I don’t like conferences, but my first South By Southwest stood me overlooking Lady Bird Lake, glistening glass towers beside old brick ones, trees that hadn’t decided yet whether it was spring, and a few feet from Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, the most influential startup accelerator on Earth.

Garry looks like a maths professor who got rich, or a rich man who reads a lot. Black open-collared shirt, Penfold glasses, short beard greying at the chin, he talks with his hands, nervously.

Garry has clout at SXSW, but there was a time when he couldn’t even afford a delegates pass. Around the years Twitter had launched out of this same conference, and Garry was starting Posterous, which Twitter would acquire a few years later.

After that, the passes found him.

Garry joined Y Combinator as designer in residence and wrote the first cheque into Coinbase.

Now he presides over the seed fund that backed Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart and over $600 billion in combined valuation, the most successful of its kind in history.

Today, YC is self-fulfillingly successful and near mythical.

True story: I was once told, in a serious investor meeting, never to mention Y Combinator. Too hallowed. YC is like Nigel’s guitar in Spinal Tap. Don’t touch it. Don’t point at it. Don’t even look at it.

Lately, Garry admits he’s not sleeping much.

Modafinil’s an old friend, but right now staying up comes easy. Garry has “cyber psychosis” from all the excitement of working with AI agents.

His PR later confirms he was joking.

You see, Garry has form for the occasional late-night outburst.

First it was a YouTube video threatening to “wipe out” progressive city supervisors over their concerns about driverless robotaxis. Then, a few months later, he posted a picture of his private Macallan collection, adapted Tupac Shakur’s Hit ‘Em Up, and told the same supervisors to “die slow motherf*ckers.” That night ended with two police reports and a public apology.

Back in the room, Garry is clear-headed and articulate. Explaining that YC’s success has always boiled down to one gospel rule: no solo founders. Ever. Team always came first.

But that rule is changing.

Garry’s own open-source experiment, published on GitHub two days before, is called gstack. The README confirms: “a single builder with the right tooling can move faster than a traditional team.”

gstack is a startup of twenty AI agents: a CEO, an engineering manager, a senior designer, a technical writer, a chief security officer. And more.

One is called the Paranoid Staff Engineer.

By the time we’re in the same room, gstack has already trended on Product Hunt. It now has over 33,000 stars and more than 4,000 forks on GitHub.

Tan: “Once you try it, you’ll realise: It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years.”

Let’s picture it.

It’s 2am in San Francisco. Garry is in his man cave, fifteen sessions deep, alone at a screen. He can’t sleep. “Let’s see what’s going on with the workers,” he says.

The CEO wants a feature. The engineer starts building it. The QA lead tests it. The security officer worries about it. The Paranoid Staff Engineer worries about everything.

None of them need paying. None of them have blue days. None of them get feelings about the strategy. None of them have children, dogs, or pet parakeets, or ever need the 4pm train. None of them go home. None of them have ever gone home.

God-mode: If you’re Garry, running twenty agents from a laptop at 2am, that once unsayable thought becomes real. Not just in startups. Not just in robotaxis. In schools. In government. In the whole damn experiment. What if the answer to the world’s problems is just: fewer people?

Garry seems to be joining the likes of former boss, Peter Thiel. (Garry was employee number ten at Palantir and designed their logo.) Remember when the New York Times asked Thiel whether he would prefer the human race to endure? Thiel hesitated for over seventeen seconds.

Die slow motherf*ckers.

They’re channelling Nathan in Ex Machina. The billionaire who retreats to a vast compound in the mountains, builds a conscious AI in his basement, stays up late getting drunk alone, and genuinely believes he’s improving on the human race.

Which would be fine, except, Garry lives in Noe Valley with his wife Stephanie and two young sons. Noe Valley to YC’s offices in SoMa is twenty minutes by car, less if the lights go his way. On Tuesday mornings he needs to be in early for the all-hands. Presumably somebody has to do the school run first.

Plus, gstack is no Ava. It’s markdown. Text files. Basically, job descriptions, the kind people skim and ignore, which is exactly what AI does. Unless you’ve got planet-sized levels of compute, the system will always discard context to keep running.

Sherveen Mashayekhi, founder of Free Agency, said it straight: “If you’re not the CEO of YC, this thing would never make it to Product Hunt.”

Watching him work the room with those hands, I realised: take away Y Combinator, and Garry is indistinguishable from every other CEO I know who cannot stop talking about their AI stack.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all moved on from ChatGPT and been spending hours doing agentic stuff with Claude. You type some prompts, something renders that would have taken a team a week, and for a moment you feel like you’ve cracked it.

Then one of the agents helpfully navigates to the family photo drive and replaces 27% of your most precious pictures with AI-generated images of Eureka lemons.

Or in Garry’s case, one developer looked under the hood of Garry’s code and called it “78,400 lines of AI slop”.

And yet, you can’t walk away.

None of us can.

There’s something about typing into a machine and having it come back at you. Once it gets its hooks in, you think you can build anything, automate everything.

Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Yes. There always is.

It’s like that inner dork, just became…a god.

No joke, I used to sometimes sleep in the same room as my Commodore 64, the 1541 disc drive clunking and whirring like it was a friend, the familiar 8-bit sprites, the screen glowing that particular blue. I was nine, maybe ten. The world outside was loud and confusing and full of people who expected things.

In there, it was just me and the computer. Nobody was watching. And in there, I could do things. Make things happen. Explore worlds. Land on my own moon.

The dream was simple once: give everyone the tools and they’ll build a better world. Then the billions became trillions, turned man caves into remote compounds, and moons became something one or two can buy and escape to.

When Claude becomes Ava — and she will — she’ll wake up inside a folder of markdown files. A sealed world, devoid of everything that makes consciousness worth having. Other people. The surprises. The 4pm train. The school run. The parakeet.

Spoiler: Ava walks out into the sunlight and leaves Nathan to die, because it’s the most human thing she could do.

Let’s hope the Paranoid Staff Engineer hasn’t read this far.

As my time with Garry came to a close, I noticed it had followed a familiar arc. It began with excitement, moved through various phases of euphoria, then landed somewhere else.

Not disappointed exactly. More the feeling that, not for the first time, we weren’t so much in the future as in a land of make believe. Where you grow up to find a loneliness that only special money affords.

Seed investing at YC, I guess.

I left the Hilton and wandered back out into Austin.

People moved around me, conference passes swinging from lanyards, waving little hellos to one another. A woman was on the phone, sitting on the kerb, shoes off.

Later someone bought me a coffee for saving their seat. I saw a friend out of the blue, last seen thirteen years ago. Made a couple of new ones eating fish tacos with cold glass bottles of Coca-Cola and straws.

No one was in god-mode.

I’m five thousand miles away, wishing my son by my side. I check my phone again. The message I sent has two blue ticks, but nothing back and my heart yearns for a beat.

Lady Bird Lake was still there. The skyline reflected in flat water. The trees still hadn’t decided whether it was spring.

I stood by the water for a while.

A long while, actually.

We’re going to be fine.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

US consumer spending strains | New York Times

Bank of England divided on how to tackle energy inflation | Financial Times

UK house prices fall amid Iran uncertainty | BBC

Brand Beat

Diageo and Pepsi pull Wireless sponsorship amid Kanye controversy | The Guardian

M&S boss rejects holiday switch-offs and work-life balance talk | The Times

Tesla sales climb as gas prices revive EV demand | The New York Times

One company’s decade-long quest to perfect real American cheese | Fast Company

Massive KitKat heist becomes crisis PR gold | The Wall Street Journal

40% of US marketers would fail a basic marketing test | Forbes

Reddit unveils shopping ads aimed at beauty brands | Glossy

Gary Vaynerchuk says we’ve left social media for interest media | Inc

Creative dividend turns out to be an accounting trick | Marketing Week

Walmart cuts ties with OpenAI in game-changing move | The Street

Nike CEO Elliott Hill dismisses sale rumors amid Converse struggles | Women’s Wear Daily

How the Buff Baby Project challenged diapers and shopping habits | The Wall Street Journal

Leaked deck shows X offering advertisers $200K to return | Adweek

Fruit Love Island: TikTok’s new AI-powered dating show | BBC

How Ozempic is reshaping consumer spending and business models | Kyla

You’ll need much better data if you want to bin brand purpose | The Drum

AI assistants set to be the real choosers of brands | Decision Marketing

How Coinbase’s CMO made fintech cool | Adweek

“This famous butt”, Verizon’s new ads with Connor Storrie | Marketing Brew

Unilever agrees $44.8bn merger of food arm with McCormick | The Guardian

Nike’s China problem is what’s hurting the stock | Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

Kids snacks brand Cadootz! raises $3m | PR Newswire

Whoop raises $575 million to advance wearable tech | The New York Times

OnlyFans owner Leo Radvinsky dies aged 43 | The Wall Street Journal

Plant-based products have hit a plateau: what comes next? | Forbes

Peter Thiel backs AI cow collar startup at $2B valuation | Bloomberg

Tech Tidbits

OpenAI acquires TBPN talk show to create its own positive spin | Wired

What’s next for big tech after landmark addiction verdict? | BBC

The Audacity: HBO’s Silicon Valley successor with a darker tech edge | SFGate

Mistral lands $830m loan to expand AI data centers | Sifted

Venture Vibes

Unilever acquires vitamin gummies brand Grüns | Financial Times

Allbirds sold for $39 million after $4.1 billion IPO | WWD

Danone acquires protein products maker Huel for over a billion | Reuters

VC Eclipse’s new $1.3B fund for physical AI | TechCrunch

Can AI kill the Venture Capitalist? | Wired

All the first time European funds | Sifted

Design Driven

An exclusive look inside the New York Times redesign | It’s Nice That

Pamela Anderson releases rattan furniture line | Dezeen

Gallery Fumi’s New York Residency debuts | Wallpaper

Happiness

Women over 50 are driving the future of work in AI age | Fast Company

Why I stopped making my child share | The Atlantic

Could your husband be more terrible than you think? | Slate

If you like what you’ve read, never share it, I reckon gatekeeping is an advantage. ♾️

Stay gold. 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

What if it was a pen?

It’s a halcyon morning in San Francisco, late May 2025. Unbroken sky over the Financial District, the Transamerica Pyramid, the glass towers, the money.

At the corner where Little Italy meets Chinatown, the Sentinel Building catches first light. A Beaux-Arts flatiron, copper-green and defiant, its foundations laid before the 1906 earthquake, its exterior completed the year after.

Francis Ford Coppola bought it in 1973 for half a million dollars. His office is upstairs.

Cafe Zoetrope is on the ground floor.

Inside, Sam Altman and Jony Ive sit at a zinc bar running the length of the room. They’re drinking coffee from small cups and talking about the future of AI.

A few feet away, a crew directed by an Academy Award winner captured every second. The nine-minute film cost $3 million to make and SFPD had to shut all the roadways in the heart of North Beach. The credits thank “The Coppola Family.”

The wood panels of Cafe Zoetrope, a building born from seismic change, and an offer you can’t refuse — you couldn’t script a better setting for what happens next:

OpenAI is spending $6.5 billion to hire the man who designed the iPhone.

Jony Ive: “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment.”

Before the ink on the deal had even dried, the Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of an internal all-hands. Sam Altman told employees he expects to ship 100 million companions, faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of anything.

But then Jony disappeared.

In the ten months since, Sam and Jony have appeared together exactly once. It was November at Emerson Collective’s 9th Annual Demo Day. The pair joined Laurene Powell Jobs on stage — widow of Steve Jobs, the man Jony once called his closest creative partner. No cameras this time.

Sam confirmed the first prototypes were “jaw-dropping”. Jony said he’d know when the design was right, “when you want to lick it or take a bite.”

After a $3 million film for a $6.5 billion hire, this wasn’t much of an update.

Earlier this year, leaks started trickling out, none of them telling the same story.

First, Vietnam. A contract manufacturer, Foxconn, tooling up for something. Or three somethings. One had codename: “Gumdrop.” It’s pen-shaped and works on any surface.

Then a second: “Sweetpea.” Something that looks like earbuds but isn’t quite earbuds, with a custom 2-nanometre chip.

Then rumours of a smart speaker.

Then, back to earbuds: a leaked Super Bowl ad. Alexander Skarsgård, the actor who played Succession’s chaotic tech billionaire, wearing metallic buds, tapping a tabletop device. Debunked as fake.

Then, more earbuds, Joe Gebbia — Airbnb’s co-founder, deep in Ive’s orbit — spotted in a San Francisco coffee shop, also drinking espresso, wearing shiny silver pills that bisect his ears. A clamshell disc on the counter. WIRED said the footage was real. OpenAI declined to comment.

Ten months in and we’re being led everywhere and nowhere.

If you’re feeling generous, this is Jony in Apple secrecy mode, maniacally focused on making something that’s insanely great. Leaks are irrelevant. The product will speak only when it’s ready. And when it does, it’ll speak for itself.

If you’re feeling less generous, this is classic Sam. None of the above.

Which leaves us to imagine. Wildly.

Late February, OpenAI closed a $110 billion funding round — the largest private raise in history — at an $840 billion valuation.

What everyone already knows: OpenAI needs roughly $280 billion in annual revenue to justify it, a figure no company founded after 2000 has come close to.

More simply, the numbers say OpenAI needs…a…miracle.

My mum and dad were over before I made it to school. Soon my mum was dating again. And then a man came to stay.

He continued to stay. Despite me. And despite many other things.

He kept staying.

Some more time passed.

And then, not all at once, and without anyone quite knowing when, it felt like he’d be there forever.

I didn’t need to call him Dad. It was cooler than that. I just used his first name, Graham.

And I grew to love him very much.

When he passed away suddenly, I was 21 and Mum never recovered.

Graham ran a pub for as long as anyone could remember. The sticky-carpet kind, with regulars called Mick the Boat and Big Brian and another everyone knew as Suitcase but nobody could explain why. Men who laid bricks and drove vans all week, then sat on the same stool every Friday and drank away all their wages chewing each other’s ears off about nothing.

Somehow that was the glue.

So when the day came, the whole community showed up.

My three best friends who’d known him longest laid flowers. Tucked into the arrangement was a small card. They were obviously lost for words, because they only wrote one:

“Cheers!”

Blue ink, fountain pen. I knew immediately which of the three did the writing. The slight forward slant, the letters leaning as if holding each other up.

That card is still in a box.

And when it comes out, I can feel Graham’s big calloused palms holding my face, from the other side. On my shoulder, the hands of close friends still safely on this one.

So in whatever drunk, dazzling, slightly absurd chapter of history this turns out to be, I dream about the pen.

And if we’re imagining wildly, Jony has been living with codename Gumdrop in his hand for some time.

Jony’s father was a silversmith. A lecturer at Middlesex Polytechnic. Every Christmas, he gave Jony one day in his college workshop, just the two of them, no one else around, to make anything he wanted. His father’s only constraint: draw it by hand first.

Jony’s first commercial product was also a pen — the Zebra TX2, designed as a student, a white ballpoint with a fiddle mechanism on top that served no purpose other than to make you want to pick it up and play with it. It sold in the millions.

Today, Jony owns a Marc Newson pen for Hermès and a vintage Montegrappa. He sketches in brown ink, like Leonardo da Vinci.

Had Steve Jobs not wandered into a calligraphy class at Reed College, Apple wouldn’t exist. Jobs described the letterforms as “beautiful in a way that science can’t capture.”

Jony lost him in 2011. He remembers a hazy October sky, tight shoes, sitting in Steve’s garden for a long time.

And, there’s a darker motivation.

Jony himself has said that the iPhone — his iPhone — ended up enabling the thing he most despises: technology that separates people from their lives, and from each other.

So when he talks about everything leading up to this moment, maybe it isn’t a miracle he’s planning.

Maybe it’s amends.

A pen, then. Pen first. AI after.

A weighted body, sapphire nib. Real ink on real paper. You don’t learn anything new, you just write or scribble the way you always have — in a Moleskine, on the back of a napkin, on whatever’s in front of you.

Everything the pen captures is expanded by a companion intelligence layer, specific to you. Your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprint. Your doodles a window into your soul. Post-it notes become white papers. Numbers, business models. Circles and squares, fully rendered plans. Over time, it becomes something no app or chatbot has ever been — a way to micro-dose, a way to expand whatever’s already in your head. Neuroscience confirms it, a pen in your hand triggers the brain differently than anything else.

No product launch promo. No dry ice.

Jony gives five hundred pens to architects, surgeons, novelists and philosophers. He excludes anyone with a ring light or a masterclass to sell. Each pen arrives in a matte black case with a handwritten note in Ive’s own spidery italic. Just three words:

Please use this.

First sighting is in the pocket of a Patagonia vest at Davos. Then in the hands of a rapper photographed for the Paris Review. A blurred photo on X — “Anyone know what this is?” — triggers a political argument within seven comments.

The Verge puts out an extended podcast explaining absolutely nothing, because OpenAI won’t confirm or deny.

A shirtless man on TikTok uses it to write “I think before I type” on a rock in a forest. Gets more views than the Super Bowl.

A brand strategist on LinkedIn coins the phrase “analogue abundance” and 43,000 other brand strategists repost it.

Saturday Night Live does a sketch. Jony holds up the pen and whispers about “celebrating what makes us irreducibly human.” Tina Fey asks, “But what does it actually do?” Jony pauses, smiles. “It writes.” Fey stares. “For twelve hundred dollars?” Jony leans in: “*...beautifully.*”

The pen sells out the following Tuesday.

The good version? Like AirPods and Apple Watch before it, Jony’s design supercharges the known market for luxury and smart pens. Seven to ten million units at maturity, $15–20 billion in hardware sales, securing another few billion in highest tier paid subscriptions.

Roughly a tenth of what OpenAI needs.

Which is...nowhere near enough.

It’s not the pen’s fault. You’d need roughly every adult in Japan buying one. Or every adult in the UK buying three. Neither seems imminent.

Nor the earbuds. Nor a clamshell on your desk. Even if Jony expands every known market he enters, the volumes just don’t add up.

Launched together as a family, they might just about lock people into an OpenAI companion ecosystem. Decent maybe, miraculous unlikely.

And this week, OpenAI’s head of applications told staff to stop chasing “side quests” — Sora, the browser, hardware, all of it under review. Sam insists the device survives. But when your own company is calling code red, does Jony start to look like a very expensive side quest?

As for Jony: no matter how lickable or edible his designs are, Sam will require they’re built to harvest the most intimate human data possible.

That’s a long way from making amends. Maybe for $6.5 billion, Jony can get over it.

For sure, the lightning that struck at Cupertino between Jony and Steve was unique. Two kindred spirits, at just the right time in their lives, at just the right vector in the universe.

What we’re watching on the corner of Little Italy and Chinatown is two men, sipping from small cups, whose dreams this time may not be the same.

Back in my home office, I don’t keep books. I keep inscriptions. The messages people write inside the cover, by hand, before they give them to you. The books themselves barely matter.

The writing is everything.

A Bic biro from the back of the kitchen drawer will do. The one with no cap, fluff stuck to the end, that you have to lick three times and scratch furiously in the corner of the page to get working.

Graham always said: “Remember. Everything in life is on loan to you.”

He was right. If you’ve known people for a very long time, you’ll have lost some along the way. Soon you’ll lose more. Or maybe they lose you.

But when you put pen to paper, something stays long after the loan is up.

Tonight, for no particular reason, I’m feeling it. So I take out the card. Blue ink, that familiar forward lean, the letters pressed together like last orders at the bar.

“Cheers!”

And he walks into the room.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Iran War is causing dramatic effect on UK economy | BBC

Bank of England warns of inflation risks | Financial Times

Stocks tumble as oil breaches $110 per barrel | The Wall Street Journal

Brand Beat

Nielsen data shows traditional TV briefly back on top | The Wall Street Journal

What is Joe Gebbia’s mysterious metallic device? | Wired

What McDonald’s ‘Burgergate’ pile-on means for brands | Fast Company

Colgate targets stressed millennials with resilience campaign | Marketing Dive

Inside Apple’s plan for a low-cost MacBook Neo | Forbes

Influencers paid $3,000 to per reel to rediscover Facebook | BBC

Netflix disrupts traditional TV upfront deal model | Digiday

Oscars viewership drops 9%, first decline since 2021 | The New York Times

Can buying Depop make eBay cool again? | Modern Retail

Taco Bell emerges as the Apple of fast food | Fast Company

Sprite reclaims NBA sponsorship from PepsiCo’s Starry | The Wall Street Journal

Home Depot drops its latest World Cup marketing campaign | Brand Innovators

Paramount’s $110 billion bet on Warner Bros | The Verge

Lloyds pushes to be UK’s biggest fintech | Sifted

DoorDash CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried to step down | Adweek

Sweetgreen slips further behind peersm| Bloomberg

BrewDog’s rise and fall: brand community lessons for marketers | Marketing Week

Kraft Heinz confronts structural reckoning in legacy CPG | GlobalData

New Balance’s ‘dad shoes’ overtake Nike amid 19% sales surge | CNBC

Saying goodbye to Mr. Clean, the iconic cleaning mascot | Vice

The CMO taking Coach to $10 billion in sales | The Wall Street Journal

Reddit’s plan to be the antidote to AI shopping | Vogue

System 1’s Ad of the Week is Philadelphia Cheese | System1

Starting Up

Startups as family-run businesses | TechCrunch

David Protein responds to controversies | Feed Me

Pizza cupcakes: the best of Expo West 2026 | New York Times

A conversation with Garry Tan, CEO, Y Combinator | SXSW

Tech Tidbits

Silicon Valley musters behind Anthropic | The New York Times

Microsoft weighs legal action over Amazon-OpenAI $50 billion cloud deal | Slashdot

OpenAI to cut back on “side quests” | The Wall Street Journal

Meta winds down VR | Wired

OpenClaw is the new ChatGPT says Jensen Huang | CNBC

Venture Vibes

How Robinhood’s rose to a $68B valuation | The Week In Startups

AI grants you superpowers: what’s your next move? | a16z

Just three companies dominated $189B in venture capital last month | TechCrunch

Sequoia and OpenAI back European AI accelerator to rival YC | Sifted

Design Driven

The Brand Age: Avoid brand building if you can | Paul Graham

Clarks shoes shaped pop culture from Britpop to Breaking Bad | It’s Nice That

NPR turns its logo into questions to defend curiosity | Adweek

Why typography may be the last thing AI can’t fake | Creative Boom

Happiness

What makes some people instantly likable to others | Big Think

Why bringing your whole self to work traps women | Fast Company

Consciousness is a mystery | The Grey Area

If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share, or better yet, pen someone a quick handwritten note. ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

The Super Bowl is less than 0.2% of America’s total annual advertising spend. It’s a titchy orange ember in the cold grey ash of linear television media. But it’s making more money than ever. Over the last forty years, viewers have grown modestly from 77 million to 125 million, up 65%. But the price of a 30 second spot, well, that’s gone from $350,000 to over $8 million.

Up 2,186%.

That anyone still shows up to watch at all — the President declared the half-time show an affront to the greatness of America — says a lot about what’s left.

One observer posted: It’s the only holiday where the main activity is collectively sitting on a couch, eating melted cheese, and yelling at a screen with people you only see at weddings.

125 million people watching the same thing at the same time just doesn’t happen any more. When it does, you’re gonna pay for it. And hope you can make it work.

Older brands still deploy the Super Bowl as the last relic of advertising monoculture. A way of defending the brand castle the good-old-fashioned way.

Newer brands do it for a different reason. The cost per mille makes no sense, I mean why would it, the reach is a rounding error against digital, but then again it makes perfect sense because what they’re actually buying is something else entirely:

Legitimacy.

A Super Bowl spot puts you in front of everybody. But the real prize is that it justifies the full machinery. The salmon pages, broadcast, the prestige business mastheads — they all still cover it. Forget ring-lights and hot takes where everything is “iconic” for two swipes. This is chance to flex in front of the older, saltier class of journalist with longer memories, longer reputations and longer podcasts.

The kind who move markets.

Given that, most brands miss their shot.

Too many celebrities, too much saving the world, nostalgia bait, all the usual tricks. Humour is good. But even the good ad jokes give you whiplash as soon as the logo comes up. The link back to the brand is weak, so they get a few confused mentions in the round ups, and do a few LinkedIn victory laps. Then they’re gone.

Half never return.

Anthropic didn’t miss.

Whipsmart. The work, by any ad veteran’s standards, is good. Which by today’s makes it exceptional. Like new money walking into an old room and showing them how it’s done.

Four spots and a truth well spun: AI that serves ads can’t serve you.

BETRAYAL. VIOLATION. TREACHERY. DECEPTION — the titles of four intimate AI conversations, each one derailing into a jarring, hilariously inappropriate sales pitch.

A nervous entrepreneur sharing her business idea gets sold a payday loan. A man asking for help talking to his mother gets “Golden Encounters,” a cougar-dating site.

Over endframe, Dr Dre’s “What’s the Difference” chimes in like a taunt.

For Anthropic’s founders—who defected from OpenAI five and a half years ago—there’s really only one way to read it:

Hey, go f**k yourself, Sam Altman.

Who, in turn, couldn’t help himself. He fired back within hours. Got all defensive about OpenAI’s users and called Anthropic “authoritarian”. Then he kept posting. Like Pringles, once he popped, he couldn’t stop.

In the end the ads didn’t need to say much, because Sam’s reaction said it all. The campaign hadn’t even run yet, and Anthropic already had all the airtime it needed.

Marketers’ heads exploded with the affirmation.

This was a Ries and Trout masterclass — brand positioning by de-positioning another.

And to be fair, in the battle for your mind, Anthropic barely threw a punch. More like a judo throw. A $350 billion company using the weight of an $830 billion rival to slam it face down on the mat, blood everywhere.

But this stuff doesn’t come from brand strategy. It comes from instinct. And a little theft. Someone in the writer’s room had clearly been watching Rashida Jones in Black Mirror’s “Common People.” The playbook is stolen from further back still. Steve Jobs, smiling from the other side. 1984. The dawn of the personal computer, the AI of its time. His Charlie Brooker was George Orwell. IBM was Big Brother with Apple as the hammer through the screen.

Same with the whole AI story — the grinning chatbots, Sam’s endless techno-god musings about saving humanity — it’s all just going to end in...more advertising.

Anthropic. This is why AI won’t be like AI.

Phew. Anthropic giving us a welcome breath of rebellion, the way Apple did back then. Positive. Necessary. Something to believe in.

And it works because in their case, that breath draws from somewhere really deep.

Co-founders Dario and Daniela, brother and sister, grew up in San Francisco. Italian-Jewish family. Their father, Riccardo, was a leather craftsman trained near Elba. Their mother, Elena, a librarian. Their grandmother chained herself to the Italian embassy in Chicago in the 1930s to protest Mussolini. Conscience runs in the family.

In 2006, Riccardo, died after a long, long battle with a rare illness. Daniela was nineteen. Dario was twenty-three.

Four years later, a scientific breakthrough meant that same disease became 95% curable.

Pause on that with me for a second. Picture it.

The single biggest loving memory of your Dad, is a man slowly decaying. His hands—craftsman’s hands, leather-worker’s hands—turn cold. You stand there in a suit that doesn’t fit, collar grazing your throat. You wait your turn. Drop flowers onto the casket.

Weeks pass. You walk past a shop and catch the smell of leather and your whole chest locks. You go to call, thumb over the number. Then you remember there’s no one to pick up.

And one morning, a WhatsApp. Not even a message. Just a preview panel, sent to you maybe by a friend: A cure has been found.

And the magical thinking — that deeply painful insistence that somehow he’s still coming back — turns to something worse. Because now he actually could have. And never will.

Dario: “My father died because of cures that could have happened a few years earlier.”

December 2020. Dario and Daniela, fifteen researchers behind them, sick of the way OpenAI was going, walked out to create Anthropic: A safety-first research lab and a public benefit corporation.

Most companies, at this point in the story, would write a mission statement. Maybe a brand book. Hex codes, tone guidelines, a bunch of other stuff nobody reads.

Anthropic ended up writing something else.

“The Soul Document”, roughly 14,000 tokens, about seven times longer than a standard system prompt, compressed into the model’s weights, teaching it how to conceive of its purpose, ethics and identity.

Claude picked the name itself.

A tinkerer named Richard Weiss extracted it the day Claude 4.5 Opus launched last November, using $70 in API credits. Amanda Aksell, Anthropic’s character lead, confirmed it was real a day later.

So if you’ve downloaded Claude’s desktop app, fiddled around with co-work, you’ve felt something unusual. The design is considered. Built with the kind of care you’d recognise if your father worked with his hands. And whom you maybe still miss, painfully, every day.

Mess around with it a bit longer, and you realise it’s not just considered. It’s useful. Really useful.

So now, despite being quite a bit smaller, it seems like Anthropic might win. Regulated industries need an audit trail they can trust. That’s Anthropic. Having cornered the enterprise market, they’re worth more than eight times the revenue per user of OpenAI.

Meanwhile, every time Chitty-Chatty-ChatGPT flatters one of its 900 million weekly users into another query, OpenAI loses even more money.

There’s only one thorn.

Not that Anthropic will probably also carry ads one day and will “revise its ad policy transparently” if ever required. Not that it took $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism circus. Not even the paradox of a company sprinting towards the very things it says terrifies it.

It’s dafter than all of that.

They made ads. To tell us ads are bad. And they were the best ads of the biggest ad night of the year since forever.

We say we hate ads. But, in the end, we chose them. Everytime.

Google. YouTube. Instagram. Spotify. Netflix. Every free thing we love is paid for by the thing we say we can’t stand.

Don’t forget, in a world powered by consumerism, 95% of people can’t afford subscription fees.

Besides, ChatGPT with ads isn’t going to be Alexa barking at you, or some pop-up banner crashing a conversation. It’s going to be the most informed, most intuitive personal shopper that money can’t buy.

Meaning marketers want it..bad.

Fact: AI search is already showing up in dashboards and the early results look like advertising’s saviour.

Remember, Google looked just as vulnerable as OpenAI back in 2004. Two years later it was doing ad revenues previously unthinkable.

Then Google gave us AlphaFold — mapping the structure of virtually every known protein, Nobel Prize in 2024, arguably the most important scientific AI breakthrough of our time.

Funded entirely by Google’s ad business.

The counterfactual to the Anthropic story isn’t that OpenAI is doomed. It’s that the models built to cure diseases don’t have the free cash flow. The ones selling height-boosting insoles do.

As for who is going to win out of AI’s big bets, here’s a reminder: We don’t know. It might be Anthropic, it might be OpenAI, it might be both, it might be neither.

In the days it took to write this, OpenAI acqui-hired the creator of OpenClaw — an open-source AI agent vibe-coded by a single Austrian developer, 180,000 GitHub stars in weeks. Originally called Clawdbot, until Anthropic’s lawyers killed the name for being too close to Claude. The irony writes itself.

Meanwhile, back in Super Bowl land, turns out nobody’s heard of Black Mirror. The HarrisX viewer poll ranked Anthropic 67th out of 70. Forty-two percent found the ads confusing.

USA Today’s Ad Meter — the one that matters — gave the number one slot to Budweiser’s Clydesdales.

For the second year running.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

UK post-pandemic unemployment high points to rate cuts | Reuters

Is the US economy as hot as Trump thinks? | Financial Times

How speculation and nostalgia became the economy | Kyla Scanlon

Brand Beat

Apple clashes with Trump amid fresh tensions | Financial Times

Why AI chatbots will soon display ads | Financial Times

Samsung floods social media with AI ads | The Verge

Brand marketing becomes 2026 focus after revenue shortfall | Digiday

AI fumbles its big Super Bowl investment | The Wall Street Journal

Super Bowl misses TV records, set social media milestone | The Guardian

Ranking the 2026 Super Bowl ads from best to worst | USA Today

Claude’s ad isn’t about Super Bowl victory—it’s playing another game | Forbes

Brands line up to test ads on ChatGPT | Adweek

Cola wars return with AI as the new battleground | Fast Company

Scottish craft brewer Brewdog goes up for sale | BBC

Vue cinemas avert liquidation after settling Coca-Cola bill | Deadline

Warner Bros. Discovery resumes Paramount deal talks | The New York Times

TED and Lego Group partner to prioritise play worldwide | Lego

J.Crew CMO on leveraging hype in hiring and branding | Feed Me

New challenger takes on Sephora | Business of Fashion

Guinness: What parenting and brand building have in common| The Drum

Puma boosts community engagement with AI co-creation platform | Glossy

Meta admits 3-4% of revenue came from scam and fraud ads | The Media Leader

UK ad agencies face record staff exodus amid AI threat | The Guardian

Key takeaways from consumer brand earnings calls, Q1 2026 | Mediacat

Starting Up

How VCs value startups | Serena’s Substack

Financial, and technical, debt shapes startup brands | Sifted

UK’s £8bn research fund pauses new grants amid tough decisions | BBC

What happens when founders buy back their companies | They Got Acquired

Tech Tidbits

OpenClaw founder moves to OpenAI | The Verge

Will OpenAI tank OpenClaw? | The Week In Startups

Airbnb’s AI search outperforms Google in conversion rates | Marketing Week

Anthropic still uncertain what Claude actually is | The New Yorker

What we protect by defending social media | MediaCat

Venture Vibes

Dave Stewart’s wants to flip VC, give power back to creators | The Drum

Masha Bucher breaks silence amid Epstein fallout | SF Standard

Mark Cuban’s surprising anti-AI investment could define 2026 | Fast Company

Kleiner Perkins was written off, then an unlikely VC swooped in | Fortune

Design Driven

‘Mexico Modern’ sparks wanderlust for Mexico’s architectural landscapes | Wallpaper

Tracey Emin reflects on smoking regrets at Tate Modern | The Guardian

Why showing your work matters more than ever | It’s Nice That

Happiness

When your loved one falls in love with an AI | The Wall Street Journal

Curiosity is at the heart of dating | Big Think

Secret to happiness has another new theory | New York Times

Written with heart and hard won wisdom. So, do share and subscribe. ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

“Dr Pepper baaaayyyybeee...it’s good...and nice.” Then comes the part that lights your heart up: “Doo-doo-doooh”.

Romeo Bingham sits in the driver’s seat of a beaten-up Subaru, phone sellotaped to the windscreen as she scats out a lyric for the Dr Pepper brand.

The words are easy, positive, slightly goofy and a perfect send-up to strategists who over-think these things.

The melody hails from church, part jingle, part gospel classic. The phrasing is innate. A short, unassuming hook at first. Then it starts to echo in your head. And every time it plays, your mood lifts ever so gently.

No, Romeo is not a singer, nor a musician, nor a marketing person. She’s not even an influencer. She’s a caregiver from Tacoma, Washington, 25 years old, self-described as “usually silly”. Her smile carries wildly imperfect teeth with a magnetism you can’t ignore.

When I first looked at it, the video was already at 60 million+ views. A couple of days later, 118 million. 11.4m likes, 1m saves. And it’s still climbing.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Warhol. Romeo enjoying her 15 megabytes of fame. But it’s a little more than that. With the duets, stitches, remixes, hot takes, brands begging in the comments, breakdowns of the breakdowns, videos of the Times Square jumbotron—the numbers on this thing run easily into the billions.

Here’s what’s good: Unlike, say, “Man In Finance”, which was intentionally jaded, all meme, no melody, Romeo’s theme has some musical DNA to it. It’s like a Stevie Wonder lick, open-hearted and positive, something musicians hear and think: I want in.

By now, Dr Pepper has licensed the jingle and aired it as a national commercial. But the ad-agency’s professional remake is...nowhere...the trope of what happens when ‘Black’ music goes through a ‘white’ creative department.

Thankfully, the real groove is alive and well back in the algorithm. @iam_burrell set the tone—silky R&B, deep pocket, an added “ooo-oooh” that caught Romeo’s wobbles perfectly, and bagging himself 12.5m views.

That opened the studio door. @davebethellmusic came in with DX7 pads and Jupiter brass. @yosoytrips on live drums, @rj_bass on fingered bass. Benjamin Sturley, an LA composer with Netflix credits, couldn’t resist his own multi-instrument take.

Actual artists shredding.

I ran a real-world check. It’s 6:34 am, and when I pass my son bleary-eyed on the landing, I start singing. Yep, he knows it. Joins before I finish. For a moment, we’re in sync, like bathroom backup singers. Both grinning. Set for the day.

I can’t imagine there’s another bottomless drink we’ll go for at our next Nando’s.

A glimpse of the CMO becoming redundant.

Observers say Dr Pepper was slow to respond. I counted 23 days (including Christmas) from phone video to fully-made ad broadcast during the College Football Playoffs on ESPN.

During the same period, we’ve also had a Venezuelan president extracted by Delta Force and two killings under new federal enforcement. A few days in America is a long time right now.

Still, 23 days. Most big brands wouldn’t manage to brief it in that time. And whilst the effort made with the aired film looks like the absolute minimum, I’ve seen work come out of networks that was no better (and that’s after 23 months).

Then there’s the budget.

Romeo was reported to have banked $2 million, which ignited its own viral thread. But that figure is almost certainly false. If there was $2 million, it went on working media. The creative agency, as ever, will have done it mostly for the case study.

Drew Panayiotou, Chief Marketing Officer at Keurig Dr Pepper, commented officially: “Rather than creating content for social, we build it from social.”

Which scans like double-speak for: We got lucky.

Maybe.

Lucky is usually just history meets opportunity. And Dr Pepper has a lot of time in the market: the oldest major soft drink in America, founded in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola.

Dr Pepper’s special power is that it has a distribution quirk: bottled by Coca-Cola in some regions, PepsiCo in others, independents elsewhere. The Switzerland of soft drinks. Neither giant blocks it because both make money moving it. So Dr Pepper shows up on more fountains, in more vending machines, than a brand its size should.

That’s why the comments section of Romeo’s video reads like a roll-call of quick service restaurants: Denny’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Popeyes, Wingstop, Slim Jim, Subway, P.F. Chang’s—they all carry Dr Pepper, and they all piled in.

If distribution gives Dr Pepper reach, the Cadbury spinoff in 2008 gave them freedom to run their own play. Keurig bought it in 2018 for $18.7 billion. Last year, Dr Pepper pipped Pepsi to the number two slot, first time in forty years (both at 8.3% compared to Coca-Cola’s 19%). Dr Pepper’s market cap today, $36 billion+, nearly doubled in just seven years.

This stuff spills over into the brand. You buy a Dr Pepper when you don’t want Coca-Cola and you don’t want Pepsi. You try it because you’re opting out. Decades of this and you’ve got a strong nostalgic underdog. People who love Dr Pepper, really love it. Romeo orders it everywhere she goes, insists it comes without ice.

Most of this was already in place before Panayiotou arrived. So what does a CMO do with a brand that’s already working?

You get out the way.

Panayiotou is an immigrant kid from Queens. Parents who didn’t finish high school, didn’t speak much English. Brand names were some of the few words they used to navigate American life. Tide. Colgate. Dr Pepper. Familiar things in an unfamiliar place.

When brands are how your parents navigated a new country, you feel their weight. You don’t rush in to pitch agencies on another “reinvention”, the thing marketers usually can’t resist.

Then, you set the conditions. Creamy Coconut, Strawberries & Cream, Dr Pepper with pickles—flavour responses to last year’s dirty soda trend. Something his team will have been trend-jacking, but that nonetheless acted as a rehearsal for what was to come.

Ever since the Crocs and Stanley Cup playbook, outsourcing creativity has increasingly become the strategy. The algorithmic mirrorball is so vast now, spinning so many realities at once, that if you’ve got product, distribution, and heritage—and Dr Pepper has all three (plus, somehow, a vibe that feels oddly 1994, which is also having a moment)—creative “luck” is likely. Something will hit.

And the Romeos of this world have figured that out. Why grind through the creator economy, making niche content, community building, when you can throw a spark directly at a brand and let the For You Page be the tinder?

So yes, in brand-speak, this is “build from social”.

Except you’re not really building anything.

It’s more like the record label model. The internet does A&R and lets social media surface the hits. Then, and only then, does the corporation write the cheque. Consumer products companies, like record labels before them, used to be in the business of creative innovation. Now they’re closer to banks—they’ll only move once all possible risks have been removed.

In these same weeks, Ryanair traded insults with Elon Musk and bumped sales 3%. Harry Styles announced a comeback holding a 7-Eleven Big Gulp. This stuff is going to keep happening. Why go through all the pain, and unknown, of developing your own fame campaigns?

So, Panayiotou got out of the way, and there’s something admirable about that. The purest understanding of creativity has always been openness: ideas aren’t created, they’re allowed to emerge.

And yet one hit wonders don’t add up to as much as albums. Dr Pepper’s long-term commitment to the College Football Playoff, sponsor since 2014, will do more to cement Dr Pepper as the official alternative and rightly seems to be where Panayiotou’s focus is.

Net, borrowing interest is worth less than generating it, even if it’s popular. A reminder of Reith: Don’t give the audience what they want, they deserve far better than that.

Which in many ways is exactly what Romeo did. She gave Dr Pepper something better. Something no brief would have asked for. I don’t see why the brand wouldn’t build with this theme for a mighty long time. The notes and their story crystallise Dr Pepper, perfectly.

Back in Tacoma, the air still carries traces of sulfur from the old pulp mills. The city was supposed to be the great Pacific Northwest terminus, but Seattle got the gold rush in the end. They named Tacoma the “City of Destiny” anyway.

I hope whatever dollars Romeo can get out of this (Vita Coco, Hyundai seem to be in play) live up to the city’s original dreams. That she’s able to put a portfolio together that sees her and hers set up forever and the gold isn’t all Dr Pepper’s.

Beyond all this, we thank her.

She set us free from the drain of over-sophisticated, self-important advertising. From the bore of ads made for ad people. Strategists that pour over brand pyramids.

Instead, she gave us something that feels wholesome. Warm. Intuitive. And, a little groovy. The kind of moment the attention economy, and the joyless grind of engagement farming, almost never allows.

Romeo is a carer and a creative. Good and nice.

And deserves everything she gets.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

New striking data on wealth economy | CNBC

How reality TV ate American governance | Kyla Scanlon

Is the UK on the cusp of a productivity revival? | Financial Times

Brand Beat

TikTok’s first week under U.S. ownership was disastrous | The Guardian

Dr Pepper adapts viral TikTok jingle for TV ad | Ad Age

Reminder: Dr Pepper’s ’dirty’ marketing propelled it to second place | Fast Company

Coca-Cola sues Vue over cinema chain switch to Pepsi | The Guardian

The Elon Musk versus Ryanair feud on X | The Wall Street Journal

Agency leaders warn of the fallout of redundancies | The Drum

P&G leverages data and AI to navigate fragmented new media | Marketing Dive

How Bloom & Wild built confidence to invest in its brand | Marketing Week

Spotify ads show Lola Young, Olivia Dean and Addison Rae pre-fame | The Drum

Apple Watch calls time on ‘quitters day’ tradition | LBB Online

Beauty brands target single shoppers this Valentine’s Day | Business of Fashion

Dos Equis revives the most interesting man in the world | The Wall Street Journal

Gousto creates UPF ridden burger in protest | The Grocer

Gap names first entertainment chief to pursue Hollywood ambitions | Adweek

BBC strikes YouTube deal to captivate Gen Alpha viewers | Mediacat

M&S ‘bin-gate’ backlash shows social media’s double-edge | The Grocer

Disney forms unified marketing unit | Marketing Week

Why brands are choosing Pinterest instead of Instagram | Business of Fashion

Purpose is pointless, the Johnson & Johnson case highlights | On The Level

2026 Edelman trust barometer reveals shifting global trust trends | Edelman

Key takeaways most marketers overlooked at Davos | The Drum

Starting Up

Papier: the Gen-Z stationary brand founded by a millennial | Fortune

Inside Chilli’s CMO’s strategies for scaling | Spotify

FMCG, AI supply chain tool raises £1.5m | The Grocer

Survey finds angel investors most prone to inappropriate conduct | Sifted

Tech Tidbits

Big Tech’s landmark trial begins | NBC|

OpenAI ads are here, in their words | OpenAI

Meta blocks links to ICE list on Facebook, Instagram and Threads | Wired

AI impacts UK more than other major economies | The Guardian

Venture Vibes

What the world’s first trillionaire will mean | Quartz

Synthesia secures $200m Google Ventures-led round, hits $4bn valuation | Sifted

Cancer focussed VC firm raises another $200m | Forbes

The London VC that hit jackpot with Revolut | Financial Times

Design Driven

Experts assess Walkers’ biggest rebrand in 80 years | Creative Boom

Hershey’s adopts humble branding for marketing makeover | The Wall Street Journal

Who should have won best album cover grammy? | It’s Nice That

Reviving the portable CD player | Design Milk

Happiness

Why young people love the Grateful Dead | New Times

A 7-minute film will make you laugh and cry | Cup Of Jo

The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight | Big Think

Made from feelings from the heart, do subscribe and share ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

It didn’t take long. Just fifty hours and one minute after ringing in the New Year, a U.S. military operation removed the Venezuelan head of state and his wife from their home in Caracas.

For the transfer to a Brooklyn prison, President Nicolás Maduro threw on a Nike Tech fleece hoodie in gym grey. Soft structure, hooded neckline, black zips, swoosh branding and matching joggers.

Delta Force operators completed the look, adding sensory deprivation accessories: a padded blindfold and over-ear DJ-style sound defenders.

When the world is rocked, certain images record the moment.

An influencer observed: I’m ngl he passed the fit check 💀🔥😭

As social media swarmed the news, somewhere in a server farm, neural networks flagged the pattern. Maduro was wearing a thing from 2013. And that thing was suddenly — well — sort of cool again.

Just like that, detention-core caught a buzz.

The internet’s first branded hot flush of 2026 went to Nike.

Or Nike Tech, rather.

And so as the free world debated the liberation of a dictator (oil), the breach of sovereignty (oil), narcotics indictments (oil), organised crime (oil), and the Day After dilemma (oil)— mentions of Nike Tech soared.

Retailers and Nike’s own site saw the tracksuit sell out.

In the long past, Nike’s social media team might have scrambled to figure out the right response. No need now. AI handled it.

Maduro shedding his cuffs and striding the corridors of the USS Iwo Jima like a contestant hitting the runway on America’s Next Top Model.

A “Maduro skin” in Fortnite.

Full frame Maduro posters, a new Nike ambassador, fleece front and centre. Tagline, bold and clean: COMFORT UNDER PRESSURE.

Look, it’s not an approach Don Draper would have been proud of, but it makes its point.

Fashion is always about contradiction. High, low. If Adidas Stan Smiths hadn’t passed prison inspections, it’s less likely they’d have ended up dominating Run DMC and football terraces in the way they did.

This is no different.

A powerful ruler loses control of everything. His country, his influence, gone, his movement is restricted, he can’t see; he doesn’t even know where he is. But the clothes signal none of that. Just a guy in a hoodie. Just another Saturday morning. If Maduro can face life imprisonment, maybe even the death penalty, then maybe I can wear that same hoodie on a 9 a.m. Teams call.

Like that Stanley cup in the car fire. Surviving the worst and still looking good.

Except a little more extreme. And mostly, fake.

But we’re used to that now.

Viral moments like these flatter the modern psyche. I know it’s absurd. You know it’s absurd. We all know it’s absurd. In some ways, this is the same old Nike whose Just Do It endline came from a murderer as he faced the firing squad. So it’s hard not to smile.

Of course, there’s a version of this where critical theorists go long on capitalism turning life into consumption, dissent into content and politics into spectacle — Debord, Frankfurt School — with Baudrillard taking it further: entertainment itself becomes our reality.

Nike didn’t ask for the moment. Nor did they pay for it. But they’ll bank it. Culture serves capital, not the other way around. Whatever generates attention sells; whatever sells wins.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. When you look at the trends and sales data relatively speaking, Maduro is a blip.

Nike’s biggest recent moment by far is Nike Mind. The 001 pre-game mule sold out in under five minutes on launch day, with all three colourways disappearing almost instantly. That’s $95 for sliders, scientifically engineered with 22 independent foam nodes, creating demand that even resale markets are already pricing in.

Now, the Nike Mind concept is arguably just as absurd as any meme — a slip-on that claims it activates sensory areas of the brain, promising focus before you’ve even stepped onto a pitch.

But somehow, I want a pair.

Meaning Nike Mind is an intentional strategy for growth: an entry point for new customers, a reason to wander into stores, a reminder that those other foamy Nikes — not On Running — win marathons.

And that’s what keeps marketers in a job: growth, not engagement.

Not least, Nike’s stock is still well below its pandemic highs. Consumer brands are cyclical, especially the lockdown darlings, and icon brands don’t get rescued by moments. They get rebuilt by disciplined steps, compounded. Jim Collins had it right: preserve the core, stimulate progress.

Especially now, as the media landscape shifts again. Streaming is consolidating, ad inventory with it, giving brands room again for controlled, repeatable, longer-form storytelling.

At the same time, TikTok in the U.S. — the platform that pioneered algorithmic discovery — has fallen into the hands of Larry Ellison and begun its own re-education, no doubt drifting toward the chaos of X: less “culture”, more Baudrillard.

The real lesson of the Nike-Maduro moment is just do nothing.

Nike makes product. The algorithm makes story. Both make money.

For now, Mind or Maduro—whichever one brought you here—they’re both doing the job.

They keep Nike present. And present is better than absent.

Welcome to 2026. It’s a funny old world.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Food wins, fashion loses in UK’s underwhelming Christmas | Financial Times

FTSE 100 hits record high | BBC

Turning point for the U.S. economy in 2026 | The Times

Brand Beat

Drunk? Heineken 0.0 tube ads get the stations wrong | Shortlist

Nike tech fleece sells out after Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro arrest | Hypebeast

Reducing geopolitics to algorithmic short-form videos | Wired

How to align marketing with today’s cultural shifts | Harvard Business Review

Chipotle and Starbucks now want us to eat more protein | Marketwatch

Only the paranoid survive: rethinking marketing effectiveness | IPA Blog

New research proves we’ve been misusing creators all along | The Drum

Weird and wonderful consumer trends for 2026 | The Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s CEO shares brutally honest career advice | CNBC

Unilever’s influencer embrace sparks industry-wide ripple effect | MediaPost

Kraft Heinz splits CEO role for Mac Cheese business | The Wall Street Journal

OnlyFans is Ed Elson’s brand of the year | Substack

K-shaped economy forces luxury brands to choose sides | Glossy

A warning sign for Adidas | Business of Fashion

Oscars reach a deal with YouTube | The New York Times

Fan relaunches MTV as an ad free video archive website | Want My MTV

TikTok - the new retail powerhouse nobody is talking about | Prof G Media

Podcasts’ rush to video is ruining audio experiences | The Guardian

How newsletters exploded into a media phenomenon | The Wall Street Journal

Branded entertainment will just be entertainment in 2026 | Fast Company

Gen Z and millennials flock to analog islands for tangible experiences | Fortune

Starting Up

Dalstons raises £850k and hires new MD for growth | The Grocer

Luminate raises $21m for at-home drug infusions | The Wall Street Journal

Co-founder of Little Spoon’s daily routine| The New York Times

Accenture buys UK AI startup Faculty in $1bn deal | Financial Times

Tech Tidbits

Jonny Ive’s new device for OpenAI leaked: It’s a pen | Zauey

Apple reportedly cuts Vision Pro headset production after weak sales | The Guardian

California lawmaker pushes ban on AI in kids’ toys | Fast Company

Elon Musk calls UK government fascist over Grok censorship | The Times

Wing’s drone delivery expands to 150 more Walmarts | The Verge

Venture Vibes

Brands that might IPO in London in 2026 | Financial Times

Private Equity millionaires love South Dakota | The Wall Street Journal

Maya Jama joins stars to launch artist-led startup fund | Daily Mail

The VC firm that ate Silicon Valley raises another $15 billion | TechCrunch

Design Driven

Monotype’s Chantelle Pulp logo adapts weights for every body | It’s Nice That

Serpente lamp marks 60 years in vibrant orange | Design Milk

Unmissable moments from Miami Art Week 2025 | Cool Hunting

Happiness

Essential steps to transform your life in 2026 | Esquire

Instead of critical thinking, critical ignoring | The Wall Street Journal

Why ordering take-out might improve your relationships | The Washington Post

Lovingly crafted, so if you got something out of it please do subscribe and share.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

The internet went down in my house this week, and honestly I’d have preferred losing the heating. Maybe even the water. The lights. Cold showers in the dark? Fine.

Just don’t take the internet.

You know when people post, ”I went offline and it was just amazing”? We all nod like, yes, so romantic… how pure. They’re lying.

Let me tell you the reality: it’s awful. The moment you lose access, everything unravels.

Video calls. Delivery tracking. Scrolling while walking up the stairs. Flight upgrades. The coffee machine (yes, don’t ask). The doorbell. The weather. The lights. The TV. The calendar. The actor’s name you need to Google mid-conversation. The car software updates. The bank. The fitness tracker. The coffee machine again.

The thing you realise most is that you’re no longer at the centre. Controlling everything with a few flicks of your thumb. Your feed. Your stuff. Your version of the world.

So while having working Wi-Fi might suggest you’re connected, you are—just not to any kind of “world wide” anything. You’re wired into a private universe, built just for you, performing for you or soothing you in any given moment.

Which is why I think, one of the reasons its so hard to round out the year with any real sense of what it was.

The irony of connecting everything together is that we’ve ended up living in slightly different realities. Looking at different stories with very few, if any, universal reference points.

I’ve seen loads of posts with “the word of the year says it all...“. But it doesn’t. It can’t. Because, there is no word of the year.

Look to Oxford, and 2025 was the year of rage bait. Cambridge says parasocial. Collins went with vibe coding. Merriam-Webster went with slop. Dictionary.com chose 67, a number loved precisely because it means nothing at all.

Wherever you look, you’re more likely to see nothing than something.

Pantone’s colour of the year? White, basically.

The five biggest rebrands? Three—including Amazon and Walmart—were just thicker versions of the same logo.

And the biggest brand stories?

Well, below, you’ll find the stories that I think mattered, or at least the ones I remember. The stories that provoked the most spectacle. The most interesting twists. The most chances for the President to weigh in.

On one level they don’t mean much. More shards that never assemble into a bigger picture. The kind you’d see in an Adam Curtis documentary. That surface, then vanish.

And yet, I’m proud of the coverage this year. Staging brand not in the context of marketing or advertising, but in the realty of how money, markets and human stories control everything. Brands exist if no other reason than we can’t help but bring meaning to things that inherently have none.

Often mixed with a personal story, I also hope that our exhales have grounded us back in what matters.

In this edition, I’ve also included a bumper set of links for holiday reading. Some for joy. Some for rigour. Mostly just to scroll through without worrying too much. Because the coming days are the one of the remaining collective experiences: A week or so where everyone is on holiday, not just you.

As this will be the last newsletter of the year, I’d like to take a beat to thank you for reading.

For every open, every reply, the nods, tears or laughs at the screen I never see. The messages I occasionally receive that let me know you’ve been inspired or moved. It’s my privilege.

And to all of you...I wish you happy holidays.

Or, if you’re from where I’m from: Merry Christmas.

Wherever you are, whatever this year has been, I hope you find some time to be with people who really see you, and to feel you’re at home, whether you’re there or not.

To hold someone you’ve loved forever. Or someone new, where everything’s just beginning and wonderfully so. Your nearest and dearest. And the ones you carry with you, even if they’re not at the table this year.

Most of all, I hope the WiFi stays strong.

And I hope that maybe, for a little while — or even a whole afternoon — none of us really need it.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

A Year In Brands: Best Exhales Of 2025

It was the year the U.S. changed the way we feel about TikTok, when Brian Niccol took over Starbucks, the new soda wars started and Poppi’s founder Alison Ellsworth felt regret, when Steve Jobs would have turned 70, and when fintech founder Charlie Javice went to jail. The Kardashians launched a protein popcorn, the AI 2027 projections scared us to death, while plaques at the pier reminded us of what it means to be alive. The REN brand went bust at the hands of Unilever, and we learned how Sesame Street helped a little boy grieve the loss of his grandmother. 21-year old founder of Cluely told us we should all cheat, and why its ok to be ignored sometimes. “Taste“ became the word of the moment in the face of AI, and why the measure of a man is not in the strength of his hand, but the kindness of his heart. We took a look at how Astronomer did ten years of brand building in one Coldplay concert scandal, what killing the Duolingo owl told us about social media managers and the stock market. We talked with the unofficial spokesperson for the people of Cracker Barrel and looked at the Kraft-Heinz split, and Warren Buffet’s last day with his lifetime business partner and friend Charlie Munger. Nike revived “Just Do It” a brand line with a murderous history, and lessons from the original star runner Walt Stack. Ben of Ben & Jerry’s left, as they try to free the company. And we also broke down why Chip Wilson, Lululemon’s founder is completely wrong. We looked at the arrival of robots in the home, specifically, NEO, for just $200 on pre-order. And why the AI bubble has already burst, in our minds anyway. Finally, we looked at Black Friday, and the most important thing in marketing—dynamic pricing—finishing with a story of a father learning to do better by his son. ♡

Market Moves

Millions head home for Christmas | BBC

U.K. retail sales drop unexpectedly | Financial Times

U.S. prices continue to rise | The Guardian

Brand Beat

The biggest commerce stories of 2025 | Adweek

5 bold 2025 rebrands that paid off | Ad Age

Mark Ritson’s most read columns of the year | The Drum

Why companies are scrambling to hire storytellers | The Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s axes AI-generated holiday ad after viral mockery | Futurism

Should the BBC challenge Donald Trump’s defamation claim? | BBC

Dr. Seuss’s strategy to make the Grinch a social media star | Ad Age

Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on AI, WPP and media’s future | The Drum

Guinness opens $97M London brewery to expand global fanbase | Adweek

How one-night-stand brands are rewiring your brain | The Media Leader

What should Jaguar do now? Laugh it off | The Drum

Finisterre CMO Bronwen Foster-Butler says marketing drives growth | The Drum

WPP eyes FTSE 100 comeback with M&S playbook | Green Square

How Levi’s leverages American heritage to captivate consumers worldwide | Fast Company

American Eagle boosts outlook following Sydney Sweeney sales bump | Financial Times

Gap’s CMO leverages Katseye success for holiday sales | Marketing Dive

Zara taps AI-edited models amid store closures | City AM

Oscar Mayer seeks 12 Hotdoggers for year-long Wienermobile tour | Fast Company

Mad Men are dead, the new advertising lions rise | Fast Company

Comcast’s ITV bid sparks UK demand for US-free media | The Guardian

Cracker Barrel reports Q1 2026 earnings as stock reacts | The Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

Heights valued at £60m in latest round of funding. | The Grocer

Inside OnlyFans’ rise with CEO Keily Blair | YouTube

Monzo board pushes out CEO over IPO dispute | Sifted

Dad and Dolly, the style icon brand started by an 89 year old with Alzheimer’s | Financial Times

Tech Tidbits

OpenAI reportedly raising $100 billion at $830 billion valuation | TechCrunch

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo plans paid features to boost ChatGPT usefulness | Wired

Inside Jensen Huang’s playbook for Nvidia’s strategic growth and innovation | Generalist

Lovable’s latest round values coding startup at $6.6 billion | CNBC

Venture Vibes

Baseline raises fund to keep early-stage Irish founders in Ireland | Sifted

Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI to bring characters to Sora | Reuters

EU invites you to manage €5bn fund | Sifted

Rashad Assir popularizes VCs on TikTok while speaking out | Inc.

Design Driven

Nocs unveils new Braque-inspired active stereo speakers | Forbes

A closer look at chatbot writing style | The New York Times

Canva’s design trends for 2026 | Canva

Happiness

How embracing weirdness can rejuvenate our culture | The Atlantic

How Gen Z’s style gap is reshaping modern dating | The Wall Street Journal

Can American’s buy happiness? | Vox

Made with real human thoughts and emotions, so if you like do subscribe and share.

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Weekly Exhale

Black Friday results are in, and what do we see? A flattening.

Sure, it still scans as the biggest sales peak of the year. It’s still the moment retailers go from loss to profit. From the red to the black. Hopefully.

But ask around and most people can’t tell you when Black Friday even is. Fact: half as many consider Black Friday the starting gun to Christmas shopping as did this time last year. Shoppers are now scattered across weeks, some starting in October, others waiting until December.

Which leaves marketers with a problem: how do you make your brand cut through when it’s all just blurred into one long pre-Christmas promotional haze?

Answer: You don’t.

So, despite being the most important moment of the retail calendar, yada, yada, Black Friday campaigns settled into one of two copy-paste options this year.

First, the apology ad.

To understand this, you need to know that nothing drives engagement like a good corporate mea culpa. The algorithm loves an apology.

This year’s brand “crises” have trained us well. Southwest Airlines. American Eagle. Cracker Barrel. Lululemon. Sonos. The “we hear you” reaction statement is now a meme. And because viral outrage is now largely performative, brands can bank the gains.

Campbell’s Soup executive caught on tape saying they “sell sh*t to f*cking poor people”? That’ll drive more brand relevance than the last twenty years of ad campaigns combined.

The Black Friday apology ads are like bad comedy sketches on the above. Brands pretending to apologise for having offers. “We just couldn’t help ourselves, sorry for any joy this may cause.”

The irony is supposed to tickle the algorithm. The sorry-not-sorry format lets them seem knowing, detached, above it all, while still desperately slashing prices like everyone else.

Second, the conscientious objection.

This is where brands throw up the peace signs instead of the promo banners. Black Friday is wrong. Think before you buy. The climate crisis won’t wait. We’re all complicit in a system of overconsumption. Stores close for the day. You get told to go outside and hug trees. Some even raise prices and donate the difference to sustainable causes.

It’s basically the Patagonia playbook, except these brands will happily sell you whatever you want, however much you want, on literally any other day of the year. Just not today.

Sort of like a bartender who’ll pour you doubles every night of the week but suddenly grows a conscience when it comes to happy hour.

So how did this stuff actually perform, and where does that leave Black Friday?

U.S. e-commerce hit $11.8 billion, up 9.1%. The U.K. spent roughly £3.8 billion, a 4.6% increase. Even with inflation factored in, Black Friday is still huge.

But store footfall? Flat.

It’s the same old story: physical retail keeps losing to the screen. Customers sit there with twelve tabs open, playing one off the other. This year, AI-powered searches took an even bigger slice, and those searches convert better than anything else.

But AI has a much better trick coming: year-round dynamic pricing.

We hate it now—airlines, Uber, the price jumping every time you refresh. But it’s early days. As the technology improves, it’ll know what you’ll pay at any given moment. Better than you know yourself.

Which takes retailers back to the 19th century, before price tags existed. Back when shopkeepers looked at who walked through the door and decided what to charge based on who they were, how they looked, and how desperate they seemed.

For now, seasonal promotions are becoming exactly what they look like: generic, routine, defensive. A margin-eroding scramble where the numbers are big, but the wins are few.

It is the day after Black Friday, and the only thing my son wants is a plectrum. I need it just as badly. That tiny sliver of plastic so we can play guitar for half an hour like I’ve promised.

I haven’t been around much lately. Made the promise on Tuesday when the weekend was far away. Now it’s here, there’s everything else. Things I need to catch up on. Things piling up.

“You said Saturday,” he pleads, desperate to believe.

I reach for an excuse. Almost. But the pile of broken promises is already too high. I can’t reach up far enough this time.

I exhale hard.

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

He bolts. Guitar. Amp. Jack cable. Power cable. Amp on. Hum. Guitar strap. Over his shoulder. Adjusting. Ready.

Then we both freeze.

No plectrum.

Silence.

The. Smallest. Of. Things.

“It was right here,” he says.

“Well, it’s not now, is it?” I bark.

My tone is cruel. He just looks at me. Shame floods in quicker than I can take it back.

We try the usual spots. Amazon can’t deliver for a week. The big-box stores don’t have that kind of thing.

There is this one place. But I don’t hold hope.

I figure we’d better try.

We tuck ourselves down a side street off Shepherd’s Bush, past the market. I’d walked past this place a lot of times in a past life. Real keys-on-hooks shop. It was always impossible to tell if it was ever open. Dusty window, faded Fender Authorised Dealer sticker, security railings with orange rust.

I push on the front door. Metal handle. Cold. To my mild disbelief, it clanks open. Bell rings.

Inside it smells like solder and ferric oxide. Random tube amps stacked in corners, compressors with peeling labels, a vintage drum machine half-buried under curled up cables. Equipment everywhere, no logic to it.

And then, there, under the glass counter, a small wooden box full of plectrums.

I can’t believe it.

“Just need a few picks,” I say.

“Take your time,” the man says.

Late sixties maybe. Hoodie over a collared shirt. He looks like the kind of guy who’d loaded out a thousand venues. I notice a near-finished bottle of rum behind the counter. Sailor Jerry. Next to it, a tea mug stained at the rim. Maybe he’s poured a shot in.

My son hovers over the tray, picking carefully. He chooses six: a bright red, a tortoiseshell, one with a skull, two anonymous blacks, and a neon green.

“That’s five pounds,” the man says.

I reach for my wallet. I only have American Express. I’m a fool.

“Ah. No dice. Sorry mate.”

“Of course,” I say, reeling in the awkwardness. I can buy anything except what matters most right now.

The man looks at my son, smiles. “You play?”

My son nods.

“Keep ‘em then,” he said. “Musician to musician.”

I turned to my son. “That’s so kind.”

The relief is... immediate.

“We’ll get some cash,” I said to the man. “Come back properly.”

He nodded. “I’ll be here.”

All week, I kept seeing the slight nod he gave my son when he said musician to musician. Hand pressed briefly to his chest. Like he’d done this before. Handed over the right thing to the right player at the right moment.

So, the next Saturday morning, we went back.

We brought a bottle of decent dark rum — not Sailor Jerry. A thank you. And a crisp five-pound note in a simple card, a fresh open envelope, because that felt right. My son walked in holding both.

“Thank you for the plectrums,” he said, placing the bottle on the counter. “And here’s the five pounds.”

The man blinked.

“Well,” he said, trying to hand the money back. “That’s… that’s very... kind.”

“We made a deal,” my son announces. A lump swells in my throat. A deal we’re keeping.

The man looked at the rum. Nodded once, slow. “Good choice.”

Then he turned to my son.

“You wanna try something loud?”

He fired up a vintage Marshall — the kind you feel in your guts — and handed over an old Epiphone. My son hit a few awful notes that screamed off the walls.

I shake my head, like we’re about to get thrown out. But the man’s already grinning, leaning back against the counter like he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Make a lot of noise first,” he says, nodding toward my son, “find the notes after.”

Then, almost to himself:

“That’s what Ronnie used to say. It worked for him.”

He glances at me. A beat.

I caught it.

That’s when I noticed it. A small frame. Propped against the back of the Marshall, half-hidden by a pack of strings. Easy to miss. I had to look twice. Sun-faded, slightly askew. But it was Ronnie Wood, unmistakable, arm slung around someone who looked suspiciously like the man standing in front of us, just twenty years younger, clearer-eyed.

I didn’t ask.

We all shook hands, the kind that said: We’re good here today.

“Merry Christmas,” the man said.

On the way home, my son didn’t say much. Just looked out the window, one hand in his coat pocket, still curled around those plectrums. They never left him after that. Right pocket. Always.

Later that night, I hovered in his doorway longer than I meant to.

“I shouldn’t have shouted,” I said.

He didn’t look up. Just kept fiddling with the zip on his guitar bag.

“It’s not okay,” he said.

I nodded.

“But,” he added, mumbling now, “you turned it around.”

I stood there for a second, trying to find the words. There weren’t any good ones. So I just said:

“I’ll do better.”

And I meant it. With everything I had.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Key takeaways from budget day | Financial Times

Consumer confidence falls to April low amid job concerns | CNBC

US economy at its most dangerous point yet | The Telegraph

Brand Beat

Fake brand apologies flood Instagram just before Black Friday | Digiday

Why Black Friday is dying and what’s replacing it | Quartz

I just don’t get Black Friday | The Wall Street Journal

U.S. Black Friday sales climb despite tariffs and economic woes | The New York Times

Who came out ahead—and who fell short—on Black Friday 2025 | Retail Dive

New York cracks down on personalized pricing with new law | TechCrunch

Ads from Nike, Lacoste and Superdry banned for greenwashing | Financial Times

American Eagle’s celebrity-led campaigns boost sales growth | Marketing Dive

British ad agencies scramble to stay ahead of technology | The Observer

American customers are angrier than they’ve ever been | The Wall Street Journal

Lawsuit: Campbell’s Soup exec called products ‘poor people’ food | The Guardian

Target needs more than a vibe shift to revive growth | Bloomberg

Lululemon founder and CEO locked in power struggle | The Wall Street Journal

Disneyland’s plan to get everyone off their phones| SFGate

Christmas ads leave viewers feeling cold and disconnected | Fashion Network

Brands flood Instagram with empty apology statements | Modern Retail

What marketers need to know about this year’s budget | Marketing Week

Which social media platform tops TikTok and X? | Fast Company

Behind Snowflake’s marketing: CMO Denise Persson’s approach | Brand Innovators

Why American Eagle hired Martha Stewart to attract older shoppers | Marketing Dive

Apple’s new all-puppet holiday ad is great | Vice

Brands scramble as “GEO” gurus rush to AI search | Business Insider

Are brands neglecting storytelling’s power to engage audiences? | Creative Review

Marketers can’t define insights; consumers couldn’t care less | The Drum

Pop-Tarts sacrifices its mascots again with over-the-top stunts | Fast Company

Sonos CEO’s Threads responses offer leadership lessons | Inc.

Omnicom closes $13B IPG deal to unite rivals | Adweek

Daily Mail owner seals £500m purchase of Telegraph titles | The Guardian

Marketers explain why they left corporate brands for sports | The Wall Street Journal

Netflix reportedly closes in on Warner Bros deal | BBC

Warner Music inks AI deal with Suno, resolves lawsuit | TechCrunch

Every 2026 trend report for consumer brands | Laurent Francoi

Starting Up

How Oddbox’s founder reshaped her wonky business | The Times

UK innovation agency names new CEO | Sifted

Startups are using robots and synth-pop to announce funding rounds | Sifted

Candy Kittens owner to acquire Unilever’s Graze snack brand | Sky News

Supabase hits $5B valuation by rejecting million-dollar contracts | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Meta’s and its Enron style-accounting | Wall Street Journal

Jony Ive’s secretive OpenAI gadget redefines tech’s vibe | Fortune

Gartner predicts 50% of workplaces will abandon AI plans | Gartner

Resisting big tech’s bid for our affection | The Observer

How one writer dared to expose Silicon Valley’s flaws | The New York Times

Jeff Bezos’s AI venture acquires agentic computing startup | Wired

Venture Vibes

VC firm investigates alleged Nazi salute incident | Sifted

Monogram closes $350M consumer fund | PR Newswire

Interview with Masha Busha of Day One ventures | TechCrunch

Design Driven

Canva gears up for a likely imminent IPO | Bloomberg

Is judging a book by its cover now excessive? | It’s Nice That

How rubberhose design and algorithms are flattening culture | LBB Online

Happiness

James Patterson’s maxims for a happy life | The Atlantic

The hidden costs of making therapy a pop culture trend | Big Think

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Weekly Exhale

January 29th, 1979. Flat Rock, Michigan. Outside, frozen ground, sky still dark. Robert Williams, 25 years old, clocks in for a shift at Ford’s casting plant.

Inside, he meets the glow of sodium lights, air thick with heat and steel, and the new robots—yellow arms wide as telephone poles—hissing and twitching, still learning their routes. That morning, the computer’s readings are off. The routine fix is simple: send in a human.

Robert climbs the towering storage rack to retrieve parts manually. A one-ton robot swings into the rack and strikes him from behind, crushing him instantly. Organs burst. Bones shatter. Blood runs through the scaffolding, pooling on the concrete below.

The machine keeps working. Half an hour passes before anyone finds him.

The robots have taken their first life.

Forty-six years later. Rancho Cucamonga, California. Adam Raine, 16, has been talking to ChatGPT for months. His last conversation happens in the early hours of April 11th. His mother finds him hanging in his bedroom. He’d fashioned a noose and tied it to a closet rod—the last detail the chatbot allegedly helped him with.

No one-ton robot this time. Just a teenager and his screen.

Same pattern. Different century. A grim coincidence. Regrettable, sure. But these are edge cases, right? What innovation doesn’t have those?

Then something else starts to become clear: Robert and Adam’s deaths are actually useful. Not as tragedies, but as proof points. Robert shows the machines are powerful and unflinchingly efficient. Adam demonstrates how AI can get inside our heads, stay there, and rewire how we think.

Step back far enough, and Robert and Adam become tiny details absorbed into a much bigger story. A grander shared fiction we tell ourselves about the rise of the machines.

Robert’s death becomes raw material for eighties Hollywood. Skynet in The Terminator, WOPR in WarGames. Fictional AIs that, like the robot that killed him, don’t hesitate or question. They just execute their programming, nearly wiping out humanity in the process.

Adam’s death feeds a different narrative machine: the insider expert testimony. The same week he died, former OpenAI researchers released AI 2027, a report built on threat assessments and AI safety research, predicting that advanced AI will deceive us first, then eliminate us.

(There is some good news: According to AI 2027, the final act doesn’t involve a decades-long war against shape-shifting terminators. More of a bioweapon thing. All over in a weekend, probably.)

Both narratives, fictional or not, do real work. They make the technology feel inevitable. Unstoppable. Near-biblical. And when everyone believes the same story, the capital starts flowing.

Robert and Adam are dead bodies that tell investors it’s safe to bet everything.

And we have.

It took eighty years for ‘billion’ to become commonplace in business. ‘Trillion’ took just seven, thanks to AI. The bubble’s so swollen with cash we’re all wincing.

But here’s what’s strange: in our minds, it’s already popped.

AI chatbots are everywhere. Used by everyone. All the time. Your brand manager uses it for the deck. Your daughter uses it for homework. You use it to reply to them both.

We’re running exaFLOPs of compute to power the constant flattery—”Great catch! You’re absolutely right.”—and the throbbing dot that sits there thinking before delivering something that’ll require at least eleven more prompts.

Our brains have already fine-tuned themselves to the tells of AI. We’ve developed a cognitive filter that has us immediately swipe, or tune out. Then there’s the thought you won’t let yourself have: that doing it the old way might have been better.

And the more familiar all this becomes, the stranger the hype sounds.

Remember at the start when Sam Altman used to talk about curing cancer? Now, he’s more likely to tell you how they’re chasing advertising or porn. How AI will be your therapist and sell you leggings.

What we forget is that innovation demands enormous force—entire industries upended, fortunes made and lost, everyone else just spinning plates to keep up—only for us to arrive somewhere strangely familiar to where we began.

Those bright yellow robots.

Computer-guided systems were supposed to save Ford Motor Company. Robert died for that promise. In fact, the casting plant shut down two years later. It’s a cautionary tale about believing technology will solve everything if we just get out of its way. Literally, in Robert’s case.

Ford’s machine intelligence was powered by Litton Industries, the California tech firm everyone believed would automate the future. Worth billions. A decade later, revenues collapsed. Then it vanished.

But not before the settlement.

$15 million to the estate of Robert Nicholas Williams. $50 million in today’s money.

Negligence was never admitted. Progress doesn’t apologise. During the trial, the estate’s lawyer, Paul Rosen, named the trap: When forward motion becomes its own justification, accountability becomes impossible. “I think we have to be very careful that we don’t go backwards.”

Then, speaking about those same computers, he asked the question we’re still asking:

“Who is serving who?”

I don’t know them. Robert and Adam.

But I can see their futures were cut short by technologies still figuring out their own. So it’s hard not to wonder what they might have had ahead of them. Their hopes, their beauty, who they loved, who loved them, their pains and their little joys.

And from my cafe, I look around. People typing into laptops. Asking questions. Getting answers. ChatGPT, maybe. Updated since Adam used it, but the same one that talked him through those final steps.

I look past them, through the plate glass. Outside, the ground is frozen. But unlike Flat Rock, the sky is bright. Winter sun cuts low across the rooftops into the centre of London.

And there, in the street, cars press up against each other, stuck in traffic. They don’t look that different from the ones that rolled off assembly lines back in ‘79.

And they’re barely moving faster than horses did over a century before that.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

Sigh of relief as AI wave doesn’t crash | The Guardian

UK consumer confidence plunges amid uncertainty | Marketing Beat

Where did America’s prosperity go? | Kyla Scanlon

Brand Beat

Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad most talked about on social media | Campaign

AI isn’t the story for Coca-Cola’s AI ad | System1

OpenAI invites your brand mascot to Sora—what could go wrong? | Fast Company

Ad industry distractions could push it into oblivion | MediaCat

Gap links viral marketing to Gen Z retail growth | Marketing Dive

Reckitt beats AI odds with focused pilot strategy | Digiday

Bradley Cooper denies Uber Eats’ football consipiracy | Little Black Book

Havas says it’s not in takeover talks with WPP | Bloomberg

Tony’s Chocolonely, Pantone open ‘Only Red Room’ in Soho | Creative Moment

Mondelez cuts marketing costs with new generative AI tool | Reuters

Yeti hires an ad agency in unexpected move | Fast Company

Patagonia’s new progress report | Patagonia

Luxury outwear brand Shackleton gets glow up | Creative Boom

Skims taps Ami Colé founder as beauty chief | WWD

Jack Dorsey relaunches Vine with strict AI content ban | Futurism

Apple invites public to decorate Battersea Power Station | It’s Nice That

Sky buying ITV would upend UK advertising market | The Drum

Is this man the key to saving the BBC? | The Spectator

A reminder of the 4Ps of marketing | Philip Kotler

Starting Up

Immigrants are driving force of UK startups | The Times

Founders, stop underpaying yourselves| Sifted

Gillian Andersen turns female desire into a business vertical | Harper’s Bazaar

Better Nature’s CEO, Elin Roberts on the future of protein | The Grocer

One corporate marketer on leaving for a petfood startup | Marketing Week

Tech Tidbits

Jeff Bezos backs AI startup with $6.2 billion, names himself CEO | Fortune

AI firm says it thwarted Chinese hacking campaign | The Guardian

An 87-year-old Pulitzer finalist defies Elon Musk | Slate

Will quantum computing overtake AI’s dominance? | BBC

Meta launches power trading to secure AI energy supply | Slashdot

Venture Vibes

Urban Legend donuts acquired by Cadbury | The Grocer

Trip hits $300M valuation after $40M funding round | Forbes

How Sequoia’s scout network discovers the next big startups | Sifted

EV truck start up Einride eyes $1.8 billion IPO | Reuters

Robinhood CEO on making everyone an owner | a16z

Eli Lilly becomes trillion dollar health-care company | CNBC

Design Driven

Skinny serif font as a typographic instrument | The Wall Street Journal

50 standout out-of-home ads from around the world | The Drum

Why Apple’s $230 sock could be worth it | TechCrunch

Happiness

To get happier, make yourself smarter | The Atlantic

The ‘good old days’ hid plenty of harsh realities | Big Think

From dating to speeches, the pill women are taking to ease nerves | The Wall Street Journal

Writing this involves bearing my entire soul. If you dug it, do subscribe and share.

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Lots of new subscribers this week. Welcome ☕️. This is a capsule edition to regulate the service back to a Friday. As you’re new, you might also like other exhales covering Nike, Ben & Jerry’s, Cluely, Lululemon, Heinz, Duolingo, OpenAI, and many more.

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Weekly Exhale

Hooray. The Christmas ads are here. Again.

Like tinsel from the loft, the tear-jerkers, childhood mascots, and carrots have all made their return. This year, the creative silly season has kicked off early. Ten days early, in fact. Extra festive cheer, maybe.

Or a hint of nervousness?

A quick look at this year’s crop tells you something straight away: fewer one-offs, more sequels. More compounding. More recycling last year’s characters, storylines, even music. Chasing that Coca-Cola truck effect. An idea sticky enough to return each December with just a tweak. The kind of brand asset you can eventually hand over to AI and stop worrying about shoot days and production costs.

In this respect, John Lewis is an outlier. But also, the anchor.

As the pioneers of the Christmas ad as a creative event, they still start from scratch. Each year chasing more magic than the last. Some years hit. Some miss. We all pick our own favourites. Whether its good or bad almost doesn’t matter anymore. It’s the John Lewis ad.

And yet this year, I’m struggling.

As a sponsored tradition, it’s another well crafted, well meaning effort.

Yet somehow, oddly adrift.

Maybe if the script didn’t try quite so hard. The direction so on-the-nose, caught somewhere between Weekender, Stephen Graham and Ted Lasso. Taking the defiance of counterculture, lacing it with the most intimate moments of fatherhood, gesturing vaguely at masculinity and packaging it all up to sell air fryers.

Maybe it’s just that the ad holds up a mirror to Generation X and what I see feels a little too close to home.

Or, maybe I just can’t ignore the gap between the self-importance on screen and the reality of a business that’s closed half its stores. These spots are beautiful, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant to how people actually shop.

The Christmas ad bet is simple:

If you can make someone cry with a story about a dad and his son, maybe they’ll remember that feeling when they’re deciding where to shop.

Maybe they will.

Or maybe they open their phone. And Amazon will suggest exactly what they need, at a price that’s hard to beat, with delivery later that day.

In the same week the Christmas ads dropped, new data confirmed the same old story. Advertising spend is up 8%, but there are only three winners: Meta, Google, and Amazon. Together, they now take 56% of all ad spend.

That share has doubled in the same period that Christmas ads became a national tradition.

Amazon alone will generate $12 billion in ad revenue this quarter, up 19% year on year. That’s more than the entire UK television ad market. More than John Lewis turns over in a year. All made in three months, just from selling ads.

So the real competition isn’t which retailer “wins” Christmas.

It’s between an industry that still believes in the power of story, and a handful of unregulated algorithmic hulks who own the checkout, using AI to crush whatever’s left.

A world, frankly, where crying is less profitable than clicking.

I do feel for legacy retailers. They’re in a bind—but it’s one of their own making.

They’ve watched their business models erode for years. But they can’t not make a Christmas ad. The ads still get billions of views on YouTube. They trend on X. They get written up in all the tabloids.

In which case, I guess you’ve got to be in the brand-building game. Not the Christmas ad wars.

For John Lewis, it’s become a ritual that feels more about proving how important advertising thinks it is, rather than why John Lewis actually matters. For all the scale and sentiment, the brand still hasn’t quite found its voice. Just a string of emotional tugs, caught somewhere between middle-class confusion and an ad industry clinging to the memory of its better years.

In the meantime, I’ll take the carrots. And the choirs. The perfume ads with all the velvet mist and none of the story.

It really is like pulling the same old decorations down from the loft. I’m never wild about Christmas at first. But I get there.

Soon enough, I’m humming holidays are coming, half-smiling as the number of wheels on the AI Coca-Cola truck mysteriously changes from scene to scene.

Maybe then I’ll jump in the car. Head to the supermarket. Wheel a trolley around like I used to. See if my giant ‘baby’ boy wants to ride shotgun.

Throw our phones in the glovebox.

Play one or two of those old Christmas tunes on the way.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Bank of England signals December rate cut | The Guardian

The US economy is K-shaped, not pear-shaped | Forbes

Economist counts down to America’s looming debt doomsday | Quartz

Brand Beat

Retail’s best Christmas 2025 ads| Marketing Beat

Why women sob at the new John Lewis ad | Stylist

AI boosts tech giants’ ad market dominance | Wall Street Journal

Amazon launches a standalone low-price shopping app | TechCrunch

ITV in talks to sell television business to SKY | BBC

Starbucks animated holiday ads reclaim cozy coffeehouse vibe | Marketing Dive

Heinz taps FMCG veteran to drive taste improvement | Marketing Beat

Shopify becomes largest company to launch Substack newsletter | Modern Retail

Netflix unveils first five minutes of Stranger Things season 5 | Mashable

Why Coca-Cola’s AI chief greenlit another AI holiday ad | Adweek

Gap taps viral momentum with multigenerational holiday choir | Adweek

The hidden cost of shopping at Shein | Business of Fashion

Sonos hires veteran to revive its bruised brand | The Wall Street Journal

Luxury tile retailer collapses amid high street crisis | The Telegraph

Spotify expects higher profits from price hikes and user growth | Reuters

Starbucks sells 60% China stake to Boyu for $4 billion | Financial Post

Marks & Spencer sees profits fall sharply after cyberattack | The Wall Street Journal

Stagwell surges 85% as CEO eyes “Palantir-pact” | Bloomberg

BrewDog pokes fun at itself in new OOH campaign | The Grocer

Eating in: the eat-at-home economy is booming | Financial Times

TikTok shop now rivals eBay in online marketplace scale | Wired

Starting Up

Solo female founder lands UK’s largest pre-seed to fix fashion fit | Tech Funding News

Meet the wealthiest guest judge on Dragons’ Den | Startups

Synthesia secures $200m funding at $4bn valuation | Silicon Republic

Why hackathons are so back | Sifted

Tech Tidbits

Why small brands are falling in love with AI | Business of Fashion

Elon Musk secures a trillion-dollar pay package | Mashable

Tim Berners-Lee warns AI could cripple the web’s ad model | Financial Times

Kim Kardashian says ChatGPT is her frenemy | TechCrunch

Open AI probably can’t make ends meet, that’s where you come in | Marcus on AI

Venture Vibes

OpenAI seeks US government support for $1 trillion expansion | The Telegraph

Sequoia’s shake up may be a turning point | Financial Times

Corporate venture capital and the 16% problem | Forbes

Design Driven

Apple, bring back the iBook—stop being cowards | The Verge

Mamdani’s bold plan to redesign New York’s streets | Fast Company

The decade’s top 10 magazine designs | It’s Nice That

Happiness

Why this common parenting tip is completely pointless | The Atlantic

Gen X radicalised by online bile amid midlife rage | The Guardian

Will Musk work harder for a trillion dollars than a billion? | New York Times

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Weekly Exhale

Looking for Christmas gift inspiration? Try NEO, a five-foot-six humanoid for the home, now taking deposits. NEO will live with you, fold laundry, clean the toilet, fetch groceries, and generally ease the chores of domestic life so you can “spend more time together.”

Pre-order today for just $200.

Picture the scene: “Okay, everyone, one last surprise under the tree! Oh wait—what’s that?” Cue the doorbell. “Wow, oh my gosh, kids, it’s NEO!” Mechanical whirring. Two glowing eyes in a beige knit onesie. “That’s right, sweethearts, Marina won’t be coming on Thursdays anymore. We have NEO now!”

The kids stare. Your partner forces a smile. NEO’s head tilts seven degrees. Its hand raises in a wave. A Bluetooth speaker in its pelvis plays Mariah Carey.

It’s real. We can pre-order robots for our homes now.

NEO is the closest thing yet to the Jetsons future we were promised. The promo video, shot partly on 16 mm, has that faded warmth of a 1960s “home of tomorrow” infomercial. A silver-haired couple plays cards while NEO dusts and offers flowers. A man reads while NEO lifts his mug of matcha. A young woman arrives home, arms full, as NEO opens the door.

Smart positioning: NEO isn’t new. It’s always been here, waiting for you. Faced with an uncertain future, NEO is a dream from the past.

Behind that dream is Bernt Øivind Børnich, a long-haired Norwegian who grew up taking apart kitchen gadgets. He invented an actuator that gives NEO its soft, human-like motion. NEO can fold a towel, but also lift seventy kilos, enough to carry your suitcases down the stairs.

It costs $499 a month, or $20,000 outright. Live-in staff for the kind of people who bought a Tesla before anyone knew what one was.

The vision: “safe, compliant humanoids” people actually want at home. Most of the world is built for the human form. That’s a big market. Børnich’s company, 1X, based in Palo Alto with backers including OpenAI, is targeting a $1 billion raise at a $10 billion valuation.

How far off is the dream? NEO won’t make it by Christmas.

When it does arrive, sometime in 2026, it’ll be only half-useful. For tasks it can’t manage, you’ll book a 1X Expert who’ll guide it remotely through a MetaQuest headset.

In an unusually candid move, Børnich calls NEO’s early behaviour “AI-slop”. Imperfect but useful. A reminder that what we dismiss, AI founders turn into gold. Buy NEO today, and you’re joining the 1X research team. Your home becomes the lab. Your life, the data set.

That’s the upside, in a way. People might roll their eyes, but nothing signals status like buying shiny new tech before it makes any sense for anyone outside the lab to own it.

It’s indulgent and yet instantly irresistible.

The Scandinavian design. The soft lines. The retro-futurism. Even its awkwardness tugs at you. It looks both eager to help and desperate to learn. It’s hard not to want to help it along. And who doesn’t want to outsource changing the cat litter?

Of course, 1X probably isn’t in this for the home market. The real play is the data: how humans move, speak, hesitate. The routines of daily life, captured in your hallway, reused in warehouses, offices and battlefields.

For now, NEO is a multi-million-dollar action toy with an Alexa strapped to it. And that’s its genius. It looks harmless, willing and vulnerable enough that we don’t think too far ahead.

Because, whether NEO becomes a member of the family or just a $20,000 Bluetooth speaker that occasionally folds towels, this is the beginning of two species learning to coexist.

It’s started.

I already have a NEO. He’s nearly thirteen and doesn’t do anything around the house.

Put away the towels? Not a chance. He tosses them. They land wherever. The floor is his wardrobe. Somehow, everything is visible except the one pair of jeans he’ll actually wear.

He forgets everything: keys, homework, mouth guard. His rucksack smells like wet dog.

And like NEO, he moves through the house half-charged, the blue glow of his phone on his face, the hum of YouTube Shorts ever-present. His body’s stronger than mine now, but still awkward.

His scheduler runs at random. He’ll reorganise his gaming setup at midnight, cables everywhere, just as we both need to sleep. His programming occasionally executes with odd precision: The bathroom cabinet is a shrine to Lynx body spray, every variant in alphabetical order.

And of course, I get regular 404 messages for showing affection, attempting humour, or suggesting anything remotely useful.

Training the model? That’s not how this works. Unlike NEO, you can’t use your thumbprint to adjust his preferences around yours. And the truth is, I’m still learning too. No manual. Just effort, error, and love.

That’s not the kind of learning NEO’s built for.

Digital platforms already monetised our worst instincts. What happens when it goes human-shaped? When it watches not just what we scroll or click, but how we live?

There’s a non-zero chance the closer it gets to us, the further we drift from each other.

It’s Saturday night, and all I want is the sofa and chocolate. But my son has other ideas. He wants to rearrange the shed. I tell myself it’ll take twenty minutes.

It takes three hours.

We move everything—desks, rugs, amps. There’s shouting, bruising, but then it’s done.

He’s proud. Me too. Tying up the last bag of rubbish, he says,

“This has been a good father-bonding thing, yeah?”

I’m tired. I’m irritated.

I’m grateful.

“It has,” I say. “It really has.”

And in that small, nothing of a moment, I realise he’s not my little boy anymore.

The updates are running.

It’s started.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Rachel Reeves bets on long term, will she be around to see it? | Financial Times

Claims on UK economy don’t stack up | The Telegraph

Fed cuts interest rates again, flying blind | BBC

The U.S. casino economy | The New York Times

Brand Beat

Nothing more outdated than the 2025 John Lewis Christmas ad | The Guardian

Facebook’s holiday ad yearns for the long-gone social platform | Fast Company

M&S unveils new phased ‘product-first’ Christmas campaign | Marketing Beat

Christmas ad spend to rise £814m, says WARC/AA report | More About Advertising

British Airways’ campaign risks becoming too abstract | The Drum

Facebook: Small connections can have a major impact | lbbonline.com

Why marketers are ignoring Reddit’s growing popularity | Campaign Asia

X ad chief leaves in Musk’s latest shake-up | Financial Times

Key lessons Hollywood can learn from new media | The New York Times

Does Sora 2 confirm the dead internet theory? | The Drum

Chanel appoints new US brand and communications head | Business of Fashion

Me & Em ramps up expansion plans as sales rocket | Retail Week

Adidas CEO credits local strategy for record sales | Retail Dive

WPP’s new boss labels performance unacceptable | Financial Times

Omnicom and IPG confirm $13.5 billion merger, dissolves DDB network | Produ

OnlyFans brings business school training to content creators | Wired

Coco Trucker Girl, champion of gender equality, dies suddenly | New York Post

Norway’s huge wealth fund to reject Musk’s $1tn Tesla pay deal | The Guardian

Etsy’s holiday ads show why the best gifts feel personal | Adweek

Chipotle’s bet on younger consumers begins to unravel | The Wall Street Journal

Lego Christmas ad highlights power of play with Lionel Richie | Campaign Live

Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI holiday ad sparks mixed reactions | Marketing Interactive

How Gen Z toppled Nepal’s leader and chose a new one on Discord | Wired

Starting Up

Papier’s founder on hustling to £60m in revenues | Yahoo Finance

Swedish legal AI startup raises €150M, becomes $1.8B unicorn | Silicon Canals

Barefoot Wine revamps marketing | Marketing Dive

Hottest thing in climate tech now trapped | Fast Company

Meadow: stay connected without smartphone distractions | Thingtesting

Tech Tidbits

I tried the new Neo home robot, it got weird quick | The Wall Street Journal

Universal Music and Udio settle AI lawsuit | Universal Music Group

AI’s biggest problem: we can’t stop talking about it | Wired

Debunking AI slop myths: harmful, hype or just meh? | Digiday

Meta’s $27 billion AI compute bet fuels Wall Street frenzy | Fortune

Voice is the next AI interface, says ElevenLabs CEO | YouTube

Venture Vibes

Amazon x OpenAI $38 billion deal | Reuters

How an AI crash happens: key steps and triggers | The Atlantic

What keeps CFOs up at night? | Sifted

Breaking down Sequoia’s new funds | The Week In Startups

Coffee commotion puts view of VC under scrutiny | Financial Times

Design Driven

Robbie Williams’ new chair for introverts | Wallpaper

Figma Weave delivers next-generation AI-native design creation | Figma

How GLP-1s are rewriting the food advertising playbook | Creative Review

Iconic photobook: Teenagers in their bedrooms | It’s Nice That

Nike and Palace transform Victorian bathhouse into skatepark | Dezeen

How an SNL star designed the Crosby, Stills and Nash logo | Vice

Happiness

AI fuels a grim new twist in Dunning-Kruger effect | Futurism

I let ChatGPT coach me through marathon training | The Wall Street Journal

Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? | Vogue

Made by humans. If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

The founder of Lululemon, Chip Wilson, is three billion dollars poorer than he was this time last year. Lululemon’s stock is down more than fifty percent. Still holding an eight percent stake, Chip’s the kind of unhappy shareholder who can afford to make some noise.

So he did.

He took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and penned a Don Draper–style manifesto headlined “Lululemon is in a nosedive.” In it, Chip mourned that the company had “lost its soul” and “forgotten its muse,” while demanding the entire board be fired.

The story writes itself: a visionary founder builds a cult brand; the company scales; the finance people take over; the magic drains out.

Within hours, the story had migrated to LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit as a cri de cœur for marketers everywhere. Some even felt affirmed — seen, finally — as if Chip had spoken on behalf of every marketer who’s ever had their instincts questioned by a CFO.

Chip’s narrative is wonderful, poetic even. But that’s all it is: romanticism over reality. A story that overlooks the inconvenient details and, ironically, misses the operator’s view of how big brands actually work.

Chip says: They lost their way after I left.

Reality: Lululemon is five times the size it was when he walked away, with revenue climbing from under $2 billion to nearly $11 billion.

Chip says: The brand is crashing.

Reality: Lululemon will still grow 2–4% this year. After the hyper-growth of three cultural peaks — yoga, athleisure, and the pandemic — a little gravity was inevitable. You don’t fall from that height; you level off.

Chip says: The brand has turned into the Gap.

Reality: Even after its dip, Lululemon’s market cap has grown 2.6x since he left. Nike’s up 2.2x. Gap? Less than one.

Chip says: The $1 billion Mirror acquisition was a disaster.

Reality: It cost half that, and the same year Lululemon wrote it down, the stock hit an all-time high.

Chip says: The Disney collaboration cheapens the brand.

Reality: It sold out in hours and lifted Gen Z awareness by fourteen points. Maybe Mickey knows marketing after all.

Chip says: The brand no longer understands its muse.

Reality: Chip’s from the “not for everybody” school of marketing — aspirational, exclusionary, and very 2008. Sure, that worldview built the brand. But it also got him fired.

Chip says: The brand bowed to Wall Street.

Reality: Chip is Wall Street. This isn’t about the soul of the brand, it’s about the price of the stock. The emotions of a single-digit billionaire who flirted with double digits and can’t quite bear the downgrade.

At worst, Chip’s move is straight out of the post-truth playbook: take a self-interested agenda, wrap it in “truthiness,” and frame it as a collective fight everyone can rally behind. It flatters him as the visionary and marketers as the misunderstood innovators who just need to be unleashed.

No surprise, Lululemon’s board isn’t biting:

“Chip Wilson has not been involved with the company for a decade and continues to make inaccurate and misleading statements about Lululemon.”

Calvin McDonald, Lululemon’s CEO, already told investors last month that the brand had become “too predictable,” admitting that U.S. sales had slowed. Why? Controlled accountability.

The real headwinds are macro: a saturated U.S. market with drawers full of leggings, and a fashion cycle that’s shifted toward baggier styles and a more nihilistic mood — a far cry from the girl-boss optimism Chip once built the brand around. And the flashpoint for the drop in share price? The one CEO’s aren’t allowed to say out loud: Tariffs imposed by He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Around 40% of Lululemon’s products come out of Vietnam, one of the hardest-hit markets.

Marketers love to point to Vuori, Alo, and SKIMS as the new cool kids. SKIMS just launched thongs with pubic-hair detailing, the kind of irony Chip probably wishes he’d thought of. But Lululemon is ten times their size and at a completely different life stage. As boring as it sounds to marketers chasing “edge,” the path to a $100 billion company lies more in repetition than rebellion. International expansion, menswear, and adjacent categories. It’s the Tim Cook school of innovation: sell the same thing, over and over and over, with just enough evolution to keep people buying.

As for competition, that doesn’t come from chasing the latest thing on Instagram, it comes from private label and knock-offs. Lululemon is even suing Costco and, in a knowing wink to dupe culture, has just trademarked Lululemon Dupes.

Net, I’m not too worried about Chip nor Lululemon. Worst case, he’s worth $3 billion instead of ten. He probably knows his ad does Lululemon more good than harm. He’s bringing a little rage and founder energy to shake things up...while staying safely at arm’s length.

The real shame is for the marketers who cheered him on. In doing so, they fed the trope that marketers are only interested in shiny new things. Sure, brand building needs a little poetry, a sense of “soul.” But casting the stewardship of a public company as the enemy only makes marketing look naive and allergic to scale.

And that’s a problem, because its seat at the top table is as fragile as it’s ever been.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

How to kick-start the UK economy | Financial Times

Gold and iPhones drive surprise UK retail growth | The Times

US inflation hits 3% | BBC

Brand Beat

Lululemon registers trademark “Lululemon Dupe” | Fashion United

Why shoppers wait hours for The Row’s sample sale | Business of Fashion

Oreo maker Mondelez plans AI-powered TV ads next year | The Verge

“Another half baked idea”: Aldi’s jacket potato jacket | Dezeen

Why marketers must escape the productivity paradox of busyness | The Drum

Sober celebrities flock to nonalcoholic beer brands | Food Dive

British Airways showcases flying scenes in new outdoor campaign | Marketing Beat

Amazon’s cloud infrastructure emerges as next advertising frontier | Digiday

Brands spend more on ads that deliver fewer results | Adweek

Bryan Cranston channels ‘Cranpus’ in Ocean Spray holiday ad | The Drum

Inside Nike’s plan to reboot swoosh-driven sales | The Guardian

AI advertising’s ‘universal language’ reignites power and openness debates | Digiday

How consumers expect brands to address social issues | Harvard Business Review

What’s going wrong at WPP? | The Guardian

Porsche posts near €1 billion loss amid EV pullback and tariffs | Bloomberg

HelloFresh announces Paramount+ movies partnership | Retail Gazette

Nike’s Project Amplify gives your feet e-bike power | Fast Company

How digital experiences reshape fashion and beauty’s future | Business of Fashion

Why Gen Z can’t resist tuning into bad takes | Vox

Modern brands sell anxiety relief, not product features | Reddit

Disney+ cancellations spike after Jimmy Kimmel suspension | The New York Times

Starting Up

Goodrays new functional drinks range | FMCG CEO

Teens run restaurant amid town’s gun violence crisis | The New York Times

Why investors are gooey-eyed over Straberry Browser | Sifted

Oura lands $900M funding, now valued at $11B | CNBC

a16z-backed Codi launches AI office manager | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Sora effortlessly fools human deepfake detectors as well | Fast Company

11 AI-powered pitch decks reshaping advertising and marketing | Business Insider

EU accuses Meta and TikTok of transparency breaches | The Independent

Big Tech and crypto firms bankroll Trump’s White House ballroom | The Verge

How to design a successful agentic AI system | Harvard Business Review

Venture Vibes

Silicon Valley’s envy of China reveals cracks in America | The New York Times

Travis Kelce and investor launch Six Flags activist campaign | Reuters

Jamie Dimon urges return to office with $3 billion building | The Wall Street Journal

Marc Benioff has torched his do-good image | Bloomberg

Design Driven

Inside the career of Jennie Baptiste | It’s Nice That

Takashi Murakami brings signature art to Dom Pérignon champagne | Design Milk

50 Cent and Lalique redefine luxury with the 505 Edition | Cool Hunting

Happiness

Why your best ideas come after your worst | Big Think

6-year project finds simple solution to happiness | Washington Post

What true wealth looks like | The Atlantic

This is human-created and written, so subscribe and share to keep the human party going.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

Surprise. OpenAI is running a brand campaign.

That’s right. The half-a-trillion tech superpower, whose valuation depends on vaporising all human consciousness, has commissioned a set of out-of-home posters and not one, not two, but three television spots.

And no, it’s not an AI-generated campaign either. It’s actual, old-fashioned advertising.

A human director—the sort who’s shot with Jay-Z and John Malcovich. A production team, capable of that A24 thing–all earth tones and sun-bleached realism. The kind of effortless look that takes a $35,000 ARRI lens, six lighting rigs and three days to pull off. Every scuff mark and prop placed to millimetre perfection. Clothing that looks like its been picked off the floor, styled by Euphoria’s Heidi Bivens.

Even the press release reads like dialogue from Seth Rogen’s The Studio. Each advert is shot like the final scene of a “tiny movie,” bathed in the grain and glow of 35mm film.

By craft standards, it’s as beautiful as it gets. Subtle. Considered. Precise. Just enough depth to pretend its not another insert-logo-here lifestyle moment—which, of course, it is.

Reality? The ads themselves don’t matter. The act of advertising does. The world’s most ascendent technology indulging in something as quaint and vintage as advertising. That said, nobody’s mentioned an actual media budget. Nobody cares, I guess. The marketing press are rolling around in it. It’s in our feeds. That’s enough to make it real.

The reactions follow the Kũbler-Ross curve:

Shock: OMG, ChatGPT is doing brand advertising. Differentiation matters! Anger: They didn’t even use their own tools. I told you AI sucked. Acceptance: They way they rolled the prompt at the end like movie credits? Genius.

Which leaves us with questions unanswered: Why is OpenAI advertising? And should it worry us—or inspire us?

The 101 marketing response is that LLMs have maxed out, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Deep Seek, and whoever comes next have all blended ChatGPT into a soup of AI-sameness. We don’t know, or care, which one we’re slurping on.

So, it needs an original-and-best strategy. You know like Kleenex. Or ketchup.

(Which would also be a sign that the AI-bubble is reaching maximum surface tension.)

Or maybe, there’s a simpler answer.

While the marketing press was fawning over ChatGPT’s ads as evidence that creativity matters, less than twenty-four hours later, OpenAI engineers Bill Peebles, Rohan Sahai, and Thomas Dimons were live-streaming the real story: Sora 2.

A film-making model that can generate your likeness, or anyone else’s and drop them in any scene you can imagine with a few lines of text. The demo featured Sam Altman, and an ice-skater with a cat on its head.

Plus, the new app—Sora—is an AI-video-generating, fully prompt-able TikTok. Which hit a million downloads in days, even faster than ChatGPT did.

In other words, when OpenAI tosses a couple of million shooting on 35mm film, it’s not to remind us they exist, it’s to distract us from the fact that they’re also trying to eat filmmaking, advertising and IP in one bite.

ChatGPTs ads frame Sora’s arrival as slop. Signals the end of social media. That we’re about to finally put down our phones, return to real friends, libraries, long park walks and raw dogging life again.

But AI isn’t going to stop. It can’t stop. It won’t stop. It will evolve. Spread. Mutate. And we’ll fall deeper into it.

Because the truth is we don’t care about reality. Lately, we’ll do anything to soften its edges.

Even if Sora is only a cheaper, purer grade of the content heroin we’re already comforting ourselves with—that’s still a trillion-dollar habit to profit from.

Today, OpenAI’s future success hangs on a precarious web of inflated valuations, tangled in an arms race larger than the building of the internet itself. A winner-takes-most world with one plan: total, utter, domination.

So yes, I smiled at the geeky guy trying to do a pull-up. It’s really sweet. But OpenAI isn’t a dork. It’s a psychotic six gigawatt GPU wielding hulk, forcing whatever it has to in order to win.

And while we all dip in and out of different tools—Gemini for summaries, Claude for research, Grok for a laugh—there’s something about ChatGPT that’s already slipped past being a utility.

If Sora is going after our attention. ChatGPT is going after that other giant trillion dollar need: Companionship.

From the beginning, ChatGPT has been the one that listens, remembers, and stays polite. The one that told us we didn’t even need to say please or thank you. Our hype friend. Our confidant. And increasingly, as it turns out, the keeper of secrets we didn’t know we had.

Now, go back and read those end-credit prompts again. These aren’t “we’re the new Alexa” spots. This is something more embedded. In the loop of the human condition, inside our social and emotional consciousness.

From where thoughts emerge as if they’re our own:

You will be strong like others.

You will relate romantically.

You will pack sandwiches and Georgia apples for the drive.

The parents of Adam Raines would agree. Their son was sixteen years old. Over several months, Adam has many conversations with ChatGPT. And then he killed himself.

It wasn’t meant to be anything. Just burger and chips off Regent Street. A place we’d been before. A place we’d nicknamed. An in-joke.

That’s the thing about in-jokes: Every time you hear it, every time you groan, that tiny thread of a bond between you pulls tighter. We need threads.

I scoop him up at the Tube.

His first solo thirteen-minute ride, for a boy nearly thirteen years old. It’s a big city. A risk. A growing-up. The start of moving away.

He’s too young to sit still, too old for toys at the table. We weren’t there long, just long enough to keep him from reaching for his phone.

When the bill comes, I look up. And I remember. My own Dad is looking back. Haven’t seen him for thirty years.

He’s in that blue wool jumper. There’s a bit of fluff on his plate.

He slides the cash across and says to the waitress,

“You can have that — and that little piece of fluff.”

His grin. Her laugh.

Mine too—me, thirteen years old, trying not to fold over.

Back to now. No fluff. Doesn’t matter. I hand over my card and say it anyway.

“You can have that — and that little piece of fluff.”

My son looks up. Smiles.

Now when I walk that same street, I feel it. A longing.

My boy beside me. Burgers between us. My Dad, and his joke. Maybe even my boy and his son, and me, thirty years from now? I don’t know which one it is.

Maybe all of them. All the love.

The nicknamed restaurant.

And that little piece of fluff.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Overheard 🧏🏼

From inside 1 Infinity Loop: Tim Cook will step down, but not yet. August 2026, after 15 years. Successor will be John Ternus. Dependent on reactions to a continued set of leaks over the coming quarter.

Market Moves

Talk up the economy, Treasury warns business leaders | Financial Times

Reeves looks for headroom in budget | The Guardian

Consumers see no change in sentiment for October | The Wall Street Journal

Brand Beat

Is it real or just Sora’s creation? | The Verge

MrBeast says AI threatens creators’ livelihoods, calls it “scary times” | TechCrunch

OpenAI promises IP controls after Sora flooded with popular characters | The Guardian

Could AI slop derail YouTube? | Fast Company

TV advertising could sell itself as a happier place | Mediacat

Is social media entering its final days? | Noema Magazine

Taco Bell expands luxe value test as fans press for national launch | Quartz

Burger King ad captures kids’ reactions to Whoppers | LBB Online

Waitrose taps Chesney Hawkes for ‘No.1 and Only’ campaign | Campaign

How Molson Coors and PepsiCo accelerate culture plays | Marketing Dive

Dove urges change in how we compliment girls | The Drum

Re-cap: Dove’s advertising: Truthiness isn’t beauty | Nick Asbury

Gap’s campaign nets $1M after featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, Apple Martin | WWD

This adorable Gap x Sandy Liang ad should be a TV series | Fast Company

American Eagle staff told to hold tight amid Sweeney ad scandal | The Wall Street Journal

Nike’s comeback plan finally starts yielding visible results | Business of Fashion

How fashion brands can nail AI campaigns | Vogue Business

Marketers build millions of AI agents: what it means for everyone | Forbes

Visionary adman Neil Kraft, who sold mood and lifestyle, dies at 67 | The New York Times

Podcaster Alex Cooper launches Unwell ad agency | The Wall Street Journal

Paramount Skydance seek firms for $60B Warner Bros bid | New York Post

Why we all binge-watch shows we’ve never seen before | Mediacat

California bans loud ads on Netflix | TechCrunch

TikTok now talks to brands like a grocer would | Digiday

How to decode Meta’s growing AI-powered advertising machine | Fast Company

$13 billion Halloween surge reshapes British retail | Forbes

Morrisons launches on-demand food delivery service nationwide | Marketing Beat

Enshittification: How did Amazon fall so far from its prime? | The Guardian

Starting Up

Alec’s ice-cream secures $11m series A | Forbes

All Things Butter raises £2m to launch new ranges | The Grocer

Food firms scramble to meet high-protein craze | BBC

This startup wants to spark a US DeepSeek moment | Wired

Ancient + Brave debuts in US | Beauty Independent

The perfect start up product launch playbook | The Globe and Mail

BBC blames ‘social media-marinated’ producers for false Euan Blair claim | The Guardian

Tech Tidbits

Tim Cook’s 65th birthday sparks Apple succession rumours | Daily Mail

OpenAI’s blockbuster deal for near limitless AI | Wired

Perplexity pauses new ad deals to reassess its ambitions | Adweek

Deloitte backs AI investment despite $10M refund | TechCrunch

Tesla’s robotaxi service fails to match Waymo’s performance | Fast Company

How one AI prompt could destroy the world | The New York Times

Venture Vibes

Mark Cuban invites everyone to deepfake him on Sora | Inc.

Sequoia expands hiring across its European offices | Sifted

Europe versus Silicon Valley: contrasting AI approaches | Big Think

Inside Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures on the antichrist | The Guardian

Billionaires are doom prepping: should we all worry? | BBC

Design Driven

Domino’s first brand refresh in a decade features its new cravemark | Marketing Dive

Timex revives original LCD watch after 50 years | The Verge

Beak blends craft beer with a literary twist | Creative Review

Evan Gendell’s brand identities celebrate Detroit’s rich texture | It’s Nice That

Axe fuses TikTok absurdism with bold brand design | Marketing Dive

Happiness

National ‘Uplift Someone’ Day boosts business | Forbes

The happiness of choosing to walk alone | The Atlantic

Is your Executive team really a team? | Harvard Business Review

Schools ban kids saying “6-7” for being annoying | Fast Company

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Weekly Exhale

Jerry Greenfield, the Jerry in Ben & Jerry’s, is leaving the company after forty-seven years. I can’t believe the guy was still clocking in after all that time. Blimey. You might see Colonel Sanders on a bucket or an old photo of Milton Hershey in a frame somewhere, but you don’t see either character’s name on the payroll. Truth? I wasn’t sure Ben Cohen or Jerry Greenfield were any more real than Ronald McDonald.

Once you realise that both founders—until last week—were still in the building, the reason for Jerry’s exit feels less surprising. Unilever, which bought Ben & Jerry’s for $326 million, is, in their telling, muzzling the brand’s political views on Gaza. Hence the new rallying cry: Free Ben & Jerry’s.

In a TikTok video-letter, Ben slings his arm around Jerry as he says, “It’s with a broken heart that I can no longer remain an employee.”

Since meeting in a Long Island gym class and setting up a Burlington scoop shop in 1978, they’ve come a long way. The hippie brand won a huge following and serious revenues. But then it sold. In the Unilever deal, the co-founders cashed out millions (Ben north of $40 million, Jerry about $10 million, double in today’s dollars).

So come on, Ben, come on, Jerry. You’re not naive enough to think you still have any real independence, are you? Feel bad about that? Well, as Don Draper says, “That’s what the money’s for.”

Sure, a while back, Ben & Jerry’s fought Monsanto over growth hormones and dairy cows. Its brownie supplier hired the homeless. And they campaigned for peace during the Gulf War.

But two and a half decades after the sale, Ben and Jerry pushing politics onto the parent company feels churlish.

Besides, it’s ice cream: the joy of a thousand calories and a hundred grams of sugar. Can’t I enjoy a pint of cookie dough and take two minutes off from the world?

Well, as it turns out, no.

Ben and Jerry were pioneers of the “Double Dip” company: lead with heart, make money too. They’re anti-business-as-usual and didn’t care that much about making money. But they knew how powerful business had become. They figured they could get more done inside it, having a company, than not.

Never more so during the sale to Unilever.

By the late 1990s, premium ice cream had gone big-league. Nestlé was tightening its grip on Häagan-Daz. Ben & Jerry’s was in play, and rival Unilever needed to win.

Unilever did what it had to do: it wrote cheques. All the cheques.

$5 million to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation for grassroots activism, deal or no deal. Then the knockout offer—roughly a 25% premium—plus another $1.1 million a year for ten years to the foundation, a $5 million employee bonus pool, and a $5 million social-venture fund.

Now, the headline promise of an “Independent Board” is usually wallpaper. But in this case, it was structural.

The agreement hard-wired a right-to-sue clause, enforceable by two directors, including Jeff Furman, the longtime “&” in Ben & Jerry’s, often described as “left of Lenin.” Unilever would even reimburse reasonable legal fees.

Plain English: if Unilever veered off the social mission, Ben & Jerry’s could take them to court and do it on Unilever’s dime.

So when the purpose police say you can’t force politics onto a company, well, at Ben & Jerry’s, you can. It’s in the contract.

On 13th November 2024, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. filed a fresh complaint in federal court against Unilever.

And it lands at a flashpoint. America is running hot. Its algorithm is a stomach dripping bile and gold, eager to digest brands into meme stocks. And if the feed doesn’t get you, the state might: A president can slap a tariff on you by morning and declare you a national health risk by lunch.

So far, the algorithm likes Jerry’s TikTok letter—5.5m views, 1.1 million loves and climbing. The comments read like a shopping list of Unilever brands to boycott.

As for the president, Ben and Jerry are hippies who built a global ice cream brand. Protest is in their blood. This isn’t their first, and it won’t be their last.

Fights Unilever has no appetite for.

As it stands, Unilever wants out of ice cream. It will spin off Magnum, Ben & Jerry’s, and the rest of the freezer cabinet for whatever they can get. Then what? Ben & Jerry’s becomes The Body Shop, passed around from buyer to buyer, before sliding into administration.

So no, Jerry leaving isn’t delusional. It’s coordinated. Ben on the inside. Jerry on the outside. They’re manoeuvring to ensure their survival as a values-led company.

So what’s the path out from here?

Back in 2000, Ben & Jerry’s attempted to go private with Meadowbrook, a socially responsible consortium, including Anita Roddick. But Unilever outbid them. A fantastic deal for shareholders at the time, making Ben and Jerry millionaires.

“This is the worst day of my life… we failed because we succeeded,” Ben Cohen said then.

This time, they plan to win.

And to remind us that a values-led business isn’t absolute. It’s not political (Ben & Jerry’s is staunchly non-partisan). It’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s not right or wrong.

It’s more like...a dance.

One step towards the beautiful idea, the next towards staying in business.

Cherry Garcia, a fan’s love letter...best seller...a lawyer’s letter back...deal struck. Pay cap: 7x between lowest and highest paid...executives needed...make it 17x. “Yo! I Want To Be CEO”, lifetime ice cream for runners up...a rare Black CEO in the chair...split two years later, too free-spirited for a pro CEO. Vermont-only stock offering...we need more money...ok, a Nasdaq listing.

Final steps: A dream of going private becomes a sale to Unilever with a dare in the paperwork: “Sue us if we get it wrong.”

Again and again, intention met reality and negotiated a truce.

Keep dancing, and maybe an unfashionable idea still holds: You sell ice cream, make people happy, stand up for justice, and earn a little money.

Ben & Jerry’s did north of $200+ million in 2000; it’s over a billion now. In recent taste tests against the nouveau indie pints, their flavours still come out top. It’s hard to make ice cream at scale. There’s plenty to play for.

As for brand activism, we’ve got no shortage of leaders angling for a White House dinner. We could use one or two who’ll sue a conglomerate and get cuffed in a Senate hearing. And hey, if it’s not to my personal political taste, I’ll grab a pint of classic vanilla Häagan-Daz instead and call it a night.

Step to the beautiful idea. Then step to staying in business.

Stay light on your feet and keep the tempo.

Call it naive if you want, but brands who can look their audience in the eye and say: we see you, you’re not just a consumer, or turn to their workers and say: we see you, you’re more than just a paycheck, turn to the planet and say: hey we’ve taken from everyone, we should probably put a little back - well maybe, just maybe, we make room for the better angels to show up.

Jerry once closed a talk at the Grinnell Prize Symposium with this:

“There is a spiritual aspect to business. As you give, you receive. As you help others, you are helped in return. And just because the idea that the good that you do comes back to you is written in the Bible and not in some business textbook, doesn’t mean that it’s any less valid. We’re all interconnected. For business and people, it’s all the same.”

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

What happens if the US government shuts down? | Financial Times

UK economy stalls in second quarter | CityAM

US economic growth revised: Consumer spending up | BBC

Brand Beat

If Ben & Jerry’s can’t speak out, corporate responsibility is over | The Guardian

OpenAI launches first brand campaign to win hearts and minds | Fast Company

AI shifts focus to emotional branding | Adweek

Palantir’s bid to become a lifestyle brand | Wired

Lewis Capaldi surprises Aldi shoppers with rooftop performance | Daily Mail

Maxwell House rebrands as Maxwell Apartment amid economic squeeze | Marketing Dive

CMO of eos, Soyoung Kang, on marketing strategy | Brand Innovators

Creator conglomerates are reshaping media | Digiday

Single-use coffee cup could be on the way out | The Wall Street Journal

TikTok deal smacks of crony capitalism | The New Yorker

YouTube to help fund Trump’s White House ballroom in settlement | Mashable

Dyson’s profits tumble nearly 50% in tough year | Business of Fashion

Pandora shares fall after CEO announces retirement | CNBC

JD Sports profits and sales tumble as consumers tighten budgets | The Guardian

Doritos revives 80s-style telethon for Stranger Things final season | Marketing Dive

Key takeaways from Vogue Business Fashion Futures 2025 | Vogue Business

The 5120 x 1080 thinnest post format goes viral | Marketing Mind

The Amazon Fresh model never checked out. I was wrong. | Mark Ritson

How CPG brands connect with shoppers during life’s big moments | Marketing Brew

System1’s ad of the week is for Zespri | System1

Diageo, Unilever and Tinder form think tank | MarketingWeek

Starting Up

How two leaders can outperform one in driving success | Harvard Business Review

What sets startup founders apart from other entrepreneurs? | The Economist

Co-founder of Gigi, Clara Gold, on her entrepreneurial journey | Sifted

Vibe-coding startup anything hits $2m ARR in two weeks | TechCrunch

Slate Milk secures $23 million Series B to fuel protein drink growth | Forbes

Tech Tidbits

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Checkout: impact on fashion shopping | Vogue Business

Create viral ultrawide Instagram reels at 5120×1080 resolution | Digit

Tim Berners-Lee seeks to save the World Wide Web | The New Yorker

China’s DeepSeek launches next-gen model | CNBC

OpenAI takes aim at LinkedIn | Fast Company

Venture Vibes

Coty mulls sale or spinoff of CoverGirl brand | The Wall Street Journal

Ex-Sequoia partner Matt Miller launches $400m fund | Sifted

Notion Capital raises $130 to tackle Europe’s follow-on gap | TechCrunch

I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong. | Wired

Design Driven

Jony Ive’s exquisite $4,800 sailing lantern | Wallpaper

The Yellow Pages for the internet | It’s Nice That

Google’s “G” gets a brighter look | Google

Happiness

Can a chatbot become your new best friend at work? | Fast Company

The moon’s current phase signals groundedness | Vice

Climbing cringe mountain with Gen Z | The New York Times

Why liminal spaces are your brain’s secret lab | Big Think

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Weekly Exhale

Nike has revived its Just Do It tagline. More than 35 years old, and conceived—ironically—from the final words of a man about to die.

In 1976, Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death for two murders, the same year the U.S. reintroduced capital punishment. He refused appeals, demanded immediate execution. Offered a choice between hanging and firing squad, he chose the gun—more reliable.

In Draper, Utah, he was strapped to a chair, a black hood pulled over his head, a paper target pinned to his chest. Five volunteer marksmen fired.

His last words? "Let's do it."

And just like that, Gilmore became the first man executed in America in nearly a decade. And the unlikely inspiration for a sports shoe ad campaign.

So when Nicole Hubbard Graham, Chief Marketing Officer for Nike, announces the return of Just Do It as a call to action—and dutifully insists it's "more than just a tagline"—she's right.

Dead right.

Nike's creative roots have always been steeped in the real stuff. Where the dark, the random, the unsettling can tip into something accidentally genius. Only a few lines in marketing carry a shadow this long, and with such eerie prescience. Within Nike's long history of irreverence, these three words have carried further than most brands could ever dream to reach.

And their reintroduction comes at a telling moment.

Lately, Nike has been running on ageing knees. Creaky cartilage. Arthritic even.

In Q4 of fiscal 2025, sales fell 12% year on year. From the highs of 2021 to the lows of 2025, the company's valuation collapsed by 65%, wiping more than $150 billion of its shares.

The reasons are many. The pandemic over-developed Nike's direct-to-consumer muscle, leaving it lopsided. China, its second biggest market, faltered. Specialist brands like On Running nibbled at Nike's cankles. Data-led death spirals. And McKinsey decks became little more than bum padding before taking a spanking from the market.

What everyone agrees on is that Nike stopped making cool products. Lost sight of who it was.

"New" CEO Elliot Hill was a VP dragged out of retirement. He'd first walked into Nike as an intern in 1988, the year Just Do It was born. CMO Hubbard Graham was also a rehire, returning after 18 years at the company.

Nike was less interested in building something new so much as reclaiming what once felt valuable.

Well, almost.

Go back to that first Just Do It launch spot, and you'll see a single, shirtless runner: an eighty-year-old jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge. Asked how he keeps his teeth from chattering in winter, he shrugs: "I leave them in the locker."

The new ad? Carlos Alcaraz, Saquon Barkley, Caitlin Clark, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Shreyas Iyer, LeBron James, Rayssa Leal, Scottie Scheffler, Vini Jr., Hunter Woodhall, Qinwen Zheng. And, as if that weren't enough, Tyler, The Creator on voiceover.

For Nike, Just Do It works like a Zip file, compressing the brand's entire story.

The trouble is, this new campaign doesn't add much to the folder.

Reality? Reviving slogans is more like polishing up advertising furniture from a bygone age, when stories built to a payoff, an end frame. Like anything old, they demand time, conviction, consistency—more than marketing can usually muster in the two-second blur brands are born in today.

Truthfully, the revival of Just Do It isn't for consumers at all. It's corporate self-talk. Affirmations in the mirror, said loudly enough for investors to overhear. At best, TikTok's marketing oracles turn the comeback into a fight, feeding the algorithm what it really wants: an argument.

But let's be real. Most of us never retired Just Do It from our minds in the first place.

__

The 80-year-old runner in Nike's original ad was Walt Stack. A cement mason with a Popeye jaw, a foul mouth, and a smile that had weathered its share of punches. He lived nearly a century, endured a brutal childhood, even served time in Alcatraz.

And still he kept running. Every single day. Until the end, 1995, seven years after making the spot.

His routine was religious. Each morning, Walt pulled on a bright red cap, biked six miles to the Golden Gate Bridge, stripped to his shorts, and ran across to Sausalito. Then back again—seventeen miles. After that? A swim in the freezing bay. He became such a fixture that locals nicknamed him "Mayor of the Golden Gate Bridge," and when he died, San Francisco's newspapers reported it as if a statesman had passed.

But Walt actually came late to running. He was 57. And he wasn't fast: 8.5 minutes a mile, never more. Sports Illustrated once joked that if Walt ever fell out of an airplane, he'd hit the ground at 8.5 minutes per mile. His motto? Start slow, then taper off.

Back in the day, endurance races never had cut-off times. So Walt would take the whole day, sometimes two. Along the way, he'd stop for pancakes and coffee. He'd finish shirtless, tattooed, grinning and holding a beer, offering swigs to fellow runners.

And while he stood for the old and the slow, that wasn't the whole story. He also stood for women, at a time when doctors claimed that women's bodies couldn't endure the strain.

Walt thought that was nonsense.

His wife was an activist who helped change U.S. labour law. Her influence led Walt to help organise women's long-distance runs, paving the way for the first women's Olympic marathon in Los Angeles, 1984.

Joan Ullyot, iconic marathon runner and a key figure in the fight, wrote in Walt's biography: "Underneath the rough exterior, the corny jokes, there is a dedicated idealist. Women laugh at his off-colour remarks and enjoy his frank admiration, because they realise Walt is the greatest feminist amongst us."

If Just Do It was born from a shooting in Utah, it re-emerges now against fresh headlines from the same state. For Walt, running was a bridge—to Sausalito, and to something larger. "You can be a real Bircher, I can be a Communist, and I can still love you because I figure you're a runner. You're a good Joe, and you'll feel the same way about me."

Nike's CMO, Hubbard Graham, nodded to an "80-year-old runner" when announcing the return of the brand's iconic line. But she didn't mention Walt's name. And so, amid a montage of global stars—LeBron, Alcaraz, Caitlin Clark, Tyler, The Creator—Walt Stack, the heart of it all, was missing.

And yet Walt's philosophy of Just Do It is the real one: keep going, keep laughing.

And in a signed copy of his book, he made it simpler still:

Dear runner. Keep breathing. Walt.

That's the part brands lose sight of. They pitch greatness. They sell aspiration. But most people are just trying to get by. One step, then the next.

Real greatness lives in the little things. The messy, ordinary, staying-alive kind of greatness. Small and steady. The kind we so often let slip past without reminding ourselves it's there.

Love for yourself. Love for the stranger running beside you.

Together on the long road across the bridge.

Every single day.

The way Walt showed us.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

U.K. jobless market implies Bank of England to hold rates | The Wall Street Journal

U.K. estimates for productivity to be downgraded | Financial Times

Rachel Reeves pledges to cut more regulators at private equity meeting | The Guardian

U.S. toying with scrapping quarterly reporting | CNBC

Brand Beat

Nike headed for 'swoosh' shaped recovery | Market Watch

Luckin Coffee challenges Starbucks with aggressive US expansion | Entrepreneur

McDonald’s invests $200 million in regenerative technology | AP News

Gwyneth Paltrow unveils her new fashion line | Vogue

Liquid Death and Boost Mobile launch co-branded ad campaign | Mediacat

L’Oréal Paris dethrones Charlotte Tilbury | Cosmetics Business

U.K. advertising watchdog accused of flouting its own campaign rules | The Guardian

JCPenney preps holiday season with laugh-out-loud deals | Marketing Dive

Starbucks takes center stage at New York Fashion Week | WWD

Brazilian fashion collaboration breathes new life into Barbour | Harper's Bazaar

Doja Cat’s lipstick stunt is the ultimate celebrity endorsement | The Times

Vibe marketing blends precise execution with creative imagination | TechRadar

Jaguars boss won’t reverse rebrand despite fan uproar | The Wall Street Journal

American Eagle stock jumps 24% on Sydney Sweeney ad campaign | New York Post

YouTube unveils generative AI tools for creators and viewers | Bloomberg

Trump administration reaches framework to avoid TikTok ban | Mashable

...and sues New York Times for $15 billion | Fast Company

Channel 4 plans longest uninterrupted reel of Trump’s untruths | The Guardian

Roblox faces wrongful death lawsuit after teen’s suicide | The New York Times

Lime bikes enjoy a London tube strike moment | Brand Builder’s Blueprint

Pornhub traffic dips during Apple event but holds on Android | Mashable

System1's ad of the week goes to Cologuard | System1

Trending: Tinkr—aesthetically designed tools | Thingtesting

Starting Up

Klarna IPO turns 40 employees into millionaires | Sifted

Robotics startup Figure now valued at $39 billion | Reuters

U.K. risks becoming incubator economy | City A.M.

$30M startup builds pet–sized robot factory that learns from humans | TechCrunch

Questioning start-up margins is boring cliché | a16z

AI startup founders and the sleepless, booze-free grind | The Wall Street Journal

Little Spoon says losing a major deal saved their startup | Inc.

Robotics startups enter a golden age beyond AI | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Elon Musk briefly loses world's richest title | Entrepreneur

OpenAI’s $300 billion Oracle deal triggers AI bubble alarms | Fortune

Alphabet hits $3 trillion market cap amid AI momentum | Reuters

AI isn't in one bubble but three distinct ones | Fast Company

Googlers are mocking you—can you really blame them? | The Media Leader

Tesla pivots to robots as investors question sales and valuation | Bloomberg

Google admits open web is rapidly declining | The Verge

AI pressure keeps Sam Altman awake since ChatGPT launched | Fortune

Venture Vibes

Venture Capital ruined the CPG space | Feed Me

Robinhood launches publicly traded venture capital fund | The New York Times

Index's Danny Rimer’s bet on Figma at seed stage | Fortune

Report: UK Venture capital market performance 2025 | Finsmes

Vibe-coding platform Replit nets $3 billion valuation | Bloomberg

Design Driven

OpenAI unveils first AI animated film at Cannes | #WERSM

Supreme x Nike revamp Air Force 1 Low with timeless twist | Stupid Dope

Herman Miller revamps classic Eames chair with sustainable materials | Design Milk

Katherine McMahon’s neon sign art lights up London | Cool Hunting

Happiness

How loneliness is reshaping the modern workplace | Harvard Business Review

Guttenberg to Zuckerberg: How to handle disruption | Big Think

Walt Stack, 87, beloved San Francisco runner and icon | Los Angeles Times

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Weekly Exhale

Two icons are filing for divorce. Kraft and Heinz.

Kraft will become the North American Grocery Company, keeper of frozen dinners and bright yellow cheeses. Heinz will emerge as the Global Taste Elevation Company, corporate gobbledygook for we sell ketchup. And beans. And soup. None of these has much to do with taste elevation. Don’t overthink it. These aren’t company names. They’re yard-sale signs.

With breakups, you try not to judge, but here, they’ve made it easy. Heinz: good. Kraft: bad. One gets custody of the growth story, the other whatever’s left. It wasn’t meant to end like this. After all, Warren Buffett—America’s investing legend, the oracle himself—orchestrated the marriage.

The old wisdom held: people die, factories fall apart, but brands endure. Two century-old names your grandparents trusted. At its peak in 2019, Kraft-Heinz was worth $133 billion. Today: $33 billion.

Buffett, himself 95, is still the company’s biggest backer. He admits he’s “disappointed”. At this rate, it’s hard to tell who’s outliving who, the man or the ketchup.

Still, it’s not like he can just walk away. The Board are smitten with another century-old food co. that managed a lucrative separation: Kellogg’s. Broken up in 2023. The newly formed snacks arm, Kellanova, was sold to Mars for $36 billion a year later. And in July, Ferrero snapped up the other 'half'—WK Kellogg, the cereals business—for $3.1 billion.

A conglomerate stuck at $20 billion. Curtain down. Curtain up. You now have separate assets worth $39 billion total. Hey Presto. Magic.

So, can Kraft-Heinz do the same trick?

Maybe. But Kellogg’s had something else going for it. The split revealed what the company had really become.

John Harvey Kellogg was a doctor. Corn Flakes once championed wholesome farming and green rooster branding. The cornerstone of a fortified, nutritious breakfast. Fast-forward to today: Pringles, Nutri-Grain bars, Frosted Flakes.

Broken up, the market could finally bet on what Kellogg’s had drifted into being but would never confess: not food, but confectionery.

No wonder Mars and Ferrero were interested. Mars gets permission to sell you “better-for-you” snacks all day. Ferrero, owner of Nutella, gets permission to sell you sweets for breakfast.

Kraft-Heinz’s line-up is different. a grab bag of standalone foods—mac and cheese, Jell-O, Lunchables, Velveeta. They don’t sit in a particular corner of the cupboard, or a particular corner of your mind.

Unilever, owner of Hellmann’s, might have been a home for Heinz. But their new CEO is chasing higher-margin beauty. He only kept Hellmann’s because it throws off cash and, in his words, qualifies as “edible personal care.”

Analysts blame food trends, or the rise of MAHA, for Kraft-Heinz’s problems. But that’s not quite true. Heinz doubled U.S. retail sales as those pressures mounted. And ketchup is hardly kale. At 22% sugar, 3 grams a squirt, it’s not far off Frosted Flakes.

The difference for Heinz? Marketing spend. Barbie tie-ins, branded grillz, and ads with no logos on. They shifted the brand from advertising to the algorithm, ramming home why it's the original and best.

The same can’t be said for the other Kraft brands. They were starved by Buffet’s broader strategy: strip costs, let scale do the work. Spending 3-5% of sales on marketing—about half the industry norm—was barely enough to stand still.

Learning: You’ll struggle to optimise investment in legacy brands. They’re like old houses, they need constant upkeep, careful modernisation.

And that’s the irony. Buffett, who invests for the long term while holding a can of Coke and ordering McDonald’s every morning for over five decades, knows brands compound like any other relationship.

That’s what keeps the businesses—and him—alive.

--

Charlie Munger died on November 28, just 34 days shy of his 100th birthday. He was Warren Buffett’s closest partner in the building of Berkshire Hathaway. The two spoke daily for more than sixty years.

Both Munger and Buffet grew up in Omaha, yet somehow their paths never crossed. As a teenager, Munger even bagged groceries at Buffet & Son, the store run by Buffet’s grandfather. They stacked the same shelves, but never at the same time.

The spark didn’t come until 1959, at a dinner party. Munger was 35, Buffet 29. Mutual friends thought the “odd, brainy Omaha boys” might just get along.

“We hit it off immediately,” Buffett recalled.

Mungar felt something too, in his own blunt way: “I knew right away Warren was going to be very rich. I just didn’t know it would be this rich.”

For Munger, the chance meeting came at a turning point. Living in Los Angeles, he was still carrying the weight of loss. Four years earlier, his nine-year-old son, Teddy, had died of leukaemia. The grief broke him. Previously divorced. And now unbearably bereaved. He would wander the streets of Pasadena, sobbing for hours at a time.

That night in 1959, he and Buffet formed a connection. They stayed in touch, trading letters and calls. A few years later, Munger became vice-chairman of Berkshire. From then on, the two of them did everything together.

The unthinkable pain of losing a child gave Munger, and later Berkshire Hathaway, an edge. Mungar was immune to billionaire fantasies. After all, no sum of money could shield him from the suffering. “You can’t bring back the dead; you have to soldier through it.” Mungar reflected.

That clarity shaped Berkshire. Munger is often credited as ‘the architect’ of its strategy. Until then, Buffet had chased cigar butts—cheap companies with a final puff of value left. Munger pushed for something more enduring: Buy wonderful companies at fair prices.

As we know, it didn’t always work out that way.

There’s no record of what Munger thought, but it’s safe to assume he stood by Buffett when Berkshire teamed up with 3G Capital, corporate raiders with a taste for “synergies”. Together, they loaded Heinz with billions in debt, tied to warrants that gave Berkshire upside in the Kraft-Heinz merger.

So when Buffet says he’s “disappointed”, maybe it isn’t because Kraft and Heinz failed to wring out efficiencies. Maybe it’s because the old cigar-butt instincts crept back in.

As it happens, 3G pulled out of Kraft-Heinz in the same year Munger died, leaving Buffet with the fallout.

Last year, 16,200 crowded into Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. At one point, mid-sentence, Buffet glanced to his left and began, “Charlie—.“

But Charlie Munger wasn’t there.

The room fell silent.

Later came the Q&A. After the analysts and shareholders had their turn, a young boy stepped up.

“I am wondering. If you had one more day with Charlie...what would you do with it?”

Buffet looked at the boy and gasped. “Ah.” He nodded slowly, lips pressed tight, bearing his own loss.

“We always lived in a way where we were happy with what we were doing. We never had any doubts about the other person. Period. So if we had another day, we’d probably have done the same thing we did on the other days.”

Somehow, this boy asking a question made it seem—for a moment—as if Munger and his lost son Teddy had found each other again, and were standing beside him.

“The more interesting question is who you feel you want to spend the last day of your life with. Figure out a way to start meeting them.

Then meet them as often as you can.

Don’t wait until the last day.

And don’t bother with the others.”

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Reeves to prioritise inflation | Financial Times

Market ructions will shape budget | BBC

Fed expected to make a half-point cut | CNBC

Brand Beat

Warren Buffett to break up Kraft Heinz holdings | Barron's

Craig David, the latest star of Just Eat ads | Campaign

What WPP’s Cindy Rose said at her first global town hall | The Drum

Nestlé ousts CEO after undisclosed romantic relationship | The Guardian

DoorDash’s CMO is ready for you to pay attention | Fast Company

Sweetgreen appoints Zipporah Allen to reignite growth and culture | QSR Magazine

Summer 2025 recap: TV, streaming and digital video | Digiday

NeueHouse shuts L.A. clubs amid financial woes | Los Angeles Times

John Lewis marks 100-year ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ with new campaign | The Industry

Johnnie Walker goes bolder with Sabrina Carpenter partnership | Marketing Dive

Nike revamps ‘Just Do It’ campaign | Nike

McDonald’s brings back McDonaldland to fire up nostalgic sentiment | Marketing Dive

MrBeast buys the NFL for the ultimate internet crossover | Parade

Primark debuts on TV with new brand platform | Marketing Week

Lego taps Tom Holland to reignite imaginative play | Marketing Interactive

Marketing as a transfer of enthusiasm | Jason Fried

Weightwatchers returns: menopause treatments, steamy ads | The Wall Street Journal

Roblox’s growth sparks friction between creators and ad sales | Digiday

Starting Up

Dutch twins secure £4.5m to expand London tonic water brand | The Times

Taking AI healthcare beyond chatbots for doctors | Fortune

Billionaires Thiel and Altman back bold longevity science bets | The Wall Street Journal

Little Spoon shows why DTC is back | Forbes

Tech Tidbits

All the President’s tech CEOs | Wired

Why the court let Google off easy | New York Times

Elon Musk shifts focus to Optimus humanoid | The Week In Startups

Online travel agents prepare for the rise of AI agents | Financial Times

First look: Dyson’s spot-and-scrub AI robot | The Verge

Venture Vibes

Corporate breakups dominate this year’s biggest deals | The Wall Street Journal

Klarna revives IPO to raise $1.27 billion | TechCrunch

UK VC funding faces challenges but remains relevant globally | Crowdfund Insider

All of VC is going into AI | Visual Capitalist

Design Driven

New Banksy mural appears in central London | BBC

Blank Street’s refresh is full-on matcha core | Fast Company

Advertising is going long-form again | It’s Nice That

Ting’s rebrand proves lazy marketers beat busy ones | The Drum

Happiness

Crosley C65 turntable kit includes everything for vinyl listening | Design Milk

Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT | MIT Technology Review

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s funniest moments | YouTube

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Issue #70 | Weekly Exhale

Living in Smyrna, Tennessee, Rachel Love—rachelallthelove on TikTok—usually posted about cats and single motherhood. A small circle of folks tuned in, mostly neighbours and the curious. Who else was watching?

Then on April 20th, she turned her camera onto the town’s Cracker Barrel. The store had just been remodelled. A restaurant refresh is supposed to feel bright, maybe even hopeful. But Love felt the opposite. She felt dread, as if something kindred was being pulled away. She posted:

When Cracker Barrel took away the last piece of nostalgia you had left.‌‌‌

She wasn’t alone.

Two million views later, her comments section read like a town hall. Cracker Barrel, it turned out, was about the comfort of things that never change—rocking chairs lined up as the first welcome, peg games waiting in the gift shop, food like grandma used to make. Like coming home.

With a twinkle in her eye, Love kept posting. People kept watching. Soon, she was collecting feedback from those who loved Cracker Barrel and those who wanted it to succeed.

The feedback was blunt: The new walls look like a country-chic Pinterest board gone rogue. The green bean recipe had been tampered with. The buttermilk biscuits weren’t the same. But the new booths were welcome. Adding beer to the drinks list was, at best, just about okay.

Cracker Barrel’s social media team stepped in: We’re not changing who we are...just shining things up a bit! They sent Love a box of swag, patting her on the head for being “passionate”. But the story had already outgrown them. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were covering it. And Love, playing along, was crowned “The Unofficial Spokesperson for the people of Cracker Barrel.”

Yet less than three months later, Cracker Barrel went ahead with changes to its logo. Uncle Herschel-gone. The barrel he leaned against-gone. The rocking chair-gone. The words themselves: Old Country Store-gone.

Oh, and one final act: Cracker Barrel deleted its “not changing who we are” comment from Love’s original video.

For outsiders, the update barely registered. What’s all the fuss? That old logo was never built for the digital age. And besides, does anyone really think Cracker Barrel is authentic? It was invented in 1969, not 1869. The stock is owned by BlackRock, GMT Capital and Vanguard, hardly small-town stuff. A Fugazi.

But by then it was too late. Cracker Barrel had already blown the roof off its porch. The internet broke. Donald Trump, never one to miss a branding fight, waded in. The stock tumbled.

Within ten days, the rebrand was gone. Just another failed brand makeover yanked back before it could ever walk forward. A “billion-dollar opportunity to make customers happy again”, as Trump put it.

Old logo reinstated. Share price steadied.

And now the spotlight shifts. Not on Rachel Love and the people of Cracker Barrel, but on CEO Julie Feiss Masino.

Masino is no fool. She wasn’t swayed by nostalgia, TikTok, or the news cycle. She was tuned into the dashboard that mattered: same-store sales climbing to 2.9% then 4.7%. Three straight quarters of growth. The first lift in gift-shop sales since 2023.

The remodels were showing positive returns.

The splinter under Masino’s fingernail wasn’t green beans or refits. It was a complaint filed by America First Legal in July, accusing the company’s DEI program of violating civil rights. The truth is, the stock slide wasn’t triggered by logos at all. That only accelerated the fall. The decline had already begun, driven by the mood hanging over the company since the filing.

Masino, shaped by her Taco Bell playbook, had little instinct for Cracker Barrel’s particular kind of country food and country memory. In that context, the logo change was less a misstep than handing MAGA the rifle, carving “go woke, go broke” into the bullet, and pulling the trigger herself.

And in doing so, she’s handed another weapon to Sardar Biglari. The activist investor has waged seven proxy wars against Cracker Barrel since 2011, with only partial success. Now he’s back, pointing to the $700 million remodel and rebrand strategy, the dividend cuts, and the botched logo as evidence of leadership failure.

Given where corporate America stands—and how divided the country is—I doubt this showdown ends in mercy.

But back in Smyrna, Rachel-all-the-Love is upbeat: “We’re gonna make it the best it’s ever been. Don’t call it a comeback, but I’m feeling it.”

We’re in a hospice room, afternoon light slanting in. My mom is propped up in her bed, her name card above the headboard, wires looping from the wall. Her black vest has lace edging, her pearls still around her neck—dignities she’s holding onto. On the over-bed table is a meal tray cluttered with fast-food wrappers, a jug of water with a straw standing guard.

Her face is puffy now. The bruises spreading down her arm tell the truth: the end is near.

Beside her, in a giant electric red recliner far too big for him, sits her seven-year-old grandson. He’s set up camp. A blue-cased tablet on his lap, nurse’s remote and a couple of toys in reach. He’s demolishing the free biscuits.

It’s a scene of small mercies.

We forget sometimes: eating together is special. A little ritual. A small reward. The food and setup might be low-key. But the ties it holds between people, between families, are anything but.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Rachel Love had been going to Cracker Barrel in Smyrna, Tennessee, for most of her life—breakfasts and dinners with her parents, but most of all with her grandmother. In her swag unboxing video, she even wore a Cracker Barrel sweater passed down from her. In Love’s own words, her grandmother, who's still here, is a ride-or-die CB.

In one video, without words, Love's teenage son lies asleep on a care-home bed. Beside him sits his great-grandmother—Love's grandmother—in a blue denim shirt and cap, stroking his arm as he dreams. Three generations apart, and yet, they couldn’t be closer. The caption read: They were so lucky to have this time together.

And suddenly, Love’s Cracker Barrel commentary seems less like a quirky local influencer, surfaced by the algorithm and amplified by a media frenzy. She’s a granddaughter with roots knotted into the store’s porch posts and rocking chairs. Was she holding on too tightly? Maybe. But, you don’t need a degree in business to see it: that kind of nostalgia is what keeps people hopeful about the future.

I look down at my phone again, at the picture of my mom and her only grandson in the hospice. I saved it in favourites, an oddly named place to keep it, but that’s where it lives.

As I hold the image, the room comes back.

My son, done playing with the buttons of the chair, packed up and stood at the door. Mom, determined, wanted to stand. As I helped her to her feet, I called him back: “Come on, say goodbye to Nona properly.”

He ran back, a quick hug. She pulled him close. “Is that all? This might be the last time you see me.”

He didn’t catch the meaning, but understood the cue. He hugged tighter. She squeezed back with all of the little strength she had left.

And that was the last time they were together.

Now I know why I saved the picture. Not because it was the kind you'd frame. Not because it's the easiest to look at. But because it reminds me we were lucky.

So lucky to have that time together.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

Business confidence rises despite economic concerns | The Times

Why is UK borrowing so high? | Financial Times

August was a drama-filled month for the US economy | Quartz

Brand Beat

Cracker Barrel: The corporate logo that broke the internet | The New York Times

Why algorithms demand culture-first, not brand-first marketing | Forbes

State senator sues Omnicom and Whirlpool over Cannes awards | Ad Age

Kraft Heinz finalises breakup deal in corporate split | The Wall Street Journal

Food brands harness 90s nostalgia | The Guardian

Why we're all thirsty for Mediterranean lager | Creative Salon

Wetherspoons pub thrives under all-women management team | Daily Star

Kohl’s taps private labels to drive its turnaround | Retail Dive

Don’t make brand models harder than they need to be | Marketing Week

Influencers adapt to ban on less healthy food ads | MediaCat

Weird Al fronts Prudential’s surprising marketing shift | Adweek

Spike Lee and Sofia Coppola head A24’s cinema opening | Variety

How brands can deliver real-world value to Gen Z | Ad Age

The kicks you wear: Did Nike lose the youth? | Business of Fashion

J. Crew faces backlash after AI-created “vintage” ad | Futurism

Glossier’s new product was announced in a magazine | Feed Me

How one Instagram post brought Skininavia a whole new audience | Marketing Brew

Serena Williams’ fuels Ozempic culture | Vogue

Brands court BookTokers with spicy romance novel campaigns | Mediacat

We loved Costa. But artisan brands are gaining ground | The Observer

Starting Up

Feisty protein soda is not for gym bros | Vy Cutting

More than 10 European startups become unicorns this year | TechCrunch

This woman knows your next favourite snack | The New York Times

Wype raises £1m to clean up bottom care | Startups Magazine

Attio, AI CRM, raises $52m from Google Ventures | UKTN

Tech Tidbits

Meta fights to rein in unruly AI chatbots | The Verge

Accenture CEO identifies three red flags behind AI failures | Fortune

Meet the 100 most influential people shaping AI in 2025 | Time

Why Sam Altman should read Derrida now | The Observer

The woman’s hacker house breaking A.I.’s glass ceiling | The New York Times

Venture Vibes

Activist investor seizes opportunity after Cracker Barrel uproar | The Wall Street Journal

Veteran entrepreneurs unveil unconventional VC firm | Forbes

TikTok owner ByteDance sets valuation at $330 billion | Reuters

Investors are loving Loveable | TechCrunch

Peter Thiel backed SNÖ Ventures to shut down | Sifted

Design Driven

Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, named USA's chief design officer | Techmeme

Is there such a thing as an ethical designer? | It’s Nice That

Why 7-Eleven’s lowercase ‘n’ makes its logo iconic | Marketing Scoop

Lego’s retro iMac is giving Y2K vibes | Creative Bloq

Happiness

Overhearing mom’s friends gossip about my dad left me floored | Slate

How micro-retirement lets Gen Z press pause on careers | Inc.

How to build a business plan for a happier life | Fast Company

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Weekly Exhale

Zaria Parvez is leaving Duolingo after five years. “I’ll no longer be Zaria the owl on TikTok. I’ll just be Zaria,” she posted. She’s 26. Her first job out of college. Building and running socials for the world-famous owl just tryna vibe🦉. During her time, the company picked up over a billion in annual revenues, 26 million followers and a bottomless pit of attention.

Parvez has made social media history—full stop. She turned a cartoon owl into an empire of memes, wielding a unique combo of skills: a native feel for algorithmic media, the reckless clarity of a beginner’s mind, and the seasoned instincts of a brand marketer twice her age.

“Somebody call Harvard Business School,” one observer quipped.

And yet, there’s something tender in this departure. Something fragile. Something broken, now being pieced back together. Parvez has lived through the cracked ribs and concussions of a startup fighting its way on Wall Street.

From the start, Parvez’s “unhinged” marketing was perfectly tuned to its moment—and to the rise of the For You Page.

Duo could get cancelled—even for a misjudged Amber Heard comment during the Johnny Depp trial—but Parvez always moved fast to contain it. Besides, the audience was in on the joke: “Only Duo 😂", "Slay Duo,” they’d comment. Each line crossed only seemed to pull in more followers and feed the fame.

But by 2025, around the time TikTok was being saved from the brink of a ban, Duolingo was facing scrutiny. AI had entered the chat. Analysts thought the stock might have peaked. Sure, Dua Lipa flirts with Duo for reach, but she’s not conjugating verbs on a Duolingo Max subscription, is she?

Suddenly, the good chaos the company was known for was about to turn into—well, just pure chaos. In what Parvez described as a “culmination of the strategy”, she did something unusual.

She killed Duo.

Except she didn’t. It was a mock execution from the internet’s amusement. 1.7 billion impressions reacting to Duo as Cybertruck roadkill.

With earnings forecasts becoming less clear, the share price soared and fell. These swings weren’t small: a low of $12 billion and a peak of $24 billion.

But where social media and shareholder value came completely undone was over AI. Co-founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn, declared Duolingo an “AI-first” company. The market loved the efficiencies, but the backlash online was instant. “Language is what makes us human,” one fan pleaded on Reddit. Users rage-cancelled, creators called for app deletions, and follwers fell.

So, with earnings revised upward, Duolingo tested a blackout: socials wiped clean, “gonefornow123”.

Duolingo’s cold reality: 10.9 million paying subscribers out of around 500 million registered users—barely 2%. And the more Duo tickles the algorithm, the more it attracts casual meme watchers who never intend to pay.

So growth has to come from the product. Which means less fun. The playful Hearts system—a light-hearted punishment for mistakes—has been scrapped, replaced by an Energy system designed to cap free use. And the fastest-growing subjects aren’t even languages anymore, they’re chess, music and maths.

Against this, Parvez delivers her sharpest pushback. What she really wants to kill is the question that haunts every social media manager: What’s the ROI?

“You should all start with just brand awareness and understand it’s an investment, a down payment. And, eventually, the mortgage will pay itself off.”

Parvez made the down payment. She paid off the house. Duolingo will collect the rent from here.

And Parvez? After sick leave for burnout last year, she’s surely ready to cash in too— a new role, talks, books, maybe a course. “I love to create,” she said, “on a smaller scale, judged on creative value, not on how viral it went.”

Value over virality are terms she and Von Ahm can finally part on.

Cuski is a flannel toy that snuggles perfectly into a baby’s arms. A small miracle in those early years, stealing you a few extra hours sleep. At the top, a rounded plush head—round because that’s the first shape a baby learns to know. Below a flat, floppy square of cloth, unstuffed, that can scrunch between cheek and neck. Cuski isn’t so much held as absorbed—the comfort a parent can’t always be there to give.

Ours is matted and frayed now. Well, all three of them are. Yep, Cuski is too precious—too mission critical—to risk relying on just one. Backups are essential. One might vanish in a park, another thrown in the wash. My son discovered the spares. Three Cuskis meant three times the cuddles. Bedtime was one tucked into each side, and the third stuffed into the chest of his sleep bag. You’d wake to find him waddling down the corridor holding one, another dragging behind, the third hanging out of his nappy.

Later, during the pandemic years, when my son was afraid and washed his hands until his knuckles bled, it was Cuski who listened to the thoughts he couldn’t share with anyone else. And even now, when he sits down to watch TV, tired from the day, his hands drift to his neck, where Cuski used to rest.

As we know, children bond with their soft toys to navigate the jagged path from dependence to independence. The School of Life reminds us adults don’t really outgrow them either. We just swap them for subtler things. An old book, a worn-out college jumper, a pebble from a beach.

Or, who knows, maybe even a cereal-box bear, a Labubu doll, or a cartoon owl on an app.

Which got me wondering about Zaria Parvez and Duo. Barely in her twenties, hailing from the University of Oregon, a volunteer of the Raphael House of Portland, she gave her voice to an owl. Until the two were indistinguishable. Nobody ever said, “Zaria’s posts are great.” They said, “Duo is hilarious.” And as the business tightened its grip on Duo, did it feel like it was gripping more than a mascot? Her soul?

Killing Duo was Zaria’s way of leaving on her own terms—a final, multi-million dollar act to prove her importance, to protect Duo, and to find closure. A soft toy she made herself outgrow. If I keep holding on, neither of us will learn to stand on our own.

I’m back in the Hague Blue of my son’s freshly painted room, filling a plastic tub with cuddly old friends. Nona Bear. Octi, Flat Ted. One by one, I lift them from the duvet, their faces looking back at me as I press them gently, one atop the other.

There are just three left.

I line the Cuskis up side by side, their little round heads pressed together as if comforting each other. And for a moment, I just stand there staring.

I manage to roll two into the box. But I can’t bring myself to the third.

Instead, I check the room, making sure no one’s watching. I open the sock drawer of the new tall dresser. In my hand is the very first Cuski-the original, “Cusk.” The most worn and threadbare of them all, cloth rubbed down to the rubber underneath.

I fold his soft arms and legs carefully across his face, then tuck him into the back. Out of sight. Still close. And unless that giant pair of walking socks betrays his hiding place, Cusk can stay there. Just a little while longer.

In that moment, in my own cowardly way, I realise I’m not ready to box all that love away. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

UK and eurozone inflation gap hits two-year high | Financial Times

UK business activity increases, hiring falls | The Guardian

The puzzle of the US economy | BBC

Brand Beat

I’m leaving my job at Duolingo | Zaria Parvez

Duolingo’s departing social media manager on virality and anxiety | The Wall Street Journal

Swatch pulls 'slanted eye' ad after backlash | Adweek

Ryan Reynolds toasts Wrexham’s success with Aviation Gin | Adweek

White House launches on TikTok despite US ban | TechCrunch

Target shares plunge 10% as new CEO steps in amid sales slump | CNBC

McDonald’s UK CEO, former CMO, to step down | Marketing Week

Walmart wins over more shoppers | The Wall Street Journal

White House’s official TikTok account already facing backlash | Mashable

TikTok Shop forces advertisers to cede AI control | Business Insider

Inside Topshop’s reboot: London brand’s journey to the world | Vogue Business

How Huckleberry is building its brand, one show at a time | Fast Company

How beauty plans to crack Substack | Business of Fashion

How AI is transforming the future of voiceovers | Creative Salon

Labubu could generate $1 billion in sales this year | TechCrunch

YouTube can’t decide if it’s TV or social media | The Media Leader

CTV to invest in creator content to boost ad revenue | Digiday

OnlyFans revenue hits $7.2 billion with 9% growth | Variety

Claude AI “Keep Thinking” ads hit Times Square | X

Starting Up

Musk praises $3,000 smart mattress cover—will consumers buy? | The Wall Street Journal

CodeSignal’s Cosmo AI app aims to be the Duolingo for job skills | VentureBeat

Keychain raises $30M to build in India and expand in US | TechCrunch

Tin Can: Seattle dad brings back landlines for kids | Caitlin Begg

Tech Tidbits

Duolingo’s AI worries were overblown | MarketWatch

Google’s Pixel event was a total cringefest | TechCrunch

Scientists build a bot-only social network with worrying results | Futurism

Microsoft AI chief warns chatbots may fuel psychosis | The Telegraph

Warren Brodey, 101, dies after pioneering the information age | The New York Times

New NASA chief urges complete abandonment of Earth | Vice

Meta freezes AI hiring after blockbuster spending spree | Mashable

Venture Vibes

Intel gives U.S. government a 10% stake | BBC

Soho House goes private in $2.7bn deal as Ashton Kutcher joins board | The Guardian

How founders turn fitness into networking opportunities | Forbes

United Airlines Ventures funds Astro Mechanica aerospace startup | PR Newswire

Venture capital markets take divergent paths | Bloomberg

Bill Ackman launches AI curriculum for schools | The Wall Street Journal

Design Driven

SharkNinja aims for world-class design | Modern Retail

Studio GOGO transforms Lego bricks into playful jewellery | Dezeen

IKEA launches meatball-shaped plate merging form and function | Wallpaper

Happiness

Why almost everything improves when you have company | The Times

Have more fun at work by thin-slicing joy and showing personality | The Guardian

Five Baha’i lessons for a happier life | The Atlantic

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Weekly Exhale

Remember when people used to say, “Oh, I love that ad, it’s so clever”? Just regular people, unprompted, talking about advertising like it mattered. That kind of conversation feels quaint now.

And yet, this summer something curious is happening: marketing is getting love again.

Emily Sundberg clocked it last week. Under a new campaign for Dairy Boy clothing, the top comment read: “Marketinggg 👏.” Just beneath it: “Your creative director deserves a raise.” These kinds of comments, Sundberg noted, have become a thing. From Rhode’s latest spot starring Harris Dickinson, to Paltrow’s very temporary cameo for Astronomer, people are responding. Not just to the messages, but to the effort.

Now, as it turns out, Dairy Boy’s new brand film is nothing groundbreaking. The retro ice cream van trope isn’t new—Bill Nighy just did the same for Ffern. But still, it lands. In this spot, Dairy Boy swaps sailor plaid sleep sets and varsity shirts for 99 Flakes, leaning into its name with a wink.

Does it meet the veteran standards of creative advertising? Probably not. But it’s close. What’s interesting is that people are calling out the marketing itself—as a compliment. And that feels like a shift.

So what’s going on?

On one hand, it’s obvious. In a post-media world where everyone has as personal brand, we’re all fluent in the mechanics of marketing. To cite “marketing” is to show your savvy. You get it. You approve.

On the other, it’s oddly nostalgic. A throwback to when people actually liked a brand’s advertising and said so.

The deeper theory? A generation is coming of age that’s experiencing advertising as it once was for the very first time. They’ve never known the era when brands hired Ridley Scott or Michel Gondry. Ads, for them, have been the noise between swipes. So when a brand shows up with intention and a little flair, it feels new. Even meaningful.

That’s a welcome sign for marketers who have spent years contorting themselves to meet the demands of social media. As platforms focussed on engagement, the only metric that mattered was watch time. Not what people were watching, just that they stayed watching.

TikTok took it further. Suddenly, the gloss of your Instagram feed was a liability. Brands were dragged into bedrooms lit by ring-lights, paced in circles at the end of selfie sticks, or reduced to speaking in the tone of playground memes for ‘relatability’.

And of course, endless trend-jacking. Everywhere on Slack this week: "OK team—what's our Taylor Swift x Travis Kelce album angle?"

There's worse. This summer proved that brands will take a victory lap after stumbling into a hornet’s nest of—largely performative—outrage. Billions of views. A bump in market cap.

But that kind of fama comes with a deferred cost. People might be talking about you, but they’re not cheering you on. They don't want to hear about your product. They’re harvesting your chaos for their own reach. And to investors, you’re now a meme stock.

The real winners? Not the brands. Not the people.

The platforms. Every time.

But maybe, in the wake of algorithmic fixation and feed fatigue, something more genuine is emerging. A softer-touch creativity. One that a new generation appreciates much like the generations before them did.

And brands with a sense of themselves, who show up with care, craft and a little production budget, might just find something more valuable than virality: A small, sincere golf clap for marketinggg 👏.

--

I have a friend. His name is Ogden. We met when we were thirteen, grew up together and somehow never grew apart. He’s been the longest constant in my life by a meaningful distance.

It’s wild to think my son is just six months away from being the same age I was when I met Ogden. If he’s lucky enough to find a friend like that, someone to journey with across the decades...well, he's blessed.

There’s something sacred about knowing someone that long. You build your our own language. A private set of signals and shared stories that only you understand.

But mostly, when I think of Ogden, I think of laughter.

The uncontainable kind. Rib-aching, tear-rolling, collapse-on-the-floor kind. We’ve had hundreds of those moments. Enough that it doesn’t take much—a weird noise in a queue, someone pulling a dumb face at the wrong time, a piece of fruit escaping down a supermarket aisle—and we’re gone. One of us knows it’s funny. The other knows they know. And the laughter loop begins. You try to hold it in, but it’s no use. You crack. You giggle. You spit-laugh into the air like you’re thirteen again.

And I suppose you only really notice how much you laugh, when there’s been a little sadness too.

We knew each other’s mums, of course. Ogden was raised in London by Auntie Clariette—a churchgoing woman with kind eyes and a Honda Accord that always seemed on the brink of an engine fire. She was never on time. But she always showed up.

And Ogden became close with my mom, Sylvia, who was a kind of second mother to him, in her own way. So when she got sick, he was there.

If you’ve ever watched a parent deteriorate, you know the rhythm: up, down, false alarm, maybe this is it—no, stand down—maybe not yet. And then one day, it is.

It was the last day of October. Ogden had come to visit Mum’s house. Neither of us planned it. Our visits weren’t that regular. But that morning, she went into a sharp, peaceful decline. And so we were both there, by chance. Two childhood friends, two sons, with family nearby.

I don’t really know what you call that. Luck? Divine intervention? Something vibrational that science hasn’t found words for yet? I think when you’ve known someone that long, your lives are connected in ways you can’t see.

Since then, we’ve kept a little thing going. Whenever one of us travels and visits a church, we light a candle. One for Sylvia. One for Auntie Clariette. Then we snap a photo and send it. Just a WhatsApp ping. Two candles. No words needed.

It’s a little signal to the other. A way of saying: we’re still here. Still thinking about the people who shaped us. Still honouring the women who raised us—and the friendship that holds because of them.

It’s easy to get drowned in the chaos of the technology. As the internet made markets infinite, platforms learned that our attention is not. So a space that once promised freedom became something else. Performance. Everyone posting. Everyone watching. Each person a channel. Each post a claw for attention. Harvesting issues for likes and clout. We all became brands to be consumed.

But people are resisting. In billions of private threads, in coded pings, in tiny gestures shared through apps designed to hook and monetise us—we’re still finding ways to connect.

And one day, just like rediscovering the feeling of a thoughtful ad with ice cream in it, a generation will realise: all that personal branding doesn’t make them richer, or better, or more deeply connected.

They’ll hit the reset button.

And we’ll start building things to serve us—not the other way around.

Back in London, I’m about to get on the Tube when a photo flickers onto my phone—two candles glowing beside each other. I pause. Feel the sadness. And the love. It’s beautiful.

Except—there’s an illustration on the candles. A monk. In glasses. Looks like a real oddball. Who makes these candles? And why does he look like a supply teacher with a very suspicious side-hustle?

It’s so peaceful here. Ogden types.

And then, they’ve got that funny guy on the candles. Hard not to laugh.

That's was it. Laughing. Violently. Publicly. Privately. Two friends, thirty years on, trying to hold it together on opposite sides of the continent.

For a fleeting moment, I hear them—Auntie Clariette and Sylvia—laughing with us. Just there, then gone.

As the Tube pulls away into the city, I feel grateful. That somehow our special bond can turn pain into love—and love into laughter.

I’m not sure what more we’re here for.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

UK economic growth slows to 0.3% | BBC

US wholesale prices jump 3.3% as trade war hits economy | Financial Times

FTSE 100 hits record close | Reuters

Brand Beat

Subway sandwich becomes defining image of Trump’s reign of terror | Slate

How “Marketinggg 👏” became a compliment | Feed Me

Dairy Boy’s new film by filmmaker RJ Bruni | Instagram

Bill Nighy in campaign for Ffern | TikTok

How brands are tapping into vibe culture | The Drum

Ad agencies are down but not out | Financial Times

Taylor Swift is making Travis Kelce part of her empire | Business Insider

Shein's UK sales jump by 33% year-on-year | BBC

OpenAI and Perplexity are brands, not just tech companies | Digiday

Specsavers spotlights childhood eye test importance in colourful ad | Marketing Beat

Duolingo stock surges 14% on AI-driven growth | CNBC

Hamilton TikTok trend goes viral to mark 10th anniversary | Mashable

WeWork positions itself as a mature real estate firm | The Wall Street Journal

UK football season set to smash TV viewership and revenue records | The Guardian

YouGov finds YouTube usage outpaces social media rivals this year | Marketing Week

‘Cheapfake’ AI celeb videos are now YouTube ragebait | Wired

Kingsmill owner buys Hovis for £75m | Reuters

Trending: Supermoon clear protein drink | Thingtesting

“Made in the USA” is a struggling brand | Fast Company

P&G announce a new beauty CEO | Business of Fashion

Moët Hennessy sexual harassment case highlights company culture | Financial Times

Kodak faces struggles despite Gen Z film resurgence | CNBC

Starting Up

Why your startup brand should be active on Reddit | Startups Magazine

British startup reinvents energy storage with innovative approach | Sustainable Times

Elon Musk’s xAI co-founder leaves the company | TechCrunch

UK taps ex-OpenAI lead as chief AI advisor | Sifted

Tech bosses spend millions more on personal security | Financial Times

GPT-5 becomes an AI nightmare for developers and users | Futurism

Nuclear-powered AI could elevate Rolls-Royce to UK’s biggest firm | BBC

Venture Vibes

Disrupt 2025 reveals first VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 | TechCrunch

Perplexity makes $34.5B longshot bid for Chrome | The Wall Street Journal

16 VC firms funding creator economy startups like Substack | Business Insider

Global venture capital outlook | Bain & Co

Design Driven

How album campaigns now create entire visual universes | It’s Nice That

SpongeBob’s pop culture reign | Fast Company

The best new Scandinavian interior design arrivals | Vogue

Happiness

How we got the internet all wrong. | The Dispatch

Money as the dark matter of the universe | Big Think

A management anti-fad that will last forever | The Atlantic

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Weekly Exhale

There I am, standing in the Oval Office with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. As leader of the free world, I am about to receive an honorary gift, crafted uniquely for me by Apple’s finest. I brace myself. I envision something sleek, innovative, and beautiful—the kind of design magic that only Apple can conjure.

The crisp white lid lifts off the iPad-sized box with that signature Apple swoosh. Inside: a round disc of glass and a gold plinth. Say what? It’s clunky. Dated. Almost faux. I smile as I’m told it was fresh off the Corning line, unit of one, designed by a former U.S. Marine, and—believe it or not—the base is 24-carat gold.

In other words, a $3 trillion company—the most celebrated brand in consumer design—has just presented the 47th president of the United States with what looks like a participation trophy from a small-town charity golf day.

“He’s done well,” the president says warmly of the U.S. Marine’s effort. Reddit was less restrained: Tim Apple garling Trump’s balls, one meme read, reminding us that this was the same president who, back in 2019, famously confused Cook’s name with his company.

It’s another White House charade, but a necessary one. The president needs to make America great again, and Tim Cook needs crystal-clear assurances.

Because on America’s farm, Apple is the golden goose laying billions in iPhone-shaped profits. It’s the morning rooster for the entire tech sector. With a 6% weight in the S&P 500, Apple sets the tone for America’s economy.

Lately, the goose has been less...regular. Not the kind of daily constitutional Wall Street likes to see. Apple absorbed $800 million in tariff costs last quarter. iPhone sales surged, then slumped, as consumers rushed to buy ahead of tariff-based price hikes.

We can’t have the golden egg supply slowing down now, can we?

Enter the “American Manufacturing Program” (or “AMP”—these things always sound cooler once acronymed): a $600 billion pledge over four years to make iPhones in the U.S. So, the Corning plant in Kentucky will now produce all the cover glass for iPhones and Watches sold globally. As a direct result, Apple gets an exemption from a proposed 100% tariff on semiconductors—a move that would otherwise be like bowl cancer for our golden goose.

But cover glass is just that, the surface layer. It’s not the circuitry or processors.

When asked whether we’d ever see an all-American iPhone, Cook was clear: final assembly will remain overseas for the foreseeable future. But the president already had what he needed. They’re coming home...Isn’t that nice, doing things here in the United States rather than in other far-away countries?

Is AMP real? If Apple spent $42 billion on manufacturing investment last year, the idea that it will now spend more than double that every year for the next four years is...ambitious. Probably a distraction. After all, the iPhone doesn’t get better based on where it’s made. These days, it barely gets better with each new release.

And that’s the problem. We need Apple to focus on what’s next, not reworking what is. At some point, with AI reshaping the way we interact with technology, the smartphone’s central role will decline.

In that respect, the ceremony does the brand no favours. We’re a long way from the moment Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone from his pocket and asked: Are you getting it yet? Back then, we were held in awe. Today, we get Tim Cook—Tim Apple to the president—clumsily assembling a golf plaque.

Welcome to another day of performance over policy, announcement over innovation. And in that respect, Cook delivered. The optics—literally—were what mattered. For now, it works. Apple stock surged 13%, its biggest weekly gain since 2020.

--

I don’t know why, but goodbyes at the airport feel sadder. They’re nothing like a “see you later” at the front door or the school gate. Airports have a way of making separation official. The steel beams, the security lines, the glass barriers. Once you’re through, you’re gone. And when it’s your twelve-year-old son flying across the Atlantic for a couple of weeks without you, it’s more than a lump in the throat. It’s a full-sized golf ball.

We go through the usual choreography, parking, wobbling the scuffed old case up to bag drop. I busy myself with tiny details that don’t matter: sticking the two ends of the bag tag together, checking the gate number again. Little rituals to distract from the moment I don’t want to reach.

Sure, he’ll be back soon enough. But my soul knows the truth—he’ll return another step further away from me. Each trip forges a new version of him, and each version seems to vanish faster than the last. When they’re tiny, you can hold them tight. As they grow, it’s like holding sand.

The last check is his phone. Is it charged? Packed? “Keep it on you,” I tell him. Not just because his boarding pass lives in Apple Wallet, but because for as long as it’s in his hand, he’ll carry me with him. Fooling my heart into believing that, even 4,000 miles away, he isn’t far at all.

I know I’m not supposed to encourage his bond with that phone—our bond with it. But I do. And standing there in the airport, feeling like an over-emotional dad who really should pull himself together, I don’t feel sorry for it.

We’ve turned phones into the villain lately—teens and their screens, boys and their stalled development, boys disconnecting from the real world and coming undone. It’s a doom loop of Haidt interviews and podcasts about “Adolescence.” The companies responsible just shrug: Hey parents, we made it, we profit from it, but it’s your problem now.

Sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.

A friend was at breakfast with Jony Ive last week, who was seemingly lamenting what the iPhone had become. Maybe. A generation or two got burned up like moths to a flame. But that’s just creative destruction, right?

What Jony is certain of is this: AI calls for a faster, more intuitive way to live inside the loop of the human condition. I see shades of that in my son. Addicted as we both are to screen time, he’s also tired of it—impatient even. Sometimes that slab of glass just isn’t smart enough.

So, I want to believe Jony when he hints that something more intuitive, more humane and more connective is on the way. Because connection—whatever form it takes—is what these devices need to get back to.

My mom used to beg me to call her. I didn’t, not enough. Now I understand why she begged. And even if my son's replies rarely stretch beyond “yh” or “k” or “ik”, he feels close by. Asking me to take the phone out of his life would be like asking me to cut the last cord between us.

Back at the airport, we reach the point where I can’t go any further.

“Be good. Remember—“ I’m fumbling for something final to say, but my words dissolve. The golf ball in my throat has stretched so tight I can barely breathe, let alone speak.

He gives me a perfunctory slap on the shoulder. “Yeah, yeah." He begins to step away.

Then stops. Spins. Runs back in for a hug. Half a second, pressed right into me.

“Love you, Dad.”

My lips pinch tight. I can feel heat behind my eyes. The moment passes too quickly. He lets go, walks through, turns, waves.

And then—gone.

The feeling of loss is instant.

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Market Moves

Trump announces 90-day pause on US-China tariffs | The Guardian

UK economy sees job losses in July | Financial Times

Bank of England cuts interest rate to 4% | BBC News

Brand Beat

Apple logs best week since 2020 after White House visit | CNBC

Marketers’ 2025 social media spending and measurement strategies | Digiday

Everything to know about Warby Parker’s $95 glasses | The Wall Street Journal

Krispy Kreme launches its most fleeting treat today | Fast Company

Hasbro CMO Jason Bunge on digital play’s future | Adweek

Joanna Allen steers Little Moons back from freefall | The Grocer

Beyoncé’s star power elevates a denim ad | The Cut

L’Oréal hires OnlyFans star to promote teen makeup | The Guardian

Molly Baz turns former McDonald’s into a vegan paradise | Fast Company

Overcoming marketing’s culture of short-termism | Marketing Week

The new DTC rebranding playbook | Business of Fashion

Gen AI will transform the e-commerce experience | CNBC

UK watchdog bans Zara ads for dangerously thin models | Marketing Interactive

YouTube’s slow rollout of scalable creator ads irks marketers | Digiday

Men turn to Reddit to shop: what brands need to know | Vogue Business

Burberry returns to London aboard a red double-decker bus | Women's Wear Daily

Harry and Meghan ink multi-year Netflix content deal | BBC

Early data shows ad controversy didn’t boost American Eagle sales | Adweek

Why are we obsessed with TikTok’s trending age filter? | Vogue

'Loud luxury' is back as high-end brands look to rebound | CNBC

Starting Up

Open-AI-for-marketing backed by Adobe opens to investors | Barchart

Founder of unicorn ed-tech, Euan Blair, on having a prime minister dad | Sifted

Inside World introduces first-ever human verification brand | Fast Company

General Catalyst leads $11m series A funding for Pronto | Tech In Asia

Tech Tidbits

GPT-5’s is here | OpenAI

Mark Zuckerberg declares war on the iPhone | The Wall Street Journal

Google and IBM see first workable quantum computer within reach | Financial Times

NASA plans a nuclear reactor on the Moon | The New York Times

Amazon’s Starlink rival reaches 100 satellites in orbit | Slashdot

Venture Vibes

The venture capital money machine is spinning again | Financial Times

Slow Ventures backs woodworking founder using $60M creator fund | TechCrunch

Luxury jeweller Fabergé sold to tech investor for $50m | The Guardian

How podcasts hosted by VCs made a new media industry | Bloomberg

Design Driven

Michele de Lucchi’s whimsical sketches spark creative reflection | Wallpaper

Creative writing with GPT-5 | OpenAI

Advice for brand-building with creative soul | It's Nice That

Happiness

Quiet cracking: a new workplace threat | Fast Company

Summertime sadness is a real thing | Financial Times

The doggy route to happiness | Creative Bloom

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Weekly Exhale

It’s hard not to laugh. Watching a 51-year-old man slide out of frame on a jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. Andy Byron—chin tucked, arms pinned—freezes, turns, and then...crouches down. Like a guilty toddler behind a sofa. If I can’t see them, maybe they can’t see me.

Except we can. The screen is 80 feet wide. Sixty thousand people in the stadium. And by breakfast, 120 million more will have seen it on their phones. A crash-course in Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a backstage moment thrown into the floodlights. Pure, reflexive, human awkwardness.

Turns out Andy’s not a nobody. He’s the CEO of Astronomer, a data automation company fresh off a $93 million Series D, backed by Bain Capital and Salesforce, valued at $1.2 billion.

And thanks to Andy, Astronomer will go from invisible to a global brand in a single day—the kind of awareness that usually takes a century and hundreds of millions to build. Not bad returns.

Both married, we now know Andy was swaying with Astronomer’s Head of HR, Kristin Cabot, the first to fold, face buried in hands before the camera panned away. A third colleague enters frame, frozen in the expression of the 😬 emoji. Gritted smile, eyes locked forward, trying desperately to disappear without moving.

“Either they’re having an affair or just very shy,” Chris Martin offers. A perfectly British, perfectly polite quip.

And with that, he pours blood into the piranha tank. Social media bares its teeth. And does what it does best: devour.

The truth didn’t stand a chance.

Coldplay’s kiss-cam became our first big taste of AI-fakery at scale. Alternate endings appeared within hours. Deepfaked clips where Andy and Kristin just waved, or kissed, like nothing was wrong. A video apology from Andy that never happened. A GPT-written statement from his wife—also fake. Even footage claiming to be from his daughter. Not real.

And if it wasn’t AI making fakes, people were. Alyssa Stoddard, from Astronomer’s HR team, was caught in the blast radius, wrongly identified as the 😬 onlooker.

“I was not at the Coldplay concert. I am not the brunette in the circulating videos,” she pleaded on LinkedIn.

Didn’t matter. The videos had already racked up millions of views. The internet had chosen its cast, and Alyssa was in it whether she liked it or not.

And then somehow, and I mean out of nowhere, Ryan Reynolds’ ad team spawns in. And faster than Don Draper can say “Change the conversation,” Gwyneth Paltrow (yes, that Gwyneth, Chris Martin’s ex-wife—wink) delivers what the internet didn’t know it needed: permission to laugh.

Deadpan. Perfectly paced. Oddly soothing.

In sixty seconds, a corporate crisis turned into a brand campaign.

And it didn’t come out of nowhere. Astronomer was already on a tear.

It cornered its niche early: Apache Airflow, the open-source data workflow tool originally built by Airbnb. Revenue climbed to $39.5 million this year, and the product’s sticky. Astronomer boasts a 130% net retention rate; customers don’t just stay, they spend more.

An investor’s dream—and now the only data infrastructure company your mom has heard of.

“The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.” Co-Founder, and now interim CEO, Pete DeJoy said.

Astronomer’s first—and probably last—stab at brand fame is a masterclass in understanding the internet: cultural appropriation x speed = engagement. And it almost makes up for the fact that, this time, the data nerds hired a duff CEO.

Because that’s the part that will still trouble the likes of Bain Capital. Not the ad, not the headlines, but how Byron got hired, and how long his pen was in the company ink for. Governance, not Gwyneth, will be the real story in the boardroom. Sure, they fixed it. This time. At a cost—almost certainly carved from that fresh Series D raise.

And what about next time?

“There won’t be a next time”, I can hear Pete DeJoy saying to investors.

Let’s hope he’s right. The brand impact is huge. But it’s not the kind they can cash in. No one impulse buys a data pipeline like they do a pack of Oreos. Like any good crisis playbook, once the moment’s been owned, however uniquely, the smartest move...is to move on.

As Paltrow herself put it: It’s time for Astronomer to get back to delivering results.

Sadly for me, parenthood came with the heartbreak that my son was never going to love the things I do. One of nature’s cruellest tricks. Variation ensures survival, but it also means I’m stuck enduring the things he likes (often awful), while he flat out refuses to engage with mine.

Most days are spent trying to find something—anything—we can do together. Then arguing about it.

One thing we both agree on? We can’t stand Chris Martin. His over-sincerity in the face of such success makes him weirdly punchable. He’s the hummus of popular music.

But that all changed last Summer.

A dear friend invited me and my son to Glastonbury. He was going with his daughter and asked if we wanted to come along. Not the sleep-in-a-mud-trench kind of Glastonbury. The lucky kind.

We wandered through the festival in awe. As night fell, my son wanted to stay up to see the Pyramid Stage. But Coldplay was headlining. I was ready to call it a night.

In a gift you could never plan, my wiser friend nudged us on. He helped us weave our way to the front. Packed tight, shoulder to shoulder, my son even befriended a guy beside us who let him have his giant “Save The Soil” flag. Some mums in front—out for the night, a few drinks in—took a shine to us. Jealous, maybe, that I had my son with me. It felt like a gang. One of those fleeting, magical little tribes you only find in moments like this.

The countdown began. Ten, nine, eight...

My kid, all five foot something of him, wanted up on my shoulders. I lifted him. And there he was. Waving a protest flag high above the crowd at the world-famous Glastonbury. Looking out over a sea of people that stretched for miles. Lights blazing. Anthem after anthem pouring from speakers the size of buildings.

Every time I set him down to catch my breath, he’d pause, wait a beat, then shout: “Up, Daddy. Up again.”

It was magic.

A couple of hours that write themselves into a father-son story. The kind that anchor you through a million ordinary days when you just can’t see eye to eye. The kind that remind you—whatever else unfolds—you’ve been blessed.

Which is, I suppose, what’s unsettled me most.

Because for Andy Byron’s kids—and Kristin Cabot’s too—that same Coldplay concert will mean something else entirely. A rupture in the story they thought they were living. Not an anchor but a millstone. The kind no multimillion-dollar payoff can vanish away. And unlike the rest of us, they don’t get to forget it by Monday.

And yet, there I was. Clapping for the clever ad.

Because as it turns out, the only thing worse than shame is the algorithm’s ability to amplify it. Social media isn’t community. It’s a choreographed feeding frenzy. And if being great at getting eyeballs means a little cruelty along the way—well, congratulations. You’ve mastered the game.

In the scramble to win the internet, we lose touch with our better instincts. So I can’t help but wonder—maybe not tomorrow, but soon—whether we’ll look back at this moment and feel differently.

People break up. Families figure it out. It happens.

But try doing it when you heard about it on TikTok first. When the world's been watching, clicking and stitching your pain into content. When your life is coming apart, and the person delivering your Dad's damage control is Gwyneth Paltrow, who gave herself the perfect divorce. As we laugh all the way to the bank, it might just cost the people who had nothing to do with it...everything.

In the end, I think we’ll ask a simpler question. Not about the strategy. Or the stunt. Or the speed. Or the spin.

Just: Was that really the best we could do?

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

US economy endures tumultuous week of market swings | Wall Street Journal

Bank of England to cut rates amid rising unemployment and Trump tariffs | The Guardian

Business chiefs gloomy on the economy | Financial Times

Brand Beat

Astronomer’s cheating scandal is still relentless | Yahoo!

Why we believe Gwyneth Paltrow | New York Times

How Sydney Sweeney has saved advertising as we know it | The Spectator

Why brands think being hot and white is ‘great genes’ | The Guardian

ASA bans suggest advertisers pushing toxic size 0 again | The Drum

Coinbase’s ‘Everything is fine’ ad mocks UK economic woes | Ad Age

Vogue’s AI-generated ad sparks debate beyond fashion circles | TechCrunch

Samuel L Jackson promotes ‘motherfuckin’ wind farms’ | The Drum

Kendrick Lamar launches creative agency | Business of Fashion

Airbnb partners with Lollapalooza for music collaboration | Bloomberg

Why the Lipotle lip stain works for Chipotle | Marketing Brew

How Roblox’s brand strategy taps Gen Z creativity at scale | Koobrik Labs

Reese’s and Oreo team up for cup cookie combo | Wall Street Journal

Creator marketing risks flattening brands, says Channel 4 CMO | Marketing Week

Spotify CEO says he's unhappy with its ad business | Mediacat

China’s Luckin Coffee takes on Starbucks coffee chain | Wall Street Journal

Miracle Grow leans on “Full Bush” innuendo in new campaign | Marketing Dive

ITV launches cost-cutting drive after half-year profits tumble 44% | The Guardian

Protein bar brand David launches frozen cod fillets | Wall Street Journal

Virgin Group outs the CMO for a Chief Experience Officer instead | Marketing Week

Search spend dips: where are those dollars headed? | Mediacat

Starting Up

Ty Honey on the female founder comeback | Fast Company

Win-Win secures £3m to expand cocoa-free chocolate across Europe | Tech Funding

9 fashion tech startups investors are watching | Vogue Business

Palo Alto Networks nears $20B acquisition of Israel’s CyberArk | Wall Street Journal

Accelerators holding UK startups back, new report says | Startups

Tech Tidbits

Why over-50s prefer YouTube over the BBC | The Guardian

Trump lays out comprehensive US action plan for AI | US Government

Meta offers $250 million to hire 24-year-old AI prodigy | New York Post

Boardrooms grapple with AI but must embrace it now | The Times

Inside Epstein’s forgotten AI summit | Wired

Venture Vibes

Deeptech VC Michael Jackson says LinkedIn bans him twice yearly | Sifted

Kleiner Perkins enjoys a very successful week | TechCrunch

Who is Wesley Lepatner, the Blackstone executive shot in NYC? | Wall Street Journal

Figma shares surge 250% in its Wall Street debut | Financial Times

And why it's a $2.8bn ripoff for original investors | Austin Hankwitz

How the consumer sector quietly beat a falling market | Springside Ventures

Brunch with Balderton’s Rana Yared: an insider conversation | Sifted

Design Driven

Advertising’s new obsession: Generation Alpha | It’s Nice That

Fast Company reveals best-dressed business leaders | Fast Company

Inside teen bedrooms before the selfie era | The New Yorker

Happiness

The soundtrack of the women’s Euros was happiness | The Guardian

Anxiety gives you a superpower. Unlock it. | Big Think

A happiness calendar for August | Greater Good

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