🎨 The return of craft

If you had told me I’d spend a weekend watching a livestream of a moving miniature paper city, I’d have assumed you were describing some obscure ASMR rabbit hole.

But there I was, genuinely captivated by Stripe’s holiday campaign.

For this year’s push, the payments company hired craftspeople to build a tiny handmade city featuring its merchants’ storefronts, and the process was livestreamed for the entire Black Friday weekend.

No CGI, no AI. Just paper, glue, and careful hands.

It was mesmerizing. I kept checking in, oddly invested in how the miniature Etsy store would finally look. The campaign generated buzz not because it was efficient, but precisely because it wasn’t. It was a display of craft.

The world of cheap creation

In other holiday campaigns, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s both faced backlash for their AI-generated holiday ads. People almost felt insulted that these massive brands were bragging about using AI. As if saying, “we didn’t care enough to do this properly.”

This proves a shift in perception:

When creation becomes cheap and abundant, visible effort becomes the scarce resource.

Apple seems to know this. They created their new Apple TV intro using practical effects—actual glass and colored lights produced the animation. No VFX, no AI. They went old-school to signal something about their relationship with art.

Anthropic, a company that literally builds AI, created a physical pop-up experience where people could interact with the brand in real life. Because human experiences carry a weight that digital ones can’t replicate.

What was once dismissed as “inefficient” and “not scalable” is becoming a strategic differentiator.

Where craft matters most

I’m not saying you should abandon AI or optimization entirely. That would be both impractical and foolish. The question is: where does human craft actually create value?

Two areas stand out.

First, anywhere you’re building genuine connection.

Building community. Creating physical events. Getting more faces from your team visible, not just the founder or spokesperson. Participating in existing spaces where your audience already gathers, like dating apps or Netflix showing up at run clubs, because that’s where their users are actually meeting people.

These touchpoints can’t be optimized or automated without losing the very thing that makes them work.

Second, anywhere you need differentiation.

We’re not starving for educational content anymore. AI handles “how to do X” just fine. What people actually want now is to know what others think about things.

The value has shifted from information delivery to human filtering.

What patterns are you seeing that others might miss? What do you believe that runs counter to conventional wisdom? What values drive your decisions?

Conviction-based content—the kind that expresses a genuine point of view and stands for something—is where human craft matters most. AI can’t produce opinions that pass the human sniff-test yet.

Showing the work

Once you’ve made strategic choices about where to invest human effort, the next step is making that investment visible.

For personal brands, this means moving beyond credentials and into convictions. Share the values that shaped your professional perspective. Express the unique perspective that comes from your specific experience. You can rarely differentiate on skills alone in a saturated market, so you need to show attitude and a unique approach.

For company brands, it’s also about transparency into the process. Behind-the-scenes content. Letting people see your team at work. Showing how decisions get made, and how you handled the trade-offs. Even fully virtual businesses can find ways to inject humanness into their communication.

The key in both cases: you’re not just being human, you’re demonstrating it.

***

What made Stripe’s miniature village work wasn’t just that it was handmade. It was that they showed us the making. We watched the craft happen, and that visibility transformed a marketing campaign into something people actually wanted to spend time with.

In a world of infinite content, craft isn’t just about quality. It’s about signaling that you cared enough to do it the hard way and trusted your audience to notice the difference.

Craft matters,

🫟 How an industrial brand wins mass culture

Last week, Pantone announced their new Color of the Year. Whether you like the ~~bland~~ minimalist look of “Cloud Dancer”, you have to agree it’s a unique way for an industrial B2B brand to enter the public conversation. I wrote a deep-dive on the campaign and what marketers can learn from it.

Read more here →

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results | A surprisingly detailed experiment, bringing a fake brand into digital existence. It shows how different LLMs treat different information sources and how to use this knowledge to keep models truthful about your brand.

Why brands should stop overlooking their most powerful influencers: customers | This piece shows why you should probably recenter your efforts from bigger influencers to your own customers, along with some great examples of how to do it right.

These 3 Rs Will Define Marketing in 2026 | Resonance, realness, and relationships. These are the three ingredients you need to stay ahead of the marketing game in 2026, according to Robert Rose. It’s a great addition to my editorial letter this week.

👀 Two for fun

These beautiful photos of old-timely Japan | A visual exploration of craft (still on point with today’s topic!) in small Japanese shops.

This database for not-so-convinced horror lovers | This site features hundreds of horror movies with exact jump-scare timestamps, so you don’t disturb your cat by jolting on the sofa while watching.