By Jessica Lansing
We’re all familiar with the concept. You walk into an unassuming retail establishment. It’s usually something terribly mundane or anachronistic such as a VCR repair shop, or a boutique pet shop that specializes in Sub-Saharan, short-eared hamsters. Somewhere in the back is a door, maybe disguised as a phone booth or a bookcase you push open. It’s not your first time, so you gain entry with a knowing nod from the attendant, and enter another dimension.
Inside, the music is low, the booze is flowing freely, and all the fascinating people, the ones who know where every cool party is, are commingling in exclusive harmony. You have reached the inner sanctum. Or maybe you just knocked on an alley door, said, “Joe sent me,” and were let into a dingy bar after hours. It’s all the same thing.
The classic speakeasy. A story as old as prohibition. The bar behind the haberdashery.
In this era of manufactured reality and faux online escapades, when more and more people are seeking authentic experiences in the real world, maybe it’s not all that surprising that we would see a return to such artifice. It was always a good time because there’s a built-in story to tell when it’s over. It doesn’t actually matter that much what happens inside, because it’s the journey that makes it memorable.
The Rewilding Of Society
While every other brand is busy clearing obstacles for a seamless customer experience, it’s the challenges of life that remind us that we’re human. It’s the little difficulties that make it real. It’s the flaws we miss because the glossy perfection of The Matrix is precisely what we find so alien and disorienting. Consumers are increasingly looking for authenticity, a word that itself has become so overused that it’s hard to define. We’re surely only a few weeks away from bespoke or artisanal AI.
This is the beginning of the great social rewilding of our culture. The quest to reconnect with the real world through authentic, sensory experiences. The desire for balance between the technological onslaught we face and our search for joy and purpose in the face of it. We long for a time we can’t even remember because we were never there, what sociologists call anemoia, the nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced.
“Nostalgia is part of this story,” write the authors of a recent Accenture report on the coming trends for 2025. “While people have always shared an affinity for simpler times, digitally-native generations are seeking textures from the past that hold valuable novelty for them. For them, the pre-digital era reveals artifacts of textured experiences, which they are culturally retrofitting into their modern existence. For instance, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are looking back to the 1990s—before they were born—and perceiving an existence unencumbered by 24/7 connectivity. People are finding a purity of joy in making memories through experiences that are tactile and finite—enjoying it while it lasts and then moving on.”
In other words, it’s not the vinyl records in the listening rooms they’re after. It’s the nostalgia for a time before we were so connected. Back when the phone just rang endlessly if no one picked it up. When you had to stay up late if you wanted to actually see the late-night programming. When everyone didn’t get a recap of every single thing that happened the day before while they sat on the toilet for their morning constitutional.
The joy of missing out (JOMO).
Sal’s Auto Club
On an empty road somewhere outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, sits a small building. On most days, that’s where you’ll find Sal, the owner of Sal’s Auto Club, a rather novel business you don’t find much these days. A keeper of bona fide wisdom and a craftsman of the sort that barely exists anymore. The real deal. The genuine article. Sal runs a tight ship and doesn’t suffer fools. He’s seen it all before, tells it like it is, and knows the difference between the real thing and a cheap facsimile.
You can visit his website at SalsAuto.club, where you’ll find a pretty standard-looking offering, although possibly a bit slicker than you would expect for an aging grease monkey on the outskirts of town. But as you begin to look a little closer, you’ll notice he’s not talking about cars at all, but brands. That’s because this is a falsehood as well. A glorious fiction. A story that is not true. The front of the speakeasy is a website.
Sal’s is just another example in a long line of theatrical performances that used to be de rigueur in the world of marketing but has given way to a lot of AI-generated puffery, which is the real grift. Sal does not exist, at least not in flesh and blood, but that fact remains disputed by those who would argue that Sal does, in fact, exist.
“Sal is very real,” explains David Todd McCarty, founder of Sal’s Auto Club. “Sal is the one who keeps us honest. He’s our authenticity filter. We don’t ask what exactly Sal would do, because he’s a little too old school, even for us, but we do wonder what he would think. Would he be curious, or would he call bullshit? Sal is grounded in a pre-digital America, when you had to work a bit more to experience the best in life. It didn’t come to you so easily. You had to go out and find it. You had to work for it.”
Sal’s Auto Club is a new style of branding agency, for lack of a better term. A concept rooted in finding fresh solutions by returning to the simplicity of the past. An immersion in the sensory experiences of the real world. McCarty believes that the future of branding requires, at least in small part, a return to this past. He and his team are looking to Sal to help them bring back some reality to an industry that has become awash in counterfeits. The problem, according to McCarty, is that so many brands are operating out of fear.
“They don’t know where to turn or what to do,” says McCarty, “so they’ve handed everything over to some AI model in the hopes that this will connect them with consumers on some emotional level. The logic of this, or lack thereof, is astounding.”
What’s Old Is New
Sal’s is yet another example of revisiting the past in order to bring a fresh perspective to the insanity of mind-bending change we’re experiencing today. The crazier the future appears, the more we seem to retreat into the past, looking for something stable to hold onto. McCarty insists that the team at Sal’s are not luddites or anti-technology, but that society has lost its balance.
“The things computers can do these days is tru