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At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, top agencies and brands vie for awards and hustle to close deals. As this years event wraps up, Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder shares the insider buzzfrom the continued rise of creator-led content to how brands navigate getting the right kind of attention in a polarized market. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. What are you hearing people talk about here at the festival? A lot is going on. There’s a recurring theme. I think . . . everyone is trying to figure out, How can I cut through without being cut out? How can I cut through without alienating a core part of my audience? Because we’re living in such a polarized time, where there are very few things people can align on. And so there is really that, but we are also in an attention recession, where it’s so difficult to get attention, and getting attention is not enough, because you have to convert that attention into intention, right? To get people to actually go into discovery, consideration, and ultimately purchase. So, it’s not just getting the attention, but the attention in the way that’s right for your brand. Exactly. Getting attention in a way that’s right for your brand and drives action, drives engagement. And now, there’s just so much that grabs people’s attention, so grabbing attention isn’t enough. It’s actually converting the attention into intention, into buyer intent. Are there any rules about it, or is it that each brand has to do it in its own way? I think that there are some themes that we’re seeing about how brands in general are doing this, across all industries, B2B, B2C, healthcare, technology, beauty, retail. We’re seeing some recurring themes. And I think one of the big themes is leaning into creators and community, because people show up for people. They might not necessarily show up for brands in the same way as we’ve seen in the past. So a lot of brands are leaning into [that]. I mean, creators are all over the place. Creators and athletes. Because creators and athletes come with a more dedicated and a more engaged and a more, I’m going to use the word rabid, a little bit, fan base. Yes, real fans. Real fans, rather than just celebrities that you see. I mean, we’ve been talking for a few years about influencers and how that has sort of changed the marketplace. It sounds a little bit like we’ve broken through to a new layer with that? We’ve certainly broken through to a new layer. And in fact, they don’t want to be called influencers. They want to be called creators. Because they’re saying, “Hey, I’m not here to just influence. I’m here to co-create with you to drive a certain outcome.” So we’re seeing that happen more now. And does that change the relationship that a brand like yours has with a traditional advertising firm? Are you going to creators in a different way? It definitely changes, because creators have, I think, a lot more say and a lot more power, and they’re taking a bigger space at the table. So, gone are the days, I think, where it’s just you find a creator, you tell them exactly what you want to do. If you’re actually trying to drive real results and you want their fans to show up, they’re taking an audience-first approach. So first of all, you’ve got to find that creator that aligns with your values. So you have to know they agree with you or they’re simpatico in that way before they start. There’s got to be trust. . . . And the trust goes both ways. You have got to trust that they are aligned to your brand values, they are aligned to your customer base, because remember, you want to cut through, you want to break through, but you are not trying to cut out a big portion of your customer base. So you need to make sure that you have that trust that yes, they are aligned to your brand values, they’re aligned to your purpose, they’re aligned to the outcomes, but then you also have to trust them to give them the space to do what they do. Because it can’t come across as an ad. It has to come across as something more organic, something that they would truly want to do on their own, because that’s when their audience shows up, and that’s what determines the result. Are you, in your conversations with your peers, with other CMOs, are you hearing them privately acknowledge like, Oh, we didn’t do that quite right? We alienated a group we didn’t want to. One hundred percent, especially in today’s world. . . . As we’re having these private CMO roundtables, we’re all sharing, here’s what went wrong, here’s what went right, here’s what I learned. And a lot of it is just, the margin for error is a lot slimmer than it ever was. There is a very thin line between cutting through and cutting out. It’s like walking on high heels on a teeny-tiny thread. There is no margin for error. And so . . . a lot of CMOs are thinking about, How do I do this and how do I do this well? . . . And I think one of the things that’s really important is making sure that you have a broad pull at the table as these decisions are being made, and that you are also able to pivot and adjust very quickly. I mean, you talked to me previously about this idea of opine with a spine, right? Yes. The idea that to break through, you have to say something sharp, but you’re also saying that the risk is higher than ever, but you have to take that risk. There’s no way out of this bind. There’s no way out. Let me tell you. Weve got to give CMOs and marketers, all marketers at all levels, weve got to give [them] a break. It is a tough world out there. And so, yes, you have to opine with a spine, but you got to be careful what you opine on. So you need to pick the thing that truly makes sense for your brand and business. You cannot opine on everything. If you speak about everything, you’re speakingabout nothing. And if you end up speaking about things that you have not earned the right to speak about, you don’t have the credibility to speak about, you could end up in some real hot water that you don’t want to be on. Not the good kind of bath, the scalding kind of bath. So there really is that thoughtfulness that has to go into it.
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On Sunday, J.J. Spaun sank a 64-foot putt to win the U.S. Open, one of the PGA Tours four major tournaments. Over the final seven holes, he made more than 136 feet of putts, including that curling 64-footer on 18. He was the only player to finish the U.S. Open under par, and it was his first career major win. It was also the first major win for L.A.B. Golf, the boutique manufacturer that outfitted Spaun with his DF3 custom putter. L.A.B. Golf is the new company shaking up the putter circuit, and its innovation is simple. Traditional putters have shafts that attach in front of the clubface or at the heel, creating twisting forces during the stroke. L.A.B. putters position the shaft directly through the putter’s center of gravity, behind the face, the shaft stabbing the putter head like a toothpick spearing a square of cheese. This creates a nontraditional forward shaft lean that eliminates torque and helps the face naturally stay square throughout the putting motion. J.J. Spaun reacts to making the winning putt on the 18th green during the final round of 125th U.S. Open Championship at Oakmont Country Club on June 15, 2025 in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. [Photo: Ben Jared/PGA TOUR/Getty Images] “Every other putter you’ve used, you’re trying to keep it square, Sam Hahn, L.A.B. Golf cofounder and CEO, says. With L.A.B., you’re trying to let it stay square. So it becomes more like so many other stroke sports out therethrowing darts, shooting a free throw, throwing a ballwhere you’re not thinking about managing the instrument, youre thinking about the target. The company has been built on one simple philosophy: Putting doesnt have to suck. [Photo: L.A.B. Golf] An accidental garage innovation In 2014, a Reno-based club builder named Bill Presse made an accidental discovery in his garage. While testing new designs, he stripped the grip from a putter, and when he grabbed the slick, ungripped shaft, his hand slipped and the putter face flopped open, almost instinctively. The putter head wanted to twist and turn on its own. This sparked Presse’s curiosity. Using a makeshift device crafted from a crutch and fishing wire, he tested every putter in his collection to see if any would remain square when properly suspended. None did. So he drilled holes in dozens of putter heads to find the precise shaft placement that would eliminate the unwanted rotation. This led him to design (and patent) the first lie angle balance putter, the Directed Force. He sold his L.A.B. putter directly out of his garage and at golf events and showcases. View this post on Instagram A post shared by L.A.B. Golf (@labgolfputters) A key early adopter In 2017, Hahn acquired one of Presse’s putters from a golf instructor and experienced dramatic improvement on the greens. (For you golf nerds, he went from a 1 handicap to plus 3.5 in six weeks.) Then, the club’s head fell off. When Hahn called customer service and sent in his broken L.A.B. putter, Presse personally called to apologize. Sam Hahn [Photo: L.A.B. Golf] “We hit it off instantly,” Hahn says. “We talked for hours on the phone and learned that were kindred golf spirits.” A few months later, Bill’s club-making company was struggling and was about to close its doors. Hahn, a music venue owner in Eugene, Oregon, and a closet golf addict, saw an opportunity and partnered with Bill in 2018 to form L.A.B. Golf. “The lie angle balancing concept was there, but nothing else really was, Hahn says. The marketing wasn’t there, the manufacturing wasn’t there, the infrastructure, the branding, the general vibethere simply wasn’t a company there. But there was a concept.” The L.A.B. Rats With no marketing budget, L.A.B.’s growth had to happen organically. Hahn spent time jumping between golf forums and online groups, explaining the physics behind lie angle balance and taking a humble approach when skeptical golfers said their putters looked like branding irons. “We knew we had to be a little self-deprecating and a little humble at first when we were out there making some pretty bold claims,” Hahn says. [Photo: L.A.B. Golf] Then, in 2021, Hahn discovered something unexpected: Two L.A.B. customers had created a Facebook group for L.A.B. fans. The group exploded into a thriving community where golfers share putting tips and success stories, many singing L.A.B.s praises. Hahn and his team began engaging with members, answering questions, and gathering feedback to inform their product design. Its a real-time focus group that Hahn and his team have leveraged to not only contiue to iterate and innovate, but to build putters that golfers actually want to use. “I log on to Facebook at night and see what’s going on,” Hahn says. “So when we sit in a product meeting and try to figure out what we should do next, it’s easy, because the customers are telling us every day what they want next.” Today, the group has been rebranded as the “Lab Rats.” It has more than 32,000 members and has been a critical component of the companys organic growth in popularity among amateur golfers. Adam Scott holds a custom L.A.B. Mezz.1-style putter at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic at Emirates Golf Club on January 14, 2025 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. [Photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images] L.A.B. cracks the PGA tour Pro golfers are notoriously traditional and skeptical toward innovation. Yes, there are outliers, like Bryson DeChambeau, a famous tinkerer who has even used 3D-printed irons. Then theres Adam Scott: 2013 Masters champion, former World No. 1, and son of a club manufacturer. Scott first saw L.A.B. design in action during the 2019 Pebble Beach Pro-Am, when surfing legend Kelly Slater used the Directed Force to dominate putting competitions. “Kelly rolled it better than anyone in our groupthe two pros, the other amateur,” Scott recalls. “You couldn’t help but take notice.” Scott began using the putter on the Tour in 2019, pivoting to the L.A.B. Golf Mezz.1 putter in 2022. The following year, Scotts curiosity evolved into collaboration when he and Hahn met at the L.A. Country Club for a couple of beers, talking putters and sketching designs on cocktail napkins. The result: the L.A.B. OZ.1. “The initial inspiration for the OZ.1 started far away from putters and was more about classic, timeless designs that I like, like a Porsche 911 or a Rolex Datejust watch,” Scott explains. “That was the starting point, and then the nice thing was that we got to include some of the real L.A.B. look in this more conventional design.” Scott became L.A.B.s first official brand ambassador, and its easy to see why. Since switching to L.A.B. putters full-time in 2022, Scott has achieved remarkable consistency, ranking 19th and 27th on tour in strokes gained putting the last two years, a significant improvement from his previous putting struggles that once saw him rank as low as 188th. And when one golfer tries something new and has success, others take note. [Photo: L.A.B. Golf] The Putter that won the U.S. Open Phil Mickelson, Rickie Fowler, and Lucas Glover are among roughly a dozen PGA Tour pros who have used L.A.B. putters. With them, of course, is Spaun, who wielded L.A.B.’s DF3 model on Sunday, a refined version of the company’s original Direct Force design. Spans specific setup includes a 34-inch length, 70-degree lie angle, TPT graphite shaft, and two-degree shaft lean customized with a blacked-out Scotty Cameron grip. The putter paid dividends throughout the tournament, where he gained over 10 strokes on the field with his puttingthe second-best performance in the tournament. His final-round heroics included not just the tournament-clinching bomb, but also crucial birdies from 40 and 22 feet on the back nine. Its been really good for me lately, Spaun said in a press conference earlier this year after The Players Championship, where he lost to Rory McIlroy in a playoff. Hopefully it keeps doing what its supposed to be doing. [Photo: L.A.B. Golf] Spaun’s win puts L.A.B. on the map L.A.B. placed two players in Sunday’s final groups with Spaun and Scott each starting the final round in the top four, demonstrating the technology’s growing acceptance among golf’s elite performers, despite resistance from both players and manufacturers. “The whole environment is wildly competitive, cutthroat even,” Hahn says. “The other reps actively work to keep their product in people’s hands, and they don’t like it when nobody from nowhere starts taking market share.” Still, performance trumps politics. In addition to the dozen players on the Tour who have used L.A.B. putters, the companys European tour repreports 16 putters in play on the DP World Tour, signaling the putters slow but steady adoption. Spauns U.S. Open win is yet another windfall for the young company looking to earn a larger share of golf’s massive equipment market, valued at $11.7 billion globally in 2025. The company itself has grown anywhere from 150 to 300% every year since inception, according to Hahn, quadrupling its employee headcount to 225 over the last two and a half years. Sales tripled in both 2023 and 2024, and the company is currently on pace to double sales in 2025, though Spauns win could accelerate that trajectory. And theyve done it all while maintaining complete financial independence, and by defying conventional industry wisdom about marketing and endorsementswhich Hahn says theyll continue doing, as long as it keeps working. “We don’t create product in the name of growth, Hahn says. We create product in the name of making a better product. The growth just kind of takes care of itself if you honor the consumer.
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E-Commerce
Winning the 2024 election came with lots of benefits for Donald Trump: more Cabinet secretaries to fire via tweet, more grimacing sit-downs with foreign heads of state, and more time beyond the reach of the criminal legal system, thanks to a generous assist from the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. It also bought him (and his family) four additional years to fulfill the primary goal of the presidential campaign he launched a decade ago this month: extract as much money as possible from his adoring followers, for as long as they are willing to part with it. Trump and his eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, wasted little time getting back to work, unveiling a dizzying array of cryptocurrency ventures that have netted hundreds of millions of dollars and counting, according to The Washington Post. (Another benefit of being the president: the power to set the regulatory agenda for the speculative assets in which you happen to be investing heavily.) But they are also working hard on what might be an even more ambitious project: creating an alternative Trump-themed economy full of shoddy, overpriced consumer goods, betting that his acolytes will happily pay a premium for anything with his name slapped across the packaging. The latest offering is Trump Mobile, a wireless plan priced at $47.45 per month. (Do you get it? 47 and 45? You get it.) The Trump Organization says Trump Mobiles unlimited talk-and-text planthe 47 Plan, in case the price was too subtle a referencewill come bundled with roadside assistance and device protection, as well as virtual medical care and prescription medication benefits at no additional cost. Sure enough, a graphic posted on the Trump Mobile website promised subscribers 27/7 [sic] access to doctors from the comfort of their own homw” [sic]. The copy has since been corrected, but still, there is no better encapsulation of the modern Republican Party ethos than its leader promoting scammy-looking, typo-ridden healthcare via smartphone app while GOP lawmakers strip Medicaid for parts. The Trump Organization is not actually operating a wireless networklike most Trump-branded products, Trump Mobile is a licensing deal with a business partnerbut Don Jr. and Eric both featured prominently during the rollout. For prospective users uninterested in using the 47 Plan with their regular smartphones, Trump Mobile is also offering (of course) a gold Trump-branded smartphone, the T1, for $499. The website says the T1 is Proudly Made in America, but after enough annoyed supply chain experts noted its similarities to an existing Chinese-made smartphoneand explained in detail why domestic production of a smartphone at that price point is more or less impossibleEric Trump backed off this promise a bit: The phones, now available for preorder, can be built in the U.S. eventually, he said. [Screenshot: Trump Mobile] As detailed in Trumps financial disclosures released earlier this week, Trump Mobiles products are only the beginning of what you can purchase if, in your estimation, the markets usual offerings are simply too woke. You can buy Trump-branded watches, some of which allegedly feature a baseball card-style snippet of the suit Trump wore for his mugshot in 2023, for as little as $499 or as much as $100,000 (not a typo). You can buy Trump fragrances, which the website advertises as Your Rallying Cry In A Bottle. There are Trump-branded guitars, Bibles, and sneakers. There is an entire publishing house, Winning Team, which is most famous for printing a Marjorie Taylor Greene book in Canada. These deals are nowhere near as valuable as Trumps crypto holdings, but still, in 2024, they earned him around $10 million in royaltiesa pretty nice annuity, in the event that the market for his meme coin collapses overnight. These ventures have been successful enough that others are eager to get in on the action. Instant Pot reportedly has a collection of Trump-branded kitchen appliances in the works; Lenox has pitched a line of Trump dinnerware, flatware, drinking glasses, snow globes, and Christmas ornaments; and a pair of home goods companies have proposed to sell Mar-a-Lago and White House sheet sets. (A spokesperson told Semafor that proceeds from sales of these products would go to Trump’s presidential library, a maneuver often employed by people who want to give presidents money but would prefer to avoid doing so directly.) [Screenshot: Trump Fragrance] A February trademark filing by the LLC that manages Trumps licensing agreements illustrates the potential breadth of his burgeoning consumer goods empire. Among many other things, the application mentions virtual training services in the field of hotel and real estate management; virtual personal coaching services in the field of public speaking and fundraising; and virtual reality-based virtual worlds in which users can exchange digital goods and crypto currencies using only those images, texts, videos, and sound files authorized by the 45th and 47th President of the United States. (Authenticated by NFTs, naturally.) Trademark applications are often drafted broadly, so the filing is not necessarily evidence that a MAGA-branded metaverse is about to launch. But it does suggest that there is basically no type of deal Trump wont make to squeeze more money from his followers. If people like Mike Lindell can cash in on grievance politics by linking it to a bedding brand, Trump and his sons figure they might as well take over the market while the market is hot. Trump has spent most of his life as a freewheeling branding guy, as aficionados of Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump Ice Natural Spring Water can attest. But the market for stuff with his name on it is considerably more robust today than it was back when he was a tabloid-fodder reality TV host. These newer ventures are also not luxury-golf-resort tee times or penthouse hotel suites or condominiums in midtown residential towers; they are low-risk, low-effort deals seeking to capitalize not just on his celebrity, but also on the political movement he represents. A discounted USA-themed phone plan is the exact sort of thing that might appeal to his supporters, and especially to the lower-income people and seniors among them. What better way to celebrate the triumphs of a candidate you voted for three times than paying for the privilege of seeing his logo every time you take your phone out of your pocket? [Screenshot: Trump Watches] Perhaps the grimmest throughline of the emerging Trump economys offerings is just how much contempt they evince for prospective buyers. As The Verge points out, Trump Mobile is a straightforwardly bad product relative to the major carriers prepaid brands, and even worse when compared with smaller alternatives. A Wired analysis found that Trump Mobiles baffling privacy policywhich claims that the just-announced company has somehow already collected consumers mail, email, or text message contentsappears to have been lifted from the Trump Organizations privacy policy. At 404 Media, Joseph Cox called attempting to preorder a T1 the worst experience Ive ever faced buying a consumer electronic product. A Washington Post columnist who tried to sign up for Trump Mobile discovered that the plans $47.45 monthly cost tag does not include a $17.25 plan telecom tax, which sort of defeats the purpose of setting a novelty price point in the first place. Even if Trump Mobile is not about to make the sitting president into the worlds next telecom mogul, his willingness to enter the market is part of a quantity-over-quality strategy designed to turn political supporters into loyal customers. And, as his approval ratings slide, the sooner the better: If he spends the next three-plus years tanking the economy, waging a wildly unpopular war in the Middle East, and/or deploying the military on U.S. soil, even his target audience might decide that, come to think of it, their current phone plan isnt so bad after all.
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