In the 1930s, Coca-Cola had a winter problem. Nobody wanted a chilled drink when the weather turned brutal. So instead of fighting seasonality, they did something bold: they rebuilt a myth.
Before Coke, Santa wasn’t the jolly red giant we recognize. He was a patchwork of European folklore—sometimes tall and thin, sometimes dressed in brown or green. Coca-Cola hired illustrator Haddon Sundblom to standardize him: warm, round, friendly, wrapped in Coke’s signature red. A character rebooted like a product line.
It worked. Sales rose. But the real insight wasn’t “marketing.” It was IP as demand manufacturing. Coke didn’t sponsor culture—they authored it. They created a character that could work 24/7, never age, never get canceled, and never renegotiate.
The lesson is simple: The strongest brands don’t just advertise. They world-build. And when a brand owns the character, it owns the conversation.
Lu do Magalu’s $2.5M Stack: Brand Talent Infrastructure
Coca-Cola proved a century ago that when you own the character, you control the story. Today, the same pattern is resurfacing—only now the characters aren’t sketched in oil paint. They’re rendered, trained, and scaled.
Look closely and you’ll see it everywhere. Lu do Magalu pulls in millions a year as a fully synthetic Brazilian retail persona. Lil Miquela books global campaigns without ever stepping onto a plane. Maybelline launches virtual spokesmodels who never miss a posting window, never drift off-brand, never create headline risk. The market isn’t dabbling. It’s reallocating.
Brands are spending billions renting influencers while the top performers are increasingly… artificial.
When compliance hardened and budgets got scrutinized, suddenly the idea of owning your creator instead of negotiating with one feels like the first rational decision in the entire creator economy.
Today’s opportunity is not about building another virtual face. It’s about building the system that turns owned talent into a measurable, repeatable growth channel—identity, governance, content engine, engagement, attribution, compliance.
The brands are ready. Give them the infrastructure.
From the Vault
VRChat Mobile Launch: Build $12K Touch Worlds for Brands
VRChat’s quiet jump to iOS and Android turned a niche VR community into a mass-market playground. The real arbitrage isn’t “metaverse activations”—it’s five-minute, one-thumb mobile worlds built before PC-first studios retrain and flood the zone. Brands like McDonald’s Japan and Gucci already moved; the demand is there, the vendors aren’t.
Yelp’s 12,276% Spike: Build the Digital Burn-Away Engine
Burn-away cakes didn’t explode because of frosting—they exploded because people crave suspense. With Instagram killing Spark AR, a vacuum opened for a cross-platform Reveal Engine: burn, peel, scratch, fog, confetti. Productize anticipation, sell it to every brand with a launch moment.
Build ‘Lore for Crypto’ After $1.1M Fandom Search Funding
A fandom-obsessed founder raised $1.1M to build a search engine for lore and proved a deeper truth: provenance sells. Crypto already behaves like a fandom with dashboards but no narrative layer. Build the time-aware context graph, sell the canon, own the obsession economy.
The Side Door
→ Discord’s $2B Blind Spot: 1B Users, Zero Access
→ Build the StockX for the $43B Restaurant Equipment Market
Some opportunities are loud. Others sit quietly inside old stories until the pattern clicks. Coca-Cola didn’t just redesign Santa—they proved that whoever controls the character controls the market. Today’s shift is the same move in a new medium: brands authoring their own talent, their own narrative gravity, their own distribution.
The signal is simple: when influence becomes synthetic, ownership becomes strategy. The operators who win won’t chase trends—they’ll build the characters everyone else ends up renting.
