SXSW lands in London, CMOs ramp up AI investments, and Jacquemus’s new Monte-Carlo beach club
Issue #60
Weekly Exhale
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Queues are in again. I think the pandemic reawakened them. Remember when a so-so restaurant looked exclusive with a safely distanced line out front? The feeling stuck. And with social media wired into the human condition, everyone’s a hypebeast now. It doesn’t have to be fashionable, novel, or nostalgic. Any obsession approved by the algorithm will do.
Walk down Oxford Street before 8 am and you’ll see a line outside Pop Mart for Labubu toys. By lunchtime, people are snaking around Archer Street for SpudBros Express. The prize? A jacket potato. I asked someone why they were there. “We saw it on TikTok,” they shrugged.
And so too, SXSW’s inaugural London event opened up with—what else?—a queue.
I didn’t go myself. The whole thing had pitched camp around our Hoxton office, sprawling in every direction. I took a meeting at Shoreditch House, and the spillover was inescapable: Crowds trying to jam themselves into two tiny lifts to reach the fifth floor. It was like a bunch of ecstatic dancers had shown up in my back garden. They were having a revelation. I was just trying to water my plants.
For sure, the event made an impact. London emptied its bench. From Idris Elba to Joe Wicks to King Charles III. Something for everyone, even me. If I’d bothered to buy one of the dangerously oversized lanyards everyone was wearing, I’d have queued happily to see drumming legend Stuart Copeland.
Not everyone was thrilled, of course. A few bands pulled out after learning they’d be playing between talks by NATO and the CIA. “We don’t want blood on our art,” they said. It turned out to be a little premature: Later that day, 91-year-old UN Messenger of Peace, Dr. Jane Goodall, took the stage to deliver a devastatingly simple appeal for humanity in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza.
“Everyone’s talking about it,” she said. “But nobody’s doing anything.”
The room clapped. Loudly. Earnestly. Then wandered off to the bar, back to work, or another panel on brand engagement.
That’s always the paradox for these conferences. The tangle between the real world and brands. One minute it's spirituality or space travel, and the next it's a social campaign for stock cubes.
Luckily, there was a golden thread. Two letters repeated endlessly. A.I.A.I.A.I.A.I.
One holding company even launched an AI ad they’d made live on stage, as a kind of power move. But combine all the holding companies on Earth, and you have less than 1% of capital being deployed by the AI giants. So, it played more like an industry cry for help. One small pistol in the fight. Pointed loosely at its own head.
And yet, the reactions out of the expo seemed genuine. For a lot of people, it was much-needed inspiration. The kind that used to circulate inside creative companies, and has since leaked out.
So if it gets people off doom-scrolling and into each other’s company, that’s no bad thing. Disconnection and disaffection are far more dangerous than AI. Gather enough people. Give them a theme, a few celebrities, a cool space.
Most of all, give them permission to feel good.
My Dad was many things, but for a long stretch, he was a drummer. He toured with Van Morrison in the International Monarchs, which later became Them. A few number ones. A few late-night vans around the venues of Europe. He even made it onto Ready, Steady, Go.
Naturally, I wanted to be a drummer too. And as a 13-year-old kid, it still felt possible.
“You want to know how to get to Carnegie Hall?” he asked. I didn’t know what Carnegie Hall was.
“Practice”, he said.
Five minutes a day. That was his advice.
“Time is on your side,” he explained. “Stack up the minutes. See where they take you.” He died when I was 21. I never really followed through. I can hold a rhythm. But that’s it.
Sure, the math was never on my side. Five minutes a day doesn’t get you to ten thousand hours. But that wasn’t his point.
Between my dad and Jim Collins, I’ve learned to separate time-tellers from clock-builders. Time-tellers point at the sky and name the hour. Impressive, yes. For selling books and consulting. For frameworks sponsored by the AMEX Soul Bar.
But it’s not the same as building something that keeps ticking long after the ray-of-the-moment has passed. That takes day-in, day-out compound work. Even when Sundar Pichai himself says Google’s goal is to move from “erratic agentic AI” to “reliable agentic AI,” it sounds smart, while saying almost nothing. That’s time-telling. That's conference fodder.
Because he’s not there to inform you. He’s there to protect the capital, the data, and the army back at the workshop building what’s next. Then they bring the rabbit out of the hat, and leave the rest of us wondering how they did it.
But you know what Sundar admits he doesn't have? Creative foresight. He doesn't know what the artists, tinkers and misfits will do with these tools. That part's not his to see.
That's the part where you surprise them right back.
So look, I don’t think anyone’s going home to frame their inaugural London SXSW giant lanyards. But I do think they’ll remember how it felt to be there. I saw the ecstatic dancers. They were lit up. Inspired. And that kind of energy, well, we need more of it.
Not least, life is for living, not figuring out computers. As Prince said at Yahoo’s lifetime awards in 1999: “It’s cool to get on the computer. Don’t let the computer get on you. There’s a war going on. The battlefield is the mind. The prize is the soul.”
Prince died the same age as my Dad, just 57, from an opioid overdose, found unresponsive in an elevator at his studio. In the battlefield for the mind, he didn't make it home. Or just a mistake. Who knows.
My Dad didn’t give me a ton of time on the kit. Most of our memories were off-stage. He didn’t want me to be a professional either. Too fraught a life. He just wanted me to play. To enjoy it.
He preferred to spend his time trying to make me laugh. Especially on long drives, fueled by black coffee and stories. He’d cycle through one-liners until something landed. And when it did, he’d shoot me a grin: “Ba-ha! I knew I’d get you sooner or later.”
In sum, if you want to get to the future, go to a conference. But go for the person next to you. It’s not the content. It’s the contact. Then get back to the shed and get building.
And if you want to laugh, ask me sometime about the time my dad burned his lip on a McDonald’s apple pie. Had a red ring on his lips for three days.
“The bloody thing looked so cold,” he said.
Let's rise together with every issue. ♡
Market Moves
UK inflation was overstated | Financial Times
U.S. economy heads into an uncomfortable summer | The Wall Street Journal
Spending review: When is it, what’s coming? | BBC
Trump and Musk are enemies made for each other | The Guardian
Brand Beat
CMOs ramp up AI investments: what the numbers reveal | Marketing Dive
Optimise your brands for LLMs | Harvard Business Review
How AI slop is warping media metrics | Digiday
Lululemon shares tumble after tariff warning hits profits | The Wall Street Journal
P&G to cut 7,000 jobs in major restructuring | CNBC
Disney’s 'streaming is dead' stance dogged Andor creator | Fortune
Levi’s e-commerce sales rise for the third consecutive year | Sourcing Journal
Starbucks brings back chief operating officer role amid restructuring | Restaurant Dive
Airbnb appoints Apple and Meta veteran as CMO | MediaPost
H&M billionaire quietly steers retailer toward private ownership | Business of Fashion
Dove’s first creator-led campaign sets a new course for Unilever | Marketing Dive
McDonald’s officially brings back the Snack Wrap | Salon
Run DMC’s “It’s like that” re-imagined by LEGO | WebWire
Your guide to Jacquemus’s new Monte-Carlo beach club | Vogue Arabia
Coca-Cola and Unilever revamp creator-driven marketing strategies | The Information
Amazon backs Ad Council mental health campaign | MediaPost
Viral Labubu dolls fetch thousands in TikTok resale frenzy | Forbes
Why you’re seeing more out-of-home travel ads on the go | The Drum
Airbnb names new CMO after major platform overhaul | Marketing Dive
Trainline’s brand VP explains why marketers are protagonists | Marketing Week
Nearly half of Holdco staff want to quit | Adweek
Walmart's new brand campaign stars Walton Goggins | Walmart
YouTube overtakes rivals as top TV and movie streaming service | Fast Company
Heineken 0.0 taps Brad Pitt, Damon Idris for F1 campaign | MediaPost
Starting Up
Scaling the $1.2 trillion ecosystem remains founders’ biggest challenge | Startups
A16z backs AI voice startup Toma with $17m Series A | Google News
Three-year-old Anysphere reaches $9bn valuation | Tech Funding News
Inside the collapse of Microsoft’s Builder.ai | Financial Times
Griddle secures £500k to fuel frozen waffle expansion | The Grocer
Tech Tidbits
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, breaks down the future | Lex Fridman
Amazon’s AI deal with the New York Times sparks publisher partnerships | Digiday
Duolingo CEO says AI-first pivot triggered unexpected backlash | Financial Times
Sam Altman urges AI privilege as OpenAI clarifies ChatGPT court data order | VentureBeat
Reddit sues Anthropic for contract breach in AI training | The Recorder
Rick Rubin's spiritual vibe coding tool | The Way of Code
Venture Vibes
Wise’s wake-up call for London IPOs | Financial Times
Europe’s VC mafias | Sifted
VCs gang up against “996” hustle bro culture | Fortune
UK startup accelerator to raise funds | Venture Capital Journal
The VC industry needs a geo-political reboot | Financial Times
Design Driven
Better branding shifts AI from curiosity to utility | Design Week
Codea’s new site and newsletter celebrate the internet’s lost purity | It’s Nice That
How SharkNinja uses design to drive product innovation | Fast Company
Happiness
Ivy League psychologist on a different way of living | CNBC
Inner peace becomes the latest corporate status symbol | Observer
Millionaire supports higher taxes as key to higher happiness | The Independent
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