In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at eight stories to think about next week, including:
– Halloween Is Coming for Christmas
– Christmas Ads Arrive Before Halloween
– The WNBA’s Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet
– Adding Green vs. Cutting Waste
– Will ‘Top of the Curve’ Synthetic Research Win on Economics?
– Netflix Kids Is Starting to Look Like YouTube
– Work Chat Moves Further Into Sunday
– Why Do People Join Online Communities?
In addition, we have ads from Rivian, Pringles, Movember, Lamborghini, Visit Oslo, Woolmark and Hatch.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Halloween Is Coming for Christmas
Holidays traditionally work sequentially, with Halloween serving as a firewall for an ever-encroaching holiday season. However, holidays seem to have gone ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ as the amalgamation of Halloween and Christmas into ‘Halloweenmas’ is complete.
As the Guardian notes, Halloweenmas is playing out across culture and shopping websites. On wholesale platform Faire, Halloweenmas products have grown from 425 in 2021 to 2,632 in 2025, led by trees, wreaths and ornaments, and Wilko says its artificial tree sales were 200% higher in September than a year earlier. The share of UK shoppers planning to celebrate has risen to 36%, up from 27% in 2025, according to IGD research cited by the BBC. Halloween now brings in around a third of Avon Valley Adventure Park’s annual income, with its founder saying “it has surpassed Christmas.”
The combination and shift isn’t just limited to the UK. In the US, singer Janelle Monáe has set out to become as synonymous with Halloween as Mariah Carey is with Christmas, running a ‘Wondaween Season’ of Los Angeles events.
Faire’s UK general manager describes Halloween as “mirroring many of Christmas’s traditions, but without the same level of expectation”, which may be much of its appeal and why it’s taken a lead in this new combination. Rather than two separate holidays, the end of the year seems to be merging into one long season of rituals and spending, with trees going up in September and Christmas ads arriving before the pumpkins have been carved.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Ceremonial Consumption
2.) Christmas Ads Arrive Before Halloween
As Halloweenmas grows, Christmas ads follow. Christmas ads used to wait for November, but this year’s first ones arrived while Halloween decorations were still going up. In Germany and Austria, retailer ABOUT YOU launched the first Christmas spot of the year on 10 September, about two months before TV Christmas advertising usually begins. In the 20-second film, model Lena Gercke drags an oversized tree through the streets on a summer evening, decorates it on her terrace and ends up on a pool lounger, under the brand’s line ‘Whatever you love’.
In the UK, Debenhams became the first UK retailer to release a 2026 Christmas ad on 15 October, weeks before the bulk of its rivals’ ads usually arrive. Its four-minute film continues the brand’s “The Village” platform, as a snowstorm and a power cut derail a village Christmas party, with Emily Atack, Mathew Horne and Gabrielle singing “Dreams”. It arrived about two weeks earlier than last year’s, itself an early entry, because, as CEO Dan Finley puts it, shoppers are “looking to spread the cost of the festive season rather than leaving everything until December.”
Following suit in the US, Twix hasn’t chosen between the two holidays at all: Zombie Claus is back for a second year of ‘Hallowmas’, and the brand’s contest pitches its prize money for “decor, food, a party, or any other mix of Halloween and Christmas.”
The three brands have taken different routes into pre-empting the same crowded calendar: ABOUT YOU acknowledges its early arrival, Debenhams makes an earnest entry and Twix commits to ‘Hallowmas’. All three aim to get ahead of the pack of what’s coming, but whether they’ll be remembered long enough to make a holiday impact is an open question.
For more Halloween and holiday ads, check out Sunday Strategy’s archive of over 1,400 holiday ads throughout the years, with more added each week.
3.) The WNBA’s Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet
The WNBA Finals, which began on Saturday, put the league’s most valuable team against its least valuable. Sportico values the Golden State Valkyries at $850m, on $78m of revenue in 2025, and the Atlanta Dream at $280m, on $16m. In their second season, the Valkyries have also become the first women’s professional sports team to pass $100m in annual revenue, selling out all 22 of their home games.
The gap between teams was clearest in where the postseason games would be played. Until the league moved the dates on 13 October, the Dream’s home Finals games were set for the 3,500-seat Gateway Center, where a Finals game would have drawn the smallest crowd in WNBA Finals history. Valkyries owner Joe Lacob admitted putting “quite a bit of pressure” on the league before Games 3 and 4 moved to the Hawks’ 16,888-seat State Farm Arena, with Game 3 shifted a day around a Sombr concert. In San Francisco, Chase Center moved a Doja Cat concert so Game 2 could stay at home, which the Valkyries called “standard practice”.
Demand isn’t the problem behind the venue issues. The cheapest Game 1 ticket was $214 on Thursday, against $34 for last year’s Game 1 (TicketData, via Front Office Sports), and StubHub told the San Francisco Chronicle these are its most expensive WNBA Finals in at least six years. The money in women’s sport looks real, but it may be pooling where teams have an NBA owner or arena behind them. The future of the WNBA is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
4.) Adding Green vs. Cutting Waste
Sustainability is often the art of what we can take away vs. what we can add. However, a paper published last month by Diletta Acuti and colleagues suggests that how consumers perceive sustainability efforts may be focused more on what a brand ‘adds’. Across nine studies, the authors identify a ‘sustainable additive bias’: businesses are judged greener for adding eco-friendly extras than for taking things away, even when taking away is better for the planet. In a European hotel, guests rated rooms stocked with organic toiletries and reusable items greener than pared-back rooms with refill dispensers (5.05 vs. 4.63), yet the fuller rooms threw away 55.1% of what was supplied, against 51.1% for the alternative.
People know less is greener, but a product with a green appearance can override this. When ordinary items were featured in a room, 78.6% picked the room with fewer as more sustainable, but with eco-friendly items the fuller room edged ahead. As Acuti puts it, “adding something is visible, while removing something is not.” Similarly, earlier research found plastic packaging with unnecessary paper added was rated greener than plastic alone. The greener move may be to do less, but it seems to earn credit only when brands can show people what’s missing.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Operational Transparency
5.) Will ‘Top of the Curve’ Synthetic Research Win on Economics?
Synthetic research has grown in use: Digiday reports that Magnum, Vans and Kenvue are using Vurvey Labs’ AI personas to inform product development. In Korea, BGF Retail, owner of the CU convenience chain, launched a lunchbox developed with synthetic consumers in August that sold 50,000 units in two weeks, per etnews.
However, alongside use comes greater acknowledgement of synthetic research’s current limitations. As one vendor, Vurvey’s CEO Chad Reynolds, puts it, “LLMs give you the top of the bell curve, the most common answer,” and a new audit of 61 AI models, not yet peer reviewed, shows a similar story. It tested the models against a real survey of 263 people: the best only matched a simple statistical baseline built from other respondents. As predictors of each person’s own answers, every specialist ‘decision model’ did worse than simply using other respondents’ answer frequencies.
Despite the limitation, ‘top of the curve’ performance may still be attractive paired with its economics. In a demo for The Drum, Mark Ritson, an investor in synthetic research firm Evidenza, estimates research on almost 10,000 synthetic Canadians for an illustrative Tabasco plan costs just over C$10,000, against more than C$2m for the real equivalent. Synthetic customers are fast and cheap, but they’re built to return the average answer: great for certain situations, but less useful if you’re trying to get away from the top-line wisdom of the crowd.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Synthetic Disappointment
6.) Netflix Kids Is Starting to Look Like YouTube
Netflix was where many parents sent children to get away from YouTube, but now YouTube’s children’s creators are among Netflix’s most-watched shows. In its report on the first half of 2026, Netflix named Ms Rachel its most-watched kids’ title at 69 million views, followed by Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs (36 million) and Salish and Jordan Matter (29 million). By What’s on Netflix’s count, the Matters drew 43 million hours in April alone.
Not all parents are pleased. A father’s viral video accusing Netflix of “commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot” drew more than 3,900 comments, and one mother told the Guardian that Netflix Kids is “suddenly more shouty, more gamified and more focused on dares”, with parents’ group chats now swapping tips on blocking YouTube creators.
Some are building the alternative. Maka, a streaming app for children up to six that launched on 15 Oct, has no ads, autoplay or endless scrolling, and algorithms that “intentionally do not maximize watch time”. Parents used to see Netflix as more distinct from YouTube, trusting specific platforms as filters for content worries. However, if content style travels with creators, no platform may be truly distinct as platforms seek out popular talent.
7.) Work Chat Moves Further Into Sunday
The ‘Sunday scaries’ are now official for Merriam-Webster, which added the term to its online dictionary in September, but the feeling may be stronger than first assumed. Data compiled for the Wall Street Journal by workforce analytics firm ActivTrak shows work messages and chats rose to about 12% of Sundays in 2025, nearly double the 6.6% in 2023. ActivTrak’s own analysis adds that people working on Sundays now start at 10:58am, against 12:24pm in 2023.
Other data reinforces the erosion of Sunday ‘Fun Day’. Analysis of Microsoft 365 signals, published in June 2025, found nearly 20% of employees working at the weekend check email before noon on Saturday and Sunday, and over 5% are back in email on Sunday evenings. Yet the official count of weekend working has barely moved. The American Time Use Survey found 30% of employed people worked on an average weekend day in 2025, the same as in 2024 and up only slightly from 28% in 2023.
Sunday isn’t turning into a work day so much as work is reaching further into it. The ‘Sunday scaries’ may be less about Monday’s work approaching than about Monday’s work already being there.
8.) Why Do People Join Online Communities?
What does ‘community’ really mean online? Brands have spent the last decade promising consumers ‘community’ as some form of ‘togetherness’, but new research suggests people may want something more practical from it. Pew Research Center’s recent survey of 9,750 US adults finds nearly four in ten Americans are part of an online community, rising to 48% of 18 to 29 year-olds. About eight in ten or more go to their most-visited one to stay informed, for fun or for advice, while fewer go to meet people. 56% visit daily, yet only about one in five feel extremely or very close to others there.
Leaving these communities is common too. About a third of Americans have left an online community, more than eight in ten of them because they lost interest and 57% because of too much arguing. Politics is largely unwelcome, with 54% saying it doesn’t belong in their go-to community. If people mainly come for information, ‘community’ may be more transactional than we assume, tied to how they feel about the information they receive, with little reason to stay beyond that.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Rivian – “Halloween Mode | Ghostbusters ft. Bill Murray”
Bill Murray is back as Peter Venkman to launch Rivian’s annual Halloween Mode, a free over-the-air update made with Sony Pictures that turns the R1S, R1T and R2 into a ghost-busting ride until early November. Owners get Ecto-1 and Proton Pack light-and-sound shows, a scavenger hunt for hidden characters and a Trick or Treat mode that plays the Ghostbusters theme from the car. Nostalgia meets your current car in a way that puts Rivian into owners’ holiday celebrations every year.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Nostalgia Economy
Pringles – “Once You Drop”
Fred Baur, who invented the Pringles can, famously asked to be buried in one, and in 2008 his family placed some of his ashes in a tube. For this year’s Halloween, Pringles has turned that lore into a prize: fans sign a “Last Will and Taste-Ament” by 22 October to win a Pringles-can urn and an “afterlifetime” supply, paid as $28,080 because the brand, sadly, won’t ship 200 years of crisps. A TikTok funeral director fronts the ad promoting it, as the brand’s strangest true story becomes the competition.
Movember – “Make a Growmitment with Rick and Morty”
Movember’s 2026 campaign asks men to make a “Growmitment” with their mates, with several ways to take part: grow a mo, move 60km, host an event or “Mo Your Own Way”. The broad asks are promoted with an ad featuring Rick and Morty taking the challenge first, followed by comedian Aaron Chen, both with questionable moustache results. For a charity focused on men’s health, isolation becomes a challenge that’s pulled closer to the core cause of male health and wellbeing.
Lamborghini – “Living Twice”
Brand heritage leads to some interesting myths, often with a hint of truth. Since 2004, Italy’s Polizia di Stato has used Lamborghinis, lent by the carmaker, to rush organs to transplants more than 200 times. Released for the European Day for Organ, Tissue and Cell Donation, “Living Twice” tells this story through the second chance a transplant gives, all while subtly playing up the luxury brand’s performance cues.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Humanized Efficiency
Visit Oslo – “It’s Totally Even a City!”
Halfdan, the grumpy local from 2024’s “Is it even a city?”, which Visit Oslo says drew 15 million views within days, is back in a Christmas musical sequel. This time he grumbles in verse about bankers commuting on skis and parks full of sledging children, until a choir of residents threatens to burn him on a bonfire and eat him, and he agrees to stay one more week. Once again, the tourism board sells the city by talking down its strengths.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Performance Without Aspiration
Woolmark – “Return to Real”
Woolmark’s new global platform sells wool as “the original wearable tech”, under lines such as “Not all intelligence is artificial,” while tapping into an appetite for the natural. A companion survey for Woolmark finds 82% of people across five markets would choose natural fibres over synthetics if price, style and fit were equal. Billboards on a working Australian sheep farm explain that the creators of “the world’s smartest fibre aren’t scientists. But they do wear white coats.” A natural fibre is positioned against AI as much as against its direct synthetic competitors, as ‘natural’ takes on a broader meaning.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: The Authenticity Tax
Hatch – “Life of Scores”
The quantified self sells optimization but often leaves wearable users with less understanding. To pare back how technology and health work together, Hatch takes a subtle stand against scores in its latest ad. In it, Olivia Munn moves through a day of numbers, goals and ratings until bedtime, where Hatch’s Sleep Clock “doesn’t score your sleep”: “When everything else in life comes with a score, bedtime doesn’t have to.” Sleep trackers have made a nightly score the norm, often telling people how they’ve done rather than what to do about it. Hatch still tracks sleep, but sells simple action over numbers.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Perfection’s Tyranny
// Sunday Snippets
// Advertising & Branding //
– For Mental Health Month, Doritos Australia’s purple Fiery Purple Blaze chips, sold only at 7-Eleven, carry a QR code to the youth mental health service ReachOut. [Food & Drink]
– Kwik Fit is asking drivers waiting for an MOT to call a friend across its 650 centres, with £1 million of airtime won through ITV’s mental health award. [Health]
– Danish rainwear brand Rains and espresso-machine maker La Marzocco have made a barista apron in Rains’ waterproof fabric, launched with a custom mini espresso machine at Rains’ Copenhagen flagship. [Fashion]
– Osaka’s Hankyu Railway will stop running hanging ads in all its trains from April 2027, ending a format more than a century old, saying passengers now get their information from phones and want “a calm travel space”. [Advertising]
– Monzo’s “Greg at Monzo”, a made-up employee who posts on LinkedIn about office life, has more than 34,000 followers and often outperforms the bank’s own account. [Social Media]
– Liquid Death’s page with Sixt invites people to “experience your first can of Liquid Death Energy when you rent a car at SIXT”, under the line “Lose your Liquid Death Virgenergy”. [Food & Drink]
– Lovehoney Australia is offering off-grid cabin stays where couples get 2% off for every 1% they cut their screen time, and stay free if they halve it. [Consumer Behavior]
– For Chipotle, the London Vegetable Orchestra recorded an original track at Abbey Road on instruments made from the chain’s ingredients. [Food & Drink]
– For Brazil’s Children’s Day, telecom brand Vivo’s film keeps the phone in another room while a girl tells her mother a story about a dragon she drew. It draws on a JAMA Network Open study of 1,303 children linking parents’ “technoference” to later inattention and hyperactivity. [Advertising]
– In Make-A-Wish Canada’s “Wishes Are Medicine”, wish alumni, among them Damien, who spent a day as a paleontologist during cancer treatment, present wishes as part of treatment rather than a treat after it. [Charity]
– For Big Billion Days, Flipkart has applied the mother’s rule of buying children’s clothes a size up to TV screens, under the line “Ek Size Bada Le Lo” (“Get one size bigger”). [Retail]
– Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission has had motorcyclists watch their own jackets shredded on a life-size abrasive treadmill next to a five-star rated equivalent. Motorcycles are under 4% of the state’s registered vehicles but about 21% of its road deaths. [Public Safety]
– Breville’s global campaign has an orchestra score every grind, dose and pour live. [Advertising]
– Pregnant Then Screwed has put hundreds of neon “33% OFF” starbursts on women across billboards, print, social and the street, for the 33% less pension income women in the UK receive than men. [Finance]
– Snooki tours Florence, Kentucky, “an authentic Italian-sounding town for an authentic Italian-sounding sandwich”, in Chili’s launch of the Chicken Parm Big Crispy, which goes national on 20 October. [Food & Drink]
– Boost Mobile has taken Mike Tyson’s “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth” literally, with a glove flooring a passenger who complains about his phone plan. [Advertising]
// Marketing & Media //
– Instagram is testing recommending Reels longer than three minutes to people who don’t follow the account. [Social Media]
– On iPhones running Apple’s latest update, ad prices in Safari have fallen 10.5% for Aditude’s publishers since Apple blocked several ad-tech trackers, about a 1% hit to their revenue so far with only 8% of users upgraded. [Advertising]
– In a Morning Consult survey of about 2,000 US adults, 61% of people earning over $100,000 trust influencers’ product recommendations, against about half of those earning less. [Creator Economy]
– In a media agency’s survey of more than 70 senior Australian marketers, 38% accept AI-generated strategy recommendations without human review, rising to 45% for budgets and creative concepts. [AI]
– UK marketers raised budgets at the fastest rate in nine quarters in the third quarter, the IPA’s Bellwether report finds, with a net 14.3% of firms revising up and sales promotion budgets posting their biggest rise since 2023. [Advertising]
– Australian out-of-home revenue rose 8.8% to $376m in the third quarter, and digital screens now make up 77% of it. [Advertising]
– Medill’s State of Local News Report counts 26 new news deserts in a year, the largest rise in its five years of records, and 170 US newspapers closed between July 2025 and August 2026. [Media]
– For its 30th birthday, Slate has rebuilt its original 1996 homepage, Times New Roman and pixel cursor included, and is selling a year’s access for $19.96. [Media]
– In 78,542 US news stories about AI, men were cited as experts 4.3 times as often as women and named in headlines 14.6 times as often, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center finds. [Media]
– Of 1.5 million free samples brands sent to TikTok Shop creators, according to one agency group’s data, fewer than half produced a video and 14% led to a sale, while creators who posted 20 or more videos sold about ten times as much per video. [Creator Economy]
– CNN has aired a 60-second promo, “Freedom of the press is not optional”, quoting five presidents from Jefferson to Obama, a day after a judge blocked the White House ban on its reporters. [TV]
// AI & Tech //
– An audit of 100 German startups finds their AI capability claims exaggerated in three ways: claims with no evidence anyone can inspect, performance numbers with no stated method and claims with no stated limits. The authors want AI claims brought under disclosure rules. [AI]
– Google is testing ads for branded prescription drugs in AI Mode and AI Overviews in the US, shown as standard text and Shopping ads labelled “Sponsored”. [Health]
– Just over 60% of US shoppers plan to use AI tools and assistants for holiday shopping this year, up from 47% a year ago, according to ICSC. [AI]
– Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11, putting its assets and its liabilities at $50m to $100m each, against a $1bn valuation in 2022, and Disney has agreed to buy some of its assets for $20m. [AI]
– A Eurobarometer survey finds 42% of smaller EU companies already use AI or algorithmic management, 36% to monitor staff performance, though 49% don’t trust it for decisions about staff. [Work]
– Gallup finds 59% of US K-12 educators used AI tools last school year, and nearly two-thirds of them say it gave them more time. [Education]
– Apple’s first home display, HomeView, costs $299 and recognises up to six people by face, giving each their own home screen on one shared device. [Tech]
– Kmart Australia has pulled its Anko camera glasses from its website after the country’s privacy regulator opened an investigation into the company that makes their software. The glasses sold out in under a week when they launched in July. [Regulation]
– Instagram has confirmed a glitch that kept suggesting Creed’s 1999 song “Higher” as the soundtrack for users’ Stories, after weeks of people suspecting the band had paid for it. [Social Media]
– Bumble has agreed to be taken private for $6.05 a share in cash, about $1.3bn, by Ithaca Holdings, founded this year by a Sequoia partner and Meta’s former revenue chief, who become Bumble’s co-CEOs. Bumble was valued at more than $14bn after its 2021 IPO. [Tech]
// Retail, Food & Drink //
– Tesco will show influencer videos on its 3,800 in-store screens, as well as in its app and on its website, saying 40% of its shoppers under 45 follow influencers for product suggestions. [Retail]
– The NRF expects US holiday sales to rise 4.2% to $1.013 trillion this year, even as its chief economist warns that inflation and gas prices will hit income groups differently. [Retail]
– US toy prices rose 4.2% in September alone and 6.6% on a year earlier, heading into the holiday season. [Retail]
– Attain’s purchase data shows Gen Z spends about 25% less a year than the average US shopper but across 6% more merchants. Gen Z shoppers are 25% more likely to say they value brand names over price, but 18% less likely to say they stick with the same brands. [Consumer Behavior]
– Across 2,145 mystery-shop visits to 13 fast-food chains, satisfaction was 99% when service felt friendly and about 27% when it didn’t, with Dutch Bros, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks rated the friendliest. [Food & Drink]
– Only 65% of Americans are confident that grocery-store food is safe, a record low in Gallup’s polling, and 73% say they have avoided foods after a recall, up from 53% in 2024. [Food & Drink]
– Ahead of the sixth “A Court of Thorns and Roses” book on 27 October, brands from Target to Knix have launched tie-ins, with Fine’ry renaming four fragrances after the books in more than 7,000 stores. [Culture]
– David’s Bridal has launched the Puppy Love Collection, wedding gowns and tuxedos for dogs, with gowns under $50 and custom looks made to match the bride’s dress. [Pets]
// Sport & Entertainment //
– For El Clásico on 25 October, Barcelona’s shirt sponsor Spotify has handed the front of the kit to Tyler, The Creator’s label GOLF WANG, the first time an artist has designed one of its Barça shirts from start to finish, with 1,899 limited matchday shirts for sale. [Fashion]
– Canadian Tire has reached its goal of putting at least 50% of its sports sponsorship money into women’s professional sport, and its new campaign cites its own figures that 75% of Canadians are fans of women’s sport but 62% of fans don’t know where to find it. [Sports]
– Netflix has won the rights to show all 104 matches of the 2030 World Cup in Spain, one of the host countries, adding to its Women’s World Cup rights in the US and Canada. [Sports]
– Lubrax has returned to Flamengo’s shirt after 17 years away, with a film premiered on Globo that draws on a Nelson Rodrigues crônica about the mystique of the shirt, and Zico as its new ambassador. [Sports]
– Durex UK has made former Premier League manager Sean Dyche “performance director” of Woodley United, a real non-league club, to launch its Durex Performance range. [Advertising]
– Canterbury is looking for the UK’s most spectacularly unflattering HYROX race photo, with £1,000 of performance kit and a professional campaign shoot for the winner. [Sports]
– Released on World Mental Health Day, Sport In Mind’s running film “Any Run & Everyone” was made by 18 animators in six countries over nearly two years, with Berocca, alongside a “100K Your Way” challenge. [Health]
– For Dragon Quest’s 40th anniversary, Shimamura has launched more than 100 collaboration items, including a ¥1,969 bath mat printed like the game’s slippery floor tiles and a wearable Slime blanket, aimed at fans now in their 30s and 40s. [Gaming]
// Life & Society //
– Pew finds 70% of Americans have cut back on extras like eating out and streaming in the past year, and 44% struggled to pay for at least one necessity, such as medical care, rent or food. [Consumer Behavior]
– In Gallup’s first global look at time on social media, across 97 countries, moderate users report more enjoyment and higher life ratings than light users or non-users, while heavy users, two hours a day or more, report more anger, loneliness and stress. 47% of 15-29s worldwide are heavy users. [Health]
– An NBER paper finds remote work lowered births among married women: a one-standard-deviation rise in how easily their work could be done from home cut annual birth rates by 2% and raised full-time employment by 1.3%, with no significant effect for men. [Work]
– Delta made a record $17.6bn in the September quarter, up 16% on flat capacity, with 61% of revenue now coming from premium seats and other streams outside the main cabin, which it plans to shrink further. [Travel]
– Financial planner Facet has named couples who keep separate accounts but share one long-term plan “SPLITs”, and says they are a growing share of its clients. [Finance]
– In Art Basel and UBS’s survey of 3,100 wealthy collectors, Gen Z spent more than twice as much on art as any other generation, while 64% of collectors prefer to keep what they own private. [Collectables]
– The UAE has become the first country to make AI a required school subject from kindergarten, and plans to train 22,000 teachers, though some schools keep young children away from chatbots. [Education]
– In advisory firm Nature’s survey of 1,020 Australians planning to study, only 36% of Year 10 to 12 students see university as essential to getting a job, against 57% of those already studying, and half see AI as a threat to their employability. [Education]
– In the ONS’s latest survey, 85% of adults in Great Britain say climate change has affected them in the past year, up from 66% two years ago, most often through heatwaves. [Sustainability]
– YouGov’s survey of 39,224 Britons finds 36% use at least one dialect word for an alleyway, led by “ginnel” at 14% nationally and 59% in West Yorkshire. [Culture]
// 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!
