🔥 Common Ground: In Community #130

Your weekly spark at the intersection of community, culture, and commerce

Nominate a Leader for the Wellth 30

I've been building Hue to center the rising majority — and to create a more connected future for us all. This is the next step.

I’m proud to introduce the first-ever Wellth 30, a new recognition platform that honors experienced innovators shaping marketing, media, and entrepreneurship — senior marketers, founders, agency leaders, creators, and community builders across:

→ Innovation & Business Growth
→ Brand Building
→ Community Building
→ Cultural Influence

Honorees will be celebrated at a private gathering in NYC this September.

Nominations are free. Self-nominations are welcome. The deadline is July 7th.

Submit here.

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🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

I spent last week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where their theme was “where creativity drives progress”.

What does progress look like? The week included moments that felt like progress, amongst awards and panels, but the best moment didn’t happen after any awards or panels.

It happened in a room buzzing with a group of leaders who answered one simple question before they walked in:

What's your biggest marketing challenge right now?

I hosted Keep it 💯: Marketers Uncensored, in partnership with OpenX and Project Management Institute. It was an interactive session with leaders across several industries and categories.

I expected fifty different answers to the question. Instead, I got slight variations of about five of them.

Some talked about AI, while others talked about growth. They called out challenges around budgets, measurement, consumer attention, organizational resistance, and brand investment.

At first, they sounded like completely different problems. But the longer we talked, the more they pointed back to the same underlying challenge: trust. Trust in AI. Trust in measurement. Trust that brand investment will pay off. Trust that trying something different won't get punished if it doesn't work.

Different companies, industries, and job titles with nearly identical concerns, and it reminded me of something we often forget.

We spend so much time believing our challenges are unique that we rarely stop to notice how many of them are shared.

👉🏽 Community reveals the shared challenges and patterns we’re all living through, even when we might not have the answers.

We didn’t need a stage, slides, or carefully rehearsed case studies. Just an honest conversation between leaders at companies in consumer tech, financial services, retail, CPG, media, ad tech, marketing tech, and more.

The biggest surprise wasn't that everyone had similar challenges. It was how quickly trust formed once they realized they weren't facing those challenges alone. The conversation converged almost immediately, with the same themes surfacing over and over despite how different everyone's experiences had been until that point.

How do we innovate when budgets are tighter? How do we use AI without losing human creativity? How do we earn attention instead of chasing it? How do we build brands and businesses while proving performance?

How do we create space for new ideas inside organizations built to minimize risk?

Different people. Same questions.

In that room, community didn't just expand our perspectives. It normalized our experiences.

It changed how we can approach the work.

For instance, instead of feeling isolated, become collaborative. Instead of assuming everyone else has it figured out, realize everyone is experimenting. And instead of competing over certainty, start learning through the questions.

Sometimes the greatest gift isn't finding someone who already solved your problem. It's realizing you're not the only one trying to solve it. That's where trust begins, with common ground.

📌 The ROOT Framework

Every lasting community is rooted in common ground. Progress looks like a series of questions together, not just answers.

R: Repeating

What keeps repeating and showing up again and again across different conversations?

Patterns are revealed when you bring together people with a mix of backgrounds and experiences.

O: Overlap

Where do our experiences converge, and where are they more similar than I expected?

Shared experiences are a foundation of common ground.

O: Opportunity

If so many of us face the same challenge, what opportunity does that create?

Sometimes the best ideas emerge from shared frustrations.

T: Trust

What can I do after each conversation that builds trust, before asking for anything in return?

Find the common ground. Grow from there.

Behind the logos, titles, and company names, the leaders shaping our world are wrestling with a lot of the same questions.

Those questions may lead to different destinations.

🔥 But remember this: wherever they might lead, we're often walking the same road along the way.

✅ Now Hiring

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I list roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

💥 Editorial Director — Hue (I’m hiring — help me find the right person for this role!)

ICYMI Last Week:

💥 Creative Director, Growth & Product Marketing — Chime (multiple other roles too)

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox.. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad