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After more than 70 years, the Ford Motor Co. finally has an architectural centerpiece. The automaker’s new global headquarters has officially opened in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit and within eyeshot of some of the main facilities that have sustained the company for more than a century. Covering 2.1 million square feet and designed by the architecture and design firm Snhetta, the new building sprawls across four circuitous stories. Getting from one side to another is a trek. During a two-hour walking tour of the building, a week ahead of its official opening, I traversed at most a quarter of the overall space. This immense size is the building’s strength, as it allows the company to bring much of its executive, engineering, design, and fabrication teams under one (very large) roof for the first time. About 2,000 Ford employees work there now, with around 4,500 expected by 2027. Jim Dobleske, CEO of Ford Land, the company’s real estate arm, says the headquarters was designed to enable collaboration and a more flexible approach to office worktwo post-pandemic prerequisites. More importantly, the building is meant to streamline how different arms of the company work together, using proximity, shared resources, and the simplicity of a single building to break down historic silos. “It’s not just a building,” Dobleske says, walking through its airy front lobby. “It’s a tool.” The Ford of 2025 is a different company than its mid-20th-century self, then still heavily influenced by the top-down approach of founder Henry Ford, even years after his death. Still, there are strands of the corporate DNA that have carried through over the company’s 122-year history. Ford has historically been a deeply stratified corporation, with a longstanding emphasis on command and control. Today, its evolving architecture is a reflection of a company that’s reconsidering its approach and priming itself for a particularly dynamic era in the history of automaking. [Photo: Ford] The new building sits 2 miles away from Ford’s former headquarters, a 12-story modernist box known as the “Glass House,” which has been the buttoned-up main office for 2,000 of the corporation’s higher-ups since it opened in 1956. Located on the other side of a highway cloverleaf and moated by a wide belt of lawn and parking lots, the building was emblematic of Ford’s corporate architectural sensibility, as well as its corporate structure. The “Glass House,” Ford’s former headquarters. [Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images] The new building is designed as the new hub of an increasingly concentrated campus of Ford buildings, situated within walking distance to an estimated 14,000 Ford employees, each of whom can use the building’s common spaces, bookable meeting rooms, and 1,000-seat food court. That includes staff at the product development center, engineers from the recently renovated Ford Engineering Lab across the street, and researchers in its components laboratory. “It’s the most horizontally and vertically integrated building I know of,” says Craig Dykers, cofounder of Snhetta and architect of the building. His firm also created the campus master plan that has reshaped the corporate landscape of Ford. During the tour, Dykers stood near a window and pointed out the buildings and facilities in the area that are all part of the Ford machine. “We took a lot of facilities that were spread all over and pushed them together,” he says. [Photo: Ford] [Photo: Ford] Inside the HQ A few finishing touches remain before the project is officially complete in 2027including parking garages that will be tucked beneath additional performative landscape that’s able to divert and clean stormwater and building runoffbut the building is already humming with activity. From the outside, Ford’s new headquarters is a gleaming spaceship of a building, with scalloped edges covered by flat and subtly shaded glass. The building’s plan, seen from overhead, is of three hexagons arranged into a kind of triangle, with spaces cu out from their centers to create large internal courtyards. [Photo: Ford] Walking through the building, its sheer size is hard to fully grasp, and parts can feel disorienting. But there are even more places where a corner is turned, or a stairway is climbed, to reveal a view down a corridor that resets the internal map. Glimpses can often be seen of the four accessible courtyard spaces, each of which has been designed by Snhetta to reflect a different regional habitat. The largest courtyard, inspired by the Great Lakes, features cascades of stone, two bookable meeting canopies, and large sliding doors that connect to seating in the building’s dining area. [Photo: Ford] This area is accessible to any Ford employee, even those not working within the headquarters building. Jennifer Kolstad, global design and brand director at Ford Land, says it’s part of the company’s effort to rethink its global real estate portfolio and make more spaces more accessible for different types of work, be it a lunch meeting or a heads-down cram session in a private booth. It’s a far cry from the culture of desks that long reigned at Ford, she says. [Photo: Ford] The design, informed by Kolstad’s deep experience in interior architecture and hospitality design, is intended to create a human scale. “The challenge of this is 2.1 million square feet at human scale,” she says. Working closely with the architects at Snhetta, Ford’s design team integrated hotel lobby-style seating across the building, as well as grand staircases that double as seating for informal meetings or large gatherings. [Photo: Ford] The right amount of transparency With so many parts of the company situated in this one building, including highly sensitive operations like the development of new car designs, there was a challenge in making the building accessible without completely blowing the doors open. One solution has been the creation of 14 “arrival areas” outside the secured doors of specific business functions. These are café-like seating areas and meeting spaces where people can gather for coffee or a meeting without having to navigate through secured parts of the building. [Photos: Ford] This attempt at openness extends to the architecture itself. Walking through the straight spine that runs between the three hexagons of the building, Dykers points up at a narrow atrium that runs through the top three floors of the building. A skylight pours light down, and people on each floor can get glimpses of what’s happening elsewhere, even if they don’t have the badge to get them through the door. [Photo: Ford] There are four different levels of security in the building, according to Ford Land’s Dobleske, including one for the top floor where there are several design studios that often move full-scale car models and properties across the building’s 22-inch-thick concrete floors. A corporate spy’s dream, these concepts and nascent designs are cleverly obscured behind frosted glass and partitions, while still allowing the skylight and atrium to spread light and views to the floors below. “We still want people to be able to see people and properties moving through the building,” Dobleske says. [Photo: Ford] But there’s a limit to that spirit of transparency, especially when it comes to product development. The design studios are located on the building’s two top floors, including spaces along window-lined edges of the building that could potentially offer views to prying eyes outside. [Photo: Ford] To allow light in while maintaining privacy, the glass that wraps the entire building has been treated with a specially designed frit patterning that obscures the view. In a nod to Ford’s famous logo, the frit is made up of millions of tiny ovalsblack on the interior side of the window and white on the exteriorto help manage heat inside while also preventing design secrets from spilling out. “It took us over a year to develop that,” Dykers says. [Photo: Ford] The design studios are also directly connected to an even more useful space: a large exterior courtyard where scale models and concepts can be given a good look in natural daylight. Elisangela Previte, global business operations manager for Ford Design, says the space makes it much faster for designers to vet their design choices, moving a model out of the controlled environment of the modern design studio and into the harsh glare of the sun. Though there are minor concerns about the potential for drone surveillance, the bigger concern is the geese that are trying to use the courtyard for their nest. Previte says they’re still trying to figure out the right way to keep the geese out. [Photo: Ford] A quick ride in a freight elevator can bring a new model down to the building’s other prize space, a large domed showroom equipped with 10 in-floor turntables to slowly rotate cars, a large overhead light that can emulate light from any time of day, and a large conference room for executive meetings and new car reveals. The showroom also connects to its own courtyard, allowing those formal car design reviews to occur under natural light, and with the benefit of view lines that can stretch 180 feet. It’s the kind of space where the final approval for a new car model can come through or an emerging concept can be doomed to the archives. Each stepfrom a design concept to a full-scale model to a new car approved for productioncan feasibly all happen within this new headquarters building. It’s a radical concentration of abilities for Ford, marking a new approach for a company that can feel steeped in its own history, both for good and for bad. Given the pace of automaking, it will take time for consumers to see what impact all of this has on the cars that Ford produces. But for now, the building itself is a big indication of how the company sees itself evolving in the near term.
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E-Commerce
New locker rooms. Rows of seats removed. Every last Real Madrid sign hidden from sight. These are just some of the measures the National Football League took to transform one of the world’s most iconic soccer stadiums for a matchup between the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Commanders. On November 16, the two teams will compete on the field of Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, though the pitch won’t look anything like its usual self. To get the field ready, the NFL spent $2.32 million on a series of temporary renovations. The most fundamental change was to the playing surface itself. Since soccer pitches are shorter than American football fields, the playing field had to be extended from 115 yards to the official NFL length of 120 yards. To make this happen, entire rows of seats in the stadiums North and South Stands were physically removed. [Photos: Victor Carretero/Real Madrid/Getty Images, courtesy of the author] The fact that this could be done at all is a testament to the clever modular work by L35 Architects; von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) Architects; and Ribas & Ribas Architects, who designed the stadium. Also important is the stadium’s patented, retractable pitch, which is divided into six sections and can be moved horizontally and vertically using electric motors and hydraulic systems. The sections are stored in an underground chamber called the Hypogeum, where the grass is attended to. The Bernabéu’s unique retractable pitch system makes it arguably the most versatile large-scale entertainment venue in the world; it can transform to host soccer, football, tennis, basketball, concerts, conventions, or almost any other event you can imagine. The logistical needs of NFL teams also forced significant, albeit temporary, structural changes. The locker rooms were expanded to handle the 53-man rosters and their extensive support staff (more than double Real Madrid’s 25-man soccer squad). Because the traditional central tunnel used by soccer players was unsuitable for so many people to go through in a timely, organized manner, new access points to the locker rooms were created in the corners of the bench areas. The league also installed a new, separate press room to meet its specific media protocols. [Photo: courtesy of the author] Unlike soccer, where teams occupy designated benches, NFL teams are positioned along the length of the field. The narrower NFL field width meant the front rows of the side stands did not need to be altered, but the home and visitors team boxes had to be removed to make space for the halftime-show stage. [Photo: courtesy of the author] The NFL even tried to fix the stadium’s noise problems, which became known worldwide thanks to Taylor Swift (and, months later, caused Real Madrid to cancel all future music concerts until a solution to the acoustic pollution is found). That in itself is remarkable. And necessary: While Real Madrid games cause extraordinary noise for 90 minutes, the NFL game will cause a lot more because of its halftime show. The NFL installed noise-absorption panels throughout the stadium, probably hoping to avoid the PR backlash that would have ensued (and still might) without them. View this post on Instagram Wow As someone who lives close to the Bernabéu, I’ve been watching the transformation closely. I went to the stadium to see all the changes just before writing this article, and the most shocking thingat least for a Real Madrid fan like mewas to see every trace of my club erased. All club shields and branding are either covered up or removed entirely. Signs for the NFL, the Commanders, and the Dolphins are everywhere, just as they are throughout Madrid, thanks to the regional government, which spent about $3.5 million to promote the event. During the game, the stadiums 1,120-foot, 350-degree screenwhich is the spectacular ever-present visual frame for every Real Madrid home matchwill display the flags of Spain, the United States, and the NFL, plus all the sponsors and game information. Even the clubs public-facing commercial spaces have been repurposed; the Bernabéu museum, which displays all the trophies and historic memorabilia of FIFA’s Club of the Century since its 1902 foundation, ceded space for a temporary NFL museum. The official team store also gave up a large portion of its retail area for a merchandise shop selling gear from all 32 NFL franchises. Everyone in Spain is betting on this being worth the money and the effort. Certainly, it will be for fans and curious people: About 84,000 will fill the stadium after the initial sale window saw 700,000 different devices attempting to purchase tickets. The regional government estimates that the game will bring in approximately $81.2 million in revenue. [Photo: Eduardo Parra/Europa Press/Getty Images] It is yet to be seen whether it will be worth it for football itself. While the NFL is the highest-grossing sport in the U.S., it pales i comparison to the globally popular game of soccer. According to Deloittes 2024 fiscal year report, in Europe alone the soccer market generated revenue of $45.1 billion compared to the NFLs $23 billion. Still, all of Madrid has seemingly been swept up by the current spectacle. Just yesterday, my son and I were amazed to see a giant double-decker bus for NFL fans decorated with Miami Dolphins colors. All around the city there are flags and bus stop ads announcing the game. According to NFL executive Jon Barker, bringing football to a wider audience is generational work. “I dont think at this point that we have any idea 100 years from now what football is going to look like on a global scale,” he told The Washington Post. The league views this game as a pivotal moment for its expansion into the Spanish-speaking market. A flashy show, for sure. A mini Super Bowl of sorts. But the NFL has an uphill battle if it wants to make a dent in the markets where real footballthe one you play with your feet, not with your handsis the undisputed king.
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E-Commerce
Outdoors brand Yeti dropped its new holiday commercial, and it has a lot of what youd expect from a seasonal spot. Bad Idea outlines all the reasons you probably shouldnt get a Yeti for someone you care about: Dont get them a Yeti, says the voice-over, as a ribboned cooler flies out the back of a pickup truck. Unless you like dogs that are always wet, eyebrows that are still growing back, and sand in places sand should never be. By the end of the commercial, its clear that the brand is aiming at people who are obsessed. It could be surfing, fishing, camping, golf, whateverits about those chasing the dream wherever it leads them. But for all its charming predictability, this is more than just another ad for Yeti; its a major shift in the way the company approaches marketing and advertising. Thanks to a partnership with Wieden+Kennedy, this commercial is the first piece of advertising Yeti has made with an outside agency, and it signals a new era for a brand that has been staunchly self-made. For the past 19 years, Yeti has largely created all its own marketing and advertising, including ambitious projects like its ongoing series of short documentaries under the Yeti Presents banner. Thats why my ears perked up when Yeti CEO Matt Reintjes announced the W+K partnership on his companys November 7 earnings call. This came amid outlining how revenue was up 2% year over year but profits were down slightly by 2%, which the company credited to higher tariff costs. International revenue was up 14%. Mixing strong in-house creative cultures with big-name agencies is rare, especially today, as more brands build out robust in-house teams to replace or reinforce their long-standing relationships with agencies. When the two do mix, one typically emerges as the alpha. When I spoke to Reintjes recently, he told me that teaming up with the same agency as Nike, Ford, DoorDash, and McDonalds is a reflection of Yetis ambition and expansion into mainstream sports, backyards, and yoga studios around the world. We’re incredibly proud of the team that we have at Yeti and the way this brand has come to life with their vision and creativity, he says. We saw an opportunity to take the power of the in-house creative and content we have at Yeti and pair it with an incredible partner in Wieden+Kennedy and their global scale and global brand storytelling experience capabilities. Its also an opportunity to redefine how a world-class creative marketer can coexist and thrive with a world-class creative shop. The Great In-house Debate Over the past 15 years or so, there has been an omnipresent tension in advertising between the role of in-house creative departments and ad agencies. Many in-house agencies were created to save a brand money by not having to outsource all of its creative work. It was also about control, the theory being that an in-house team would know the brand better, and it would be able to produce work faster to keep up with the pace of culture as social media exploded. The reality is that brands were also fed up with unnecessary fees and bloated holding company bureaucracy. So they started to build out their own teams. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publishes an in-house report every five years. Its 2023 report said that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018. Some estimates now put that figure closer to 90%, though the trade groups next report wont be published until 2028. Each brand has its own model. Almost all brand work from Airbnb, Squarespace, and Liquid Death comes from their in-house teams. Patagonia, another heavyweight in outdoorsy film content, produces all of its marketing in-house, too. In the past three years, Kraft Heinzs in-house agency, the Kitchen, has expanded its work from 4 of the companys brands to 19, and grown its team from 35 to more than 135 across two offices. PepsiCo has three different in-house agenciesSips & Bites for bigger projects, D3 for PepsiCo Foods in the U.S., and Creators League, which is focused on beverages. All told, its a major investment for these companies. Ad agencies began to feel threatened. Every project or creative win by an in-house agency could conceivably have been theirs. Trade group In-House Agency Council reported last year that external agencies did 70% of the workload in 2021, but by 2023 that dropped to just 30%. Some execs estimated that 30% to 40% of revenue had bled from the traditional creative agency model through in-housing. Yet Krafts most high-profile (and awarded) work still comes primarily from partner agencies like Rethink. When Pepsis in-house agency made the infamous Kendall Jenner ad in 2017, many ad agencies not-so-quietly celebrated the blowback. What makes Yeti and W+K unique is their chance to reset this narrative and show what two incredibly strong creative entitiesin-house and externalcan achieve together. Irrational Commitment Last year, Yeti released a short film called All That Is Sacred. Directed by Scott Ballew, the 34-minute film is a portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, back in the late 1960s and 70s. It shows the balance between the work and leisure life of writers and musicians, including Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne, and Richard Brautigan, and their shared obsession with fishing. No ad agency on earth wouldve made this. Or let e rephrase: No client would likely buy this idea from an agency. Not because ad agencies lack the creative talent. Ad agencies can, and do, make great, unexpected creative work. Even if we just stick to films, look no further than The Seat on Netflix (Modern Arts for WhatsApp), award-winning short doc The Final Copy of Ilon Specht (McCann for LOréal Paris), or waaay back to Pereira ODells role in Werner Herzogs 2016 feature doc Lo and Behold for Netscout. But All That Is Sacred is ambitious even by Yeti standards. Most of Yetis best work has a direct tie to the brand, typically telling a personal story or chronicling an adventure of one of its many ambassadors. This is none of that. The tie to the brand is less direct, and more about vibes. That can be tough for an agency to push from the outside. To use a Yeti-appropriate metaphor here, as a piece of brand content goes, its not just out in the wildernessits fully off-grid, to a point that would make most marketers feel naked and afraid. But its beautiful. And it fits. It fits in a way that only a brand so fully confident in itself and its point of view could. That point of view has been the backbone of Yetis overall brand strength. Pierre Jouffray, Wieden+Kennedy executive creative director, says the agency worked with the internal Yeti team to really crystallize what that point of view is. After talking to all the brands ambassadors, one thing stood out. There’s something that is so true about their product, about the ambassadors, about the people, and about the way we would work together, which is this idea of irrational commitment, he says. Thats something that you can really connect with no matter what your pursuit is. For Reintjes this isnt about taking a weird left turn for the brand. This isn’t about doing something different; it truly is additive, he says. It’s almost like a layer cake. We’re just adding another layer on top of the incredible work that our team does from the most grassroots, endemic, connected, authentic audiences across social media and different platforms. We look at this as augmenting and a partnership in and how we scale this brand for a really long time. Bad Idea is a great start, blending what both companies do incredibly well. Its even narrated by musician and actor Ryan Bingham (Yellowstone), who hosted a Yeti show called The Midnight Hour in 2020. The real test will be to build up the global brand work that truly taps into that idea of irrational commitment while still connecting and creating with the audiences who built this brand in the first place. Just Yeti It.
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E-Commerce
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