A letter from our CEO: Leading in 2026 with gratitude

I’ve been journaling every morning, pen and paper in hand since before going analog was considered an ideal remedy for digital fatigue.

It’s a personal ritual and a genetic predisposition that I can trace to my Grandma Norma. I also have her thumbs.

For a while now, I’ve used a specific format for my entries that I learned about from Huberman Lab. It’s exercise for my mind and structure for my day. Plus, I like to write.

I’ve found that it also helps me frame my leadership intentions in support of our highly connected and creative team in this carnival of an industry called marketing and advertising.

It’s simple and it starts with capturing five gratitudes. Occasionally, I write down funny things my husband says, too, because laughter feels even better than 30 minutes in the sauna or resistance training.

As I consider all the opportunities that lie ahead for us in 2026, I think of them in terms of what I’m feeling grateful for across our organization and how the way we show up for each other in the days and months ahead will influence our collective success.

We’re creatives, each one of us in our own right. At DS+CO, our path forward will be determined by our courage to learn, try and apply new technology to our fundamental understanding of human behavior as we architect effective marketing strategies and unique creative outputs.

Knowing that our company must deliver value at speed, this year, our compass is aimed at innovation, integration and accountability.

When small but mighty organizations like DS+CO, FLX AI and Cause + Effect Strategy combine our expertise to co-create solutions for our clients’ most complex business challenges, we are unstoppable.

We’re focused on a collaborative ecosystem of partners interested in co-creation + acceleration, knowing this will amplify our problem solving in the months ahead.

Courage, curiosity and community—the core values guiding our team—inspire us to meet the moment with our best, whatever that may be. To take risks. To exhibit BRAVE leadership (thank you, Brené Brown). To challenge, question and confront the status quo. To build something new, different and untested. To fail and learn, adapt, adjust and start again.

We’re going to keep coaching our team to build confidence through inquiry, debate, “widening our spotlights” (check out “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath) and above all else, approaching each day with growth mindsets.

In the words of Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” While it’s possible to become hypnotized by the promise of AI to promote efficiency and efficacy in 2026, we’ll be challenging each other to experiment, explore, investigate, and also to pause and think deeper, interpret, iterate, collaborate and create.

While AI is used as our accelerator, we will remain the inventors, strategists and challengers of ideas and the status quo.

It’s true one of life’s most useful skills is learning how to ask questions. In conversations, in prompts, in our own self-talk.

One question we’ll be practicing is “What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?” Its intent is to spark constructive disagreement and better decision making.

Asking more questions will lead to clarity—which we believe is the most powerful force in marketing. If we just start asking “why” a little more often, we’ll all be thinking deeper, together.

As we move marketing forward in this new year, we’ll be innovating trends, like micro-influencers gaining attention for brands and physical mail making a comeback. Here’s to the delight of opening something unexpected!

We’ll develop content with depth and value while we test new ways to engage and capture our audience’s focus, time and attention.

We’ll leverage hyper-local community-building to keep growing connections and resonance.

And above all else, we’ll ground ourselves and our ideas around humanity. Because after all, marketing is about people, for people and made by people.

Here’s to provoking progress together in the days ahead.