October 2025 | Bray & Co and Fidium Fiber Take the Advertising Week New York Stage to Challenge How Utility Brands Think About Creativity

New York, NY — October 2025 — Bray & Co takes the stage at Advertising Week New York alongside Fidium Fiber, using the forum not to unveil creative work, but to challenge how utility and service brands think about creativity, differentiation, and effectiveness in categories long dominated by sameness.

The session arrives at a moment when many senior marketers are questioning whether the operating assumptions that have defined utility marketing for years are still serving them. Internet service, energy, telecom, and infrastructure brands have spent the last decade optimizing performance systems, fine-tuning targeting, frequency, and messaging. Yet for many, the outcome looks the same: rising costs, declining differentiation, and brands that feel interchangeable in the minds of consumers.

Advertising Week provides a rare opportunity to step back from execution and address that tension openly.

Rather than presenting a campaign or previewing future work, Bray & Co and Fidium Fiber focus the conversation upstream. The discussion centers on why categories like internet service have become emotionally flat, how brands end up reinforcing sameness unintentionally, and why creativity must play a strategic role long before media plans or messages are finalized.

“For years, creativity in utility categories has been treated as surface-level,” says Peter Bray, Founder and Executive Creative Director of Bray & Co. “The assumption is that people only care about price or performance. But that assumption is exactly what keeps these categories stuck.”

The session challenges the idea that differentiation begins with messaging. Instead, it argues that differentiation begins with how a brand defines the problem it is trying to solve. When brands accept category norms as fixed, they end up competing inside a narrow frame, using the same language, the same visual cues, and the same promises as everyone else. Over time, that behavior trains consumers to disengage.

Fidium Fiber’s presence on stage signals a willingness to question those norms before creative decisions are made. While no creative platform or campaign has yet been developed, the brand uses the moment to articulate why it prioritized creative leadership early in its growth journey, before locking into a direction or execution.

The conversation resonates with an audience of marketing leaders facing similar challenges across categories. Many are discovering that access to platforms, data, and performance tools has largely equalized. What remains scarce is clarity, the ability to stand for something distinct and meaningful in the minds of consumers.

Industry coverage surrounding Advertising Week, including reporting and commentary from Adweek and Campaign US, reflects this broader shift. Sessions focused on brand-led thinking, creativity as a driver of effectiveness, and category redefinition draw strong interest, particularly among leaders navigating parity-heavy markets.

Bray & Co’s perspective emphasizes that creativity is not the opposite of effectiveness, but a prerequisite for it. Work that is designed to stand out reduces waste, improves efficiency, and gives media investment something meaningful to amplify. Without that foundation, even the most sophisticated performance systems struggle to deliver sustained growth.

Importantly, the session avoids presenting creativity as a silver bullet. Instead, it frames creativity as a responsibility. Changing how a category feels requires discipline, patience, and leadership. It means resisting the pull of short-term sameness and investing in clarity before amplification.

For marketers in attendance, the conversation offers both reassurance and challenge. Reassurance that frustration with category sameness is widely shared. Challenge in recognizing that differentiation cannot be outsourced to tactics or formats. It must be defined deliberately and early.

For Bray & Co, the Advertising Week appearance reinforces the agency’s role as a partner focused on category-level thinking rather than campaign output. The agency positions itself not as a producer of ads, but as a strategic collaborator helping brands rethink how they show up before they speak.

The session also reflects a larger shift within the industry. As economic pressure continues and scrutiny on marketing spend intensifies, brands are increasingly willing to question long-held assumptions. Creativity is no longer being asked to justify itself as entertainment, but as a driver of effectiveness and long-term value.

The work with Fidium Fiber has not yet begun, but the conversation at Advertising Week makes one thing clear. Before brands can change how they advertise, they must first change how they think. In categories defined by sameness, that shift in perspective is often the most important creative act of all.