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newsletter compiled by James Herring
Lufthansa is turning some of flying’s most pressing social questions into a limited-edition fashion collection, putting armrest politics, seat reclining and the rush to stand after landing at the centre of its latest brand campaign.
KFC and French wine brand La Vieille Ferme are opening Coq au Vin, a limited-edition Shoreditch wine bar pairing fried chicken with wine over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
The Andy Warhol Museum has launched “See It at The Warhol”, a minimalist out-of-home and digital campaign that advertises Warhol’s work without showing the art itself.
Vagisil has hijacked the familiar “What’s in my bag?” social trend for a summer brand campaign about intimate health, with Publicis España transforming beauty bags into subtly suggestive reminders of the things women rarely talk about packing. “What’s in my vag” takes the endless stream of online handbag reveals and swaps beauty and fashion essentials for intimate care.
Garage Beer and Liquid Death Energy have teamed up with former NFL star Jason Kelce for a satirical brand campaign asking Americans to donate their urine to cool AI data centres, turning growing concern over AI’s water consumption into a highly shareable music-video stunt.
Partner post | Tracksuit
Specsavers grows funnel in UK prescription eyewear.
Insight: Between Jul ‘25 and Jun ‘26, Specsavers moved awareness, consideration, usage and preference.
Preference: 44% → 51% (+7pp)
Consideration: 64% → 71% (+7pp)
Claimed usage: 59% → 63% (+4pp)
Awareness: 90% → 93% (+3pp)
Why it’s interesting for Brand Believers: The standout is preference up 7 points to break 50% for the first time. It’s the payoff from pushing on three fronts at once. On advertising, Specsavers stretched its 22-year “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” line into a flexible “Should’ve gone to [problem]savers” platform, even temporarily rebranding as “Specsandhearingsavers”. On access, it rolled out nationwide OCT scans and a Tottenham Court Road flagship store. On community, a parkrun accessibility deal.
By the late 1950s, Ferruccio Lamborghini was a rich man — but from tractors, not glamour. His firm, Lamborghini Trattori, had made him wealthy enough to buy Ferraris, and he owned several. He also kept burning out their clutches. When one of his own mechanics took a Ferrari apart, the story goes, he found the clutch was the very same commercial part fitted to his tractors — bought for a pittance, charged for a fortune.
image source: Reddit
So Ferruccio went to Maranello to tell Enzo Ferrari how to fix it. Ferrari, no fan of advice from a tractor man, reportedly told him to stick to farm machinery and leave cars to him. Humiliated, Ferruccio decided to build a grand tourer better than anything Ferrari made: poached engineers, opened a factory, and in 1963 unveiled the Lamborghini 350 GT, badged with a raging bull to face down Ferrari’s prancing horse. One of the great luxury brands on earth exists because a man was told to know his place… and refused.
partner post | Ad Forum
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partner post | words and pixels
The insight:
Professional football has become increasingly sophisticated at supporting women’s performance. But fertility and family planning have largely remained private issues that players navigate alone, leaving a significant knowledge gap around fertility. Chelsea FC Women saw an opportunity to close the gap.
The intervention:
Chelsea Women have put fertility support and education at the heart of their player welfare. Partnering with Fertility Plus, the club has created a first-of-its-kind fund giving every player automatic access to personalised assessments, counselling and workshops. The aim: to give players greater support and confidence in navigating their own fertility journey.
The impact:
This goes beyond raising awareness. Chelsea Women are disrupting the traditional approach to player welfare by making fertility part of the support every female athlete can expect from her employer. It sets a new standard for supporting women on and off the pitch.
Got a problem in need of disruption? That’s our kind of brief www.wordsandpixels.co
⦿ Reddit is marketing's hottest platform — and its users are pushing back. With Reddit the most-cited site in AI answers, brands are scrambling to shape how they show up there. But moderators are fighting the influx: one jewellery sub sounded a "siren" over a brand hiring a "Reddit strategy manager," and a SaaS sub banned promo posts outright. A cottage industry of "Reddit agencies" has sprung up — some promising to plant positive posts and bury negative ones. (read the full article in WSJ)
⦿ Only in Italy can a heatwave threaten a bank vault full of cheese. Since 1953, Credem bank has taken young Parmigiano Reggiano wheels as loan collateral, advancing farmers 60–80% of the value while it ages. It holds over 500,000 wheels — worth €325m ($382m) — in climate-controlled vaults, where the summer's record heat has pushed energy use up 30% a day.
⦿ Ogilvy says Gen Z isn't confusing — modern life is. A new Ogilvy Consulting report, Gen Z Pulse 2026 argues the cohort isn't contradictory so much as stuck managing four tensions: energy vs indulgence, trusted peers vs institutions, code-switching identity, and digital fluency vs a hunger for real-world connection. Its pitch to brands: treat community as infrastructure, not a campaign.
⦿ The Ordinary’s $15 water bottle goes viral. The minimalist skincare brand has made a permanent product of its frosted-glass 500ml bottle after a limited-edition giveaway sold out on demand. Same stripped-back look as the skincare: no markings, no sip prompts, just a bottle.
⦿ Instagram updated their wordmark. IG said "We feel the refresh is sharper and more modern, but references the original and has the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram." Drop your thoughts in the comments.
⦿ Lidl puts PAW Patrol on the fruit and veg. Having stripped cartoon characters from its less-healthy own-brand kids' products, Lidl is now doing the reverse — putting PAW Patrol on 13 own-brand lines that meet WHO nutrition criteria, including ten fruit and veg varieties. Same pester-power trick, pointed at blueberries instead of biscuits. [image via Louis Bedwell]
⦿ Nike hits a 12-year low. Nike closed at $39.09 on 17 August, its weakest since September 2014 and down roughly 78% from its 2021 record high. Its market value has fallen from more than $250bn at the peak to around $58bn. Tellingly, there was no Nike news: a weak update from rival On triggered the sell-off.
⦿ A new messaging app sends texts by virtual pigeon. Carrier Pidge, a free iOS app built by developer Noah Iarrobino, delivers your texts at pigeon speed based on the real GPS distance between you and the recipient — seconds across town, 22 hours from LA to New York, days overseas. There's a live flight tracker, and a 0.2% chance the bird dies and your message is lost forever. The dev's own pitch: "genuinely no practical use."
⦿ Facebook tests charging Pages to post links. Meta is trialling a limit that caps some business and creator accounts at two link posts a month — to share more, they'd pay £9.99 for Meta Verified. It's a limited test, not a full rollout, but the direction is clear: Facebook's free traffic tap is being turned into a subscription.
⦿ Neutrogena faces backlash after Hayden Panettiere's death. Following the actress's death on 16 August, aged 36, her resurfaced claim that Neutrogena tried to end their decade-long deal in 2015 — after she spoke publicly about postpartum depression — has driven a wave of anger and boycott calls online. Neutrogena, which hasn't confirmed her account, has yet to formally respond.
⦿ Wetherspoons tells customers to shut their phones up. UK pub chain JD Wetherspoon has asked customers across its 792 pubs to stop playing videos or taking calls on speaker, after complaints that other people's amplified phones were driving drinkers "nuts." Chairman Tim Martin billed the chain as "an oasis of tranquillity," and said the aim was to stop people being driven "chicken jalfrezi by a cacophony of sound."
⦿ The Guardian names the tech annoyances we all suffer. In a comic piece for the Guardian, writer Stuart Heritage coins 18 words for modern digital irritants — among them "baggravation" (self-checkout meltdowns over a light item), "quit-shaming" (the guilt-trip maze when you try to cancel), and "Schrödinger's wifi" (the train connection that both does and doesn't exist). Worth reading in full. (The Guardian)
⦿ A designer who sizes his clothes by his own name. On Sam Nowell's garments, the neck label doing the sizing is his name.
In 1971, the Quaker Oats Company (a firm that made porridge and had never touched a film) put up the entire $3m budget (about $24m today) for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. It wasn’t a passion project. Quaker wanted to launch a range of Wonka chocolate bars, and reasoned that a feature film running in cinemas nationwide was the perfect feature-length promo.
There was just one problem: the bars kept melting on the shelves, even in cool weather, and had to be pulled. The film underperformed too, and Quaker exited, offloading the confectionery rights. Then home video in the 1980s turned the film into a beloved classic — and the Wonka Bar, revived by others, outlived the company that botched it.
h/t Ben Liebmann
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A stray letter between a medieval city and a Big Mac.
McDonald’s Belgium found it and put up a sign.
Source: Threads
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