I’m writing this essay because I hope it changes the way you think about brand marketing.
I’m also writing it because I lead a brand consultancy, and if these ideas resonate with you, I’d love the opportunity for Fifty Thousand Feet to earn your business one day.
That shouldn’t feel like a remarkable admission. Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve made it one.
Over the past two decades, brand marketing has become remarkably uncomfortable acknowledging the very thing it exists to do. We don’t advertise; we create content. We don’t persuade; we educate. We don’t build demand; we build community. We don’t sell; we tell stories. Somewhere along the way, “it doesn’t even feel like marketing,” became the highest compliment our industry could receive, as though success depended on convincing people they weren’t being sold to at all.
I understand how we got here. Brand marketing earned much of the skepticism directed toward it. We interrupted people, optimized for attention instead of trust, and often confused persuasion with pressure. The movement toward storytelling, utility, experience, and genuine value creation was an important correction. Consumers deserved something better than the hard sell.
But I wonder whether we’ve quietly turned that correction into an ideology.
A few months ago, I attended a beautifully curated, exclusive executive retreat where brands were seamlessly integrated throughout the experience. Products appeared in guest rooms. Wellness activations emerged between sessions. Sponsors helped create an event that simply wouldn’t have existed without their investment. Nothing about it felt forced. In fact, it was exceptionally well executed.
What struck me wasn’t the sponsorship itself; it was how carefully the sponsorship avoided looking like sponsorship.
Everything seemed designed to feel organic, as though acknowledging too plainly that these companies hoped attendees might one day become customers would somehow diminish the authenticity of the experience. It reminded me of the influencer who buries #ad beneath a forest of hashtags, the executive whose thought leadership quietly reinforces the services their firm provides, or the native advertisement engineered to resemble journalism rather than advertising.
The examples are everywhere because they all stem from the same assumption: if people recognize they’re being sold to, the brand has somehow failed.
I’m no longer convinced that’s true.
Consumers today are arguably the most marketing-literate audience in history. They understand recommendation algorithms. They recognize sponsored content instinctively. They know why companies sponsor conferences, podcasts, newsletters, and executive retreats. They understand why founders invest in thought leadership and why creators spend years building audiences before launching products.
The commercial intent isn’t hidden from the audience; it’s hidden from ourselves.
That distinction matters because the performance isn’t fooling anyone. It’s simply creating distance between our intentions and the people we’re trying to reach.
I’ve seen this play out inside my own business.
Not long ago, a global professional services firm that had previously decided not to work with Fifty Thousand Feet came back to us. There hadn’t been a dramatic sales pitch, a clever outbound campaign, or a perfectly timed cold call. What had changed was our body of work. We repositioned our brand, elevated the quality and consistency of our thinking, and launched a newsletter that reflected a more mature point of view about branding, leadership, and business.
Months later, they told us something that has stayed with me. They hadn’t simply noticed the work. They had concluded that we had become a different company.
Our thinking had changed their perception long before anyone asked for the business. The newsletter wasn’t separate from business development. The rebrand wasn’t separate from marketing. The ideas weren’t separate from selling.
They were selling — just not in the way we’ve come to imagine the word.
The best marketing has never been about disguising persuasion. It’s about earning the right to persuade through ideas, consistency, generosity, and trust. Calling that selling doesn’t cheapen it. It elevates what selling can actually be.
Ironically, consumers seem to be asking us for exactly the opposite of what we’ve been optimizing toward. Research from Sprout Social found that 86 percent of consumers believe transparency from brands is more important than ever, yet only 15 percent believe brands are actually very transparent. Even more telling, 86 percent said they would take their business elsewhere if they believed a brand was being dishonest or withholding information.
Consumers aren’t asking us to become less commercial. They’re asking us to become more honest.
That distinction feels increasingly important because we’ve spent years chasing authenticity while rarely stopping to define it. Somewhere along the way, authenticity became an aesthetic. We learned to sound conversational. We published founder stories. We embraced vulnerability. We perfected behind-the-scenes content and carefully curated imperfection. We became extraordinarily good at making brands feel authentic.
But authenticity isn’t a style. It’s alignment. It’s the distance—or lack of distance—between what we’re doing and what we say we’re doing. By that definition, disguising marketing as something else isn’t more authentic. It’s less.
Some of today’s strongest brands seem to understand this instinctively. Liquid Death doesn’t pretend it’s doing anything other than convincing people to buy canned water; it simply does it with wit and complete self-awareness. MrBeast regularly explains that each increasingly ambitious video exists because the previous one generated enough revenue to finance the next. And for more than two decades, the founders of 37signals have openly used books, essays, podcasts, and opinions to explain how they think about building software. No one mistakes those ideas for objective journalism. They’re thoughtful, opinionated brand marketing—and precisely because they never pretend otherwise, they’ve earned extraordinary credibility.
What connects all three isn’t creativity. It’s confidence. They trust what they’ve built enough not to disguise why they’re talking about it.
I wonder what would happen if more of us adopted that posture. Imagine if executives began thought leadership by acknowledging the business problems they were trying to solve. Imagine if brands openly admitted they create useful content because useful ideas eventually earn customers. Imagine if conference organizers celebrated sponsors not as silent benefactors but as businesses investing in communities they genuinely hope to serve.
Would that diminish trust? Or would it simply make the relationship more honest?
I’ve spent much of the past year writing about what remains uniquely human as artificial intelligence reshapes creativity, communication, and business. The more I explore that question, the more convinced I become that we’re chasing the wrong virtue.
Everyone is talking about authenticity. But authenticity, at least as we’ve come to define it, has become surprisingly easy to manufacture. AI can already generate founder stories, vulnerable LinkedIn posts, customer testimonials, thought leadership, and personal essays that feel remarkably authentic. It can reproduce the aesthetics of sincerity at an extraordinary scale.
But honesty is different.
It isn’t something that can be engineered through better prompts or more convincing storytelling. It requires clarity of intent. It asks us to reveal not only what we believe, but why we’re saying it in the first place, directly and without shame.
Perhaps that’s where we’ve lost our footing.
In trying so hard to appear authentic, we’ve become reluctant to be honest about the simple fact that we’re trying to earn someone’s business. Yet those two ideas were never in conflict. Businesses exist to create value, communicate that value, and persuade people that it’s worth paying for. There is nothing manipulative about that exchange when everyone understands the terms.
Maybe the next evolution of business isn’t finding ever more sophisticated ways to disguise commercial intent. Maybe it’s rediscovering the confidence to state our intentions plainly, trusting that people are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves.
We built something we genuinely believe creates value. We’d like to tell you why. If it isn’t for you, that’s okay. But if it is, we’d love the opportunity to earn your business.
In a world increasingly capable of manufacturing authenticity, candor may become the most human signal we have left.
