This week, Graeme Douglas-Kilgannon became CEO of Stitchy, which is an agency that bills itself as one built for the ‘post-social world’.
Stitchy was founded at the end of 2024 by Angela Kilgannon — to whom Douglas-Kilgannon got married at the weekend — and both she and the agency’s partner and CSO, Ruth Nichols, have a background working at online publishers, like Joe Media and Buzzfeed, as well as agencies.
We’d been following the LinkedIn posts that Douglas-Kilgannon was writing while on gardening leave from his previous role (at Bicycle), so we asked him to chat to us about how he thinks media and marketing are changing, and also what it means to be living in a ‘post-social world’. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
You’re now CEO of Stitchy. What is stitchy?
It’s an agency that was started around 14 months ago. It was born from a tension in the industry, which was social agencies don’t tend to do brand strategy or marketing science very well, and brand agencies don’t do social well, which is odd because the two things have to co-exist. [Stitchy] is designed to create and deliver full-stack marketing for a post-social world.
Attention is obviously completely fragmented. People are consuming media in different ways. And brands have to understand how to grow in a different way. But the laws of science that underpin [marketing] haven’t changed. So what would happen if you could apply a marketing-science lens and rigorous brand strategy to creator and content marketing?
It’s also predicated on the idea of post-social, which means social is so important now that it’s not a vertical, it’s not a channel, it’s not a medium — it’s a space that affects everything.
Social media has totally changed the way we share content, we buy products, we talk about brands, culture is created. Even if those things are happening off-platform or off-feed, it’s still affected by what social’s done to the world.
I thought a ‘post-social world’ referred to the way that the platforms have largely switched from friend graphs to interest graphs, making them less about friend networks and more about algorithms, in terms of how content spreads.
Yeah, we don’t mean post-social in the sense that it’s no longer ‘social’ media, although that is also true. The term is much broader than that for us. It’s about the idea that the world has totally changed.
Would you mind expanding on your thoughts about how the platforms are no longer social, though?
I’m not sure I’ve worked out what it all actually means yet, and that’s part of what we’re going to do at Stitchy. But I find it fascinating that the vast majority of interactions on what you would call social media aren’t remotely social. They’re either content first or creator first or brand first or culture first. But they’re very rarely peer-to-peer interactions. I actually think we might see something emerge in the future that tries to reclaim some of that interaction, but it feels like it’s the natural evolution of what happens when you make an audience or an eyeball the product.
But it’s meant for brands that, on one hand, you’ve got myriad ways of reaching customers, and speaking to them in new and exciting ways. But on the flip side, it’s so fragmented on an individual basis that creating mass culture, which brands thrive on, is harder than ever.
I wrote a piece about monoculture recently and I think it’s a fascinating subject. When I started 25 years ago, it was at the tail end of a time where you could buy a spot in Coronation Street and reach half the country, give or take. You can still buy eyeballs, but those exist on a one-to-one basis rather than a collective basis. And that fundamentally affects how culture is built and how brands are built.
Would you go so far as to agree with Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez that the era of big big brand messages is over?
I hope that’s not true because I think that big brand messages can be exciting and a force for good and they’re commercially important. But creating them is becoming increasingly difficult.
I’m quite a big fan of out of home. Out of home is the last great broadcast channel. That and Channel 4. But really out of home is the one place you reach everyone. I’m a huge advocate for what I call positive wastage. Brands are built at scale by people that don’t use them now, engaging with the message, right? If you’re not reaching 95% of the people that are out of market, you can’t really create a brand. And the more we drill down into this one-to-one communication system that the digital world presents to us, the harder it is to get that wastage. It’s in that wastage where brand fame is created.
What are the theories and texts that inform your view of how marketing and advertising work?
My worldview is very rooted in Ehrenberg-Bass and Byron Sharp. I’ve seen it work. I’ve worked at agencies, like Wieden & Kennedy, that are hyper creative and would never have talked about Ehrenberg-Bass. I’ve worked at agencies that are much more rigorous. And the answer is all these things are important. If you’re not creative then you are not going to win the hearts and the minds of consumers or stick in culture. But you can’t allow it to become the wild west.
I talk a lot about low-attention processing, and the work Robert Heath did 25 years ago. And you’re not going to be able to activate those memory structures through low-attention environments if you’re not consistent, if you’re not distinct, if you haven’t got those frameworks in place that we know work.
Creative compounding, repetition, brand assets — all underpinned by a massive obsession with creativity — is basically how brands grow today. But the ways to achieve that have changed. The RAB used to say radio is like a trusted friend at home, that’s what creators do now, really, but in a different way. When you follow a creator, you end up trusting them and liking them, like they’re your friends. That’s a one-way relationship, though. That’s parasocial. So understanding that is critical.
You mentioned you adhere to the Ehrenberg-Bass school of thought. Where do you stand on the need for brands to be differentiated?
People talk about distinctiveness as a kind of silver bullet, which means you can forget about differentiation. I don’t really subscribe to that. I think you do need to have a point of difference. But it can’t ever replace distinctiveness. If you’re not distinct, and you’re not building memory structures, differentiation on its own is not enough.
You also mentioned Robert Heath and his writings on memory structures. What’s the gist of his arguments?
He wrote a book 25 years ago, called Seducing The Subconscious, which talks about how most brand communication is processed at an unconscious level, but it still has an effect. You just have to understand how it works — how memory structures are created at that level.
You seem to have the view that advertising works by making brands easier to recall in buying situations, rather than actively persuading people, is that right?
One hundred percent. There are isolated occasions where persuasion is critical, but really most for most categories, for most brands, for most of the time, it’s emotion over reason. It’s system-one thinking.
Way too much money is put into lower-funnel or last-click things because you can measure it, and because it’s goal-hanging. Some of it’s critical but, really, most big brands don’t do it in the right way and don’t have their budgets split in the right way.
Byron Sharp wrote a good thing on LinkedIn last week about how you should think about performance advertising not as advertising but more like physical availability. It’s not building memory structures or brand equity. It’s basically making the brand available at the moment of purchase.
How does the post-social world change how agencies should work?
They need to have genuine neutrality. They need to be able to navigate millions of touch points comfortably and create across them in a smart way. They need to have experience beyond advertising. They need to understand how publishing works, how creators work, and how culture is built in those environments.
The team at Stitchy that I’ve come into work with have all got creator or platform or digital publishing experience. They understand how to build audiences from within, not just how they can observe and advise from outside.
I also think we need to adopt a bit more of a Hollywood model of production. A core team of smart people who understand platforms and can manage accounts — rather than massive verticals that you’ve got to sell to clients — and that can then bring in a network of specialist freelancers depending on what they’ve got to create.
The other thing you need is to have AI absolutely baked in at the center of the agency. It’s just a non-negotiable. You can’t outsource creativity or critical thinking or taste. But you can outsource basic research.
Can you think of any campaigns that show how brands should operate in a post-social world?
Nike’s All Conditions Gear work recently. Orange is their colour and it was at every touch point. They didn’t sponsor The Winter Olympics but they created content that was in lock step with The Games, and they distributed in a way that was fascinating. They [branded] a train that went through to Milan, which was a metaphor for the brand, but also delivered content on a regular basis, creating something episodic. The whole thing fitted together amazingly well and I think it’s a phenomenal example of comms that are built for a world that is fragmented and creator led, and that understands that [distinctive brand assets] are critical.
