Coach: Planting Trees in a Market Full of Grass

Client

CoachSince 1941

The talk

AI Trailblazers Intelligence SummitJoon Silverstein, CMO, with Kirthiga Reddy and Marty Swant

The film

2:32Cut for LinkedIn in 4:5

The world

One fieldTwenty-two scenes, one tree, one grove

Made

October 2026Brief to delivery in five days

Posted

20 October 2026On LinkedIn, credited to RIOT

How do you plant trees in a market full of brands planting grass? Coach‘s Chief Marketing Officer Joon Silverstein opened with that line at the AI Trailblazers Intelligence Summit, an analogy borrowed from the Chinese marketing leader Jason Jiang, and spent the next half hour on a panel with Kirthiga Reddy and Marty Swant explaining how Coach answers it. When the talk needed to travel beyond the room, Coach asked us to cut it for LinkedIn, the way we had cut the Cannes Lions talk in the summer.

Coach•Joon Silverstein at the AI Trailblazers Intelligence Summit•2:32•2026

Half an hour on stage became two and a half minutes on a feed, and the analogy became a world: one field, one tree, and roots made of twenty thousand questions.

The talk, in three parts

The argument runs in three parts, and the film follows them. First, make the consumer tension the brief: Coach combined deep consumer immersions with research into more than 20,000 consumer prompts around the first luxury bag purchase, and broke what it found into 29 purchase drivers. “Create content about quality” could be any brand’s brief; “help someone fall in love with a bag and feel discerning about paying the premium” is a richer problem. Second, build credibility with the community, because authority is becoming more distributed and people want to examine the evidence for themselves. Third, build the operating model to deliver it, and measure which questions Coach shows up in, how it is represented, and whether the answer gives someone a reason to choose it.

The footage was one wide camera on a panel. That is the honest starting point of most talk edits, and it is why we build them a world rather than cutting between angles that do not exist. For Cannes the world was a red stage and white captions. For this one, the analogy was too good to leave as a line of type.

One field, one tree

Everything in the film happens on a single green field. The first card plants one tree, hand drawn in a hairline so it reads at phone size, and from then on that tree stands faintly behind every scene, so that when the camera tilts underground, or pulls back to a grove at the end, you know whose roots and whose grove they are. The grass is always in the wind. Only the captions ever sit on it; nothing else crosses the grass line.

Joon’s point about personal search needed a person, so the field becomes a search box and two messages type themselves out, written to sound like a real first-bag shopper rather than a demo. The film highlights three things in them, context, self-expression and hesitation, in the three colors that run through the rest of the piece.

Desire and substance

“Is it worth it?” gets its own chapter. Two circles, desire and recognition on one side and substance on the other, glide together until they overlap, and the overlap is where craftsmanship lives. Then the film leaves the field for the first time: a generic product listing on an off-white page, its copy struck through, and a push into the photograph itself until the stitching, the edge painting and the hardware fill the frame. The macros are cut from Coach’s own product photography and from footage we shot for Coach years earlier, because the point is that a shopper now wants to see it for themselves.

The operating model

The last argument is about velocity and scale, so for this chapter the film leaves the ground and goes to space. If the research is what happens below the tree, the operating model is what happens above it: the field drops away, the sky fills with stars, and a stream of real Coach content rushes through it until Joon says “in service of something” and it stops dead. One card survives into a chain, consumer insight to content and partnerships to measurement to learning, and the chain closes into a loop that drops seeds back down onto the field. Roots for the one half of the proverb, sky for the other.

The grove

The seeds take. The camera pulls back from the one tree and the field is full of them, in rows that fade with distance, and the lines Joon closes on, more content, more places, more often, more specificity, stand among them. The grove is not one tree copied: we drew five species so it reads as a real orchard. Tree 1, the oak from the opening, stays the hero at full strength; the round, the poplar, the birch and the pine stand behind it in rows at 70, 40 and 10 percent, so the first tree always reads as the one that started it. The end card returns to the first question with the answer in it: planting trees in a market full of grass.

How it was built

We designed the whole film as a working prototype before a single After Effects comp existed: twenty-two numbered scenes, each with its own clock, playable end to end with Joon’s audio, so every note changed one scene and nothing else. The trees grow by space colonization, an algorithm that models how real branches compete for light and space, so no two in the grove are alike. The approved scenes were then rebuilt in After Effects, with the living parts of the world rendered as plates and everything you read set natively in the two typefaces from the Cannes film, all caps, cream on green. Captions and the lower third were added in the edit, so the graphics stay clean wherever the film is reused.