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newsletter edited and compiled by James Herring
The beer brand’s ‘living posters’ use long shadows cast across Cape Town to form a bottle silhouette for a few fleeting minutes each evening, a simple white chalk outline of the label completing the picture once the light lines up.
KFC France has turned its cult-favourite pickle into a nail art collection, part of a Pickle Club campaign running from 29 July with a pop-up beauty bar in Marseille and a new pickle-heavy menu range. KFC is leaning into that fandom with ‘Pickle Nails Club’, three sets of pickle-themed press-on nails handcrafted by French nail artists, turning the ingredient into a wearable statement
Coca-Cola’s biggest brand update since 2021 doesn’t touch the logo. Instead, JKR and The Superultrarare have doubled down on the assets everyone already knows, the ribbon, the script, the red, rolling them out with more consistency across 200+ markets. The strategic principle behind it, straight from Coca-Cola’s design chief: ‘make Coca-Cola more Coca-Cola’.
Read how a 140-year-old brand rebrands by refusing to.
Partner post | Tracksuit
Claude is leading the field vs Chat with much stronger year-on-year growth in awareness (+19pp vs +6pp) and consideration (+9pp vs +6pp). However ChatGPT still leads across every brand metric and is growing faster further down the funnel, including investigation, usage and preference.
In simple terms, Claude is building mental availability and attracting attention, while ChatGPT is doing a better job of turning that attention into active use.
Spotted in the wild:
Not Piccadilly Lights or a tube-wide DOOH takeover — ChatGPT beer mats at my local.
The Chupa Chups logo is a Salvador Dalí original. By 1969 the Surrealists had disowned him; André Breton had taken to calling him “Avida Dollars,” an anagram of his name and a swipe at a painter who’d cheerfully knock out adverts for Alka-Seltzer and Lanvin chocolate. So when Chupa Chups founder Enric Bernat grumbled over coffee that he still had no logo he liked, his old friend obliged — doodling one on a sheet of newspaper in under an hour, the brand name tucked inside a bright red-on-yellow daisy.
Then came the part that earned the fee: Dalí told Bernat to print it on top of the wrapper rather than the side, so it would always be seen whole. It’s barely changed since. The most widely distributed Dalí on earth hangs in no gallery — it rides on twelve million lollipops a day, and you can own one for about 30p.
Ten years after Ryan Gosling admitted the original La La Land poster “haunts me,” Lionsgate has finally fixed his infamous “La La Hand.”
Gosling told the WSJ “I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie...we were supposed to have our hands up, and I thought it would be cool to put my hand [more flat] even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool. I was sure it was cooler.”
Conveniently timed for the film’s 10th-anniversary cinema re-release, it turns a tiny piece of talent trivia into a PR moment.
In 2014, Apple gave half a billion people an album they didn’t ask for. At the iPhone 6 launch on 9 September, Tim Cook’s “one more thing” was U2’s Songs of Innocence — dropped, into some 500 million iTunes libraries across 119 countries. Apple reportedly spent around $100 million on the release and its marketing. It did not land well. The album sat there eating up storage on devices that didn’t have much to spare — and at first users couldn’t even delete it, only hide it.
The outcry forced Apple to build a dedicated one-click tool just to remove it: the only album to earn its own delete button. And when Songs of Innocence finally reached shops that October, it sold barely 100,000 copies in North America — everyone who wanted it already had it. Bono took the blame: “I take full responsibility,” he wrote, for a giveaway generous enough to make buying it pointless.
partner post | Ad Forum
Empower your teams with AdForum’s Creative Library and access award winners at Cannes Lions, ANDY’s, Clios, D&AD, LIA, One Show, FAB Awards, Eurobest, EPICA, +++. Take a test drive here or contact us for more info.
partner post | words and pixels
The Insight: Football fans dismissed the FIFA World Cup’s new hydration breaks as “three minutes to kill” before the action resumes. The British Heart Foundation found an uncomfortable deeper meaning hiding inside the phrase: someone in the UK dies from cardiovascular disease every three minutes.
The Intervention: BHF subverted football’s most complained-about pause, turning the three-minute break into a moment to help save lives. Through match coverage across Sky Sports, talkSPORT, LADbible and other media partners, supporters were asked to donate £3 towards lifesaving research while play had stopped. Cardiac-arrest survivors and footballers Tom Lockyer and Charlie Wyke fronted the campaign.
The Impact: BHF transformed dead time into donation time. By connecting the statistic, message, media placement and ask to the same three-minute window, it gave an unpopular new football ritual an urgent purpose and made doing nothing during the break feel much harder.
Got a problem in need of disruption? That’s our kind of brief www.wordsandpixels.co
Apple’s “Relax, it’s iPhone” platform has reached outdoor advertising for the first time, and the billboards break one of the brand’s oldest visual rules: nothing on screen ever looked less than flawless. Instead of the usual gleaming studio shots, the new AT&T-backed OOH series shows scratched, soaked and slobbered-on iPhones getting on with ordinary life.
⦿ Is Myspace coming back? In Tommy Avallone’s new documentary Myspace, Chris and Tim Vanderhook — the brothers whose company, Variant Technologies, acquired the social media platform from News Corp in 2011 — reveal they have plans to relaunch the once-dominant site. “We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace,” Chris Vanderhook says in the documentary, per People. “We’re just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.” - via Russh
⦿ Spotify’s spam purge. Over the past year, it has removed more than 75 million “spammy” tracks — including duplicates, SEO manipulation, stream-farming and artificially short uploads. Spotify frames the issue as spam rather than AI, although generative tools are accelerating it. Around 100,000 tracks are uploaded daily.
⦿ Burger King is preparing for the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs by testing smaller, protein-focused menu options.“This GLP-1 movement is going to have a profound impact on the industry,” said Tom Curtis, Burger King’s president of U.S. and Canada, in an interview with NBC News. The chain is already testing items like Whopper Bites and protein-forward bowls to satisfy shifting appetites.
⦿ Google shifts AI liability onto advertisers. Google’s updated Ads terms of service took effect on 1 July. The revised language reaffirms that advertisers remain responsible for the campaigns and assets Google’s automated systems produce — auto-generated headlines, Performance Max outputs and the rest — even as more of the buying process moves into automation.
⦿ New Emojis: Unicode — the global standard that makes letters, symbols and emojis work consistently across devices — has previewed the new emojis lined up for Unicode 18. They include a cracking face, meteor, monarch butterfly, lighthouse, eraser, pickle, bug net and two sideways thumb gestures. The update is due in September 2026.
⦿ IKEA Croydon is hosting a marathon inside its store, with 80 runners completing 17 laps through the showroom, market hall and warehouse. The December race sold out quickly and may feature meatball aid stations and build-your-own medals. Competitors must finish within six hours, with proceeds supporting housing charity Shelter.
⦿ France has approved a ban on social media for under-15s, making it the first European country to introduce such restrictions. New accounts will require age verification from September, with existing accounts covered from January 2027. The move comes amid concern across Europe about social media’s impact on children’s mental health.
⦿ Apple is reportedly partnering with Klarna on Apple Upgrade, a lease-to-own scheme allowing customers to pay for iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches over two or three years, with options to keep, return or upgrade the device.
⦿ Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has stormed the box office, taking US$264m (£196m) on its opening weekend — his biggest debut since The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. It is also the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras.
⦿ MPs in the UK want the junk-food ad ban extended to billboards and bus shelters by July 2027. They also want to scrap the brand advertising exemption, which currently lets food companies promote their overall brand as long as no specific unhealthy product appears. Sports sponsorship, social media and in-game advertising could be next. The Advertising Association, ISBA and IPA have objected.
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