This editor’s letter is adapted from Side Projects: Issue 01. Get your copy here. 

Welcome to Side Projects. We are a strategy studio and creative outlet aimed at helping brands, marketers and everyday people think critically about how advertising shapes the cultural landscape across digital surfaces, generational cohorts, and our social fabric. 

Side Projects grew out of a series of questions and observations we’ve made to ourselves:

• Why does it feel like every brand is working from the same playbooks and references? 

• How can brands be less extractive, culturally, and more generative? 

• What even is a brand community?

• Why are people turning to brands as a means of confronting socioeconomic displacement?

And heard from brands we’ve worked with: 

• We’ve lost sight of our North Star while chasing trends. 

• Our content performs on social but isn’t building any meaning or equity.

• How do we make work that has impact beyond the industry?

Each article you’ll find in our first print project, Side Projects: Issue 01 takes on one or more of these angles, including the pitfalls of taking a socioeconomic issue as a brand insight, youth-led community as a brand-subsidized chimera, and what a framework of cultural stewardship rather than cultural extraction might look like for brands. Together, they also serve as a broad introduction to us and how we think. 

In the way of a thematic throughline, Issue 01 highlights the tension between the omnipresence and invisibility of ads in our lives. Advertising, particularly digital marketing, has permeated every quarter of our lives: online and off. It’s the governing logic of politicians and OnlyFans models. Yet it’s become harder to actually tune into and understand what it’s saying to us and about us. This is true both on a literal sentence basis and more abstractly: What does advertising reveal about what brands think of consumers and what consumers believe about themselves?

How might brands pivot from unwittingly fueling cultural dissonance through their desire to resonate? 

Side Projects believes that looking at advertising critically—from the dumb stuff to the interesting stuff—helps one understand culture more broadly and regain a little more space and autonomy in our brand-mediated lives. As a brand, as a marketer, and even if advertising is the furthest thing from your conscious mind, we hope something you read here helps put some breathing room between yourself and the next ad or brief you come across. 

Eli Williams
Co-founder, Strategy Director

Clara Malley
Co-founder, Editorial Director