OFFF's Pep Salazar: Brands Show Up to Sell, Not to Understand

Brands keep debating how to "connect with Gen Z" in rooms where nobody is Gen Z. That's the opening observation from Erik Herrström, founder and creative director of STUDIO HERRSTRÖM, and it frames his argument that audience strategy built without the audience is guesswork.

Herrström writes that he has sat in that kind of executive meeting "more times than I'd like to admit." Everyone brings a deck and an opinion. The missing party is the audience itself.

His diagnosis targets how companies research people. Teams collect demographic reports, analyze trends, and increasingly ask AI to define who their audiences are and what they want. The approach fails, he argues, when it replaces actual conversations.

The core of the piece is a distinction that data-first teams tend to blur. A generation is not a community. A community is not an individual. People born in the same years can share almost nothing beyond their age, Herrström notes — demographics describe groups, not the individuals inside them.

What matters more, he says, is what people choose and why: what they dedicate their time to, where they gather, and why they feel they belong there. His blunt conclusion: you cannot design your way into cultural relevance without first understanding the culture.

What does OFFF's cofounder say about metrics?

Herrström grounds the argument in a conversation with Pep Salazar, cofounder and director of OFFF, the international creativity and design festival that began in Barcelona more than 25 years ago. Salazar has spent over two decades turning a gathering of digital creatives into an enduring international community.

Salazar described the tension between knowing an audience through metrics and understanding it as people. Sponsors want attendance numbers, engagement reports and evidence of reach. Those figures matter, but they don't explain why someone travels to Barcelona to spend three days among fellow creatives.

For Salazar, feelings are more interesting than data. A dashboard tells you what people clicked. A conversation tells you why they care.

He also learns by taking deliberate risks — introducing perspectives and ideas that challenge what his audience already knows and expects. Not everything resonates immediately. As he puts it: "I understand by doing."

What does that mean for brands?

Herrström draws a practical lesson from Salazar's method. Understanding an audience doesn't mean giving people more of what they already know and love. It means knowing when to experiment, introducing something unexpected, and learning from the response.

Inviting a target audience into the process doesn't require outsourcing every decision to them. Brands can develop the judgment to know when to respond to a community and when to challenge it with something unfamiliar.

Salazar also flagged a common brand mistake around creative communities: don't show up only to sell. He has watched brands arrive at OFFF with polished corporate messaging while missing the social dynamics of the event. His advice: "Come here to understand the people and to talk to them."

Is AI flattening brand language?

Salazar's sharpest warning concerns generative AI. "When you speak similar to your neighbor, then you don't have a soul," he told Herrström.

Herrström recognizes the problem from his own work. Too many brands begin by studying the competition and end up borrowing its language, aesthetics and assumptions. The output looks professional but rarely feels personal or unique. People want brands with personality that speak the language of their community.

His closing prescription for the next boardroom debate about reaching an audience: ask who is missing in the room, invite the audience in before the strategy is set in stone, spend time where they gather, and give opinions that contradict the brief the power to change the outcome.

Otherwise, he writes, the empty chair at the table says more about your brand than the strategy deck ever will.