Reading · Accidental Insights

This week’s newsletter is dispatched from my summer vacation. So sorry for all the typos.

Someone ironically told me that this is the time when you want a really long newsletter because you have the time to read it. So if you are longing for insights, maybe it’s time to check out the archive.

This week’s newsletter might sound very negative towards AI. Honestly, I’m not anti-AO. But it seems to be the general sentiment out there, and this newsletter is about people and culture. Not my opinions.

See you in the sun.

The most interesting things I’ve read, seen, thought about, or debated the last two weeks. High and low.MARKETING’S NEW FACES. Women in SPAM (Social, PR, Advertising and Marketing) became a thing earlier this year to highlight the fact that people tend to underestimate the complexity of the female-dominated marketing world. Now Charli XCX has come out as a marketing thought leader (watch out, Sharp, Ritson and Romaniuk, marketing science is going BRAT). Charli pushes the idea of Anti Marketing – a more intimate, personal, private, one-to-one approach. The tech bros are also betting on marketing. In classic techbro fashion, they are repackaging it and changing up classic marketing titles for new ones such as “narrative engineer”, “UGC engineer” and “media engineer”. Strategic Accidents will happily rebrand as “strategic narrative engineers” for VC money.

OVERPRICED EVERYTHING. Are companies betting on the wrong pricing strategies right now? Everything is turning luxury (just read this newsletter), but consumers seem not to comply. I’ve covered the luxury collapse before. Blue dot fever is the phenomenon that artists fail to sell out their tours (due to high ticket prices), and seats stand empty. Robyn had to shave down her three Stockholm shows into one. Ticket prices for the World Cup have become a real issue (they are four times higher in inflation-adjusted prices than World Cup 94, also in the US) and a point of debate among fans. Beyond ticket prices, everything from hot dogs to parking has seen hefty price increases, generating both criticism and creative coping strategies. Price hikes have gone so high that even doing things at home is getting too expensive for people – they are cutting spending in gaming, streaming, home fitness, and electricity prices.⁣ It might be a bigger issue than just price points – according to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, “we” (the elites he is a part of) have left the lower-income folks behind, which has led to an “anti-rich sentiment”.

UNSEXY GLASSES. Meta has invested loads of money in making their new glasses sexy by collaborating with Jennie and Kylie Jenner, among others. Those who aren’t paid might not agree. Lorde recently claimed, during her Mad Cool concert, that Meta Glasses are not sexy and encouraged people not to wear them. Luxury retailers and nightclubs are banning wearers of said glasses. This cheeky campaign in London took a jab at the glasses. What all critics have in common is the question about privacy when no one knows who is filming. Since many (men) seem to use them as a tool to covertly film women and extort people, they have earned the name pervert glasses. Not sexy.

ANTI AI ACTIVISM. The glasses haters are not alone. There is a general activist movement against artificial intelligence. America’s anti-AI center activist movement has become nationwide. Tesla Takedown and Stop the Money Pipeline (two anti-AI activist groups) recently left body bags outside OpenAI’s HQ to protest their collaboration with the Department of Defense. Two weeks ago, 400 people took to the streets in SF to protest under the banner “stop the AI race”. Brands are, of course, tapping into the conversation. The Economist launched a campaign with punny lines like “Think outside the box.” Polaroid recently tried to position itself as the camera for an analog life in a campaign. Some people call this the anti-AI brand movement. All this might be the reason the streetwear community isn’t really feeling OpenAI’s new merch line.

HYPE HYDRATION. Spotted: cool (not cold) water having a moment. Earlier this spring, Loonen Water became a thing that managed to drive insane price points for something that is usually free by pushing for plastic-free (glass) bottles. More brands are trying to seize the water moment. Erewhon has launched a “Sacred Water” retailing at $12. Billionaires are sipping Saratoga water for $40 a 12-pack. The wellness set is taking the DIY route and instead going for okra water – water with okra in it. Someone thought that fermented foods are great, so they launched a pickle flavored water. Apparently, water sommeliers are staging a grand comeback.

FRAGRANTIC EXPERIENCES. We have been in the era of perfume for a very long time, but are we now in the era of perfume as an experience? Last newsletter, I linked Diptyque’s pop-up, where you can indulge in water versions of this season’s perfumes. Bottega Veneta just opened an ice cream stand on Selfridges in London where you can taste their perfumes as gelato, and Loewe has opened a pistachio-filled sensorial experience to celebrate their pistachio-themed candle. Byredo is reinventing the wunderbaum and has launched a “car diffuser” – a leather accessory using a cold diffusion system to release fragrance through airflow. You can choose between Summer Rain, Bibliothèque and Coin Laundry. L’Oreal is collaborating with a future immersive museum called DATALAND to transform perfume into some sort of living medium that reacts to your movements.

GROCERY POPPIN’. Inflation has made grocery stores restaurants’ number one competitor due to their upped ready-to-eat options. According to placer.ai, the shift has started to show up in real data. Lifestyle brands are also having their grocery moment. Glossier is turning its flagship store into a bodega to launch its I❤️NY Balm Dotcom. Earlier this year Prada took over a fruit market in Milan, and The Ordinary made headlines for a supermarket selling fresh produce with insane markups to demonstrate how skincare brands sell generic ingredients with insane markups. I will keep shopping at ICA Aptiten, so you know where you can find me.

PROMOTIONAL RAP MAGS. Everyone is doing print right now. Rappers have carved out a niche of leveraging the media as a marketing vehicle. Marketers used to do print ads, now the printed magazine is the hottest marketing piece. J. Cole complemented his The Fall Off album with a 144-page magazine “exploring hip-hop as a living culture”. For the launch of his Iceman album, Drake did the Iceman Zine.

AGENTIC COLLAPSE. The agentic revolution was the talk of the town a few months ago but is now facing a backlash. AI-obsessed bosses are now recognizing that they have created too many agents that create too little value. Gartner predicts that 40% of all agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Companies that overinvested in AI have managed to turn their production into a slopfest and are now rehiring humans to fix the errors their beloved AIs have created. According to a new Gartner study, half of AI job cuts will be reversed by 2027 – predominantly because companies deployed agents to do tasks that demand human judgment, and many are already rehiring.

NICHE WELLNESS. Wellness is now so big that very niche target audiences get their own tailored wellness experience. For frequent fliers: Paragon Studio’s wellness concept, Altitude, is specifically designed for use in an aircraft cabin (sic!) and is a guided exercise program with resistance bands and mindfulness routines. For mourners: In New York, people are participating in grief workouts, which is exactly what it sounds like. For festival goers: Grown Alchemist has launched a hair and skincare collection inspired by the growing trend of holistic experiences at festivals (sic!), which they are bringing to Tomorrowland. For the fashion set: Balenciaga just launched the wellness line TechWear. It’s launched with a series of adaptogen power bars and juice-stocked pop-up stores, as well as a collab with Barry’s, taking over major cities like L.A., NYC, London, and Milan.

SLOP FREE. It’s less than a year since OpenAI launched Sora 2 – an AI slop-filled competitor to TikTok. The product is now defunct, and platforms are trying to battle the invasive slop taking over their platforms. LinkedIn is on a roll to remove AI slop from its platform (I’m not really convinced that they are succeeding. Tidal is cutting off monetization for AI-generated music. Spotify removed 75 million AI tracks last year. Substack is working with Panagram to scan newsletters for AI-generated content.