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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Baiju Shah is constantly bridging different worlds. His formative years were shaped by observing his mother, who trained as a commercial artist, and his father, who was an engineer. As global CEO of agency AKQA, he leads an organization that deploys creativity and technology on behalf of clients such as Nestlé, Nike, and Montblanc. And he teaches graduate students pursuing dual degrees in engineering and business administration at Northwestern University. Rather than seeing art and science as distinct specialties, Shah argues that companies and brands must take an interdisciplinary approach, especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Technology without craft is a path to efficient mediocrity, he tells Modern CEO in his first extended interview since joining AKQA in July. Exploring the new frontier Shah believes marrying imagination and technology will not only yield better results but that the union is key to AKQAs success. Hes positioning the business as a frontier agency, which helps clients develop new products and experiences through imagination and advanced AI applications. AKQA is hardly the only company promising to blend creativity and tech. Shah joined the agency from Accenture Song, which calls itself a tech-powered creative business. Nearly all large consultancies and advertising companies also boast agencies that sit at the intersection of digital and design. Shahs effort to promote AKQA as a frontier agency comes amid consolidation and turmoil in the advertising world. Earlier this month, Omnicom said it would lay off 4,000 employees and shutter some agencies following its acquisition of rival Interpublic. This year, AKQA parent WPP shuttled creative agency Grey from AKQA to sister agency Ogilvy. As a result of the move, AKQA shrank from 5,500 employees in 2024 to about 2,400 today. AKQA doesnt disclose its revenue; WPP last year reported revenue of 14.7 billion (about $18.6 billion)roughly flat from a year earlier. Preparing for a new playing field The moves come as the industry grapples with how AI is changing the way advertising is made and distributed. Shah believes AKQA is well placed to leverage AIto serve its clients and help WPP build new business modelsrather than be disrupted by it. The agency recently launched Nestlé Goodness, an AI-powered service that acts like a personal chef and dietitian for families, helping them plan meals while balancing time, cost, and nutrition. AKQA has developed generative stores on Googles AI platform that clients can use to create real-time personalized storefronts based on individual intent and preferences. And AKQA harnessed AI to builda cultural intelligence engine that uses dozens of AI agents and computer visioning to analyze millions of pieces of content globally, uncovering cultural signals in real time. AKQA is making the engine available for all the agencies in the WPP network to use. Early in his career, Shah personally witnessed the importance of wedding creativity with technology. While working as a manager at Accenture Labs in the early 2000s, he and a team of developers used advanced analytics to design a system that predicted oil rig failures with extraordinary precision. The technology was superior to existing solutions, but the clients engineers rejected it. Technology by itself, while its the most powerful force out there, is incomplete to actually drive innovation and drive change, Shah says. Accenture Labs supplemented the technical work with a strategist and designers who could build empathy with the users. He says: That was the only way we could drive the innovation forward. For me that was an unlock. The experience prompted him to get an MBA from Northwestern, where hes now an adjunct professor in a program that awards students with a masters in design innovation and an MBA. And while his students are opting into the kind of multidisciplinary degree that feels future-proofed, Shah believes that theyll need to be open to a variety of professional experiences. The future is not going to be defined by rigid job titles, he says. He encourages students to think of careers as a series of steps, each lasting three yearstime enough to really dig in, learn something deeply, and make a meaningful contribution. He also urges adaptability, noting that the teams of the future will likely feature a mix of creatives, technologists, and systems thinkers, and some of them may be AI agents instead of humans. But Shah maintains that human creativity is what will help AI bloom into something more potent than a tool for efficiency. With every wave of technology, the instinct is always to automate what exists, he says. I believe that the brands that grow are not the ones that are just automating yesterdays thinking. Theyre the ones that imagine and are creating what matters next. World changing ideas Is your company or team developing creative or innovative solutions to pressing challenges? Consider applying for Fast Companys annual World Changing Ideas Awards, which recognizes groundbreaking concepts and projects across industries and company sizes. The final deadline is December 12. Read more: future-focused brands Accenture says elevating creatives gave it a competitive edge 121 Brands That Matter in 2025 Six strategies that turn brands into cultural forces
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E-Commerce
At first glance, Clove’s collaboration strategy may seem a little wacky. Why, you might ask, is a startup that makes sneakers for healthcare workers partnering with Land O’Lakes butter, Levain cookies, and Olipop prebiotic sodas? It’s a good question, but there’s method to the madness. Clove’s team members spend their days studying the lives of doctors and nurses, and they’ve discovered that food is a rare source of pleasure and joy in a very stressful workplace. “I watch nurses get ready with me videos as a form of ethnographic research,” says Jordyn Amoroso, Clove’s co-founder and chief brand officer. “You see nurses pack their lunches with a baked good, or a healthy soda, because it might be the only happy moment in a difficult shift.” Clove’s partnerships offer a fascinating glimpse into the wild world of food collabs that have exploded over the last three years. They’ve ranged from blockbusters like Rhode makeup’s partnership with Krispy Kreme to the absurd, like Arby’s collaboration with Old Spice. Still, brands say that smart food collaborations are now an important tool to standing out in the increasingly competitive grocery aisle and becoming lifestyle brands. Tapping into collaborations is a radical move for a company in healthcarean industry that isn’t known for being fashion-forward or trendyhelping it stand out from more established players like Nurse Mates and Alegria. Earlier this year, Clove dropped a butter-yellow sneaker in partnership with Land O’Lakes in a collaboration that went viral in the healthcare community, with more than 100 million impressions and thousands of butter-colored sneaker sold. And today, Clove is dropping a new collab with Olipop for socks that are emblazoned with the soda’s iconic fruit symbols. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] A Fashionable Healthcare Brand Joe Ammon founded Clove as a love letter to his wife, a nurse who spent 12-hour shifts in the ugly, uncomfortable shoes. Healthcare workers are required to wear special shoes that are slip-resistant and waterproof because they’re exposed to bodily fluids; many hospitals also have a dress code requiring them to be black or white. Ammon felt that nursing shoe companies weren’t putting much care into how shoes looked or felt. In 2019, he launched Clove with a line of shoes that met all the functional requirements, but also had a much cushier insole and also looked more like a cool sneaker. The concept was a hit: The brand has now sold more than a million pairs. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] Amoroso believes that Clove’s success comes, in part, by tuning into the worlds of doctors and nurses. For instance, the brand’s name does not refer to the spice, but is rather a play on medical lingo: Doctors use a line over the letter “c” as a shorthand for the word “with” so the brand’s name means “with love.” Each pair of shoes comes with a pen that says “for borrowing only,” since people notoriously steal nurse’s pens. As Amoroso has spent time with healthcare workers, she’s seen that they care just as much about fashion and trends as other people, but the industry doesn’t treat them like other consumers. On social media, she’s seen nurses and doctors get excited about say, Rhode’s partnership with Krispy Kreme donuts or Studs’ partnership with Van Leeuwan ice cream. “Food collabs are everywhere now, and some are really cool,” she says. “Why shouldn’t healthcare workers get things that are fun and trendy? The industry seems to assume they are content with boring products.” Clove’s first big food collab launched in September, when it partnered with Land O’ Lakes butter to launch a butter themed sneaker. Earlier in the year, another butter brand, Kerrygold, had gone viral on TikTok after it had taken influencers to Ireland, where they created swoony-worthy content of landscapes and food. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] Land O’ Lakes and Clove attempted to create an equally fun moment by delivering influencers enormous yellow boxes that looked like sticks of butter, filled with everything from butter hair clips and tote bags, to butter yellow sneakers and socks, and cooler bags filled with butter. In some cases, they sent a butter butler to nurse’s homes to deliver sneakers on a silver tray. The collab was a success, generating upwards of 100 million impressions, and selling thousands of butter yellow sneakers. Another collab with Levain came out of an insight that cookies were often a go-to treat after a long shift. “In a 12-hour shift, a nurse has seen people be born and die,” says Paula Belatti, Clove’s co-founder and COO. “Sharing a cookie with a co-worker is a brief moment of self-care.” Clove partnered with Levain bakeries near hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia to give healthcare workers coffee, cookies, and compression socks when they left their shift. And today, just in time for the holiday season, Clove is launching its next big food partnership with Olipop, a brand that is well known for its viral marketing, from creating immersive hotel rooms inspired by its flavors to collaborating with a swimwear brand Kulani Kinis on soda-inspired bikinis. Clove customers will be able to buy a set of three socks for $40 that feature fruit icons. “They’re very nostalgic,” says Amoroso. “They’re inspired by ‘day-of-the-week’ underwear and socks millennials had when we were growing up in the 90s.” Why Are Food Brands Obsessed with Collabs Over the past three years, food brands have gone all in on collabs. Some have made sense, like when olive oil brand Graza partnered with Areaware to launch a ‘drizzle and drip’ serving set, or when the buzzy food brands Fishwife and Fly By Jing created cans of spicy smoked salmon. Others created buzz and cute products, like when Studs created ice-cream inspired earring charms with Van Leeuwen. Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s director of strategic partnerships, says that collaborations have been a feature of the fashion industry for more than 15 years, when brands realized they had a powerful opportunity to tap into each others’ audiences, especially as the cost of marketing on social media has gone up. But over the past five years, as the food industry has been flooded with new players, brands have needed to get more creative. “It’s not enough to focus on the food itself,” Vigilante says. “We want to become a lifestyle brand. Collaborations allow us to partner with likeminded brands to create an emotional connection with customers, so they choose us over the competition.” But as food collabs became commonplace, some brands have needed get more bizarre and extreme in order to get any media attention. There was the time when luxury brands like Balenciaga partnered with Lay’s on a clutch that looked like a bag of chips or Kate Spade partnered with Heinz on ketchup themed accessories. Crocs created a clog that looked like a KFC bucket that came with an accessory that smelled like fried chicken. Arby’s created an deodorant with Old Spice supposedly designed tackle the sweats diners get after a meat-heavy meal. E.l.f. cosmetics dropped an eyeshadow palette inspired by Chipotle ingredients. “In some cases, the partnerships don’t seem to make any sense,” Vigilante says. “They’re just kind of a cash grab, and it might put off the customer.” Brands appear to be pulling back from the more absurd collabs, and focusing instead on partnerships that are authentic and logical. Olipop for instance, positions itself as a better-for-you soda, with low sugar and prebiotics, and it has been working to make inroads with hospitals. “Hospital kitchens and cafeteria offer regular soda, which doctors actively dissuade patients from drinking,” says Vigilante. “We’re offering a healthier alternative.” Land O’Lakes, for its part, tends to attract older customers who have been using the product for years, but the brand has been trying to win over younger consumers. The Clove partnership made sense because the brand skews younger, and butter-colored products were having a viral moment on social media. “This collab was an opportunity to put ourselves in front of a new generation, and tell a story about how we’re not just their grandmother’s butter,” says Catherine Fox, Land O’Lakes’ VP of central marketing. Clove and Olipop both have a pipeline of other collabs in the works for 2026, and they believe partnerships are a valuable tool in the arsenal for building a modern brand. “Collaborations don’t need to be surprising or outlandish to work,” says Vigilante. “It’s about giving your customers something fun to look forward to and telling a story about what your brand stands for.”
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E-Commerce
In Apples new holiday ad, A Critter Carol, a group of woodland puppets frolic in a wintery forest to a wildlife-themed parody of the Flight of the Conchordss song Friends. Every element, from the puppets to the set and even the ads typography, was rendered using practical effects. The ad was directed by TBWA\Media Arts Lab (MAL)a bespoke global agency that partners only with Appleand shot on an iPhone 17 Pro. It appears to be building on a larger marketing theme for Apple. Just this November, MAL worked with the company to create a new visual identity for Apple TV using real glass props and colorful lighting. This kind of work stands out in a marketing landscape thats become saturated with CGI and AI-generated content. Coca-Cola, for example, has now released not one but two AI-generated holiday ads, both of which have been met with considerable backlash. As consumers are inundated with AI slop across their social media feeds, its becoming less and less common to encounter an ad that makes anyone stop and think, HuhI wonder how they made that? Apples A Critter Carol signals that a new marker of quality in marketing will be the ability to show real evidence of the creative work that made it possiblenot just the final product. A Tactile Process For MAL, creating A Critter Carol was a tactile process from beginning to end. It started with conceptualizing the cast of raccoons, foxes, birds, bears, moles, rats, and others who populate the ads fantastical forest. [Image: Apple + TBWA/Media Arts Lab] Every animal on camera was designed and built by a dedicated team of artists. Each puppet needed to be both expressive enough for emotional close-ups and durable enough for manipulation by multiple puppeteers behind the scenes. That meant an intense focus on every possible detail. [Image: Apple + TBWA/Media Arts Lab] The puppets were constructed using a combination of internal armatures, foam bodies, synthetic furs, hand-painted surfaces, and carefully crafted glass or resin eyes. Internal mechanisms were added to give each character its unique personality. Before the shoot, a puppet stylist was on hand to tweak body shapes, fur, coloring, and allover shading to give the animals a lived-in look. The final result is a ragtag crew of friendly faces who look like theyve lived in the forest all their lives. On top of handcrafting the puppets, MAL also made the forest setting using practical effects almost exclusively. The team created a tactile, miniature woodland world 3 feet off the ground that the puppeteers could physically inhabit beneath the set. Handmade trees, snow, and ground textures were built at a scale, allowing the puppets to interact naturally with their environment, while the set was configured in layers to help puppeteers navigate through it while remaining hidden. In the end, digital effects were used only to remove the puppeteers when the shot couldnt conceal them, and to extend some backgrounds. [Image: Apple + TBWA/Media Arts Lab] As a final detail, even the typography that appears on-screen at the end of the ad was created by hand specifically for this project. Its called SFWood, and its a mishmash of various sizes and weights of Apples official font, SF Pro. The name SF Wood comes from the fact that this font was hand-printed using custom woodcuts, then scanned and touched up in post. Irregularities in the ink density and wood texture are preserved in the finished version. [Image: Apple + TBWA/Media Arts Lab] The entire ad is an ode to whats possible when artists commit their time and energy to a single project. It hits all the right emotional notes of the seasonnot because its purposefully tugging on viewers heartstrings, but because it feels so deeply human. Why practical effects might get an AI-induced comeback For ad agencies and film studios, theres no doubt that generative AI tools are poised to become integral elements of the creative process. But its possible that these shifts may also make practical effects more sought-after among viewers experiencing digital effect fatigue. [Image: Apple + TBWA/Media Arts Lab] Aside from Apples recent ads, other projects have also brought practical effects back into popular consciousness. In James Gunns Superman film released over the summer, the ice fortress was painstakingly built using real props rather than CGI. And the highly acclaimed 2024 film The Substance relied almost entirely on practical effects despite its surrealist concept. As AI begins to make polished final products more easily attainable, it stands to reason that the gritty, hands-on, behind-the-scenes details of creation will become more valuable to viewers. Apple seems, at least on some level, to understand that growing interest in process. Alongside A Critter Carol, it also published a behind-the-scenes video that allows viewers to watch the puppeteers gearing up, production designers arranging the set, and actors cracking up onstage. Puppeteers dressed like blueberries. Individually placed whiskers. An entire forest built 3 feet off the ground. And so much more, the videos caption reads. Take a look behind the scenes of our new holiday film to see how we handcrafted a cast of woodland puppets and brought them to life on iPhone 17 Pro. There are plenty of downsides to AIs encroachment on the creative sphere, but one positive might just be that the value of the human touch becomes more clearand for advertisers, the behind-the-scenes process becomes part of the spectacle.
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E-Commerce
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