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With more than 100,000 artifacts dating back thousands of years, nearly 900,000 square feet of floor space, a site that spans more than 120 acres, and a total price tag estimated to be more than $1 billion, it’s not hyperbole to call the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, Egypt, the most significant museum project in recent decades. It’s the kind of blockbuster building that would have even the starriest of starchitects salivating at the chance to lay claim to what’s likely become one of Egypt’s most visited tourist attractions. So, in hindsight, it’s a bit unexpected that the architecture firm that won the museum’s international design competition way back in 2002 was a little-known office from Ireland with no completed projects to its name and only three people on staff. [Photo: Iwan Baan] Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects was virtually unknown when its concept was chosen, unanimously, out of more than 1,500 submissions as the winning design. “We hadn’t built any buildings,” says Róisín Heneghan, the firm’s cofounder. “We had one project just starting on site when we won the competition.” A lot has changed since then. The museum had an initial target opening date set for 2007, but several delays caused by the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the COVID pandemic kept stretching the timeline. Heneghan Peng Architects’ design is now fully built and, as of November 1, open to the public. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Thousands of years of history The Grand Egyptian Museum’s design is a sprawling spread of airplane hangar-sized concourses, sculpted landscapes, conservation workshops, and a network of underground storage facilities. The museum building itself is a cavernous space with 12 main galleries and direct views of the pyramids of Giza. A vast entrance hall sits under a tall sawtooth roof that doubles as an open-air pavilion, shading a ticketing area accented by a 30-foot-tall statue of Ramses II that’s more than 3,000 years old. On the facade, throughout the landscape, and even within the building’s structure, pyramid shapes abound. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Central to the design, according to Heneghan, is not so much the main building but the placement of the museum itself. “People were saying to us, ugh, you Westerners, you all are so fascinated by the desert, but Egypt is about the Nile,” she says. That led the architects to think first about how the museum should fit into that dichotomy. With a site selected near the famous pyramids in Giza, just on the fringe of Cairo’s urban footprint, it was clear that the museum would sit in the middle space between the desert and the Nile valley, a space that has been carved away by millennia of river flow. “There’s a 50-meter difference in level between one side of the site and the other, because that’s where the desert and the Nile met,” Heneghan says. “When you’re coming out of the city, you see the pyramids on the plateau. So what we decided was that the museum should never go above the plateau level, but that it should exist between the plateau and the Nile Valley.” [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Despite grand ceilings capable of holding towering statues, the building sits low to the ground, with a fair amount of its bulk sunk into the landscape. The design of the Grand Egyptian Museum utilizes large walkways and views within the museum to give visitors a zoomed-out experience of the sprawling history represented in the galleries. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] The first part of the museum visitors see after they enter is a long staircase bordered by thousands of artifacts, sarcophagi, and statuary that tracks the entire 4,000 year span of Egypt’s pharaonic history. It’s a walking crash course for the mostly international visitors to the museum before reaching the top where more discrete sections of Egypt’s ancient history are explored in more depth. Its main galleries cover themes like kings and queens, religious belief systems, and ancient Egyptian society, and the museum features an extensive collection of artifacts from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The museum’s layout allows each of these galleries to stand on its own, but with visual connections to the others in order to tie them into a broader arc of history. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects “The galleries are themed, but at the same time from different points you can see across, so you can make connections across the whole timescale,” Heneghan says. “That helped organize it. If we had tried to make it human-scaled, I think we would have found it more difficult.” [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] A engineering feat The architects also had to grapple with the realities of designing such a massive structure in the desert heat of Egypt. Partly out of consideration for the operational costs of running such a space, they designed the galleries to pull in daylight from lateral angles that’s dappled through metal shading structures and overhangs. This approach also works with the collections on display. “It’s quite a lot of stone,” Heneghan says. “And stone works well with natural daylight.” To handle the sheer weight of the statues on display, the building has incredibly thick concrete floors, which also serve to regulate the building’s climate, absorbing the cool night temperatures and slowly releasing it during the heat of the day. “What we were trying to do is make a really heavy structure, like a church,” Heneghan says. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Though Heneghan Peng Architects are the design architects of the Grand Egyptian Museum, they had plenty of help bringing the concept to fruition. Even at the competition stage, once they were named one of several finalists, they called in extra assistance from the engineering firms Arup and Buro Happold. Cairo-based Raafat Miller Consulting is credited alongside Heneghan Peng Architects as the project’s architect. Given the many delays that have hampered the project, Heneghan says her firm has essentially had very little to do with the design since it was largely finalized around 2009. “Once it went into construction, we weren’t really involved,” she says. The project has evolved since then, with new structural, technological, and material changes that have necessarily altered the overall design. Heneghan says the facade of the building is a departure from a more reserved approach in the initial design, but she accepts that some tweaks were inevitable. “You know, 16 years is a really long time,” she says. But there are also parts of the final museum that were among the architect’s initial thinking about what this museum could be, way back in 2002. Heneghan seems gratified that certain major elements like the grand staircase leading up to the main galleries and the direct views of the pyramids made it through after all these years. “Some things are very much what was envisaged,” she says.
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E-Commerce
Have you ever been to the Gamerhood? Part game show, part reality series, it recently wrapped its fourth season in August. Over five weekly episodes on Twitch and YouTube, the show pitted gaming creators like Kai Cenat, Ludwig, Mark Phillips, and Berleezy, against each other in a combination of gaming and IRL challenges. The third season from last summer attracted more than 23 million views. In September, the show went mainstream when season four landed on Prime Video. Even before that, just on YouTube and Twitch, season four was getting about 20 million views for each episode. Not too shabby for a show created by a brand. Thats right, Gamerhood is fully owned by State Farm, and it’s a key part of the brands marketing strategy. State Farms head of marketing Alyson Griffin says that despite the unpredictability of creators and reality TV, the reward is worth any perceived brand risk. We believe in them, she says. We don’t script them. They say the things they want to say, they can do the things they want to do. And we’re in the risk business! Nobody does that in insurance, right? We’re excited about extending the reach of that for an even bigger audience. Some brands make funny ads. Some brands invest in entertainment IP. Some brands go deep into major sports sponsorships. State Farm utilizes all of these and Jake of courseto firmly embed the brand in culture. It’s a flywheel of culturally relevant content across many different audiences, which has helped the company boost its net worth to $145.2 billion in 2024, up from $134.8 billion in 2023. There’s a sea of sameness in insurance or financial services in general, says Griffin. We are meticulous about creating conditions over time, with a longer view, that allow us to capture lightning-in-a-bottle moments when they make themselves available. Heres how State Farm does it. In this premium piece, youll learn: Where Gamerhood fits into State Farms growing brand entertainment strategy State Farm’s head of marketing on the secret sauce that makes a boring company break through The balance stake State Farm strikes between mainstream advertising, celebrities, sports sponsorships, and original IP Why embracing risk with creators is so important to brands in 2025 State Farm Gamerhood Season 4 hosts and contestants (from left): Alex “Goldenboy” Mendez, Jake from State Farm, JasonTheWeen, Ludwig, CouRage, Cinna, Mark Phillips, Berleezy, Sydeon, LuluLuvely, Barbara Dunkelman. [Photo: State Farm] Nobody cares, now what? In Spike Lees newest Apple TV film Highest 2 Lowest, the characters David (Denzel Washington) and his chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) are in the car. Paul pulls out a gun to deal with their situation. What is that? David asks, as Paul cocks it. Insurance, says Paul. Thats Jake from State Farm. This is what marketers call cultural relevance. When Paul says the line, its a joke everyone gets. It even made it to the trailer. Theres no brand partnership or product deal, just an acknowledgement of the place in pop culture that State Farm has carved out over many, many years including Super Bowl ads, major sponsorships, and celebrity ad campaigns across the NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball. This isnt the first time State Farm has been involved with Apples entertainment. While this one was unexpected, its hilarious take on the hit show Severance was very much part of the plan. Griffin says the goal of the brands full court press on pop culture is relevance. First of all, nobody cares about insurance, she says. Nobody’s thinking about it unless something happens and they need it. They also aren’t going to statefarm.com to just casually see what their insurance carrier has to say on a random Tuesday. It’s not happening. Nobody cares. You have to break through. This is why we get Megan Trainor trying to be an NFL trainer for Patrick Mahomes, Jason Bateman rivaling Batman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger turning the tagline into Like a good neighbaaaaaa! for the Super Bowl. Its also how we get Travis Scott teaming with Jake from State Farm to create custom varsity jackets at Coachella. That mix of names alone illustrates the various ways the brand is aiming at a variety of audiences. When you break through and you’re relevant, you get earned media, talk value, and social engagement, says Griffin. I have to use the right talnt to break through, so when you see the ad, it’s actually better, more creative, and more interesting. But its the less high-profile names that have Griffin most excited right now, and the strategy around it she says is a key to the future. Creators are key State Farms budget for Gamerhood wasnt a big departure from what they were already spending to advertise in gaming. Griffin says it was just a matter of shifting spend from other investments that were essentially getting them a static logo on a game screen. I just thought I could get more engagement with it than just a passive logo, she says. The secret is investing in, and trusting, creators to do what they do best. Griffin says it can be nerve-wracking for any marketer to cede control of their brand, but so far, it has been worth it. Griffin says that the key to a successful partnership with creators is to be prepared to give up some control. Brand leaders must do their due diligence and vet any potential partner, but then they must let them cook. If you know you have the right person, because you vetted them to your brand needs, let them be them,” says Griffin. “Let them create because then it looks and is authentic. Cenat is one of the most popular creators and streamers on the planet. He ran a month-long Twitch stream in September that peaked at more than one million concurrent viewers and 82.5 million hours watched. Hes also one of the stars of the newest season of Gamerhood. But State Farms work with Cenat goes beyond the stream. Cenat also starred in the brands Super Bowl turned March Madness spot with Jason Bateman. Griffin says that Cenats help in explaining the situation of delaying the Super Bowl ad, due to sensitivity about the severity of the Los Angeles wildfires, came from trust built over time. He worked with the brand to get on Jimmy Fallon to explain why State Farm delayed the ad spot’s rollout. That was not what we intended to do with that spot, that’s not what he signed up for, says Griffin. He signed up to be in the Super Bowl, and he could have been mad about it. Instead, he helped us think strategically about how to make that transition and make it work. Measuring success Looking at all the various ways State Farm is getting its brand out into the world and into culture, it can be tough to decipher how it defines success with its advertising and marketing investments. Griffin says that State Farms marketing is split across three areas: current demand, future demand, and retention. Current demand is work aimed at people who are actually in the market for insurance. Every dollar that the current demand team spends is measured against a bound policy, so you better be effective and efficient, she says. These are deals and promos that really show people why State Farm is a good choice for them right now. The bigger swings in brand building are more closely tied to the other two buckets. Future demand is about starting to build a relationship with people outside of their specific insurance needs, so when they do shift over to the current demand category, they have State Farm in mind. Not $1 that we spend in future demand is measured against the bound insurance policy, says Griffin. It is about paving the way, firing synapses, dopamine, serotonin, attention, reach, engagement, talk, value, PR, and earned media. Retention is a mix of the first two, making sure the brand work makes them feel good about the company, while still offering them deals and upgrades to keep their business. For Gamerhood, the measurement for success is more specific. Just before the third seasons launch in August 2024, gamer Ludwig posted a TikTok clip of himself, dancing with fellow gamers Berleezy, Mark Phillips, and Kyedae. There was no State Farm or Gamerhood branding, and among the more than 2,000 comments, fans were trying to figure out why their favorite gamers were together like this. Among them was, This gotta be State Farm Gamerhood. @ludwig slay #jojosiwa Karma – JoJo Siwa For Griffin, that was the proof she needed. I knew it right then, she says. Unaided with no identifying marks, the target market is anticipating why those people are together and what they’re doing. And I was like, Well, we just, we won IP right there.
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E-Commerce
On May 19, 2023, a photograph appeared on what was then still called Twitter showing smoke billowing from the Pentagon after an apparent explosion. The image quickly went viral. Within minutes, the S&P 500 dropped sharply, wiping out billions of dollars in market value. Then the truth emerged: the image was a fake, generated by AI. The markets recovered as quickly as they had tumbled, but the event marked an important turning point: this was the first time that the stock market had been directly affected by a deepfake. It is highly unlikely to be the last. Once a fringe curiosity, the deepfake economy has grown to become a $7.5 billion market, with some predictions projecting that it will hit $38.5 billion by 2032. Deepfakes are now everywhere, and the stock market is not the only part of the economy that is vulnerable to their impact. Those responsible for the creation of deepfakes are also targeting individual businesses, sometimes with the goal of extracting money and sometimes simply to cause damage. In a Deloitte poll published in 2024, one in four executives reported that their companies had been hit by deepfake incidents that targeted financial and accounting data. Lawmakers are beginning to take notice of this growing threat. On October 13, 2025, Californias Governor Gavin Newsom signed the California AI Transparency Act into law. When it was first introduced in 2024, the Act required large frontier providerscompanies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and Xto implement tools that made it easier for users to identify AI-generated content. This requirement has now been extended to large online platformswhich essentially means social media platformsand to producers of devices that capture content. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity?","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Such legislation is important, necessary, and long overdue. But it is very far from being enough. The potential business impact of deepfakes extends far beyond what any single piece of legislation can address. If business leaders are to address these impacts, they must be alert to the danger, understand it, and take steps to limit the risks to their organizations. How deepfakes threaten business Here are three important and interrelated ways in which deepfakes can damage businesses: 1. Direct Attacks The primary vector for direct attacks is targeted impersonations that are designed to extract money or information. Attacks like this can cause even sophisticated operators to lose millions of dollars. For instance, U.K. engineering giant Arup lost HK$200 million (about $25 million) last year after scammers used AI-generated clones of senior executives to order money transfers. The Hong Kong police, who described the theft as one of the worlds largest deepfake scams, confirmed that fake voices and images were used in videoconferencing software to deceive an employee into making 15 transfers to multiple bank accounts outside the business. A few months later, WPP, the worlds largest advertising company, faced a similar threat when fraudsters cloned the voice and likeness of CEO Mark Read and tried to solicit money and sensitive information from colleagues. The attempt failed, but the company confirmed that a convincing deepfake of its leader was used in the scam. The ability to create digital stand-ins that can speak and act in a convincing way is still in its infancy, yet the capabilities available to fraudsters are already extremely powerful. Soon, it will be impossible in most cases for humans to tell that they are interacting with a deepfake solely on the basis of audible or visual cues. 2. Rising Costs of Verification Even organizations that are never directly targeted still end up paying for the fallout. Every deepfake that circulateswhether its a fake CEO, a fabricated news event, or a counterfeit adraises the collective cost of doing business. The result is a growing burden of verification that every company must now shoulder simply to prove that its communications are real and its actions authentic. Firms are already tightening internal security protocols in response to these threats. Gartner suggests that by 2026 around 30% of enterprises that rely on facial recognition security tools will look for alternative solutions as these forms of protection are rendered unreliable by AI-generated deepfakes. Replacing these tools with less vulnerable alternatives will require considerable investment. Each additional verification layerwatermarks, biometric tools for detecting that an individual is a live human being, chain-of-custody logs, forensic reviewadds costs, slows down decision-making, and complicates workflows. And these costs will only continue to mount as deepfake tools become more sophisticated. 3. The Trust Tax In addition to the direct costs that accrue from countering deepfake security threats, the simple possibility that someone may use this technology erodes trust across all relationships that are grounded in digital media. And given that virtually all business relationships now rely on some form of digital communication, this means that deepfakes have the potential to erode trust across virtually all commercial relationships. To give just one example, phone and video calls are some of the most basic and most frequent tools used in modern business communications. But if you cannot be sure that the person on the screen or on the other end of the phone is who they claim to be, then how can you trust anything they say? And if you are constantly operating in a realm of uncertainty about the trustworthiness of your communication channels, how can you work productively? If we begin to mistrust something as basic as our daily modes of communication, the result will eventually be a broad, ambient skepticism that seeps into every relationship, both within and beyond our wrkplaces. This kind of doubt undermines operational efficiency, adds layers of complexity to dealmaking, and increases friction in any task that involves remote communication. This is the trust taxthe cost of doing business in a world where anything might be fake. Four steps that companies need to take Here are four steps all business leaders should be taking to respond to the threat of deepfakes: 1. Verify what mattersUse cryptographic signatures for official statements, watermark executive videos, and communication channels, and use provenance tags for sensitive content. Dont try to secure everythingfocus your verification efforts where falsehoods would hurt the most. 2. Build a source of truth hubCreate a public verification page listing your official channels, press contacts, and authentication methodsstakeholders should know exactly where to go to confirm whats real. If your organization relies on external information sources for rapid decision-making, ensure that these are only accessed through similarly authenticated hubs. 3. Train for the deepfake ageRun deepfake-awareness drills and build verification literacy into onboarding, media training, and client communication. 4. Treat detection tools as essential infrastructureInvest in tools that can flag manipulated media in real time and then integrate these solutions into key workflowsfinance approvals, HR interviews, investor communications. In the age of deepfakes, verification is a core operating capability. From threat to opportunity Social media echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and alternative facts have been fracturing our shared sense of reality for over a decade. The rise of AI-generated content will make this unraveling of common reference points exponentially worse. An earlier generation of internet users used to say, Pics or it didnt happen. Well, now we can have all the pics we like, but how are we to tell if what they show happened at all? Business leaders cannot solve the fragmentation of perceived reality or the fracturing of communities. They cannot single-handedly restore trust in institutions or reverse the cultural forces driving this crisis. But they can anchor their own organizations behavior and communications in verifiable truth, and they can build systems that increase trust. Leaders who swim against the stream in this way will not only help protect their organizations from the dangers of deepfakes. When seeing is no longer believing, these businesses will also become the beacons that people rely on to navigate through an increasingly uncertain world. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity?","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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