Bennett Bennett

Every week we’re highlighting marketing leaders, experts, and disruptors within the SUM community sharing real advice, insights, and perspective.

This week, we caught up with Bennett D. Bennett, the Creative Director, Cultural Strategist, and Principal Consultant at Aerialist. He helps purpose-driven brands and organizations build culture-first marketing that connects with diverse audiences. As principal consultant of Aerialist, he partners with Fortune 100 companies and emerging brands to drive more intentional, insight-led storytelling across lifestyle, entertainment, and multicultural spaces. He is also the founder of 600 & Rising and a founding partner of Allyship & Action, where he advocates for equity in advertising and advances more inclusive pathways for Black voices in media and marketing.

AI has forced many brands and businesses into a game of hide and seek.

Consumers (and businesses) are prompting their way to their next favorite product or tech to discover. LLMs have made AI platforms quiet disruptors in the search space, shifting behavior away from algorithm-curated finds, and now brands need to draw attention and deliver the right context. Brands aren’t just fighting to be seen or heard — this is the first time they’re actively fighting to be understood well enough as the right answer.

For founders and the marketers that work with them, the daily grind gets a lot more pressure added to it. If your story is inconsistent, scattered, or shallow, it’ll be hard for any AI tool (much less humans) to connect the dots on how different you are in the ocean of sameness.

This challenge brings me excitement because as a lifelong fan of storytelling, the solution is so simple to spell out: create a compelling brand story that has real proof as part of their plot line. The LinkedIn posts, new job descriptions, and briefs that I’m seeing affirm the need for hybrid storytellers to help brands show up clearly as AI shifts from novelty to infrastructure.

Chasing the title of writer is only half the story, if even. Will you get paid to write? Absolutely, in ways you couldn't imagine, and you'll also take on and get paid to do high-stakes projects that thrill your inner superhero, and that’s its own kind of fun.

But the deeper win is becoming the person who makes that living, while keeping yourself whole as possible in the process. Learn your limits, protect your peace, and lean on your team. You'll earn a lot of respect for your voice, not just your talents because writing isn't the only thing you learned to be great at.

After burnout, I rebuilt my own life and career on my terms. Needing a job could only get me so far. I had to build the right ecosystem, and it's allowed me to be much more intentional in projects and people I say yes to.

My top resource is my community.

My career started as a blogger, and I eventually came up to be one of Twitter’s (RIP) top voices when it came to marketing, advertising and the forces of culture shaping it. So much of that was possible because I curated my feed in ways that plugged me in to rising trends and creators, major happenings, and the newsmakers shaping it all. The collective perspective (on and offline) is critical for me to do the work I have over the years.

As a native New Yorker, sometimes online communities can be just as overwhelming as the city streets. So when I do unplug, it’s to read and explore the local art scene, and to take in calls and meet with subject matter experts–turned–friends. Those conversations often become the sparks that help founders and marketing leaders see their challenges in a new light.

My last two years have been spent agency-side, leaning into my cultural know-how to build a discipline, but I’d say professionally, I don’t showcase how operational my creativity really is.

Long before I considered advertising, I was deep in STEM. I studied physics in college and came up through advanced math and science tracks from elementary school on — even learned quite a bit from NASA before age 10. That foundation made me into a systems thinker, even if I lean heavily on storytelling as my vocation.

It’s not much for me to see the character of a founder-led brand (or any brand for that matter) and map out how its narrative can show up in product, comms, partnerships and within a community. The questions I always ask beyond “what’s the story”: what’s the momentum and trajectory that a brand has in the current moment, and what factors make that story real in the everyday?

Going solo and reclaiming my sanity. In a way, I have burnout to thank. In 2018, I left a journalism job that spiked my anxiety and forced me to reset with one goal: fall back in love with the act of writing.

That pause, filled with mentor chats, astrology wisdom, and reframing how I showed up, led me to take the leap to the consulting practice I’ve had since 2020. I stopped considering myself a copywriter–turned–journalist, and leaned into the hybrid space I still take up as a creative director and cultural strategist. All I learned covering the industry and making the work led to a repositioning just in time for the pandemic.

Within months, I worked with independent agencies and startups on Fortune 100 brands like Google and Chase, and some of the most-awarded work in the industry. I’ve gotten to fight in the equity work space in the months and years after George Floyd, all while fortifying my mental health and boundaries. What am I most proud of? Making sure my inner child wasn’t left behind.