In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including:
– AI Gets Cute?
– McDonald’s Focuses on the Customer Over the Burger
– Gloomy, but Still Spending
– What Does College Mean Now?
– Paying Agencies for Outputs, Not Hours
– Japan Closes the Third-Beer Gap
– Retiring Robots With Dignity
In addition, we have ads from KFC, Visit Sweden, Flipkart, Marshall, Kirkens Korshær, ASICS, SKF and Frida.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) AI Gets Cute
What does the face of AI look like? It may range from a blinking cursor to the ominous terminator (recently found plying its trade in underground SF fight clubs), but the agentic age has seen the rise of cute and cuddly mascots. From Muse to OpenAI’s dots, cute and fluffy representations of technology are aiming to overcome anxiety about the technology and data access through cartoon neoteny.
OpenAI’s new dots are “plush, colorful creatures taking the shape of a heart, frog, or cloud with a beret”, and OpenAI invites users to “give it a name, and make it your own”. Meta’s Muse comes with Jolly, a character Mark Zuckerberg calls “really fun and cute”, while xAI gives every Grok Bot an avatar of “simple shapes and expressive eyes”.
So is cuteness the way to our hearts and data? Only 2.2% of consumers were paying for AI as of May (TechCrunch), and agents need access to inboxes, calendars and cards to be useful. “These types of cute factors can make the product seem warm and less threatening,” says Harvard’s Julian De Freitas, and the testing seems to agree: Meta’s first Muse TV ad left Jolly out and scored 1.8 out of 5.9 stars with System1.
However, a friendly face also makes permissions easy to give and forget. A YouTuber whose Muse sent a Marketplace buyer his address had ticked “allow always” rather than “allow one time” (Engadget). The pushback is building too, with Fairplay calling the mascots “children’s iconography” and Florida asking a court to stop ChatGPT “presenting itself as having human characteristics”. On the day dots launched, the White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “artificial intelligence” and say “Super Intelligence” instead. Can fluff and super intelligence coexist?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Consent Collapse in Data Flows
2.) McDonald’s Shifts Its Focus From the Burger to the Customer
McDonald’s latest moves have more to do with customers than their burgers. Franchisees have always set McDonald’s prices restaurant by restaurant. However, Reuters reported this week that a pricing engine now analyses millions of daily transactions across nearly 14,000 US restaurants to recommend “the optimal price” for each item at each store, based in part on “customer willingness to pay in your area”. One company-run Fresno restaurant sells a Big Mac for $5.69, while another two miles away charges $6.89, a 21% premium, though Reuters couldn’t confirm the engine caused the gap.
McDonald’s has responded that “AI does not set McDonald’s menu prices. Franchisees do,” calling the story “a nothingburger with maybe extra pickles” (which made me instantly distrust it). Reuters’ own reporting suggests the engine has lately pushed more conservative pricing, including some cuts, as US visits have fallen every month since March.
Alternatively, this week showed another way McDonald’s is earning from customers. Since August, its Media Network has run ads such as Geico’s on drive-thru boards in 450 company-owned US restaurants, drawing on nearly 220 million active loyalty members, and its CMO hopes to build it into “a billion-dollar business”.
From dynamic pricing rumors to harvesting attention, your next trip for a Big Mac may come with a side of data driven customization.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Price Transparency Mandates
3.) You Still Spending Hun?
Optimism has been retreating for some time, but spending hasn’t fully followed it. Ipsos’ latest Global Trends survey, analyzing nearly 30,000 interviews across 38 markets, finds 25% of people are optimistic about the world, 36% about their country and 55% about themselves and their family. US personal optimism has fallen from 73% in 2024 to 57%.
However, the gloom hasn’t stopped spending. In a PayPal survey, 58% of Americans feel more worried about money heading into the holidays, yet 64% expect to spend the same or more, cutting back on dining out and gifts for themselves – shifting the focus of buying.
4.) What Does College Mean Now?
Historically, college has been sold as the safe route to a good career, with a high price often read as a sign of quality. However, that promise seems to be slipping, as Gallup finds a record-low 31% of Americans now call a college education “very important”, down from 70% in 2013. Those saying it is “not too important” rose from 6% to 29%, with declines across every major demographic group.
Colleges look to be responding by rethinking the price tag itself. Private colleges now hand first-year students back roughly 57 cents of every tuition dollar in grants, up from 54.5 cents a year earlier, and Carroll College in Montana is cutting its published price by 40% after finding some families ruled it out before even applying. Students also seem to be buying shorter versions of the product, with certificate enrollment up 10.2% in spring 2026 against 1.0% for bachelor’s degrees.
For a category that has long let price signal prestige, the job now looks to be proving value rather than banking on tradition.
5.) Paying Agencies for Outputs, Not Hours
For decades agencies were paid for their time. However, a WFA survey of 69 multinational brands finds hourly rate agency payment deals have fallen from 54% in 2011 to 19% today, while fixed-fee and output deals have risen from 20% to 33%. 89% say they get value for money, yet only 48% feel they can see what the work costs the agency. WFA’s Laura Forcetti says AI makes “time an increasingly weak proxy for value”, and AI is also becoming the newest thing brands can’t see into.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Markup Markup
6.) Japan Closes the Third-Beer Gap
For three decades Japanese brewers have played cat and mouse with the tax office, inventing low-malt recipes to fit lower tax bands – with the result as ‘third beer’, a category that exists in this range. However, since 1 October every beer-type drink in Japan pays a single rate of ¥54.25 per 350ml can, with beer falling from ¥63.35 and happoshu and third beer rising from ¥46.99.
The category’s best seller, Suntory’s Kinmugi, is the number three beer-type brand in Japanese supermarkets at 9.4% of sales (Mainichi), and on 6 October it relaunches as a ‘full’ beer with a higher malt ratio, with the line “Kinmugi is changing. Japan’s everyday is changing.” Alongside this, all four big brewers are now turning their third beers into beer, with Suntory putting Kinmugi in a cheaper ‘daily beer’ tier at ¥880 a six-pack against ¥1,030 for its standard beer.
However, there is a risk that Japanese drinkers don’t follow the change and engage with more options. With drinking attitudes changing and prices for ‘third beer’ shifting, beer brands have to ensure third beer drinkers don’t shift away from the category.
7.) What Does a Dignified Retirement Look Like for a Robot?
Most machines are retired quietly. However, Figure gave its F.02 humanoid robots, which helped build over 30,000 BMWs, a divisive but cinematic send-off. In a reported act of respect, the brand trained the fleet of robots to leap, unaided, into a 75-ton furnace of molten steel in Finland, ala Terminator 2. In fact, the idea was actually at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s suggestion.
The film capturing the fiery retirement passed 545,000 YouTube views in three days, and the metal from it was available as replicas of the F.02 head. The wider question is whether we can humanize the robots in our life, but keep ourselves from giving them a human style send off. When a robot is a robot, training it to jump into molten metal is more acceptable than when we have feelings for it.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
KFC UK&I – “Don’t Crack: An Original KFC Game Show”
KFC has turned its “Believe” ads into a 32-minute game show on its own YouTube channel, where 30 fans compete for £50,000 and the golden egg. 9.8 million people scanned the QR code in the ads, about 50,000 applied and 30 made the show. The original ads became a casting call and the casting call has become content, though so far the 30-second trailer has drawn far more views than the show itself. When it comes to branded content, the question still remains whether telling people about the stunt is as powerful as getting them to watch a detailed version of it?
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Ritualized Fandom Belonging
Visit Sweden – “The Introvert Travel Agency”
Most tourism ads talk about all the new people you’ll meet, but one has taken a different direction. Visit Sweden has opened a travel agency for introverts in a new ad, matching a short quiz to a Swedish trip, with pop-up agencies opening in Berlin on 14 October and then Paris and London. Its YouGov research across nine countries found 53% would pay extra for peace, privacy or fewer crowds, turning the country’s quietness into the product, rather than something to apologise for.
Flipkart – “Maine Prem Nahi Kiya”
In a new Flipkart mockumentary ad, actor Piyush Mishra plays out his regret at missing Maine Pyar Kiya and imagines himself as its hero, Prem, ahead of the brand’s ‘Big Billion Days’ sale. The ads turn one actor’s regret into a vehicle for the fear of missing a sale.
Marshall – “Dead Venue Sessions”
What happens when we lose all of our iconic music venues? As gentrification and NIMBY-ism puts music venues under threat in cities around the world, we often don’t realize what we had until they are gone. However, Marshall is filming bands playing the sites of closed music venues, from a Philadelphia club that became a gym to LA’s London Fog, where The Doors played, and which is now a barbershop. The episodes show what we’ve already lost in music culture, while the amp brand is giving 1% of its online sales to help keep more small venues open.
Kirkens Korshær – “Secondhand Skins”
Danish charity Kirkens Korshær, which runs about 230 secondhand shops, has opened one for Counter-Strike 2 skins: players donate in-game items they no longer use, and the charity resells them to fund its work with vulnerable young people. With 8.2 million CS2 inventories averaging about 70 items, it brings charity retail into a game economy.
ASICS – “Human Nature”
ASICS has made a ten-minute nature documentary, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, that puts human movement on the endangered list. Its research, across 34,000 people in 31 countries, finds we spend 86% of our waking day not moving, and on its new “Movement Conservation Status” about a quarter of people qualify as ‘Endangered’. Rather than veering towards accusations of ‘laziness’, the brand blames how modern life shifts movement out, and asks for 15 minutes a day in activity to get off the ‘endangered list’.
SKF – “Pay Like It’s 1919”
Bearing maker SKF has revived a 1919 deal in which customers paid for its technology out of the energy it saved, and has used AI to bring back Greta Garbo, who appeared in an SKF promotional film as a teenager, to sell it. While it was made with her family’s consent, the move has seemingly hit an uncanny valley shaped speed bump – as The Guardian gave it one star and called her “a Stepford robo-star”.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Digital Afterlives
Frida – “Kid Wash”
Frida, which made its name with baby products, is now selling a 32-product hygiene line to six to 11 year olds, so it went where they watch. The brand worked with Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs to build the first-ever Kid Wash, a drive-through car wash for messy children foamed with Frida’s body wash. The brand’s move borrows the trust of one of kids’ YouTube’s best-known engineers.
// Sunday Snippets
// Advertising & Marketing //
– The Contagious Brands Report 2026 names 45 brands across nine categories, ranging from Scrub Daddy and Fishwife to Fanatics and Substack. [Branding]
– The new Ultimate Sevens rugby league has given its six clubs lettering instead of animal crests, with names such as Albion Athletic, Clan Taran and Sol Feroz. [Sports]
– In a survey of 300 B2B marketers, 80.8% use social media for brand building, while 7.4% use linear TV and 1.1% cinema. [Advertising]
– Twisted Tea has put its cans in Realtree camouflage, with merch from duck calls to a talking fish. [Branding]
– Lexus had MSCHF loop an RZ nose-to-tail and twist an RX along its length for a three-day show during New York’s Armory Week. [Automotive]
– Clean Creatives counts 1,321 agency contracts with fossil fuel companies, up 9% and the most since it began tracking in 2021, flagging oil ads that sell fuel as the power behind AI. [Sustainability]
– A Kroger study with Vidmob and MMA Global scored more than 1,900 ads before launch and predicted their e-commerce conversion with 81% accuracy. [Advertising]
– Discord now pays users in its in-app currency to watch 15-second video ads, building on a format it says gets a 97% median completion rate across 90 million daily users. [Advertising]
– Mid-sized companies in six Asia-Pacific markets can now run ads starring Will Smith for a usage fee, with the project covering production up front and promising that “no synthetic or AI-generated likeness is used”. [Advertising]
– Dads and babies held a mass “change in” in nappies printed “two weeks is sh*t” the weekend Labour’s conference opened, protesting UK paternity leave of two weeks at £194.32 a week; Tesco backed the campaign. [Advertising]
– Steve Buscemi’s galactic emperor returns for Telstra, whose “BLOCKED” warnings sink his scam plans in a sequel to last year’s “Scamageddon”. [Advertising]
– For its 170th year, Burberry photographed 170 people on the streets of London, New York, Seoul and Shanghai in its outerwear, mixing passers-by with names like Crush and OG Anunoby. [Fashion]
– Fiverr’s spoof luxury skincare kit, RRELIEF, lists $250 of Fiverr credits as its active ingredient: “The best way to turn back the clock is to stop working around it.” [Advertising]
– McAfee has rebranded around AI scams after finding 68% of consumers link it only with antivirus. [Branding]
– For its 80th year, SAS is selling “Scandinavian as Standard”, framing trust, punctuality and simplicity as everyday life. [Travel]
– Brooklinen’s first celebrity-led campaign, made in-house, puts Robby Hoffman, Ben Marshall, Alana Haim and Mikal Bridges in bed. [Advertising]
– Uber Hong Kong has turned Gareth T’s hit “Your Ride Is Here” into a three-minute love story, in which an early Uber no longer cuts short his confession. [Advertising]
– IKEA has covered its future SoHo store in giant assembly manuals for New York life, from living in a shoe box to getting your security deposit back. [Retail]
– Toyota Australia’s HiLux “Mud Dance” drags rival utes into a dance-off down a muddy hill to a yodelled “Blue Danube”, launched before the first bounce of the AFL Grand Final. [Automotive]
– For its tenth birthday, PhonePe had India’s fastest speaker start reading out its users’ names; at 494 words a minute, all 700 million would take 980 days. [Finance]
– Caffeinated protein bar Unhinged held an open casting call for its first ad and cast everyone who applied. [Advertising]
– Reese’s surveyed 15,000 Americans to find the “Trick-or-Treatiest Street in America”, with a council including Christina Ricci and Kathy Najimy crowning a winner on 21 October. [Food & Drink]
// Tech & Media //
– Gallup finds 33% of Americans now trust the mass media, up from last year’s record low of 28%, with almost all of the rise among Republicans. [Media]
– Across 11,000 consumers in seven markets, Usercentrics finds only 7% are fully comfortable giving AI assistants their data, while 17% grant access anyway. [AI]
– In a 40,000-person survey, Android has overtaken the iPhone as Japan’s main phone, 54.1% against 45.6%. [Tech]
– In IAB Europe research, 58% of 50 ad executives expect agentic buying to reach scale within a year. [AI]
– The MTV VMAs drew 8.4 million viewers, up 51% on last year and an 11-year high, with 20 advertisers new to the show. [TV]
– An indie developer’s Duo-Man app turns the foldable iPhone Duo into a Walkman, with cassettes on the inner screen and playback on the outer one. [Tech]
– Bose says wired earbuds are “experiencing a cultural renaissance” as it launches its first wired pair in more than a decade, $99 USB-C noise-cancelling earbuds shipping on 15 October. [Tech]
– DoorDash is testing ordering by text in Apple Messages with 20,000 US customers, and has opened a way for office AI tools to place restaurant orders. [Retail]
– The WSJ finds people picking up “prompt speak” at work, from contrast framing (“This is not a morning meeting, it’s a reset”) to chatbot-style flattery; “We just sound like bots,” says one Stockholm investor. [AI]
– Pew built AI “digital twins” of its own panel members and found they missed the real answers by 12 points on average, almost never said “not sure”, and changed their picture of America depending on the model used. [AI]
– Slow Ventures has disclosed stakes of $1 million to $3 million in three niche creators from its $64 million creator fund, including a commercial fisherman; its cofounder says “What we invest in are cults.” [Creator Economy]
– A survey for Germany’s women’s council finds 67% of women restrict what they do online for fear of digital violence, rising to 76% of 18 to 39 year olds, one in five of whom has faced sexualised deepfakes of herself. [Social Media]
– Best Buy will open on TikTok Shop in late October with nearly 10,000 products, from Dyson to Oura, with checkout in the app and returns in its stores. [Retail]
– Safari on iOS 27 has stopped loading The Trade Desk’s ad-serving domain, and Apple added Unified ID 2.0, LiveRamp and ID5 to the same blocklist this month; Google’s ad server still loads. [Tech]
– Europe’s consumer authorities have opened coordinated action against nine games companies, including the makers of Candy Crush, Minecraft and Valorant, to make in-game currencies show their real-world price and honour a 14-day right to withdraw. [Regulation]
– Patreon had ten tabletop creators roll a six-foot, 200-pound D20 down a hill to choose their next projects; tabletop creators earned $51 million on Patreon last year. [Creator Economy]
– As YouTube adds tools that test thumbnails on creators’ older videos automatically, a study of 56,419 YouTube vlog videos finds 36 measures of images, speech and text explain at most 1.1% of the differences in views within a channel, while a channel’s first hit lifts the views of everything after it by 164%. [Creator Economy]
// Wider Culture //
– Of 472 Instagram posts under #womenshealth, 39% were selling a product or service and 69% made health claims, but only 7% cited evidence; more of the individual posters were coaches and naturopaths (55%) than doctors (35%). [Health]
– In an experiment with about 1,000 US students, devoted Taylor Swift fans who read about her carbon emissions then reported lower climate concern. [Culture]
– Linking census records for 10 million children, an NBER paper finds growing up next to someone in an occupation raises the chance of doing that job 30 years later by about 10%. [Work]
– Coursera’s new AI-Human Skills Synergy Index ranks the US eighth of 98 countries for AI preparedness but 27th for learner proficiency. [Education]
– LEGO’s first Dragon Ball set, a 1,764-piece Shenron and Goku for adults at $179.99, goes on sale on 4 November. [Collectables]
– Ahead of its first UK restaurant, Jersey Mike’s has renamed the EFL Trophy the Jersey Mike’s Trophy in a £5 million deal that runs to 2030/31. [Sports]
– Dazed calls 2026 the year of “motherbombing”, as younger artists put older icons at the centre of their releases: Charli xcx’s album cover features Martin Scorsese, Marc Jacobs and John Cale, and Troye Sivan’s new single samples Madonna with an Ian McKellen voiceover. [Culture]
– From 1 October every employer in Japan must act to protect staff from customer harassment; Odakyu has put body cameras in all 70 of its stations, and SoftBank sells call-centre AI that makes a shouting caller sound calm. [Work]
– Sunkist Fruit Gems, a kosher staple thrown at bar and bat mitzvahs, will return in early 2027 under a new manufacturer after Ferrara’s decision to drop them set off an outcry that began in a Jewish community publication. [Food & Drink]
– Among American girls who have never played organised sport, 54% say they want to, and 45% of girls cannot name a favourite professional athlete, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s first annual report. [Sports]
– The Vienna Tourist Board has released a free Figma kit built from Viennese Modernism, with an Otto Wagner Green and a Klimt Gold, aimed at designers in five countries. [Travel]
– Outkast and Waffle House have a merch line out on 2 October, with Andre 3000 and Big Boi in Waffle House uniforms, teased by a Waffle House sign reading “Gator belts and patty melts”. [Culture]
– Diet Coke has gone missing from New York grocery delivery: Amazon Fresh shoppers say Coke products have been unavailable since early August, and nobody will say why. [Food & Drink]
– 42% of Americans now use no cash at all in a typical week, up from 24% in 2015. [Finance]
– The NHL opened its season with “Hot for Hockey”, short audio stories about real players written by hockey romance authors; the league says the players approved it. [Sports]
– England’s new whisky GI lets English single malt be mashed and fermented away from the distillery, which Scotch rules forbid, and the Scotch Whisky Association says it is “profoundly concerned”. [Food & Drink]
– Nubank is in talks to buy Monzo for £8bn to £10bn, against the UK challenger bank’s £4.5bn valuation in 2024; Monzo has 16 million customers. [Finance]
– Costco’s under-40 membership is up more than 60% since Covid and now more than a quarter of members, as digitally-enabled sales reached $33 billion with help from DoorDash and Uber Eats delivery. [Retail]
– Copenhagen furniture brand OMHU made 100 copies of its own $1,995 sofa, priced at $799.99 on Temu, Etsy and Dupe.com, and they sold out in 10 minutes. [Branding]
// 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!
