkNinja family of products. They are constantly innovating into real consumer desires that bigger brands ignore. And they turn out viral hit after viral hit. 150 calorie protein ice cream.

If you can't do that, you have one alternative: you have to be a better storyteller. Tell the stories that the big brands ignore, or the stories that are too raw and real and ugly. Or lie about the product.

That's what the biggest, fastest growing brands on Meta are doing in 2026.

Now, a lot of people reading this refuse to do that. And I get it. If you push it too hard, you get taken out by the US government. Your enterprise value goes to zero.

Also–it is not ethical. But neither is building a mythos around "made in Italy", and then using a loophole to do most of your manufacturing in China. And neither is selling "canned pumpkin" that is actually generic squash. And neither is "health washing" your branding to sell people 900 calorie breakfast wraps.

But, before you claim that there is any enterprise value to protect, you have to ask yourself one question...

Is My Product Really That Good?

We all love to rag on the broccoli boi's dropshipping selfie sticks from AliBaba, and the MRR bro's selling the same magnesium that you can buy for $20 at GNC, but it has a "secret ingredient for better absorption" (and then they rebill you for 3 bottles every month and it shows up as "NETFLIX" on your cc statement).

But at a product level–can you really say that what you're selling is any more differentiated?

Here is a "is my product differentiated" checklist:

• I hold at least one patent on some part of my product
• Some or all of my manufacturing process is proprietary, and I had to build all or part of the factory/assembly line myself
• My manufacturing is 100% vertically integrated
• There are clinical studies backing up the efficacy of my product (not just one ingredient in it...like magnesium)
• I am able to deliver a component of the product, or all of the product, at a price that the competition cannot beat, due to some kind of supply chain or manufacturing innovation
• I am able to deliver more value or quality for the price vs the competition, for similar reasons

If you can't answer "yes" to at least one of these, I have bad news for you...

From a product POV, you are on the same level as the broccoli boi's. Your product itself does not have much inherent enterprise value. Refusing to run Pixar song ads about cheating spouses is simply putting on airs.

It's true that brands are built over time. Many of the big brands I listed at the top of the article are nothing more than generic products with a logo, although many of them started with a single innovative product.

So running the AI drama slop ads might dilute brand perception (or it might not–get to know your real customers, not the idealized one in your head).

But if you are trying to compete against brands who are willing to run the AI slop, and your products are effectively the same from a differentiation POV...you're not going to survive long enough to find out.

If you're trying to build cultural associations between your brand and a desirable concept (Nike = victory, Lululemon = status, Alo = baddie), a Meta ads conversion campaign is the wrong platform for that. And, honestly, so is organic social media. On both platforms, you get distribution by appealing to the basest instincts of the median scroller.

The problem is: Meta is still the best way to invest a dollar today and earn back three dollars by the end of the week. There is no other avenue that presents this combination of favorable economics and scale potential.

So the folks who are averse to AI drama slop still desperately want Meta to work for them, and drive consistent growth. Even though, from a creative POV, they are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Some new regulation is coming to this space, and I expect it to continue. That might stem the tide of egregious lying, but I don't think it's going to stop "off brand" AI content. The median scroller simply loves to watch this stuff.

When the first AI slop brand supplement product kills someone due to shoddy manufacturing and quality control practices, and that becomes a viral news story, AI slop might become a negative signal. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

If you're trying to build a generational brand:

1. Create a TRULY differentiated product. No yassified toilet plungers (shockingly still in business).
2. Get TF off Meta. Make your first $5M selling to real people. If you have a coffee brand, open a coffee shop. If you have an athleisure brand, open a pickleball club (or whatever). Then use digital ads, affiliate and organic social to expand gradually, using your IRL business as the cash engine.

I get it. This is a hard pill to swallow. We want to return to the arbitrage era of digital brand building. But that era is gone. We can only move forward.