Your brand is only as strong as your filter

Hey everyone,

Think about the last time you completely trusted a brand. 

Where you'd buy anything they put out without even reading reviews.

It’s rare, isn’t it?

And yes, it’s important for a brand to put out good-quality products. 

But it’s even more important that it doesn’t deliver junk. 

Case in point: TED Talks.

For a while, TED was the most trusted intellectual brand on the planet. 

Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk hit 75 million views. By 2012, TED content had crossed 1 billion total views. Ridley Scott put a fake TED talk in Prometheus — set in 2023, 11 years in the future — as the format the future would use to share big ideas.

That only happened because TED said no to almost everything.

Founder Richard Saul Wurman ran TED with an iron fist. Talks were eighteen minutes, no exceptions. If he didn't understand something, he'd interrupt the speaker mid-talk to demand clarity. He once walked onstage during a talk by the head of the MIT Media Lab and cut off the man's tie with scissors. 

Everything was curated obsessively, from the speakers to the format to the culture.

The product wasn't the talks. The product was the filter.

But in 2009, everything went wrong.

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In 2009, new owner Chris Anderson launched TEDx, a licensing model that let local organizers run TED-branded events anywhere in the world. The vision was to democratize ideas globally.

The result: 44,000 events. 233,000 talks.

Elizabeth Holmes, comedians sneaking onstage, the infamous “Vortex-Based Mathematics” (complete nonsense). 

Because what TEDx scaled wasn't TED's ideas. It scaled the format (18 minutes, scripted, polished) without the judgment that made the format valuable. Anyone with a projector could run a TEDx.

The problem was that the value of the TED brand was “you can trust this”. 

As soon as anyone could attach the TED name to anything, that promise dissolved.

Your turn:

If you doubled your volume tomorrow, what would have to give? 

Quality? Client selection? Your personal involvement in the business? 

Whatever you’ve built that earns trust — in other words, wherever that key filter is — that thing is not separable from your brand. It is your brand. 

And the moment you scale in a way that compromises that filter, you're diluting your brand instead of growing it.

TED Talks are basically a punchline today. But it’s not only because they lost their quality filter.

When they started out in 2006, the internet was genuinely starved for quality content. Knowing what to watch was the problem. TED solved it. You could trust anything with a TED logo.

By the 2010s, the internet had more content than anyone could consume. People desperately needed curation.

Launching TEDx and letting everyone use their brand was exactly the wrong move. 

Not to mention attention spans have compressed fast. Content consumption is K-shaped: three-hour deep dive podcasts on one end, 8-second TikToks on the other. TED’s 18-minute talks were right in the dead zone.

And today they’re a punchline.

Thanks for attending my TED talk. 

(By the way: If you want to hear more of the TED story, check out my video on it here!)

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What does your filter look like right now?

Thanks for reading!

Michael

P.S. What questions do you have about using AI in your business? Drop them in the RSVP form for the upcoming AI lecture, and I can bounce them off our expert guests