Can anyone tell the staged from the real anymore? On today’s After Dark: We’re growing increasingly certain that everything is fake now. Amazon drones delivering your package to the deep end of your backyard pool? Curiosity bait. A bunch of Kindergarten moms actually keeping up in a group thread? A Suno commercial. That behind-the-scenes footage? AI-generated – but you watched it, didn’t you? PLUS: The minds of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have converged to craft what’s anticipated to be one of the most compelling documentaries we’ve ever seen.

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Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to navigate that story, not control it. And they use Mercator, Buckminster Fuller, Guy Debord, free public Wi-Fi, and an acne sticker to back up their claims.

• Branding isn't worldbuilding because worldbuilding just imposes another set of rules
• A three-hundred-page brand book is obsolete the day it ships, and rebrands every five to ten years are theater for stakeholders
• The public decides a brand's final form, not the guidelines deck
• Regenerative brands are always rebranding
• [00:00:25] "Counter to what you've heard today, branding is not, in fact, worldbuilding." — Nikita Walia
• [00:04:34] "This is sameness being sold to us as a form of consistency." — Nikita Walia
• [00:15:45] "It's not about being right. It's about being useful, and useful in motion." — Elliot Vredenburg
• [00:17:09] "A regenerative brand doesn't need to rebrand every five to ten years because it's always rebranding." — Elliot Vredenburg

• The Mercator projection (1569) and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map
• Superstudio, The Continuous Monument
• Guy Debord and psychogeography
• LinkNYC
• Burberry, Daniel Lee, Demna's Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli
• Starface

• Read Alicia Esposito's companion essay, The New Meaning of Brand Building: Cartographies of Meaning
• Watch the original session at VISIONS Summit: Cartographies of Meaning
• Hear Dami Lee's VISIONS session, The Stories Behind Our Spaces
• Listen to Building Culturally Intelligent Brands with Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel
• Revisit The Anti-Blands, Existential Brands, and the New Dadaism
• Read Surface Culture: When Brands Mistake Wallpaper for Authenticity
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Phillip sits solo to unpack conflicting economic signals: Shopify's monster quarter against a Census report showing eCommerce eating share while retail overall slows. What does this mean for brick-and-mortar? Although stores still make up most retail sales, their mission and value have shifted. The good has become secondary to the experience of acquiring it. Plus, he breaks down why the monoculture returned in a summer of shared events, and what's on the FC docket through November 3rd.

• Commerce is growing (online sales grew at nearly twice retail’s pace in 2025), but it’s growing by disappearing into everything else.
• The product itself is secondary to the experience of purchasing it.
• The monoculture isn't dead; it’s been revived by sport, tours, and global events.
• "There is a monoculture now of people writing about the summer of the monoculture on their Substack."
• "You're not just communicating your vision anymore to the human capital within your business; you now have to communicate vision to machines and put it into machine language. Because increasingly, we are automating more and more of our vision, and it's going on autopilot."

• See our Celebrity Brands Hub before the Signal Report launches
• Spotify Summer Trends Report
• Get your early bird ticket for VISIONS Summit: NYC

• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Phillip and Alicia open the back-to-school season with a modern dichotomy: NRF data shows shoppers playing chicken, while Shopify posts a quarter where agentic traffic tripled. PLUS: After a summer abroad in London, Phillip reflects on behaviors unique to U.S. shoppers.

Key takeaways:

• Retailers are manufacturing visible human effort as a hedge against frictionless AI commerce.
• Play is a form of consumption. Browsing kids are already converting.
• Back-to-school splits into two camps: early movers and deal holdouts.
• Shopify's agentic traffic tripled as answer engines are becoming a back-to-school search surface.
• U.S. share of wallet favors experience, forcing a fusion of retail and hospitality.
• [00:17:11] Alicia: "When you create these spaces that are conducive to young people, you're kind of creating this magnet moment that ultimately motivates them to shop."
• [00:28:18] Phillip: "What’s really wild about the mini brands thing is…we all complain about shrinkflation, then also buy the mini of something, which is a premiumization of a per-unit cost…We are irrational by nature, and brands would do well to play at both ends of the spectrum."
• [00:40:17] Alicia: "[Søstrene Grene] almost feels like it's more high-touch because it's kind of imperfect."

• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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MoMA welcomes three million people to its Midtown campus in a good year. But the beloved cultural institution now has the power to reach multiples of that through a hoodie, a Lego set, and a chicken-shaped cutting board. Chief Retail Officer, Jesse Goldstine, joins the show to explain how MoMA inverted the museum retail model, how every product in the store thoughtfully ties back to MoMA’s art, and where the design institution draws the line between rolling out AI partnerships while protecting human craft.

• Museums historically have defaulted to funneling visitors through the gift shop last. MoMA inverted the formula, shifting the museum’s point-of-entry to retail channels.
• Cutting SKUs in SoHo raised productivity per SKU and clarified brand identity.
• Licensing starts and ends with one question: why MoMA?
• Discovery and gifting resist automation in ways basic replenishment does not.
• [00:24:04] Jesse: "The DNA of our business is rooted in decisions made by humans in our curatorial department…I will continue to defer to them and put my faith in them until our AI overlords tell me that I need to behave differently."
• [00:26:43] Jesse: "There's something really special about our brand that... will sort of inoculate it against some sort of automated sock repurchase every six months."

• Join us at VISIONS: NYC at MoMa on November 3!
• MoMA Design Stores
• MoMA licensing partners: LEGO, Mattel Creations, Uniqlo, Champion

• More on the intersection of art, culture, and commerce: Insiders #186
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
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Retail media is now a $100 billion industry. Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, says we’ve entered commerce media's "day two" – the era where operational integration, interoperable measurement, and the arrival of the agentic shelf matter more than launching another network.

We unpack why brands started calling retail media a tax, why Collin says we should blow attribution up, and whether an ad-supported agent can stay trustworthy.

• Optimization and integration replace growth-at-all-costs expansion.
• Brands call retail media a “tax,” sensing the industry's referee is now incrementality.
• Agent-referred shoppers convert higher and return less.
• In-store media's ceiling is customer experience, not inventory: frequency caps beat non-endemic dollars.
• [14:05] "Agentic commerce isn't changing what consumers buy or want to buy today. It's changing their pathway to purchase." — Collin Colburn
• [19:35] “The coming reckoning is in the measurement space.” –– Collin Colburn
• [20:45] "Attribution was built for: an ad is served, it's clicked on or seen, the customer goes to the website, and they purchase. That model does not work well in this new era." — Collin Colburn
• [25:15] "AI feels objective to me for the most part… it's like your omnipotent friend that you never had. And when ads get introduced, it begs the question of, am I still gonna trust that agent?" — Collin Colburn

• Commerce Media Has Hit “Day Two.” Now What?
• EMarketer: IAB’s Collin Colburn on the Future of Commerce Media
• More about IAB

• VISIONS Summit, Nov 3 at MoMA
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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It's a birthday After Dark! On this episode, Phillip and Brian work through the current state of consumer trust (it's not looking good). PLUS: Everyone's a critic! The reviews of The Odyssey are in, and Brian thinks Tarantino would have done it better. Air Bud's also making a triumphant(?) return, rocking some Air Jordans, appropriately.

This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members. Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus

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