WSJ's Katie Deighton on brand crisis as the word of the year, owning your narrative, and whether consumers will care about AI in ads

Summary

Katie Deighton, a marketing reporter at the Wall Street Journal, names crisis as her word of the year for brand coverage — and the case is easy to make. American Eagle and Cracker Barrel both landed in brand firestorms within months of each other, for entirely different reasons, and the speed of the pile-on caught both off guard. The lesson Deighton draws is that no brand is insulated anymore, not even a nostalgia-driven chain like Cracker Barrel whose logo redesign shouldn't have been news.

The American Eagle episode is instructive. The brand's CMO held the line, insisted the Sydney Sweeney campaign was never political, and declined to issue a retraction or an apology. Deighton argues that posture — standing firm rather than feeding the cycle with a notes-app statement — is what let the controversy burn itself out. The brands that pulled campaigns on the first sign of backlash are the ones that prolonged their exposure.

Narrative ownership

For 2026, Deighton expects brands to shift budget toward PR and owned media, driven by the desire to control the story before someone else tells it. The Substack, YouTube channel, and branded podcast are all part of the same logic: get ahead of the next crisis rather than react to it. The risk, though, is self-inflicted. Brands that build owned audiences and then go silent at the moment of maximum interest — exactly when subscribers want to hear from them — squander the whole investment. Astronomer, the data company whose CEO went viral this year, is held up as the counter-example: they leaned in immediately and treated the controversy as a content moment.

The corollary argument is that owning your narrative requires actually disclosing something. Deighton's pitch filter at the WSJ is simple: come with numbers. She publishes around four to six stories a month and turns away pitches that describe a "great campaign" without a dollar figure or a percentage attached. The phrase she uses internally: "we are the Wall Street Journal."

Friction as storytelling

The segment sharpens into a broader argument about why authentic narratives outperform polished ones. Founders who hide the failed fundraise, the crashed product launch, or the employee who said no are left with a story that has no arc and no tension. The better play is to surface the lows voluntarily — a disgruntled former employee will surface them anyway, and on worse terms. Deighton frames it as the journalist's version of the same logic: give the reporter something with friction, or they'll find their own angle.

AI in advertising

The open question Deighton flags for the year ahead is whether consumers will actually penalize brands for using AI in creative. The honest answer is that nobody knows yet. The more pointed version of the question is whether they'll ever find out — AI-generated ad variants are already being served at the platform level, personalized by political lean, with no disclosure to the end user. A brand may not even know which version of its own ad ran.

Political branding

The decade-long brand purpose era — ocean plastic, cause alignment, implicit left-leaning positioning — has largely receded, replaced by brands simply trying not to become a proxy battleground. Whether explicitly right-leaning consumer brands proliferate beyond the Black Rifle Coffee template remains unclear. Deighton's instinct is that most brands will quietly retreat from politics rather than plant a flag on either side.