Will Mayer of Cold Holdings breaks down five pillars of cult brand building with Polymarket and Blueprint as case studies

Will Mayer's five pillars of cult brand building

Will Mayer runs Cold Holdings, a brand strategy and creative agency that takes equity stakes in roughly two-thirds of its clients instead of cash. The shop has worked with Equinox, Polymarket, and Bryan Johnson's Blueprint brand, and it co-created Built Rewards, the credit card company backed by Index Ventures. Mayer's framework for all of it traces back to a straightforward conviction: the best brands function like religions.

The Polymarket campaign

The Rick Rubin Polymarket ad, which ran during the World Cup and on UFC broadcasts, was built in roughly three and a half weeks — a fraction of the six-month runway a typical Super Bowl campaign requires. Mayer had been working with Polymarket since January across strategy, brand, and out-of-home work before that brief landed. His explanation for why Rubin worked is simple: nobody represents questions better, and nobody on the creative team, including the photographer and talent, would normally touch a prediction market campaign. Hiring out of category is the deliberate method — Equinox's photographers came exclusively from fashion, the design team was poached from museums.

“The first being doctrine — having identity before features, what is the sacred text that everybody abides by? The second is ritual. The third is symbols and language — how can you take elements to create in groups versus out groups? The fourth is a charismatic leader. And then the fifth one is an enemy. I think every brand needs a nemesis.”

The five pillars

Mayer distills cult brand building into five components:

• Doctrine — identity before features. Not a tagline, but a sacred text the community actually enforces. He cites "Think Different," "Just Do It," and longer-form doctrine like Peter Thiel's Zero to One or Alex Karp's The Technological Republic.
• Ritual — initiations that become habits that become identity. Bryan Johnson's Don't Die Dinners. A daily live show. "You buy a pair of shoes, you join a run club, you are a runner."
• Symbols and language — in-group signals that separate insiders from outsiders. CrossFit calls the workout a WOD; Equinox called locations clubs, never gyms. Mayer reaches back to stained glass windows in 12th-century Catholic churches as the template.
• Charismatic leader — someone who iconifies themselves. Palmer Luckey's goatee, Hawaiian shirts, and flip flops are his example alongside Johnson.
• Enemy — every brand needs a nemesis, and the best enemies are ideas rather than competitors. Apple started with IBM, then evolved the enemy to conformity. When you outgrow a competitor, that enemy loses power; an abstract antagonist never does.

The business model

Cold Holdings has no ambition to scale into a large agency. Only a third of clients pay in cash; the rest pay in equity. Mayer describes that as a deliberate structural choice made five years ago, citing Built Rewards as the clearest example of what the equity model produces.

The bigger argument on creativity

Mayer's sharpest point sits underneath all of this: AI will democratize visual production fast enough that beautiful imagery becomes abundant and essentially free. When that happens, the concept — and specifically what action a brand is willing to take — becomes the only differentiator. The Equinox January campaign he references spent less than 1% of the brand's typical January budget and was nothing but black-and-white text saying memberships were closed. The action was the ad.