OCTOBER 29, 2026
Brand Makeovers: David Cameron of LIGHT+CO On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image
The best rebrands don’t make a company look different for the sake of looking different. They make what is timeless about the company more timely.
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As part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” we had the pleasure to interview David Cameron.
David Cameron is the founder and CEO of LIGHT+CO, an independent brand strategy and marketing agency that helps ambitious, often heritage-rich companies turn what makes them distinctive into lasting competitive advantage. A former CEO of Dentsu America and Managing Partner of mcgarrybowen’s New York flagship, he has led brand and marketing work for companies including Marriott International, Steinway & Sons, Rockefeller Capital Management, Juliska, and The Wall Street Journal. Drawing on a career at the intersection of business strategy, creativity, and culture, David believes the strongest brands honor what makes them timeless while finding new ways to stay relevant.
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Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My career in advertising really began before I knew it was a career.
I spent part of my childhood and teenage years living in Europe, including several formative years in Milan. Living outside the U.S. gave me a particularly interesting vantage point from which to observe American culture. I became fascinated by the differences — not just in what people bought or watched, but in how different cultures thought, communicated and expressed themselves.
A surprising amount of that education came through advertising.
I remember seeing commercials in Italy that felt completely different from the advertising I knew in America. Then, when I was fifteen, we moved to the UK, and it felt like I’d entered another dimension. The humor was sharper, the wit was more understated, and the advertising seemed to assume that consumers were smart enough to get the joke without having everything explained to them. The work was often designed to be memorable rather than simply persuasive. I was fascinated by the fact that these little pieces of commercial communication could tell you so much about a culture.
As a musician, I also saw advertising as an intersection of things I loved: part art, part culture and part value exchange. I became increasingly interested in the way ideas, images and language could shape how people saw the world.
By the time I got to Yale, I was drawn to American Studies because it gave me a way to study many of those same questions about culture and identity. But I was also a musician, and I wanted to do something creative. Advertising ultimately felt like the place where all of those interests could coexist.
Looking back, I don’t think I really chose advertising so much as I realized it brought together a lot of the things I’d been observing and thinking about for years. I’ve always been interested in the space between culture and commerce — and in how a brand can understand a culture well enough to actually become part of it. That’s still a big part of what draws me to the work today.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?
Yes.
I was running the advertising accounts for all of Marriott’s hotel brands at mcgarrybowen. I’d been in that role for about four years, and the creative work had gotten better and better, in large part because we had brought some amazing new talent into the agency. But there was a problem: our advertising — the promise we were making about the guest experience — was beginning to overshoot the actual experience of staying in a Marriott hotel.
Around the same time, my lead client called and told me she was talking to a brand consultancy about helping update the core brand strategy, voice and experiential design system for their flagship brand.
My account-guy defense immediately kicked in. I asked, “Would you consider having us do it?” We were their lead strategic and creative agency, after all.
Her answer was, “I didn’t know you did that.”
That was the moment.
I went to the founding partners at mcgarrybowen and said, essentially, “We need to do this.” Their response was simple: if I wanted to build it, I had to run it.
So I built it.
Over the next few years, that brand strategy and design group worked on significant projects for a wide range of our clients, including all of the Marriott brands, Century 21, Kraft, NewsCorp and JPMorgan Chase.
Our clients had clearly been needing this, and once I saw the gap, the answer wasn’t to wait for someone else to define a new role for me. It was to figure out how to solve the problem.
I’ve carried that lesson with me ever since — through my time at Dentsu and ultimately into founding LIGHT+CO.
I think there’s a useful lesson in that for anyone: look for the gaps. What are your clients, customers or colleagues asking for that you’re not currently providing? If you can solve the problem — and especially if you can solve it well — don’t wait for someone to give you permission to expand your role. Ask for the job.
The other lesson I took away — which has guided my counsel for every client since — was learning the difference between branding and advertising — and the relationship between the timeless and the timely.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
One of the projects I’m most excited about right now is a new brand campaign for New Orleans, my adoptive home, which launches later this fall.
New Orleans is a heritage brand in the truest sense — more than 300 years old — so it’s a particularly natural fit for LIGHT+CO. When the city came to us, they had a challenge we see often with established brands: they had an enormous amount to say, but needed one distinctive idea that could unify their marketing and advertising and express, memorably, why New Orleans is such a unique, unmissable and welcoming destination.
The interesting part of the challenge is that New Orleans has almost too many things that make it distinctive. Over time, many of those things have become familiar, and some have even become clichés. So rather than simply cataloging the city’s recognizable details, we focused on something more fundamental: the feeling of being in New Orleans, and the unexpected ways the city gets into your heart.
I can’t give away the campaign idea just yet, but I think it’s launching at an interesting moment. The world is full of conflict and uncertainty, yet people are still looking for pleasure, adventure and experiences that surprise them. They’re looking for reasons to put down their phones, go somewhere, taste something they’ve never tasted, encounter another culture, hear a different story and feel genuinely alive.
That’s part of what New Orleans offers so uniquely. It’s a city built around authenticity and joy — extraordinary food, music, history and culture, but also layers of beauty and luxury that people don’t always associate with the city. It’s a place where discovery is around almost every corner.
So when I think about how this work will help people, it’s not just about getting more people to visit New Orleans. It’s about reminding people of the value of real-world experiences: of curiosity, spontaneity, hospitality and being open to something you didn’t expect.
New Orleans is an unusually powerful expression of all of those things. I’m proud that we get to help tell that story — and to invite people to experience it for themselves.
What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?
I think one of the most important things marketers can do right now is protect their sense of taste.
There’s a lot of anxiety in our industry about AI commoditizing strategy and creativity, and I understand why. But I don’t think the answer is to compete with machines on their terms. The things that make this business valuable — human relationships, connection, curiosity, judgment, discernment — are still deeply human.
In fact, I think taste matters more than ever. AI can give you an almost infinite number of answers. The hard part is knowing which one is actually worth pursuing.
That’s also where I think burnout can become a problem. We’re living in a world where there’s an endless supply of content, ideas, inputs and demands for our attention. You don’t necessarily need to consume more or produce more. Sometimes you need to step away from the noise and return to the basics: elegance, simplicity, clarity and genuine human connection.
Before turning over all of your content — or your thinking — to AI, ask yourself whether you’re actually adding something of value. Is there a point of view? Is there discernment? Does it feel human? Does it make someone feel something? I don’t think the answer is to produce more and more. I think it’s to get better at knowing what’s worth people’s time — and what’s not.
Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?
In a nutshell, I think of branding as building the reason someone will choose you, and advertising as giving them a reason to choose you now.
Branding is the longer game. It’s about defining what a company or product means in people’s minds: what it stands for, what makes it distinctive, what it promises, and why someone should care about it beyond the immediate transaction. It creates memory, familiarity, preference and, ideally, an emotional connection. You’re building the familiarity and preference that make future growth possible.
Advertising — and more broadly, product marketing — is where you put that brand to work in the marketplace. It’s about communicating a specific proposition, product, offer or idea in a way that motivates people to act. It can drive awareness, consideration and ultimately a sale.
The mistake I see companies make is treating the second as a substitute for the first. It’s tempting because advertising and performance marketing can produce very visible, immediate results. But you’re often talking to the small percentage of people who are actually in the market right now. The much larger audience isn’t ready to buy today. Your job is to build familiarity and desire with them so that when they are ready, you’re one of the brands they remember and consider. That’s the thinking behind the 95/5 principle and the reason I believe brands have to invest in both the long game and the short game.
And the two should absolutely work together. The best advertising doesn’t operate independently of the brand; it brings the brand to life. At LIGHT+CO, we’ve seen this with brands like Steinway. We first helped define the brand’s deeper purpose, values and beliefs, and then translated those into a campaign that could be distinctive, memorable and persuasive in the marketplace. The brand gave the advertising meaning; the advertising gave the brand energy and traction.
That’s actually how I think about the relationship between what we call Marrow and Mojo at LIGHT+CO. Marrow is the authentic DNA and accumulated equity of a brand — the things that make it distinctive and difficult to copy. Mojo is the energy and relevance that gets it noticed, shared and chosen today. You need both. The job isn’t to choose between building the brand and driving the business. It’s to make the two reinforce each other.
Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?
One of the easiest ways to understand the strength of your brand is to turn off all of your performance marketing and promotions tomorrow. How much demand is left?
It’s a useful exercise because a lot of companies have gradually shifted more and more of their marketing investment toward performance marketing. And it’s easy to understand why. Performance is measurable. CEOs and CFOs can see the clicks, conversions and immediate return, and those numbers are much easier to put into a spreadsheet than something like brand affinity or future demand.
The problem is that you can end up harvesting all of the goodwill you’ve built behind your brand without replenishing it.
If you’re constantly optimizing for the people who are ready to buy today, you’re extracting value from the brand without necessarily investing in what that brand means to people over time — what it stands for, what makes it distinctive, and why people should care about it in the first place.
Building a lasting brand requires continued investment in those things. It’s not a one-and-done exercise. And importantly, brand investment and performance marketing aren’t opposing strategies. They’re symbiotic.
There’s a raft of evidence showing that sustained investment in your brand makes other marketing efforts more effective. Look up Les Binet and his 60/40 framework: roughly 60 percent of marketing investment should be focused on longer-term brand building, with 40 percent focused on shorter-term activation. The exact ratio will vary by category and business, but the underlying principle is simple and important: you need to be both planting and harvesting.
The companies that get into trouble are often the ones that become very good at harvesting and forget to plant. Brand is the thing you’re building for tomorrow’s customer. Performance marketing is often about converting today’s customer. You need both if you want to build a business that doesn’t just produce results this quarter, but continues to create demand years from now.
Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?
There are a lot of reasons a company might consider a rebrand, but I think they generally come down to one fundamental question: Does the way we present ourselves still accurately reflect the business we are today — and the business we want to become?
Sometimes a company has simply outgrown its brand. The business has evolved, the customer has changed, or the company has moved into a different competitive or cultural context, but the brand is still communicating an older version of the organization.
Sometimes the issue is differentiation. The company may be doing something genuinely distinctive, but its brand doesn’t make that distinction clear. It looks, sounds or behaves too much like everyone else in the category.
Sometimes there’s been a strategic change — a new audience, new market, acquisition, change in leadership, or a shift in the business model — that requires the brand to catch up.
And sometimes the company has accumulated a lot of equity over time, but that equity has become fragmented. Different products, divisions, offices or marketing teams are telling different stories. A rebrand can provide a common idea and a common language that brings all of those pieces together.
But I think there’s an important distinction: a rebrand shouldn’t happen simply because a company is tired of looking at its logo. Changing the visual identity without addressing the underlying business and brand strategy is mostly cosmetic.
The best rebrands I’ve been involved with start with a much more fundamental question: What is actually true about this business that is valuable, distinctive and relevant to the people we want to reach — and how do we make that impossible to miss?
That’s particularly important for established companies. Often, the most interesting brand opportunity isn’t inventing something new. It’s uncovering the value that’s already there and finding a more compelling way to express it.
In other words, a good rebrand isn’t about throwing away the past. It’s about making the brand fit the future without losing the equity that made the business successful in the first place.
Are there downsides of rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?
There are downsides to rebranding, particularly when you approach it as a makeover rather than as a business and brand challenge.
The biggest risk is destroying equity that you don’t fully appreciate. Brands accumulate meaning over time. Certain visual cues, language, experiences and even quirks can become incredibly valuable because they are embedded in people’s memories. If you remove those things without understanding what they mean to customers, you can end up taking away the very things that make the brand distinctive.
Cracker Barrel is a pretty good recent example of what can go wrong. As most people on any kind of social media will be aware, in 2025, the company introduced a new logo that removed its familiar Old Timer character and the “Old Country Store” language. The change generated significant backlash from customers, and within days the company announced that it would return to the old logo and subsequently paused its restaurant remodels.
The lesson isn’t that Cracker Barrel shouldn’t have evolved. Its own stated objective was to strengthen the connection with both loyal and new guests while preserving its heritage. The lesson is that when you have a brand with a lot of emotional equity, you need to understand exactly what people value before you start taking pieces away.
I also think there’s a danger in confusing “different” with “better.” A new identity can certainly look more contemporary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it communicates more value or creates more preference. Sometimes a company is spending a lot of money to make itself look newer when what it really needs is to make itself look more like the quality of the business it already is.
So I wouldn’t advise companies against rebranding. I’d advise them against rebranding without a very clear understanding of the equity they have, the gap they’re trying to close, and what they want people to think and feel differently as a result.
The best rebrands don’t discard everything that came before. They identify what’s valuable, protect it, and then build from there. Sometimes that means a significant change. Sometimes it means a surprisingly light touch. The objective isn’t to make the brand look different. It’s to make the brand more valuable.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image? Please tell us a story or an example for each.
I’d start with five simple principles. And they’re less about giving your brand a makeover than about making sure the brand has the foundation, energy and perspective to stay relevant.
1. Know thyself. Start with the marrow.
Before you try to make a brand more contemporary, you need to understand what is fundamentally valuable about it. What is the DNA? What have you earned over time? What do customers actually love about you that a competitor can’t easily copy?
I call this the marrow of a brand. It’s the authentic stuff underneath the advertising — the history, expertise, personality, point of view, product or service, and accumulated equity.
Coca-Cola is a great current example. In July 2026, the company introduced a new global visual identity system, but it didn’t try to reinvent Coca-Cola. It actually did the opposite: it put greater emphasis on the red and white palette, the Dynamic Ribbon, the Arden Square and Spencerian script — the assets people already recognize. The company described the strategy as building on “the things people already know and love” while creating a more consistent and contemporary expression.
Sometimes the opportunity isn’t to find something new at all. It’s to understand what you’ve already earned and figure out how to make more of it.
2. Get your brand into the culture. Give it some mojo.
Once you know what your brand stands for, you need to find ways to participate in the world people actually live in. That’s where the mojo comes in.
Guinness has done something interesting recently in the U.S. with its “A Lovely Day” campaign. Rather than simply telling people that Guinness is an iconic Irish beer, the campaign found contemporary American stories where Guinness could naturally belong — from a Louisiana brass band to Michigan ice fishermen to roller-skating dads in Pennsylvania. The campaign connected a very old brand with very current people and experiences. Guinness reported 474 million impressions and said the campaign was particularly resonating with younger legal-drinking-age consumers.
That’s what I mean by getting a brand into culture. Don’t just talk about your brand. Find the places where your brand has a legitimate role in people’s lives and show up there.
3. Balance the harvest with the planting.
This is one of the biggest issues I see in marketing today. Companies naturally gravitate toward activities where they can see an immediate return. Performance marketing makes that very easy: you spend a dollar, you can often see what happened to the dollar.
But that’s the harvest. You also have to replenish the field.
Coca-Cola’s return to “Share a Coke” in 2025 is a nice illustration of the other side of that equation. The original campaign began in 2011, but Coca-Cola brought it back for a new generation, specifically connecting the idea of personalization and sharing with Gen Z’s desire for more authentic connection in an increasingly digital world. The 2025 version combined physical packaging with digital and real-world experiences.
The lesson is that a brand is an asset you keep investing in. If you continually shift more and more of your marketing toward short-term activation, you can spend years harvesting the familiarity, goodwill and preference created by previous brand investment without replenishing it. You have to keep planting while you’re harvesting.
4. Invest in discernment. Use AI — but don’t outsource your taste to it.
AI is going to be extraordinarily powerful. Companies should absolutely use it to eliminate repetitive work, accelerate production, analyze information and explore possibilities.
But there’s a danger in confusing the ability to generate something with the ability to know whether it’s any good.
AI is extraordinarily good at optimization and generating options. But brands don’t need an infinite number of options. They need humans with the judgment to know which option is right.
People bring taste and judgment. They understand context and nuance. And they can tell the difference between something that’s technically right and something that actually moves people.
So I’d tell companies to use AI aggressively for what it’s good at — and invest even more deliberately in the people responsible for strategy, judgment, creativity and curation.
5. Build for the long term.
The brands that endure are almost never built by people thinking only about the next quarter.
Many of our clients are more than 100 years old. They didn’t become 100-year-old brands because someone found the perfect campaign or optimized their marketing for a particular quarter. They became enduring businesses because generations of people had the vision, discipline and perspective to keep investing in what they stood for.
A brand is an asset you are building over time, not an expense you are trying to optimize away.
If you want to re-energize a brand, don’t just ask, “What can we do this year to make people notice us?” Ask, “What are we building that we want people to value 10, 20 or 100 years from now?”
That question will produce very different decisions, and more lasting outcomes.
In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job doing a “Brand Makeover”. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?
One inspiring — and simultaneously cautionary — example is the roller coaster of the Burberry brand over the last couple of decades. Its journey illustrates both how to do a brand transformation well and how easy it is to be seduced and distracted by the allure of timeliness.
Burberry has an extraordinary heritage (est. 1856), but by 2009 much of the brand’s equity had become diluted. Their iconic Check had become overexposed and associated with counterfeiting, and the brand had less control over its presentation than a luxury house should. The company responded (with inspired leadership from CEO Angela Ahrendts and Creative Director Christopher Bailey) with a return to the brand’s timeless roots — its British heritage, the trench coat, craftsmanship — and expressing it through dynamic digital and social content. The company moved its runway shows back to London, embraced livestreaming and digital commerce, and eventually created an ultra-lux Regent Street flagship that blended heritage and modernity, physical and digital. In doing so, they reasserted Burberry as a current and aspirational British luxury brand. Their marrow was fueling their mojo.
Then, over time, they lost their way. The pursuit of newness, fashion relevance and modernity began to obscure some of the things that made Burberry distinctive. In 2018, they replaced their iconic Equestrian Knight emblem and classic, soft-serif wordmark with a bold, flat, all-caps wordmark that looked like a dozen other fashion/luxury labels at the time. They launched a new “TB” interlocking monogram that appeared to emulate the badges of competitors like Louis Vuitton and Gucci.
The 2018 transformation initially looked successful. The new identity generated significant attention, and the first collections under Riccardo Tisci performed well. But over the following years, Burberry’s broader pursuit of fashion-forwardness and a more elevated luxury position began to obscure the core equities that had made the brand powerful in the first place. By 2023/24, the company itself acknowledged that it had moved “too far from our core.”
In 2023, the Equestrian Knight returned in a modernized form, along with a renewed emphasis on Britishness and the brand’s heritage. And in 2024, Burberry launched “Burberry Forward.” Its new strategy was literally called “Timeless British Luxury.”
The learning we can take away: The goal of a brand makeover isn’t to choose between timeless and timely. It’s to understand what should remain timeless and then continually find timely ways to express it.
For any company considering a rebrand, I’d start there. What have you earned that people already value? What is distinctive and ownable? What’s the marrow of the brand? Then ask how you can make those things relevant to the world you’re in now — and the world you’re moving toward.
The best rebrands don’t make a company look different for the sake of looking different. They make what is timeless about the company more timely.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d start a movement around Renaissance skills — bringing back the idea that being educated, and being human, means developing a broad range of interests and capabilities rather than specializing as early as possible.
It seems to me that kids are being pushed toward specialization earlier and earlier. We have single-sport athletes in elementary school, students choosing a professional path before they’ve really had a chance to explore what they love, and increasingly, college being treated as a pre-professional environment rather than a place to learn how to think, write, question, create and understand the world.
And I think that’s particularly dangerous at a moment when AI is going to make so many specialized skills more accessible and, in some cases, more interchangeable. The things that will become more valuable are the things that make us deeply human: the ability to think critically, appreciate ideas and beauty, make connections between seemingly unrelated things, exercise judgment, and connect with other people.
So I’d want to champion exposing kids — and, frankly, all of us — to music, the arts, athletics, literature, history, languages, different cultures and different ways of seeing the world. Not necessarily because everyone needs to become a musician or an artist or an athlete, but because breadth creates depth. Exposure gives us more ways to understand one another, more raw material for creativity, and a richer vocabulary for making sense of the world.
I also believe that cultural literacy is one of the great antidotes to intolerance. The more we encounter people, ideas, histories, traditions and forms of beauty that are different from our own, the harder it becomes to reduce the world to simple categories of “us” and “them.”
And there’s something else at stake. So many of the things that have fed our hearts, minds and souls for thousands of years — music, art, literature, sport, conversation, craft, culture — are increasingly being filtered through algorithms optimized for engagement and sameness. We risk living in a world where everything is personalized to us and, paradoxically, everything starts to look the same.
I’d like to see a renaissance of cultural curiosity — an education and a culture that engages our minds, our senses, our bodies and our souls. We don’t need less specialization. We need more breadth before specialization, and more permission to remain curious throughout our lives.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite is Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” passage from his 1910 speech, Citizenship in a Republic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
I read it almost every day.
Teddy Roosevelt was a great leader, connector, and visionary, in ways I’ve aspired to be throughout my career. That passage captures something I push myself to do, especially when things get hard:
Dare greatly.
If you want to build something, create something, lead something, or make a difference, you have to be willing to step into the arena. You will make mistakes. You will get knocked down. Some things won’t work. People will criticize you. That’s part of the bargain.
For me, it’s about having the courage to put yourself and your ideas out there, in pursuit of something you believe is worthwhile. I’ve tried to carry that through my career, from taking jobs that stretched me to starting my own company and continuing to put new ideas into the world.
In the end, I’d rather be in the arena, occasionally getting bloodied, than throwing tomatoes from the stands.
