In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including: why everything is suddenly maxxed, the AI employment pendulum, GLP-1 quietly redrawing the grocery shelf, Claire’s turning malls into creator checkouts, the reassurance economy, the duck that out-marketed FIFA and China’s AI-made nostalgia.
In addition, we have ads from: Reddit, MILO, Amazon Prime, Bol and Pick n Pay.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Why Is Everyone Maxxing?
The internet’s favorite suffix has escaped its containment. Use of “maxxing” terms grew 96% between January 1 and May 25 this year, with engagement up 208%, according to Meltwater. The word traveled a strange road to get here: from game theory’s “minimax” through tabletop gaming’s “min-maxing” into the looksmaxxing forums of the early 2010s, then out through TikTok until, by linguist Adam Aleksic’s informal lecture polls, student recognition jumped from 40% to 80% in two months of 2024. Today a majority of maxxing talk has nothing to do with appearance. There is sleepmaxxing, fibermaxxing, and even Nixonmaxxing, with the Richard Nixon Foundation converting archival footage into 250 million views and sold-out merch for an audience which is either all under 35 or well above it. The purest expression is “whimsymaxxing,” which Inside Retail defines as the deliberate maximisation of playfulness, wonder and childlike joy, backed by Etsy searches for whimsical items up at least 50% year over year.
So why are we all maxxing? To theorymaxx about it, when the world is unpredictable we look for advantages where we can. An easy way to talk about overcommitting without admitting you’re overcommitting may have taken “maxxing” from table top into culture. However, with all words, we now seem to be quickly “maxxing” out on “maxxing”.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Looksmaxxing
2.) Is the AI Employment Pendulum a Return or a Retraining Loop?
Maybe we won’t all lose our jobs to AI…at least for now. As Ford and others rehire to fill knowledge gaps, organizations look like they’ve moved too quickly into AI hype.
Ford spent the last three years rehiring 350 veteran “gray beard” engineers after its AI quality systems missed defects the old hands would have caught. The returners rebuilt the data pipelines feeding the AI, and CEO Jim Farley credits the turnaround with “literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” in savings as Ford topped JD Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Study among mainstream brands for the first time since 2010. The reversal is a pattern, not a limited anecdote. Klarna, which froze hiring after claiming AI did the work of 700 agents, admitted “we went too far” and is rebuilding human service. Commonwealth Bank of Australia cut 45 call-centre roles for a voice bot and reversed within a month, with an apology. Among leaders who made AI-driven redundancies, 55% now admit wrong decisions were made per Orgvue, while Robert Half finds 32% of US hiring managers who cut a role for AI have already rehired it.
However, before celebrating the humans’ return, look at Ford’s job description: the veterans were brought back to retrain the systems that displaced them. The pendulum may not be swinging back so much as loading the next swing. For marketing leaders watching creative and QA teams shrink, the question is whether human skill is returning as the product or as the training data.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Efficiency’s Hidden Costs
3.) GLP-1 Is Redrawing the Grocery Shelf, Quietly.
GLP-1 use has reached 12.4% of US consumers, roughly 31 million people, up from 5.8% in 2024, and the category change is real: chips are down 11%, sweet bakery is down 9% and soft drinks are down 6.5% among users over six months, per Tastewise.
The response from brands is a reformulation wave. Nestlé built Vital Pursuit, its first major new US brand in around 30 years, for this shopper, and Conagra’s “On Track” badge marks 26 Healthy Choice and Simply products as GLP-1 Friendly. Previous functional-food waves shouted claims. Yet most brands are deliberately keeping the drug’s name off the front of pack, since only 27% of GLP-1 users seek foods designed for them and over-medicalized positioning risks alienating everyone else.
Grocery shelves are being rebuilt around a buyer nobody wants to name, which quiets the noise around a macro shift in the category.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Hero Nutrient
4.) Claire’s Turns Dying Malls Into the Creator Economy’s Checkout.
Claire’s, the mall accessories chain that definitely pierced the ears of at least one millennial you know and has flirted with bankruptcy, launched a 45-piece collection with Lana’s Life, a Roblox-native creator with 9.3 million subscribers, and had it live across stores in a single day, timed to a VidCon debut. It’s more than your normal creator collab though, as the story is speed: most DTC brands still cannot convert creator fandom into physical shelf presence in under a year, let alone a day.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Creator-First Ad Models
5.) The Reassurance Economy Rewards Boring Brands.
Morning Consult’s Most Trusted Brands 2026 put average brand trust at a record high, and the winners are surprising. The single biggest gainer was Mr. Pibb, up 13.7 points, while several marquee AI brands lost trust ground, with Google’s Gemini a notable exception. Morning Consult’s own name for the phenomenon is the “reassurance economy”: consumers under sustained pressure rewarding the familiar, the consistent and the unglamorous over the novel.
Most AI brand strategy decks assume novelty earns attention and attention earns preference. The trust data says the opposite is happening however. Novelty asks them to bet on something, but when the whole world feels like a casino – something reliable and familiar is attractive.
6.) A Duck May Be the Best FIFA Mascot.
Pato Merlin, a water-seller’s pet duck in a Mexico jersey, has generated an estimated 4.5 billion potential impressions and pulled Netflix, Volaris and IHOP into its orbit, all without a peso of media. FIFA spent years engineering official mascots for this World Cup. The internet built its own for free. The family that owns Merlin registered the trademark in late June, and so far only soft-drink maker Pascual holds rights to use the image.
When culture can manufacture its own cultural mascots faster and cheaper than any sponsorship can buy one, the premium on official partner status starts to look inflated. Official may mean more access, but when the culture that occurs outside the stadium is more valuable – brands need to consider both.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Mass Moment Sports
7.) China’s Gen Z Is Dreaming Its Way Back to the Boom.
On Bilibili, a genre called Chinese Dreamcore combines AI-generated and found footage of a half-remembered 1990s and 2000s childhood: flickering CRT televisions, abandoned playground slides, tiled apartment towers that once signaled the future. Its audience is Gen Z and young millennials navigating youth unemployment and the property bust; Chinese commentators have called the genre a “digital pain reliever”, and the aesthetic has already migrated into games, hot pot restaurant dinnerware and medicine packaging.
While US nostalgia has been more Polaroid tinged, Dreamcore takes a route with a CRT glow to the same type of anemoia.
// Stat of the Week: Luxury Now Runs on Sport
Bain and Altagamma’s spring luxury update contains a stat that will feel right to anyone currently at Wimbledon: over 80% of luxury market value is now represented by brands that sponsored a sport experience in the past 12 months, against worldwide luxury spending of 1,443 billion euros in 2025. Bain is explicit that the goal is cultural credibility and saliency rather than direct sales. Sport has become luxury’s borrowed relevance source, which raises the strategic question of what happens to the price of that when every house is bidding for the same fixture.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
1.) ‘People Are the Best’ – Reddit:
Reddit’s first-ever US brand campaign, and new CMO Jim Squires’ opening move, pits real beauty, TV and soccer threads against claims of AI-slop from rivals. The ads are pithy but hold an inherent contradiction: Reddit licenses that same human conversation they champion to Google for a reported $60 million a year and to OpenAI for a reported $70 million, training the systems the campaign positions against. Selling humanity to humans and to machines is a delicate balance – but luckily the same quality message sits at the heart of both.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Human Detection Premium
2.) ‘Ba Codes of Love’ – MILO:
Ogilvy Vietnam noticed that the barcode on a MILO pack could hide a drawing, and that “ba” means dad in Vietnamese. Around 300 hand-drawn illustrations of fathers and kids playing sport became scannable “Ba Codes” and a stop-motion film for Father’s Day. Converting the pack real estate into media is built on an insight precisely observed for the market: dads who show love through actions rather than words.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Handmade Textuality
3.) ‘It’s on Prime’ – Amazon Prime:
Amazon drops Prime delivery drivers into the worlds of The Boys and Reacher, in the first collaboration between Amazon’s brand marketing team and its studios, made in-house with Untold Stories and timed to the World Cup, as well as both shows’ new seasons.
The idea attempts to succeed where others have failed, uniting disparate elements of the Amazon brand under one creative idea and offering. While it’s difficult, making the delivery driver an equal character gives Amazon’s retail arm a face as vivid as its studio heroes – the same Prime, seen from both sides.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Tier Stacking
4.) ‘Effe bollen’ – Bol:
Dutch e-commerce leader Bol wants its brand name to become a verb, positioning “effe bollen” (roughly, “just bol it”) as shorthand for worry-free shopping, with returning mascot Billie joined by a new sidekick built from the delivery box. Verbs like “googelen” happen by accident. Bol is trying to install one on purpose, and rival Spar has already publicly objected that it sounds like its own “Effe sparren” line. Can the Dutch metaphorically make “Fetch” happen?
5.) ‘What Are They Feeding Them?’ – Pick n Pay:
The Springboks’ sponsor turns world rugby’s standing question about South African player size into a supermarket claim, filming bewildered fans and pundits across four continents, five countries and seven cities, with Dan Carter and England’s Eggchasers podcast along for the ride. It’s clear and simple sponsorship logic: a grocer that has fed South Africa for 50 years takes credit for the most visibly well-fed team in sport.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Heritage Storytelling
// Sunday Snippets
// Marketing & Advertising //
– IBM ends its 32-year run with Ogilvy and hands lead creative to Stagwell’s Anomaly and Code and Theory, working as a single team [Agency Business]
– Omnicom’s PHD wins Adidas’ $512M global media account mid World Cup, ending eight years with WPP [Media]
– Family-owned Capelli Sport becomes the World Cup’s business Cinderella story, outfitting first-time qualifier Cabo Verde from a Manhattan office 3,500 miles away [Sport Business]
– Thailand’s Darlie recruits the comedian behind the country’s most famous bad-breath joke to publicly retire it, via BBDO Bangkok [Brand Move]
// Technology & Media //
– Amazon buys Prime Day sponsored placements inside ChatGPT while simultaneously blocking OpenAI’s shopping crawlers from its site [Retail Media]
– Starbucks becomes the first brand on TikTok’s Custom Creator Networks, briefing its own baristas and paying them a share of ad revenue [Social Media]
– Threads passes 500 million monthly users as it turns three, finding its footing as a Reddit-style community platform rather than a Twitter killer [Social Media]
// Life & Culture //
– France’s new ultrafast-fashion law adds per-item penalties and bans advertising and influencer marketing for Shein-style players [Regulation]
// Related Issues
– Dopamine Shopping vs. Gamifying Purchase
– Can Cannes Keep Up with AI Creativity?
– Will the World Cup Shift Attitudes About America?
// Until Next Sunday
As always, let me know what you think by email (dubose@newclassic.agency), website or on LinkedIn.
You can also listen to an audio summary and discussion of each week’s newsletter on Spotify. We’re also on TikTok!
