Your Next Brand Ambassador Already Works For You

Marketing is such a broad term, and part of the fun is finding new ways to do it. One approach that has gained traction this year has been within arm’s reach all along: Employee Branding. It puts your team’s expertise and personalities to work: they share what they know, show what they’re building and give people a reason to follow them. Your audience gets to know the people behind your brand first (and fall in love with them). The outcome? Brand awareness and a relatable business.

Someone pops up on your feed sharing their office outfits, how they landed their job or a day in the life working as “X” You stick around, see their content again and hit “follow.” A few posts later, you know where they work and that something new is launching next week. You never followed the brand, but somehow, you’re keeping up with it anyway.

That’s the opportunity behind employee branding: giving the people who know your business best a platform to share it with others.

Gap Inc. recently opened its creator program to employees across Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta. It’s simple: employees are encouraged to create brand-related content, and the brand features that content across its channels. Similarly, Starbucks is helping its baristas develop content creation skills through its Green Apron program. For audiences, that means access to behind-the-scenes content. For brands, it’s a way to build familiarity through the personalities that are already on payroll.

So, where should brands start? Look for the employees who already enjoy creating content on their own — the more natural it is, the better. A designer can share the thinking behind the creative, a product developer can speak on an overlooked feature and a strategist can shed light on lessons from a project.

Your job is to clarify what employees can share, give them time to create and provide them the freedom to sound like themselves. Their perspective is the whole point, and it disappears when every post reads like a company announcement. Keep participation voluntary and make the investment mutual. If employees are building your brand’s reach, the content should build theirs too.

❄️ Kith | Kit Harington for Kith

For its Winter 2026 collection, Kith cast Kit Harington in a film that follows him around an English country estate as he rides a horse, chops wood, and drives a Land Rover, before settling in by the fire, all while he recites Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man. Harington spent the better part of a decade bracing for winter on Game of Thrones, so Kith can leave “Winter is coming” unspoken.

🖌️ Prada | Drawing Prada

For its holiday campaign, Prada brought in veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy, whose credits include Pocahontas and The Land Before Time, to create a series of short films that pair live-action footage of Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu, and Luther Ford with traditional hand-drawn animation. In one, Sink finds a group of mice trying to make off with a polka-dot Prada loafer in a cozy attic room, and in another, Hawke wanders a snowy forest alongside an animated fox. Luxury customers pay a premium for things made by skilled hands, and a campaign drawn frame by frame by hand shows them Prada holds its marketing to the same standard.

✂️ Ouai | Chopped starring Victoria Pedretti

Ouai released a three-part slasher series on Instagram in which a maniac in a robe and red light therapy mask stalks the Ouai office, punishing employees who abuse their hair with too much heat or bleach by giving them botched haircuts like a forced bowl cut, with Ouai’s Bond Repair Balm as the only cure. Victoria Pedretti, who already has The Haunting of Hill House and You on her resume, plays the final girl racing to unmask the killer before her own hair is next, and her horror credentials make a bit about split ends feel like a real scary movie just in time for Halloween.

👸🏻 Rare Beauty | Still Making Each Other Blush ft. Demi Lovato

Selena Gomez reunited with longtime friend Demi Lovato to launch the Delena Soft Pinch Blush Bundle, with a campaign shot like one of the YouTube videos the two used to film together, complete with a bedroom webcam setup and Photo Booth effects. Between the vlog format and a product named after the nickname fans gave them years ago, Rare Beauty made something that feels like a time capsule for anyone who grew up watching them.

🏠 SharkNinja | There’s No Home Like a SharkNinja Home

Kevin Hart house-sits for David Beckham over the holidays and invites Tom Brady and Aryna Sabalenka over to test-drive everything SharkNinja in the house, from the vacuum and air fryer to the slushie machine and red light mask. The house-sitting premise lets SharkNinja show off half its catalog in one spot without it feeling like a product demo, right as holiday gift lists are getting made.

🎧 The Thesis Behind Slow Luxury: Why Belmond Treats Time as the Product (The Stanza): Belmond CEO Dan Ruff on building a slow luxury positioning around giving travelers their time back while competitors keep adding amenities, keeping a heritage brand fresh through creative collaborations with Wes Anderson, JR, and Baz Luhrmann, and carving out a distinct niche inside LVMH.

📺 As AI Shapes B2B Buying, What Makes Buyers Trust a Brand? (The Drum): Salesforce VP of experience strategy Madeline Schofield and Sparks president Melissa Levy on why in-person events matter more as AI builds buyers’ vendor shortlists, and how designing for the whole buying committee and measuring business outcomes over badge scans makes those events pay off.

🎧 Proactivity is the Key to Survival With Edelman’s Dave Fleet (The Design of Business | The Business of Design): Dave Fleet, head of global crisis at Edelman, on why building trust with employees and customers before anything goes wrong is a brand’s best protection when volatility never lets up, and why empathy and media literacy now belong in the business case.

📄 So What Actually Works in DTC Marketing Now? (Cool Kids Table): Fractional growth marketer Kait Pearse-Cerulo on where DTC budgets are going now that cheap paid media is gone, including how turning Floura’s repeat buyers into subscribers and ambassadors led to review-based ads that converted 72% better than the account average.

That wraps this issue of the debreef. Keep an eye on your inbox for the next edition!