Soapbox 2025: Geoff Castillo on How Bravery Can Build a Tribe
Our LBB community is buzzing with ideas, opinions and visions for a better advertising industry. So this year, we invited you to dig out your megaphone and climb onto our figurative soapbox to share your hopes for 2025: what change do you want to see? How can the inner workings of the industry improve? How should it adapt to the tech, social, cultural, economic, and politics shifts shaping the market?
Taking the mic today is Geoff Castillo, creative director at the Richmond-based ad agency Arts & Letters. He discusses how brands can use the media landscape of today to be braver, bolder and more memorable than ever before.
This year holds a big opportunity for the industry to shift toward creating bolder work for smaller audiences.
Over the past 10-15 years, media fragmentation has taken what was once a unified stage–the single, powerful TV buy–and scattered it across a trillion tiny screens. This has created more noise than ever and audiences’ attention spans have become shorter than ever before.
At face value, it can seem like fragmentation has been great for data and bad for creativity.
Sure, we still have Super Bowl ads once a year.
But in general, instead of crafting one strong idea into a single focused execution, it feels like the industry is fixated on optimising dispersed budgets into work made for algorithms and metrics, rather than people.
The spread-thin media landscape doesn’t have to kill creativity.
It’s just a new game.
Fragmentation means creatives can think smaller, target tighter and to speak directly to specific audiences in bolder ways.
The brands that have been doing that the best in 2024, are not just selling a product; they’re building a tribe.
Look at Liquid Death.
They’re not trying to win over everyone who drinks water. They’re hunting a core audience of countercultural misfits who love that the brand isn’t afraid to make wild ads, (ads that would never fly as prime-time TV buys).
Leather diapers for moshing?
Zombie commercials dripping in gore with an ‘80s soundtrack?
The brand is creating a cult, not just a customer base.
I also love what McDonald’s did with their anime campaign this year.
‘WcDonald’s’ wasn’t for the burger-eating masses.
It was a love letter to anime fans. For those who know, it was really really cool. For everyone else? Who cares? It wasn’t for them.
It allowed the massive brand to shrink down in a way that became really personal.
These examples work because they don’t pander.
It’s not a faceless boardroom trying to talk ‘Gen Z’.
It’s a brand showing that they get you.
That kind of resonance builds loyalty brands can’t buy – and gives us license to make different, exciting work that people can embrace.
But there are a few obstacles to overcome for work like this to become more standard.
Audiences are bombarded like never before online.
Competing ads aren’t your real competition.
Its sports teams. Celebrities. Friends. A kid in Thailand who is really good at the ukulele.
Attention is a commodity and the industry’s addiction to metrics and best practices sometimes feels like it devalues the audience’s time – treating it as a statistic rather than an opportunity for meaningful engagement.
The way to break through is to tell stories that aren’t polished, focus-grouped and watered-down. Advertising is a mirror that works best when it shows what’s real. When people see themselves, or something they want to be, they lean in, they share, they become evangelists for the brand.
But the biggest obstacle in the way of big work for smaller audiences is fear.
It’s scary for clients to be bold.
There’s a lot on the line and today’s media channels are participatory environments rather than mere content delivery systems.
Some brands would rather play it safe and stay invisible than make a splash.
Comment sections can be brutal.
But many brands are so terrified of alienating anyone or saying the wrong thing that they’ve forgotten the cardinal rule: safe and broad is forgettable.
The path to more exciting work lies in the relationships and trust we build with our clients.
It’s the only way good work is possible.
The best work always comes from that partnership and collaboration – from brands willing to say, “let’s make something real together”.
That’s how you get campaigns that matter for real people.
It’s how we’ve been able to do some of our best work with longstanding client patterns at Arts & Letters.
It’s ultimately the job of the creatives to sift through the chaos and find the signal.
Creatives need to use insights to push toward bolder work.
The brands and creatives that get this will win.
They’ll take risks. They’ll embrace the weird.
They’ll stop worrying about reach and start aiming for resonance.
Advertising is a mirror held up to society. It’s really obvious when it’s fake. But when it’s real and relatable, and when people see themselves in the work, or discover something new because of it – it can be great.
The true power of advertising today lies in the niche moments where brands can deliver hyper-relevant, personal experiences or messages that hit people where it matters.
