In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at eight stories to think about next week, including:
– Is Everything Destined to Become Second Order Content?
– Advertising Is Now Trusted Less Than AI
– Can Publishers Lure Teenagers Back to the News?
– The Rise of Cognitive Surrender
– Insurance vs. an Age of Insecurity
– NYC Property vs. Aggregators
– Privacy as a Bipartisan Issue
– Why Are So Many English Football Clubs for Sale?
In addition, we have ads from s.Oliver, the Norwegian Consumer Council, Adora Fertility, Coffee mate and Budweiser.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Is Everything Set to Become Second Order Content?
In April, a seven-and-a-half minute film about a boarding school in 2034 became the music video of the year. Romain Gavras directed Yung Lean and a class of feral schoolboys through GENER8ION’s “STORM” – which Esquire called the video, so far, of the year as it passed 21 million views. Part of the praise around it was for how it was made: real extras, real choreography and not a trace of AI – a deliberate creative choice in a year when a growing amount of content is AI-generated.
However five months on, the film has become something else deeply ironic – an AI template. On September 1st, Higgsfield, a video AI company, released Genjutsu: a motion transfer tool that maps a new face and body onto existing footage. ‘STORM’ wasn’t included in this by the platform, but users rapidly thought to upload and use it as a base for new videos. Two of the largest tutorials to do so, have 42k and 11k views. Within two weeks, an unsolicited spec ad appeared mapping footballer Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang onto the video for a spec Spanish clothing brand ad and a football club, neither of which had commissioned it. Rachel Karten summed up the reaction aptly: “it’s so frustrating watching the creative direction from yung lean’s music video become a viral AI prompt.”
The ironic second life of ‘STORM’ is a clear signal of how even the most original creativity is a potential input for AI to build upon, while potentially stripping out artist intention in the process. Whereas the original video’s craft clearly inspired viewers and users, in its first wave and the second Higgsfield driven iteration – it raises a question on what modern creativity’s life cycle looks like? Are even the most avant garde ideas set to push ahead, but then see others being dragged along in its wake?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: AI Backlash
2.) Advertising Is Now Trusted Less Than AI
It was said, at least within the halls of the agency while it existed – that in the 1920s and 30s, JWT was so trusted that it could go door to door and get people to happily open the door and speak with them. While the good folks at J. Walter Thompson have gone the way of mergers and consolidation, trust in advertising overall seems to have also vanished.
Ipsos’ Global Trustworthiness Index, covering around 20,000 adults across 31 countries, found that advertising executives are less trusted than AI chatbots (included for the first time). 23% of respondents consider AI trustworthy, against 40% who do not. Alternatively, advertising executives saw 15% consider them trustworthy, second from bottom of 22 professions and ahead of only politicians on 13%. Meanwhile doctors led on trust at 58%, scientists at 57% and teachers at 53%. The people who sell the machines are, unfortunately, less trusted than machines themselves.
Gallup’s annual industry ratings tell a similar story from another angle about where advertising stands. Advertising and PR sits at 26% positivity as a sector, third from bottom of 25 sectors and only above the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government.
For an industry that spends much of its time telling clients how to build trust, it may be worth remembering how little of it the industry currently holds – the proverbial advertising ‘physicians’ may need to heal thyselves.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Verified Distrust
3.) Can Publishers Lure Teenagers Back from Social News?
As an increasing amount of young users get their news from social media, can publishers win them back? A recent experiment suggests the problem may be availability over taste. Researchers from Sciences Po and Columbia gave free digital access to French newspaper Le Monde, to 9,628 students across 243 French high schools for the 2024-25 school year. At the start, 81% used social media for news in the past week and 19% used newspapers.
The shift throughout the experiment was striking. 70% activated their access, 88% of those visited more than ten times, and 64% more than fifty times. The share naming a newspaper among their main news sources doubled from around 20% to over 40%, while the share citing social media fell by five to eight points. A year later, students who had been given access were around two-thirds more likely to be paying Le Monde subscribers.
As the experiment shows, the challenge facing media brands may not be to win younger readers over vs. making yourself more present and available. Readers aren’t anti-publisher, but cost and access needs to be addressed. The college ‘lifestyle’ subsidy, where users are captured at a discount younger in life, for long term value may need to be expanded and revisited to fight a social news shift.
4.) Cognitive Assistance is Rapidly Becoming Cognitive Surrender
There is a significant difference between asking a LLM for information vs. asking it for instructions. New research shows that the latter may be the default for a growing number of users. A Stanford-led team has published work on what it calls LLMs as oracles – all-knowing authorities on subjective personal questions – and built a typology to measure how often people offload judgement rather than research.
Applied to 68,000 public prompts, ‘oracle’ style use has risen steadily between 2023 and 2026, being more prevalent among younger users. A separate analysis covering 140,000 private prompts from 52 participants found the same pattern in individuals’ own histories. The finding additionally showed people were often unaware they were doing it, and expressed dissatisfaction with the behaviour once they were shown their own data.
The growing behavior to cede authority to AI contradicts our lingering distrust of it. As people, we may not know what to make of AI, but we’re happy to get an increasing share of our decisions from it.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Machine Credibility Gap
5.) Insurance No Longer Means Security
Last week’s issue showed that 60% of Americans now describe themselves as working class, indicating the label increasingly describes how secure someone feels rather than their occupation. New data adds another level to this security shift, as even owning insurance no longer seems to provide holders with the security it promises.
The Commonwealth Fund found that one in three privately insured US adults aged 19 to 64 are paying off medical debt, based on a nationally representative survey of 6,353 people. Around 15% of all working-age insured adults owe more than $2,000.
The consequences reach well beyond healthcare. Of those in debt, 37% drained their savings, 30% cut back on essentials like food, heat or rent and 30% delayed or skipped care, with hospital visits the source of nearly two-thirds of it. “Most Americans don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around,” says the study’s lead author Sara Collins, “and when they are hit with an unexpected expense in a month when their income is allocated across all necessities of life, it can push people into medical debt they are unable to pay.”
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Priced-Out Generation
6.) NYC Real Estate Companies Go to War with Property Portals
Most brands readily spend money to get their inventory in front of people. However, recent moves in New York real estate are seeing one brand spending money to take inventory away. Corcoran’s CEO has reportedly told their real estate agents to pull their listings from StreetEasy, the Zillow-owned platform that functions as the city’s de facto listing service, and promised to fund the alternative. “Take all of your listings off of StreetEasy, and when you take them off StreetEasy, we will give you the money to promote them.”
The numbers are substantial. The CEO said the company is “now spending $1 million a day”, across print, digital and the subway. Ads appeared for Corcoran, Compass and Sotheby’s International Realty, all owned by Compass International Holdings, promoting the “thousands of homes for sale not on StreetEasy”. Corcoran’s scale is what makes it possible, as data this month puts the group at nearly half of all Manhattan resale listings after Compass’ $1.6 billion acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate in January. The company’s framing was existential: “If we lose this battle, we will be at the mercy of this portal for now and forever.”
Brand vs. aggregator battles aren’t new in real estate or numerous other sectors, but they are notoriously hard to win and maintain. Insurance brands like Direct Line in the UK famously pushed buyers to go direct to find the best rates. However, for a sector where sellers are a pressurized third party, can Corcoran maintain the spend and reach to provide a valid alternative to those offering their inventory for sale?
7.) Privacy Becomes a Bipartisan and Pressing Issue
Brands from Flock to Meta have seen surveillance become a Bipartisan issue amongst Americans. Technology brand Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, which number up to 120k running roughly 2 billion scans a month, have become a rare thing that both sides of the political spectrum unite to oppose. Outrage over privacy has seen Newsweek track 149 cities and counties cancelling or rejecting the cameras by late August. Boston ended its use this week after Flock reportedly shared its data with outside agencies in breach of contract, Texas’ Republican governor paused all state funding, and Republican Senator Josh Hawley, Democrat Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders have all moved against it. This week hackers even pulled a camera off a pole and found its software detects people, not just plates.
Despite this outrage, there is an open question what cities will do next. Boston had already started pilots with Flock’s rivals Motorola and Axon before it dropped Flock, showing that cities may simply swap one company’s cameras for another’s.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: The Snooping Bargain
8.) Why Are So Many English Football Clubs for Sale?
Buying an English Championship football team might be one of the most ‘expensive lottery tickets’ you can get. However, English football has rarely had so many clubs on the market at once. Leicester City’s owners put the club up for sale in August for more than £200 million after its fall to League One, Charlton Athletic is for sale again after three years of American ownership, and a planned Derby County takeover was shelved.
The churn may be a function of worries about new financial regulations and the reality of trying to scale a club in an increasingly competitive football pyramid. However, as Wrexham, Birmingham City and others see celebrity investment and clubs become media properties off the pitch, new buyers are seemingly still lining up.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Norwegian Consumer Council – “The Life of Death and the Ensh*ttificator”
Norway’s consumer watchdog has a recurring villain. The Ensh*ttificator, a professional product-ruiner introduced in an earlier film, returns with a new business partner – Death – so that planned obsolescence and digital obsolescence can be efficiently combined. It fronts research finding two-thirds of Norwegians have binned a product due to a lack of spare parts and 75% have had electronics die when software support ended.
The long form content approach (both films are over 2 minutes) has allowed the council to take a humorous, almost Wes Anderson, approach to the annoying, but dry issue.
s.Oliver – “s.Oliver x Heidi Klum”
German fashion brand s.Oliver has used AI to de-age Heidi Klum, so that today’s Klum plays opposite her younger self who first fronted the brand in the 1990s. The result is a novel take on the brand’s archive that shows the potential of the technology to play with brand heritage – while teetering a bit on the cusp of the uncanny valley. It is a test of whether AI can turn heritage into a living asset that still evokes aspiration or relevance to viewers.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Heritage Reinterpretation
Adora Fertility – “No Awkward”
Australian fertility provider Adora is facing a donor shortage, and has decided tackling the awkwardness of the decision can unlock greater…suppliers. Its campaign stages deliberately awkward family portraits, the kind that make everyone in the room shift in their seat, to argue that the discomfort of talking about donation is smaller than the discomfort of not having it. Nostalgia meets an Olan Mills photo shoot in a unique attempt to tackle taboos.
Coffee mate – “Pour It On”
Do you need to say anything about why you should drink coffee creamer alternatives like ‘Coffee mate’? The creamer alternative’s newest campaign seemingly abandons making an argument to new customers for an earworm that reminds current customers to pick up more. A musical starring animated creamer bottles turns its 30-plus flavours into the cast, set to ‘Gimme Pour’ – a remake of Britney Spears’ ‘Gimme More’. With an expected media push behind it that can establish the song, the brand looks to be remembered more than newly considered.
Budweiser – “Fã Captcha”
Budweiser Brasil has built a captcha that proves fandom alongside humanity. To win tickets to their band’s gig, fans have to pass a fandom test built on knowledge only a genuine follower would have. Through reframing an internet annoyance into proof of devotion, the brand gives the tickets to the people who want them most. For big acts, expect more spikes in band trivia, similar to Oasis’ impact on Google with their latest required trivia for tickets.
// Sunday Snippets
// Advertising & Marketing //
– On has entered football with Kylian Mbappe as its star, ending his Nike relationship [Sports]
– French rail brand OUIGO renamed itself HUITGO to sell an eight-euro child fare, handing the rebrand to a seven-year-old who drew the logo that went on a real train. [Advertising]
– Carl’s Jr. dramatised a switch to cooking burgers to order as gladiator-versus-clown combat in the Colosseum. [Advertising]
– Zoom’s newest ad evolves its existing Bowen Yang led ad, with an evil CEO undone by work that’s already in motion [Advertising]
– Tesco’s F&F built its autumn campaign around the hand you are dealt – with a Tarot twist [Fashion]
– M&S made its London Fashion Week debut with 100 years of clothing and 57 looks available to buy the same day in ten flagships. [Fashion]
– Calvin Klein’s Jung Kook film passed a million views in a day, the fastest brand film of the week. [Fashion]
– Transport Victoria has written a love letter to the bus, listing reasons to ride rather than apologising for the service. [Advertising]
– A fake Angela Hartnett restaurant called Centena, an anagram of canteen, served real school meals to foodies and influencers and filmed their reactions. [Food & Drink]
– The Swedish city of Skovde has suspended the Law of Jante with a brag booth on the main square and a digital brag-meter for the rest of the country. [Travel]
– Samsung New Zealand cast a real estate agent called Tim Cook to unbox and switch to the Galaxy Z Fold8. [Advertising]
– Carrefour turned its butcher, baker and fishmonger counters into four playable Fortnite worlds to recruit students into food trades. [Retail]
– The Busker Irish Whiskey launched a live-music platform across Japanese venues rather than importing a global artist. [Food & Drink]
– Duolingo India has reclaimed the Punjabi insult “ullu da pattha” as a compliment for English learners. [Advertising]
– Japanese care-equipment rental firm Yamashita has hired pop star Tomohisa Yamashita as its first brand ambassador [Tech]
// Media & Technology //
– Pinterest is launching ads inside visual search results, citing more than 80 billion searches a month. [Social Media]
– Axios is building paid feeds for AI models and agents, starting with a terminal-style product for investors on two-year contracts. [Media]
– Meta One, a subscription across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, sells small businesses a bold follow button and automatic follow invitations for $14.99 a month. [Tech]
– Snap has opened pre-orders for Specs, a $2,195 pair of AR glasses launching with NBA, HBO Max and PGA lenses as content. [Tech]
– Germany’s Kinder Medien Monitor found 71% of children aged 6 to 13 who know ChatGPT say using it secretly in an exam is not acceptable, while 69% think asking it for story ideas is fine. [AI]
– YouGov finds 34% of Britons now name AI among the likeliest causes of human extinction, up from 15% a year ago, with 79% distrusting AI companies to develop it responsibly. [AI]
– Level-5 apologised and re-uploaded its trailers after players frame-by-framed them for AI artefacts within hours of a livestream. [Tech]
– Sweden’s first election after the EU banned political ads on Google and Meta sent SEK 126 million to Swedish publishers instead. [Media]
– Bolt is using the sensors already on its scooters to grade pavement quality and publish it as open data any city or map can use. [Tech]
– Mastercard finds 31% of teens trust an AI product recommendation over a friend’s, and 23% over their parents’, in a survey of 26,000 parents and teens. [AI]
– Sam’s Club is selling advertisers 800,000 households it predicts will buy within 12 months, claiming 94% accuracy in pilot. [Retail]
// Lifestyle & Culture //
– Time Out’s ninth annual list of the 40 coolest neighbourhoods in the world puts Seoul’s Jongno 3-ga, Rabat’s L’Ocean District and Athens’ Neos Kosmos at the top. [Travel]
– A 34-country survey for the Rockefeller Foundation finds nearly 70% think the world got worse in the past year, yet 61% would back a coalition solving global problems without the US or China. [Culture]
– Chronic social isolation in Australia has doubled from 10% to 21% since 2002, while chronic loneliness rose only from 6% to 8%. [Culture]
– Starbucks’ $39.95 Snoopy cold-cup glass, limited to two per customer, is reselling for $254 within days of launch. [Collectables]
– Costco has nearly doubled the price of Kirkland motor oil and limited members to two boxes a week as crude passed $100. [Automotive]
– Mercari has banned listings of Pokemon’s 30th anniversary cards from its own marketplace until safe trading can be assured. [Collectables]
– A creator with 30,000 followers called a MAC shade ‘the anti-blush’, and the product has since sold out at Ulta and Sephora. [Fashion]
– France has raised the permitted alcohol limit for Champagne to 15% after record heat forced an early, high-sugar harvest. [Food & Drink]
– Rolling Loud is selling an official $999.99 branded wheelie bin as a ticket add-on, after clips of bins being thrown at the festival went viral. [Culture]
– The Denver Broncos are the first NFL team with beer vending machines, which check ID and re-verify your age by camera before dispensing. [Sports]
// 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!
