Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
Inspiring Futures pulls back the curtain on the minds reshaping advertising and marketing today. Host Ed Cotton, former Chief Strategy Officer at Butler Shine and Stern & Partners, engages industry visionaries in raw, unfiltered conversations about their career pivots, creative breakthroughs, and strategic innovations. No canned responses. No PR filters. Just honest insights about navigating the complex world of brands, creativity, and agency life. Each episode delivers actionable wisdom from those who've mastered the craft and aren't afraid to share their failures alongside their successes.
Inspiring Futures - Lessons from the Worlds of Marketing and Advertising
Justin Herber- Scaling Brands and Hollywood
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week on Inspiring Futures, we sit down with Justin Herber.
He's a chief brand officer, consultant, and former screenwriter whose career has moved between Hollywood and the brand world.
Justin got his start working for Michael Bay, spent five years helping scale Tom's, won a writing assignment to adapt Mario Puzo's final novel for television, built Hot Wheels into the number one boys' toy brand on YouTube, and led Tractor Beverage Company from a proof of concept to a national challenger.
Justin thinks about brands the way showrunners think about television: start with a theme, build a world, and design systems that keep generating stories over time. Here are three ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.
Start with theme, not positioning.
Most brand strategy starts with how you're different from the competition. Justin starts with the deeper tension the brand exists to explore — the same way a great TV show is built on a dramatic question, not a plot summary.
"We didn't just pitch plot, we pitched theme. Succession is about generational power struggle. Breaking Bad is about moral decay. That's how I build brands too — what are we doing beyond product? What's the deeper theme that we're exploring?"
Build story engines, not stories.
Justin doesn't make one great piece of content and hope it travels.
He builds repeatable systems that keep generating stories — the way a show format can run for seasons.
At Hot Wheels, that meant a scalable content format. At Tom's, it meant employee giving trips that turned every team member into an advocate.
"A showrunner is like a chief brand officer. You're setting the conditions that teams can align to, creating the world you're playing in, and building the frameworks that keep you on message and moving the plot forward."
Belief systems aren't messaging — they're operating systems.
At Tractor, the belief in a cleaner food system wasn't a campaign line.
It shaped supply chain decisions, partnerships, a foundation dedicating 1% of revenue to helping farmers go organic, and an employer brand built around soil health education.
His test for whether a belief system is real is simple.
"If you take away the belief system from the company and the company still exists, you never had a belief system."