Almost everything marketing runs on is something people used to do without being asked. In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including:
– Social Media’s Posting Recession
– What’s the Reality of Brand Fandom?
– The Risk of Chasing AI Citation
– The True Impact of AI on Education
– The Dystopian Brand Promotion of Rent as a Prize
– Engineered vs. Earned Loyalty
– The True Face of Gen Z’s Side Hustles
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Social Media’s Posting Recession
Social media has arguably been anything but social for some time, with a shift towards content consumption over connecting with friends. However, the impact of this shift has been clarified further in a recent report showing the decline in social posting. Ofcom’s Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes tracker, sampling 7,533 UK adults, found that 49% of social media users now actively post, share or comment, down from 61% in 2024.
The reason behind this shift seems to be reputational risk. Half of adults now worry their posts will cause them problems in future, up from 43%. The share saying the benefits of being online outweigh the risks dropped from 72% to 59%, and those saying social media is good for their mental health fell from 42% to 36%. Additional qualitative work found people migrating to limited-lifespan posts, such as IG’s stories rather than permanent grid posts, and some stopping altogether.
Beyond less content, there are commercial impacts to the change – as shown in the 2026 South African Customer Experience Report. Sampling 2,000 South African consumers, it found that while 81% had a negative experience in the past year, up from 76% in 2024, the share who posted about it publicly fell from 50% in 2023 to 24% currently. With social listening and NPS relying on users sharing experiences, a social post recession looks to deprive brands of a ready source of insights and improvements.
2.) The ’Myth’ of Brand Fandom
Are brands really as popular as marketers would like? Three days after his exit was announced, Klarna’s departing CMO David Sandstrom called out the belief that every brand can have a fandom. “There are too many brands that believe they have fans or are part of pop culture, they’re just not,” he told Marketing Week. The truth he’s highlighted is a painful, but useful one. Marketers and agencies love to believe that consumers care about their brands as much as they do – but the reality is the opposite. Few brands have active fandoms and everyone else needs to earn attention and engagement constantly. It may be an uncomfortable truth, but acknowledging the challenge is half way to solving it.
3.) The Volatility of AI Optimisation
As sites optimize content for AI engagement, shifts in how platforms index and reference have big impacts – as reportedly seen with Reddit this week. Much has been made of Reddit’s value for AI platforms, as the site’s curated user base has offered quality reviews, content and training data. This resulted in Reddit holding a steady 3.83% share of ChatGPT search citations from mid-July to the first week of August. However, between the 14th and 17th of August it averaged 0.52% – an 86% collapse. The timing and circumstances seem to be a technical shift over a planned pivot. ChatGPT’s use of the site: operator inside its fan-out queries jumped from 0.4% to nearly 17% on August 8, and independent analysis from Suganthan Mohanadasan found the search tool itself rebuilt between the 16th and 20th, moving from JSON to a compact query language with freshness windows, domain targeting and separate verticals.
What further replaced Reddit is interesting. Promptwatch data notes that 32% of ChatGPT citations are now documentation and help centres, and that small company pages fell from 66% to 32% as the model leaned toward established names like Salesforce, Google and Shopify. While we’re still unpicking if this is a long term shift and what drove it, the technical change shows the volatility in trying to optimise towards AI – with small changes driving large shifts brands and content owners have to rapidly adjust to.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Algorithmic Authority Contested
4.) What’s The Real Cost of AI Use in Education?
When we use AI in education, what’s the impact on the knowledge we’re aiming to gain? A study of 26,811 Chinese secondary students, tracked across 30 months by researchers at Stockholm University and the University of Hong Kong, found that adopting generative AI raised homework scores by 18% and cut homework time by 30%. However, within six months the same students’ monthly exam scores fell by 20%, and high-stakes entrance exam results dropped between 18%-24%. The research seems to show that while AI is a useful copilot to complete homework and educational tasks, cognitive outsourcing has a potentially harmful impact on the ability to develop new skills and retain knowledge. Seemingly, students who outsource homework pass their assignments, but fail the exam.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Skill Surrender
5.) When Did Lifestyle Brands Start Offering Rent as a Prize?
Economic uncertainty tends to make marketing seem a little more dystopian and ’Hunger Games’ than usual. For example, on August 29 Nike will run a 100 metre sprint on New York’s Lower East Side with fastest runners winning $4,000 – positioned as one month of rent. Nike NYC’s own promotions claim “Talk is cheap. Rent isn’t” and the most liked comment under the IG announcement post calls it “some corporate dystopian bullshit,” followed by “what kind of hunger games ass shit” and “let them eat cake.”
Prizes covering the cost of living are not new, but they often arise in rough periods. Grocery Outlet ran a free-groceries-for-life sweepstakes from January to March 2008, as the recession that began the previous December got under way. In January 2009 Hyundai launched Assurance on the Super Bowl, letting anyone who lost their job return the car and walk away from up to $7,500 of the loan. Hyundai hit its highest ever US market share by mid-year, General Motors and Ford copied it, and roughly 350 people actually returned a car. Hyundai actually revived the same programme in March 2020.
What’s different this time is who’s offering it. Nike isn’t alone in being a surprise entrant into ’Running Man’ style contests. Verizon is raffling $1,200 toward rent and Amazon ran its first ever free-groceries-for-a-year sweepstakes with $10,000 for the winner. Back in February, prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket ran duelling free grocery stunts in New York, with Kalshi handing $50 of groceries to nearly 1,800 people at a Manhattan store and Polymarket opening a five-day free grocery market in the West Village, both landing directly on Mayor Mamdani’s pledge to open city-run grocery stores. Competing to cover life’s daily costs isn’t new, but lifestyle brands jumping into it is. With everything becoming a potential bet and younger generations being priced out of many everyday costs – we may be seeing the start of a new age of useful, but offputting everyday living cost contests.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Priced-Out Generation
6.) Earning Loyalty vs. Trapping It
Loyalty has often been engineered as much as its been encouraged, with difficult to opt out subscriptions creating loyalty through friction. However, three jurisdictions are now attempting to erode this on different timetables.
California’s AB 2863 took effect on July 1 2025, requiring cancellation through the same medium used to sign up and 7 to 30 days’ notice before any price change on an auto-renewing offer. However, one week later the Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC’s own click-to-cancel rule on procedural grounds.
The obligation however, didn’t disappear when the federal US version fell. Instead, it shifted to local government. New York City has adopted the first municipal click-to-cancel rule in the US, effective October 1, requiring cancellation to be equally simple and available through the same channels as sign-up, and treating failure as a ’deceptive and unconscionable’ trade practice. The Roosevelt Institute puts the savings to New Yorkers at between $21.5m and $162.5m annually. Similarly, the UK looks to add one-click cancellation parity, renewal warnings and post-trial cooling-off periods in 2027.
Many brands aren’t going to build two cancellation journeys, so often, the strictest rule ends up shaping everyone’s experience. The consequence is that a meaningful share of what a business was called loyalty, but was actually friction, is set to erode. Ofcom’s One-Touch broadband switching already moved 1.6 million customers in a single year, which is a good example of what happens when the exit is easier to find. For brands that engineered loyalty, real questions about whether it can be genuinely created are looming.
7.) The Real Shape of the Gen Z Side Hustle
What is the reality of the Gen Z side hustle? While influencers and creators are the popular face of it, new analysis from Bank of America shows that social commerce and gig work is the reality. The brand used its own account data to paint a picture of how Gen Z earns money outside of a salary and the picture is surprising. Social commerce (selling products through e-commerce and social platforms) accounts for close to 40% of Gen Z side work, while deliveries take 30% and ridesharing 23%. Content creation, as part of ’the influencer economy’ is 5%, despite being seemingly 95% of every trends deck for the last 10 years.
The gap between the ’influencer’ cultural narrative and the selling and gig work reality is notable. The data shows a much more rational and much less romantic version of how Gen Z makes their money – less from a live stream and more from a shipping box. While influence and social commerce are intertwined, what we see here is that for the majority of young people, a tangible good beyond influence is being sold or delivered as a secondary revenue stream.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Precarity as Career
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Paddy Power – “Why the Football Not?”
Why is football fandom like it is? Like many of life’s great passions, it’s hard to articulate it logically. Why do we wake up early, travel late, cram into stands and pubs or dedicate ourselves to teams we’ve never met? The answer is often unclear, but still powerful.
On the first weekend of the Premier League’s return, Betting brand Paddy Power, and human manifestation of the brand Danny Dyer, celebrate the specific stupidity of football fandom: grown men dressed as seagulls (you do you Brighton), adults with Newcastle football-themed bedrooms, and babies named Jurgen (truly a beautiful name, alongside Norbert).
While betting brands have long focused on selling the feeling of the win, Paddy Power has built a continued legacy around championing the power of sport. As gambling has become an inextricable part of it, it’s allowed brands, like Paddy Power, to sell in new ways beyond the direct odds push. Coupled with their history of humor, and Paddy Power has shown that they have the ability to tap into a real insight around fandom with this campaign, in an on-brand way.
Right Guard – “Right Work For Right Client Right Guard”
The existence of deodorant brand ’Right Guard’ must mean a ’Wrong Guard’ also exists – or at least that’s what the brand claims in their latest campaign. The piece of logic is the jumping off point for an ’everyman’ no frill sell that takes on Dr. Squatch, Old Spice and others indirectly. Sounding more like Carhart or Motor oil, Right Guard turns a piece of logical pun into a full campaign and tone of voice (with a voice that sounds strangely like Bender from Futurama).
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Performance Without Aspiration
Hard Rated – “Body Double”
Athlete endorsements for alcohol brands often ignore the inherent contradiction at their heart – elite athletes might be some of the least likely people to be hard drinkers (at least in the modern age of performance sport science). Alongside constraints on sponsorship and advertising, brands are often left with a challenge in how to marry product and athlete.
Beverage brand Hard Rated tackles this head on, providing ’body doubles’ to NRL and AFL stars who feature in their ads. The workaround becomes the idea and as a ’stunt double’ drinks the product, the unlikely endorsement cuts through more uniquely than it would have without the limitations.
Toyota – “Please Hilux Responsibly”
Car ads often have to play up excitement while quietly reminding viewers to be responsible in their own cars. To promote the historically versatile Toyota Hilux, the brand taps into this tension, offering 8 PSA style films based on extreme, real life uses of the Hilux. ’Hilux responsibly’ uses the extreme nature of the stories, and the need to disclaim them, as the core idea – making the same category durability claim in a new way.
Little Caesars – “Doorman Codes”
In the modern food and takeaway markets, winning intermediaries is core to success. While brands normally think of winning over delivery drivers and app users, Little Caesars in Colombia has taken a more novel approach. Targeting doormen for Colombia’s apartment buildings, each was given unique codes and stickers based on their surnames. With greater code redemption resulting in their own free food, every door man became an unlikely brand ambassador.
// Sunday Snippets
// Marketing & Advertising //
– Loto Nicaragua built a print campaign on the finding that 18% of people use their pet’s name as a password. [Advertising]
– Nuuly replaced its entire fall campaign with a twelve-part microdrama. [Advertising]
– The IAB’s new AI disclosure standard rejects blanket labelling, citing NYU research that disclosure cut click-through by 31.5%. [Advertising]
– World of Warcraft opened a fake estate agency in London called Azeroth Homes to promote the expansion’s in-game player housing. [Gaming]
// Technology & Media //
– From August 24 YouTube counts a view the moment playback starts, matching TikTok and Instagram. [Media]
– OpenAI switched on advertising in 31 European markets sold exclusively through the six holding companies. [Media]
– Indonesia is now treating gifted stays and comped experiences as illegal work on a tourist visa, deporting creators from Bali. [Regulation]
– Fairphone is bringing its modular, repairable handset to the US with replaceable screens, batteries and ports and a five-year warranty. [Tech]
// Life & Culture //
– Ipsos finds the number one reason customers enter a gas station convenience store is needing the bathroom. [Retail]
– Euro banknotes in circulation have climbed to around 1.6 trillion euros despite contactless payment, with the ECB now framing physical cash as resilience infrastructure. [Consumer Behavior]
– Circana’s 41st Eating Patterns in America finds half of all meals now take under five minutes to prepare, rising to 65% of breakfasts and 35% of dinners. [Food & Drink]
– Only 35.5% of American teenagers held a summer job this year, against 58% at the 1978 peak. [Culture]
– Empower finds 51% of Americans have made a purchase or investment because of financial FOMO, rising to nearly 70% of Gen Z while scrolling. [Consumer Behavior]
– Sega’s 1989 classic game ’Golden Axe’ sees a new turn as an animated series on Paramount+. [Media]
// 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!
