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newsletter compiled by James Herring
Netflix installed a live performer inside a fully furnished billboard above the intersection of Sunset Boulevard in LA, an experiential marketing stunt promoting new sci-fi thriller The Last House. For three days, the man has eaten cereal, waved to commuters through a bay window and scanned the traffic with binoculars, replying to bewildered passers-by via a dry-erase whiteboard.
DuckDuckGo has released a $35 pair of sunglasses whose entire selling point is that they do nothing. Made with San Diego eyewear brand Knockaround, the Paso Robles frames carry no camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery and no electronics of any kind, marketed under the deliberately blunt name “Normal F***ing Sunglasses.” The launch is a direct swipe at Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which start at $299 and have been nicknamed “pervert glasses” after reports of people using them to film others without consent.
Are you the person who drowns their chips, or the one who does a polite little dot on the side. Whatever…Heinz has just turned that behaviour into packaging. The ltd edition 'Love Lid' — is a customisable ketchup cap with three pour settings: "Like it," "Love it," and "Crazy Love."
The Big Issue has doubled the size of its magazine for one special edition, printing 3,000 oversized copies to make the barriers to eye and hearing care facing people experiencing homelessness impossible to ignore.
Partner post | Tracksuit
Stanley grows every funnel metric in the UK — preference included.
Insight: Stanley moved the entire funnel in UK reusable bottles between Jul ‘25 and Jun ‘26 — awareness, consideration, investigation, usage and, tellingly, preference all up together.
Significant data movements (Jul ‘25 → Jun ‘26):
Awareness: 40% → 46% (+6pp)
Consideration: 26% → 32% (+6pp)
Preference: 11% → 16% (+5pp)
Why it’s interesting for Brand Believers: This is Stanley growing without the viral Quencher moment. The UK gains are being built the slow way — through retail and partnerships. It became Arsenal’s official drinkware partner, with Emirates stadium branding from 2025/26, deepened its tie-up with JD Sports beyond the Quencher, and opened a permanent shop-in-shop with live engraving at Go Outdoors in York, on top of John Lewis and Selfridges stocking.
The lesson: the viral spike made the name; the boring graft is what’s moving preference.
The fast food brand turns sauce pots into a wedding favour, giving couples the chance to personalise its condiments with a bespoke message for their big day.
Spam launched in 1937 as Hormel's tinned spiced ham, then the war made it inescapable — rationed Britain lived on it, and Allied troops were issued so much they came to loathe it. By the 1960s the word already meant cheap, everywhere, impossible-to-avoid. That reputation is what Monty Python seized on in 1970, with a sketch set in a café where every dish comes with Spam and a chorus of Vikings chants the word until nothing else can be heard. The joke landed because the fatigue was already real.
Two decades later, early internet users watching messages flood in and bury everything worth reading reached for the perfect existing word — and Python had handed it to them. So Spam means junk mail thanks to two things in sequence: a wartime glut that made the product a byword for the unavoidable, and a comedy troupe that turned that byword into a chant. Hormel now politely asks you to write the meat ‘SPAM ‘and the nuisance ‘spam’. Nobody does.
partner post | Ad Forum
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In Greece, you’ll never be charged more than 50p bottle of water at the airport. In ‘captive-audience’ spots — airports, ferries, stadiums, cinemas, archaeological sites — the price of a 500ml bottle is capped by law, currently €0.60 (about 50p). Coffee, toasties and sandwiches are pegged too, and venues that overcharge face fines. It's a neat bit of consumer protection for exactly the places you'd normally expect to get gouged.
partner post | words and pixels
The insight:
Social media platforms are becoming the go-to source of health information, especially for women’s sexual health. Yet crucial advice from verified health creators is suppressed for using the word “vagina”. CensHERship and The Case for Her spotted an absurdity: “cunt” is algorithm-friendly, while the medically correct term isn’t.
The intervention:
Cunt Say It reclaimed one of the most loaded words used against women and turned it into a loophole. Replacing “vagina” with “cunt” across multiple touch points, the campaign ensured essential health information remained visible online: from creator-led content and a “Cunt Health 101” scientific paper to labelled “cunt anatomy” diagrams and OOH.
The impact:
“What gets banned as health gets boosted as profanity”. By turning the platform’s contradiction into a very public provocation, the campaign exposed the bias built into content moderation, putting women’s access to health information in the spotlight.
Got a problem in need of disruption? That’s our kind of brief www.wordsandpixels.co
⦿ Greggs renames a bake after Andy Burnham fumbles its name. Asked his Greggs order in an interview, Prime Minister Andy Burnham reached for the Sausage, Bean & Cheese Melt but called it "the sausage, bean and cheese thing." Greggs ran with it, retitling the £2 bake "The Sausage Cheese & Bean Thing" on in-store displays and reporting a "Burnham bounce” in sales.
⦿ Gen Z is buying its way back to 2005. Digital cameras, wired earphones and early iPods are back in fashion, driven largely by under-30s chasing something that feels "more real" than a smartphone. eBay says UK sales of iPods and Walkmans rose nearly 50% in 2025, and searches for iPod minis are up 48% on the year.
⦿ A 162-year-old Guinness has been pulled from a shipwreck. Divers recovered a bottle of 1864 Guinness Extra Stout from the Mindora, wrecked off Dover, and sent samples to microbiologists in Belgium. They hope to extract enough yeast DNA to recreate the original recipe — a stout that tasted markedly different from today's.
⦿ Reddit stock fell 23% despite a record quarter. Reddit beat expectations — revenue up 61% to $805m — but shares dropped after US daily users declined for the first time in over a year and CEO Steve Huffman warned that Google search referrals had turned "choppy" as AI Overviews divert clicks away from the site.
⦿ Claude starts watermarking everything it writes. New Claude models embed an invisible, machine-readable watermark in all generated text — a statistical fingerprint detection tools can read but people can't, designed to survive copy-paste and light edits. Prompted by the EU AI Act, Anthropic is applying it worldwide, across the API, chat, Code and Cowork, and adding signed provenance data to image files.
⦿ London's first self-driving taxis get the green light. Uber and UK firm Wayve have won London's first private-hire licences for autonomous cabs — 15 AI-driven Ford Mustang Mach-Es cleared to carry paying passengers "later this summer," with a human safety driver aboard for now. It puts them a step ahead of Google's Waymo and China's Baidu Apollo Go in a race that will make London one of the first cities with US and Chinese self-driving firms on the same roads. Not everyone's cheering: the GMB union, which represents minicab drivers, has urged "extreme caution," warning of job losses and unclear liability when things go wrong.
⦿ Apple weighs a screen-free fitness band. Bloomberg reports Apple is rethinking its wearable lineup and considering a display-free tracker to take on Whoop and Google's Fitbit Air, as screenless bands emerge as their own category. Nothing's confirmed — and it's a report, not an Apple announcement — but it fills an obvious gap below the £219 Apple Watch SE.
⦿ 7UP goes lime-first — and redesigns again. Keurig Dr Pepper is reformulating 7UP to a "lime lemon" recipe, dialling back the lemon to chase younger, citrus-leaning drinkers — its biggest change in over 15 years. It comes with a new vertical logo and bolder packaging, rolling out in the US from mid-August. Notably, it's the brand's second redesign in three years.
⦿ Disney lets TikTok creators use its IP In a first-of-its-kind deal, opt-in TikTok creators get licensed access to clips and assets from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and FX. Their videos run on TikTok and in Verts, Disney+'s vertical feed — the first time TikToks have streamed off TikTok. A tiered ambassador scheme rewards top creators.
⦿ Taylor Swift pulls her music from Trump's TikToks. After Team Trump and White House accounts soundtracked posts with her songs — one captioned "I'm sure @TaylorSwift is going to be super excited we used her song!" — Swift blocked at least 10 tracks from those political accounts, including "august." Owning her masters gives her that control.
⦿ A site is now cataloguing brands that got "worse on purpose." Worse on Purpose publishes investigative "autopsies" of once-trusted brands that quietly cut quality to protect margins — from cookware (81 brands now owned by six firms) to Whole Foods and Dr Martens. Private equity is the recurring villain. It even sorts brands into "approved" and "avoid" lists, and invites readers to nominate the next target.
In January 2009, Tropicana gave its best-selling orange juice a makeover. Their agency retired the carton’s most famous asset — an orange with a straw jammed into it, a fixture since the 1950s — and replaced it with a plain glass of juice, a restyled logo and a generic cap. Backed by a $35m ad push, it was clean, modern and, by every account, a hit in the boardroom. It bombed in the only room that mattered: the supermarket aisle.
Shoppers walked straight past. Some assumed the store had switched to an own-brand; others simply couldn’t find the Tropicana they always bought, and reached for Minute Maid or Florida’s Natural instead — both of which saw double-digit sales jumps. In under two months, unit sales fell 20%, wiping out around $30m, and on 23 February Tropicana surrendered and brought the old carton back. It had lasted about six weeks.
Cause of death: they poured away the one thing shoppers used to find the brand.
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Whoever wrote "there's a reason we're not called sometimes" - take the rest of the week off.
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