François Cassin

Luxury brands don't sell products. They sell worlds. The problem: they accumulate content without a narrative backbone. The result? An aesthetic noise that convinces no one. I work the opposite way. I start with a question: What cultural conversation should this brand be having to justify its existence? From there, everything is organized. Content strategy. Creative choices. Partnerships. The tone. Because in luxury, cultural coherence creates prestige – not raw visibility. My approach: I combine three rare perspectives. Critical analysis: I decode the economic and philosophical fundamentals underpinning your brand. Creative vision: I build narrative architectures – the structures that carry your message. Transmission capability: I train your teams to embody this positioning, I prepare you to defend your vision to the media and critics. For whom: I work with brands that don't follow trends; they create them. Houses that understand that storytelling is a discipline – demanding, intellectual, decisive. Strategic repositioning. Launching new lines. Building foundational narratives. Preparing for cultural critique. Harmonizing fragmented communication. Why: Premium audiences seek substance, not superficial aesthetic content. The brands that win this attention are not the loudest. They are the ones that say something true, relevant, and difficult to ignore. That's what I build.

Art history is not a subject of the past. It's a method for reading the present. This is the premise of my course at ISEFAC, where I teach B2 and M1 students in communication and management. My approach rejects the separation between historical culture and contemporary professional practice. A student who understands why Gustave Caillebotte framed his urban scenes with the angle of a photographer even before the invention of cinema better understands how Instagram has transformed our relationship with visual composition. A student who knows how to read an Art Deco poster knows how to read a luxury LinkedIn post. The storytelling module extends this logic. Telling the story of a brand, a product, an event is not about listing arguments. It's about constructing a narrative experience that activates the right cultural codes in the right audience. The great campaigns I analyze with my students, from Dove Real Beauty to Patagonia's communication to Chanel's perfume launches, all rely on a fine understanding of the cultural narratives their audience already holds. Pop culture is the third axis of the course. Not as a minor culture to be legitimized, but as a privileged observation space for the shifts in taste, values, and aspirations of a society. Understanding why a meme spreads, why a series creates a community, why an artist becomes a cultural phenomenon and not just a commercial one: it's understanding the deep drivers of contemporary attention, on which brands depend. My pedagogical objective: to train professionals capable of analyzing an image, a narrative, a cultural phenomenon with the precision of a critic and the pragmatism of a strategist.

Teaching generative AI in a communication school in 2024-2026 means teaching a discipline that is still defining itself. Not a tool. Not a shortcut. A new creative grammar, with its demands, its limits, its real possibilities. My module at Sup de Pub is for M1 students. Professionals in training who, in a year, will be responsible for content, brand strategies, and creative direction. Their challenge is not to learn how to use Midjourney or ChatGPT. Their challenge is to understand what AI changes in their profession, what it doesn't change, and how to integrate these tools into demanding creative practice without losing what makes human insight valuable. The course is structured around a premise I've defended from the start: the quality of an AI production is strictly proportional to the cultural precision of the person driving it. AI reveals and amplifies an existing perspective. It does not create it. In practice, this translates into sessions that begin with visual culture before addressing tools. With brief exercises before prompt exercises. With critical analysis of generated productions, not to judge their aesthetics, but to understand what they reveal about the quality of the framework of the person who requested them. I also address the strategic dimension: how does a brand integrate AI into its creative production chain without homogenizing its identity? How do creative teams maintain their role as cultural trendsetters in an automated generation environment? These questions are not theoretical. They are the immediate professional stakes for my students. The pedagogy I developed at Sup de Pub also informs my corporate workshops for marketing teams, art departments, and agencies wishing to integrate generative AI into their practice in a demanding and differentiating way.