.jpg)
foryoutopia: our ideal marketing landscape
This week, we’re celebrating 5 years of For You Agency.
But more than that, we’re celebrating ForYouTopia: our vision of an ideal marketing landscape. A world where brands, agencies, creators, and communities no longer operate in separate lanes, but work together as one connected cultural engine.
And the good news? That world is already starting to take shape.
During our clients & press brunch, we hosted a panel conversation about the future of marketing with Darre van Dijk, and Perre van den Brink.
Darre, Chief Creative Officer at TBWA\NEBOKO, is known for creating campaigns that don’t just win awards, but become part of culture itself. Perre, strategist, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Nice+Important, helps brands translate cultural shifts into sharp strategies and meaningful stories.
Together, we explored what the future of marketing could, and should, look like. These are the insights that came out of that conversation.
.png)
The future of marketing is collaborative
Agencies operating in separate lanes. Creators briefed at the last minute. Brands spending millions to rent audiences they'll never own. Sound familiar?
The marketing industry isn't short on ambition. It's short on a better model. One where brands, agencies, and creators actually build together instead of working next to each other. One where social creates long-term cultural relevance instead of disappearing the moment the media budget dries up.
Why your campaign works, but your brand doesn't grow.
Here's the uncomfortable truth most agencies won't tell you: You can run a successful campaign and still lose cultural relevance. Impressions don't compound. Reach doesn't remember you. A spike in awareness in October means very little by March if you've disappeared in between.
The brands growing fastest today, six times faster than their category average, aren't necessarily the brands with the biggest media budgets. They're the brands that built something people return to. A format. A community. A reason to keep paying attention.
.png)
Culture doesn’t move in separate lanes
Most marketers still work within fragmented systems. A creative agency. A media agency. A PR partner. A social agency. A creator agency. Each with their own strategy, their own KPIs, their own interpretation of the brief. And somewhere in the middle sits the client, translating between all of them.
The agency world is fragmented. Darre said it plainly, and he's right. “The current model asks brands to project-manage their own marketing ecosystem, briefing five different agencies and hoping they align.” His alternative is one overarching structure. “One partner that orchestrates the whole thing. That sets up the collaborations, runs the briefing, and actually takes responsibility for the outcome.”
And someone has to push for that change. Darre believes that starts with the client. Brands that actively demand their partners work together, and give one partner the responsibility to make sure they do.
.png)
Every direction at once
But culture doesn't move neatly from one department to another. A moment that starts on TikTok becomes a meme, becomes press, becomes search behaviour, becomes group chat conversation, becomes real-world relevance. Culture moves in every direction at once.
Brands responding to culture in isolated bursts will always feel slightly behind it. The shift we're pushing for isn't just structural. It's behavioural. Agencies sharing knowledge instead of protecting territory. Creative agencies acknowledging they don't own creator strategy. Media agencies understanding that cultural relevance isn't captured in a CPM.
Not because collaboration sounds nice. Because the brands that win long-term will start demanding it.
.gif)
Co-create with creators
Most creator workflows still look like this:
Strategy gets built - The concept gets approved - The campaign gets locked - And then creators are brought in to “execute.”
By the time creators enter the room, the thinking is already finished.
Which is strange, because the person who understands the audience best is usually the creator who's spent years building trust inside that community. Yet they're often treated like distribution instead of strategic partners.
That's one of the biggest missed opportunities in modern marketing.
In the model we believe in, creators sit at the table from day one. Not as talent. As co-builders of the format itself. Because no strategist understands a community better than someone who earned their trust organically.
.png)
AI isn't the threat. Irrelevance is.
Everyone's talking about AI. But the conversation is still stuck in the wrong place. AI gets framed as a risk to creativity. A shortcut that cheapens the work. But that's not the real story. Used right, AI is an accelerator, for production, for project management, for getting to the interesting creative question faster.
The more telling shift is what's happening in response to it.
Perre signalled something we're already seeing in culture: "We're entering a phase where AI has started to feel a bit cheap. Companies feel the need to prove they haven't used it. People are even making typos on purpose, just to show it's real."
That's not a small thing. That's a fundamental reordering of what people value.
What started as "omg, this is AI", said with awe, is quietly flipping to "ew, this is AI", said with disappointment. High-end craft is becoming the new luxury. And in a world where content can be generated infinitely, the things that feel genuinely made, with intention, with imperfection, with a human hand behind them, will carry disproportionate weight.
Which brings us back to what Darre said about campaigns that last. "If you can touch human emotion, you can still achieve that people remember your campaign." AI can produce. It can optimise. It can scale. But the emotional core still has to come from somewhere real. The brands that understand that distinction, and use AI to serve the human idea, not replace it, are the ones that will build lasting relevance.
.png)
our role in this shift
What we're seeing today is an industry full of new possibilities.
A world where brands don't just rent audiences, but build them. Where content isn't only made for algorithms, but for people. And where creators aren't just part of the execution, but part of the idea itself. That shift also asks something from agencies. To do more than execute campaigns. To help build formats, communities, and long-term cultural relevance alongside brands.
That's how we see our role.
As a partner operating between media, creators, community, and culture. We know the creators, understand the communities they speak to, and know how to connect those worlds to brands in a way that feels culturally real. Because the biggest growth won't come from reach alone. It will come from relevance.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE MARKETER?
The industry already has the ambition. What it lacks is a better operating system.
ForYouTopia isn't a fantasy. It's what happens when brands stop renting attention and start building relevance people choose to return to. When agencies stop protecting their lanes and start combining what they know. When creators stop becoming the final step in the process and start becoming part of the thinking itself.
The brands that define the next five years won't necessarily be the loudest. They'll be the ones people come back to voluntarily. The ones embedded in culture deeply enough to stay relevant long after the campaign ends. Because in the next era of marketing, attention will be rented, but relevance will be owned.
