How do great companies stay distinctive when everything around them is pushing them toward sameness?
In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Anthony Reeves, speaker, consultant, and author of Eat the Donkey: Why Great Companies Embrace Discomfort, for a conversation about creativity, brand identity, AI, and why discomfort may be one of the most valuable forces in innovation.
Anthony shares how growing up in the Australian outback shaped his understanding of progress, boredom, resilience, and the creative power of empty space. From LVMH and Amazon to WPP, Nike, Jaguar, Kohler, and Southwest Airlines, he explains why the strongest brands know when to evolve and when to protect what made them matter in the first place.
The conversation also moves to the tension leaders face in the age of AI. As companies chase efficiency, optimization, and automation, Anthony warns that many risk becoming average by design. We discuss why human creativity, curiosity, and distinctiveness matter even more as technology pulls everyone toward the same answers.
This is a conversation about brand courage, creative restlessness, and the difference between useful discomfort and unsafe pressure. How can companies use AI without losing the very human qualities that make them worth choosing? Listen in, and share your thoughts.
Name: Anthony Reeves
Title: Speaker, Consultant, and Author
LinkedIn | Website |
Anthony Reeves has spent 20 years figuring out one thing: how brands stay distinctly themselves inside ecosystems that want to make everyone the same.
At LVMH, he was CMO of their startup house, scaling acquired brands to compete alongside the world’s biggest luxury houses without losing what made them worth acquiring. At Amazon, he led the internal creative agency during its fastest growth period, running Super Bowl campaigns and building the quality standards that determined how every brand showed up on the platform. At WPP, he helped pull Nike off Amazon when the platform was hurting the brand and ran Airbnb as agency of record, scaling their media from $200M to nearly $800M per year.
As Global Head of Brand and Creative at Kohler Co., he took a 152-year-old American brand through a different kind of bet: refusing AI-generated people in its advertising and reimagining how products are seen across retail platforms. He is a three-time Cannes Lions keynote speaker, Campaign of the Year winner, first male recipient of the 3% Conference Award, and author of Eat the Donkey: Why Great Companies Embrace Discomfort, which debuted in 2026.