What Sofia Hernandez Can Teach You About the Future of Marketing
"People Are Tired of the Bullshit"—Build a Brand People Want to Be Around
Lots of great things happened last week on Sports Beach—from a casual hang with Carmelo Anthony to seeing Scott Galloway roast the audience—but one of my favorite moments was the masterclass conversation I had with Sofia Hernandez, Head of Global Business Marketing and Sponsorship at TikTok, on why everything we think we know about marketing is wrong.
If you want an insider track to the future of marketing, buckle up. Because what Sofia shared isn't just theory—it's truisms.
1. You're Playing Checkers, Creators Are Playing Chess—The Board Has Changed, Have You?
Here's the insider reality: Marketing budgets are systematically shifting away from creativity and toward performance, creating a vicious cycle where brands become increasingly transactional with their audiences.
The context of this is slightly horrific. In a world where we're going through a connection crisis, and every communication becomes more transactional, automated, and optimized toward a number, not a human, it's like we're living in Wall-E, just being fed ads on autopilot.
But what Sofia is talking about isn't new metrics or justifications—it's about setting up the table, the brief, the way marketing organizations and their agencies work completely differently.
"A lot of the people that work at big brands have been doing it for a while. A lot of us learned from the marketing books of the 90s and early 2000s, and the reality is that has all shifted over the last five years."
- Sofia Hernandez
Her advice to current marketing students? "If you're in university learning from those books, burn them, because that's not the reality of today."
While big marketers struggle with cumbersome processes, and big agencies still think about production of the past—hire a director, work with a big production company, edit over the next few weeks—creators are producing authentic, engaging content in a matter of hours and days.
This isn't just about speed. It's about agility quotient (AQ)—the ability to read culture, respond authentically, and iterate in real-time. And if you master that, you can unlock the holy grail of fast, cheap, and effective.
An example of this lately is a creator named 'Anthpo' (aka Dumb Internet Banksy) who created the Timothee Chalamet look-alike contest and the ‘Kid with Crocs’—igniting conversations globally to drive a local, neighborhood-like connection. That's how creators view the world differently. (Listen to his podcast with Colin and Samir or watch his YouTube above to start to get the vibe of what connects today and why)
2. "People Are Tired of the Bullshit"—Build a Brand People Want to Be Around
Sofia sees something most executives are completely blind to:
"People are tired of the bullshit. They want to act and react more authentically with each other."
Sofia sees something most executives are completely blind to: "People are tired of the bullshit. They want to act and react more authentically with each other."
People want to feel, and they expect to participate. Marketing isn't a one-way, holier-than-thou story—it's a community collaboration. This is why TikTok works: its community is hyper-engaged, genuinely supportive, and leaning in because they feel at home on the platform. They anticipate and expect the community to add on to the story. They lean in when they feel the joy, the entertainment, the knowledge swap, the health realizations, and the ways to be seen and heard. Importantly, these feelings don't just end and stay on the platform—they are more like sparks, and it's fascinating when this online culture migrates offline into supportive communities and intense fandoms.
Take Risa Tisa's viral dating story series. It started when she responded to another creator's prompt to share a terrible date story. She did a simple stitch, and the community responded: "We want to hear more." That response inspired her to create a 52-part series about her marriage to "a real pathological liar" and "the United Nations of red flags"—which is now becoming a television show.
But the truth is brands still see creators as a platform versus a behavior they need to adapt. We've moved beyond influencer marketing to the realm of being a creator. And when brands act like creators, as Sofia mentioned, people will naturally be drawn to them.
"If brands can show up like creators, engage and entertain, and really show up that way, creating joyful experiences, really delivering quality information, then people want to be around them."
- Sofia Hernandez
This isn't just social media or attention strategy—this is a fundamental shift in how human connection works in 2025.
3. Stop Consuming Culture, Start Cultivating It
According to Sofia, the CMOs who are winning are Craig Brommers at American Eagle, Chris Brandt at Chipotle, and Soyoung Kang at EOS. The CMOs who are winning aren't just studying their audiences from spreadsheets - they're combining deep human research with daily platform presence. They understand both the data and the feeling.
And here's a stat that should make every marketer pay attention: 71% of users on TikTok say they want brands on the platform. In a world where people actively try to avoid advertising, this is remarkable. They want brands engaging, conversing and being in culture with them.
Small and medium businesses have already figured this out. "It's not really a challenge for SMBs," Sofia noted, "because they're very fluid, they're very scrappy, and they haven't been bogged down with all the old school best practices."
The irony? The engine of the U.S. economy—SMEs—are the ones who've figured out the future of marketing, while Fortune 500 companies are still playing catch-up.
The Time Is Now
One thing that was clear from the Cannes Lions winners: They're showing up authentically in the spaces where their audiences live, building genuine relationships through consistent, real-time engagement, and treating creators not as hired talent but as the blueprint for modern marketing success.
Now, with more AI tools, the challenge and opportunity will be to use technology not to replace creativity but to allow more creators to flourish. This is the shift from doers to directors—unleashing young creators and marketers to focus on strategic and creative decisions while technology handles execution.
"We believe that at the core of creativity are humans and human insights and ideas and passions, and the tools exist to empower them to do things faster, cheaper, and better."
- Sofia Hernandez
Don't over-optimize to the transaction. Understand people in real time, converse, convene, create communities, stir things up - make it weird, wonderful, and magical.
The time is now to understand your audiences deeply—that's why we do in-depth interviews, salon series, mobile ethnographies, and creative-based studies on the moving needle of culture, conversations, connections, and aspirations.
While everyone else is still studying culture from conference rooms and trying out synthetic data, the future belongs to the practitioners who live in it every day.
Big shout out to Stagwell Content Studios on Sports Beach for giving us time in the recording studio and 10 minutes out of the blazing sun!
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Penned by Libby Rodney and Abbey Lunney, founders of the Thought Leadership Group at The Harris Poll. To learn more about the Thought Leadership Practice, just contact one of us or find out more here.
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