Jan 30, 2025

World Building: How to make the future irresistible

Leland Maschmeyer

About this video

Description

As creative spirits, we love change. We seek it. We drive it. But, generally speaking, people have a love / hate relationship with change. Not always in equal parts. So how do we get people excited about a new, future state? "Seeing is believing,” as they say. This is the purpose of brand world-building. This talk is a “how to” of world-building that blends lessons from World Builders in literature, politics, religion and more to teach each of us how to make the futures we see so irresistible, that they become inevitable.

Sponsored by SVA, Masters in Branding

Leland Maschmeyer

Between 2016 and 2021, Leland stepped away from his daily duties at COLLINS to lead Chobani as its first Chief Creative Officer and, eventually, Chief Brand Officer. During his five years of leadership, Chobani topped Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies in the World” list five times—something not achieved by the manufacturer before or after his tenure. In those five years, he was part of a small executive team that 10x’d the company’s valuation, transforming the single-product yogurt maker into an international iconoclast brand awarded globally for its creativity and social impact. Leland is also the co-founder of Sway, a clean materials company that has created an entirely new category of biopolymer resin: a thermoplastic seaweed resin that can replace flexible petroleum plastics at scale. In 2023, TOM FORD awarded Sway its “Plastic Innovation Accelerator” as the world’s most viable, marine-safe alternative to traditional thin-film plastic. He has earned recognition from the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, from IBM as “Design Thinking Leader,” from Ad Age as a “Young Influencer” and from the Association Of National Advertisers as a “Master of Marketing.”