In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at six stories to think about next week, including: Marketing Needs More than Training, Social Media’s ‘Big Tobacco Moment’, the Limits of Agentic Commerce, Robot Pratfalls and Timeless Trendslop and the Brand Mascot Renaissance.
In addition, we have ads from: Testicular Cancer NZ, Aerie, INEOS and Tesco Mobile.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Certifications Won’t Fix Marketing On Their Own
According to a new study from IPSOS, only 35% of marketers in the US, UK and Australia would pass (score 7/10 or more) on a 10 question assessment of foundational marketing knowledge. It implies that an era of ‘vibe marketing’ has left marketers unable to grasp basic theory or hold a conversation at the top table of business leadership. Does it have a valid point?
Discounting the study’s potentially self-serving implications, marketing does have a flawed knowledge base. We often don’t speak the same language. We’re swayed by novel ideas over time tested concepts and empirically proven conclusions. The answer however, isn’t as simple as a certification. To think a degree alone magically transforms marketing into medicine, physics or chemistry is simply false advertising for marketing degrees.
Instead, a marketing education is just one part of the actual solution needed by the industry: a greater shared knowledge base – open to all. An understanding of the concepts, not just the acronyms, that empower good marketing. An evolving but proven, foundational base to build upon. Without a standard set of ideas, new marketing certifications just sound like old MBAs without the nice campus – promising even less advantage than their predecessors while offering budget elitism and LinkedIn badges.
2.) Is Social Media Having a Big Tobacco Moment or Something Worse?
With two jury verdicts in a single week finding Meta liable for knowingly designing addictive products that harmed children, the big question is whether social media has found their “Big Tobacco moment”. Both industries have been found to know about harm and suppressed it. Both face converging legal, legislative and cultural pressure simultaneously. But what comes next may be worse than what tobacco experienced.
The tobacco industry’s crisis didn’t come from one lawsuit. It came from the moment legal exposure, legislative pressure, and cultural toxicity converged, with the structural remedies that followed reshaping the sector permanently. The Master Settlement Agreement’s most consequential element wasn’t the $206 billion payout, it was the mandates: no outdoor advertising, no cartoon mascots, no youth sponsorships, and the forced disbandment of internal research groups. For tobacco, those mandates removed a marketing channel. However, for social media, the equivalent would restructure the product itself. Algorithmic feeds, engagement-maximising design, and behavioural data collection that regulators are targeting aren’t incidental to the business model… They are the business model.
A blunting of the platform’s advertising capabilities overall, while simultaneously making brand association with social media more culturally toxic, threatens future revenue in ways beyond what settlements look to do to current revenue. Social media’s ‘tobacco moment’ may not just push it into the shadows of regulation, it looks to fundamentally challenge what it sells in a way that could potentially compress decades of tobacco’s post judgement experience.
3.) The Current Limits of Agentic Commerce
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in September 2025 with Etsy, Shopify and Walmart as partners, but this month it’s dead – as commentary highlights near-zero conversions, limited merchants onboarded and no sales tax infrastructure built. However, the broader agentic commerce race carries on and hasn’t slowed. OpenAI’s retreat doesn’t call into question whether agentic commerce has potential, instead it highlights where the current borders for the opportunity are.
Recent IPSOS research shows only 14% of Americans are currently comfortable with AI placing orders, despite 51% theoretically willing to allow it. That gap isn’t a preference, it’s the psychological barrier brands need to consider. We have less AI hesitation for recommendation or discovery, but payments feel too important and irreversible. Despite an opportunity to tap into payment processing as revenue, AI still has no long term answer on building trust at checkout. Until one does, Agentic commerce has a very clear guardrail.
4.) Robots Are Headed Into Our Lives, One Smashed Bus Shelter at a Time
Two delivery robots, two different companies, two shattered bus shelters in Chicago within seven days. As a Serve Robotics device hit a CTA shelter on Sunday, followed by a Coco robot doing the same on Tuesday – one alderman summed up the mood effectively: “Two in seven days is not great.” Meanwhile Waymo crossed 10 US cities this week, targeting 1 million rides per week by year’s end. Can failures like Coco & Serve slow the march of robotics into our daily lives?
The honest answer is probably no. The image of a robot covered in glass shards, escaping the scene of the crime at 5mph is more likely to entertain than worry viewers. The Serve video has accumulated 3.6 million views on X and may show that minor mishaps are part of the integration process rather than a barrier to it. A news cycle full of robots behaving like confused interns may be the pratfall we’re all looking for, simultaneously reassuring worried humans of their value while normalizing robotic presence all around us.
5.) “Trendslop” – A New Name for an Old Concept
HBR’s new report on LLM’s strategic gaps might have coined the term ‘Trendslop’, but the problem it describes pre-dates the AI boom. The HBR study highlights the inherent bias in LLM strategic output, derived from its training data and giving it a preference for buzz words and newer, trendy ideas over tried and tested strategic bedrock.
Anyone who’s ever been or managed a junior strategist has either seen, created or promoted something worthy of the label. It’s the nature of the job – novelty and experience, judgement and creativity, growth and reduction, they are all a balance the strategist needs to strike. Tip too far into one side and you’re off the Ninja Warrior beam into the strategic slop. The reality may be that AI didn’t invent ‘Trendslop’, it’s just made it faster to create.
6.) Are Brand Mascots Making a Comeback? Did They Ever Go Away?
As audiences fragment, GenAI floods output and brands are stretched across more touchpoints, mascots may be having an unlikely renaissance. Mascots, unfairly dismissed as a relic of mid-century advertising, are having a genuine resurgence, because when everything can be generated and nothing feels distinct, a character with personality and emotional residue becomes one of the hardest things to replicate. The open question though, is whether the mascot is a long term strategic answer or a short term response to creative uncertainty.
Nowhere is this more visible right now than in tech. Apple’s ‘Lil Finder Guy’ – a tiny anthropomorphised version of the Finder icon introduced almost as an aside in TikTok marketing for the MacBook Neo – captured hearts and sparked illustrations, 3D printable models and merch concepts, with fans demanding Apple make him official. Speculation immediately ran that the character could become the face of Apple’s AI – “this is going to be the personification of Apple AI for kids,” as put by one Redditor. Firefox has launched Kit, its first-ever official mascot, a flame-bright fox formalising a character latent in the logo for twenty years. Both cases make the same argument: in an era of infinite generated content, a character with genuine personality is not a creative throwback. It is a defensible brand asset.
Read More Here.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
1.) ‘Lump Lottery’ – Testicular Cancer NZ:
Everything feels like gambling nowadays, but what about checking for testicular cancer? Most men know they should check for testicular cancer. Almost none do and the gap between knowledge and action is what Testicular Cancer NZ’s latest campaign aims to close. The campaign offers men the chance to win a new ute in exchange for checking their testicular health fronted by All Blacks legend Wayne Shelford and timed to Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. With 182 cases diagnosed in New Zealand annually and a 96% survival rate when caught early, the lottery metaphor works on a few levels – check early and the odds are in your favor
The problem with men’s health campaigns has never been awareness, it’s been action. Shame, discomfort and the vague sense that checking is something you’ll get around to eventually are not solved by information. They’re solved by giving men a reason to act right now that feels different from the usual guilt-based prompt. A prize mechanic turns a private health behaviour into an actionable and participatory moment. It might be simple, but the best solutions usually are.
2.) ‘100% Aerie Real’ – Aerie:
As H&M and Mango are testing AI-generated models and Prada is running AI art campaigns, Aerie has chosen the opposite direction with its latest ad ‘100% Aerie Real’. Featuring Pamela Anderson prompting an AI system to populate models on screen – the ad shows her struggling with flat and lifeless results, before demanding they “feel real” in a live Aerie shoot. The campaign builds on a 2014 pledge to stop retouching models, extended in October 2025 to never use AI-generated people or bodies and uses Anderson’s credible voice for natural beauty.
As Aerie’s CMO framed the strategy, “In an industry where everything can be generated, real becomes rare and rarity is powerful.” With brands increasingly taking a stance on real vs. artificial imagery, Aerie’s heritage, reinforced by Pamela Anderson’s modern cultural credibility on authentic beauty shows that pledges alone aren’t enough.
3.) ‘Born in a Pub, Built for More’ – INEOS:
Lots of great ideas have come out of the English pub, but few automotive brands have leaned into it as an origin story. Challenger auto brand INEOS was reportedly the child of an evening in the Grenadier in London (famously haunted and a wonderful boozer if in Belgravia), as INEOS Chairman Jim Ratcliffe had an idea. The 5 quid note the first Grenadier was sketched on is still pinned to the pub’s ceiling, heritage that’s on show in their latest ad. Narrated by the landlady and proud of the pub itself, it does automotive heritage without pinning too much on one person (lest we have another Musk / Tesla situation on our hands). 4x4s in West London are normally accused of never seeing off-road action, but INEOS will be hoping the ad can draw a clear path between an idea in the pub and adventure further afield.
4.) ‘Your Second Most Important Network’ – Tesco Mobile:
Mobile phone networks often take an inch of natural importance and run a mile in messaging – assuming people think about the network that facilitates important moments in their life, as much as the important moments themselves. The reality is, like a great waiter, there are very few positive moments you’ll think about your mobile network. Tesco Mobile’s no-nonsense approach to the brand has begun to acknowledge this truth, in their latest campaign ‘Your Second Most Important Network’. While it doesn’t completely cede a presence in UK customers’ lives, it revels more in the mundane, the everyday and the realistic ways that people interact with a phone network.
// Sunday Snippets
// Marketing & Advertising //
– KFC is giving UK consumers a chance to show how much they ‘believe in chicken’ and win a $50k ‘golden egg’ [Food]
– Persil takes aim at humanoid robots to sell their new detergent in Spain [FMCG]
– The Yankee’s Ben Rice has agreed a sponsorship with Ben’s Rice. These things write themselves. [Food]
– Chinese EV brand Denza recruits Daniel Craig (definitely not doing James Bond style looks to camera) as a spokesperson [Auto]
– McDonald’s announces a KPop Demon Hunter’s Happy meal – complete with purple McNugget sauce [Food]
– A five year sponsorship deal makes Dodger Stadium…’Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium’ and honestly it could be worse [Sports]
– Southern Fast Food Chains want a piece of NYC [Food]
// Technology & Media //
– Vibe coding website app Lovable has followed the shift towards security, introducing penetration testing [Security
– Sequoia Capital believes the next trillion dollar company will come from services, not software [AI]
– Netflix confirms it is raising prices again – the second time in two years [Media]
– Fortnite adds the ability to create your own Star Wars themed mini-games [Gaming]
– Is AI coming for the sommeliers? [AI]
– How Miley Cyrus cracked the code on Nostalgia Bait [Media]
– Musician Grimes reportedly joins LinkedIn [Social Media]
– Reddit expands human verification requirement on site [Social Media]
– Sparktoro’s new research wants to remind you that influence still happens across the web [Media]
// Life & Culture //
– New research shows American’s positive views of Canada and the UK are weakening [Culture]
– Japan’s ‘Office Chair Racing’ may not be F1, but with gas prices where they are, it might have a shot [Sports]
– Group botox amongst coworkers is on the rise. Anything to avoid a happy hour. [Health]
– Are Gen Z turning grocery stores into a hobby? Anything to avoid a happy hour. [Culture]
– Is 2026 the year we all go to the renaissance faire? [Culture]
– In the name of not worrying their children, many aging parents are creating a ‘Boomer Hospital Reveal’ phenomenon [Health]
– A plan to make the London marathon a two day event highlights the competition to participate in running’s major events [Sports]
– A video of seven missing dogs walking 17km back to their village in China, led by a Corgi known as ‘Big Fatty’ have gone viral – making it the first time a Disney live action remake has preceded the original film. [Animals]
// Until Next Sunday
As always, let me know what you think by email (dubose@newclassic.agency), website or on LinkedIn.
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