📓 The Creativ Brief: Career Time Machines
Coachella debt. Google ruled a monopoly. OK Go robotic music vid. In-game advertising stats. Money wars.
In 1895, writer H.G. Wells invented the time machine.
In Time Machine, a time traveler leaps to the year 802,701, where humans have become two different species. Compounding class and inequalities drove humanity so far apart that it caused a genetic rift, dividing us into childlike Elois and savage Morlocks. Jumping another 30 millions ahead, he witnesses the Earth’s rotation cease, the sun dim, and the world fall silent and freeze.
He returns 3 hours late to his own dinner party and relates his travels to a dubious audience.
Time, the fourth dimension, is an elusive creation of our own conception. It’s difficult to measure, harder to perceive, and passes us relatively with both astonishing speed and molasses like drudgery.
13 years ago I acquired my first real job in the William Morris mailroom.
I sit at my Venice Beach desk, time traveling through past dim memories of people, places, and things I’ve done to arrive as CEO of a nascent machine intelligent marketing firm.
This morning, my co-founder and I forecast the future, mapping out our anticipated growth for the next five years in hopeful anticipation of what comes next.
Ambitious young professionals consistently yearn for what comes next. The next assignment, next promotion, next opportunity, time traveling in their minds eye to an abstract future.
Meanwhile, grizzled veterans nostalgically pine for the scrappy, younger days when they were just getting started, eager for possibility, with the energy to move fast and break things.
Time travel is a pointless endeavor. We are incapable of changing the past or knowing the future.
Don’t miss the present.
3 Stories Dominating Media and Tech Headlines
Coachella tickets are now so expensive that most general admission buyers are using buy now, pay later (BNPL) services like Klarna and PayPal to afford them, with 60% of 2025 GA tickets purchased this way. These BNPL options can make a $500+ ticket feel more manageable through monthly installments, but they also risk obscuring the true cost and can lead to debt if users aren’t careful.
Why it matters: The popularity of BNPL for festival tickets reflects how younger consumers are increasingly financing experiences they can’t fully afford upfront, even if it means carrying payments for months after the music stops. It also highlights a concerning trend of increasing debt loads on young people.
Why it matters: The deal introduces protections against AI-driven commercials, ensures better pay for actors, and mandates clearer terms for talent’s involvement in advertising campaigns, setting a new model for future negotiations.
Judge rules against Google in ad tech antitrust case. Google has been found guilty of antitrust violations in two of the three alleged markets, following a long-awaited ruling in its ad tech antitrust battle with the Justice Department. Google was ruled guilty of monopolizing the markets for publishers ad servers and ad exchanges, but not of monopolizing the ad network market. Essentially, the government said Google couldn’t both buy and sell the ad space across the internet which corners the market..
Why it matters: The case moves to the remedies phase, where the government will impose solutions to the verdict of monopolization. These could include something simpler like increased transparency that Google will favor or divestiture of assets into a separate company which the prosecution will favor.
Creativ Spotlight - OK Go Launches Massive Music Video
Our PR team supported the release of OK Go’s latest music video masterpiece. The video was created by clients SpecialGuestx and 1stAveMachine, co-directed by Damian Kulash, Aaron Duffy, and Miguel Espada and executive produced by Andrew Geller.
Go behind the scenes with the articles on Mashable, Fast Company, and The Hollywood Reporter here!
Stat of the Week - Groups Most Influenced by In-game Advertising
Over half of story-driven gamers say in-game ads influence what they buy.
53% of U.S. video game players who primarily play story-driven, single-player games say that in-game advertising or related promotions impact their purchase decisions, according to March 2025 CivicScience data.
As daily time spent gaming increases and total ad revenue hits $8.6B this year, advertisers may find outsized influence among narrative-focused players—even though many blockbuster titles aren't in that genre.
One Fun Thing - Business Comedy Journalism?
I’ve been enjoying the antics of Good Work’s Journalist Dan Toomey. From hits to “What Do Wall Street Quants Actually Do” and “Will Taking Ayahuasca Maximize Shareholder Value”, the channel has amassed over 1 million jaded business subscribers.