In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including:
– The Age of Reverse Engineering Anything
– Fame Gets a Brand Named by AI. Taste Gets It Recommended.
– Permission to Be Average, the Antidote to Optimisation
– Shoppers Stop Believing the Discount
– Anti-Status Is the New Status
– Staged to Prove It Wasn’t AI, Then Parodied by AI
– Young Americans Now Get More News From Instagram Than TikTok
In addition, we have ads from Corteiz x Nike, SPECS, MLB x Marvel, J.Crew, OpenAI, Banana Republic, Whatnot and LEGO x Daft Punk.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) The Age of Reverse Engineering Anything
What does the world look like when we can deconstruct everything digital around us?
For most of software’s history, the hard part of copying a product was time. Now AI coding tools can do much of that work, breaking down a previously insurmountable barrier. In early October developer Brandon Thomas released seven free, open-source apps that recreate Photoshop, Illustrator and five more Adobe tools without Adobe’s code and subscription, then turned to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. A PCMag reviewer reckons the Photoshop copy does 80 to 90% of what Photoshop does (Thomas’s own roadmap rates it only about 45% ‘work-ready’), and a first academic study counts 4.1 million downloads of the clone suite in 12 days. The repo that bears the name of the craze, ‘Reverse Engineer Anything’, has passed 342,000 GitHub stars.
‘Reverse Engineering’ isn’t limited to software, as gaming is showing how quickly it spreads. Steam Next Fest opened on 19 Oct with nearly 7,100 demos, and indie developers report emails demanding $200 in Steam items within 24 hours, or an AI copy of their game goes on sale first. In the time between demo and launch, someone else can get to market first – borrowing a page from fast fashion and applying it to software.
Reverse Engineering doesn’t just threaten software and gaming though. It also sees consumers taking control over the experience their devices provide. Owners are using AI to change and strip smart TVs’ UX to “your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else”, though only currently on Android-based sets.
The law hasn’t caught up. Reverse engineering is generally legal in the US, one lawyer told PCMag, but it “does not excuse breaking a license agreement, infringing a patent, or copying a product’s name or look”. QUT’s Marek Kowalkiewicz told the ABC he expects software firms to lobby for new protection: “It’s an arms race.” If an app’s features can be worked out on sight, and the clearest legal protection is still focused on the name and the look, what’s left that competitors can’t copy? Does brand become the last moat against functional replication or does the name on the ‘Ship of Theseus’ not really matter?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Pervasive Intellectual Theft
2.) Fame Gets a Brand Named by AI. Taste Gets It Recommended.
Much of the focus on AI search is simply about getting a brand mentioned. However, a new paper from Cornell Tech suggests being named and being recommended are different things.
Its author asked 102 language models to name, and then to recommend, brands in 42 categories. When asked to name a brand, the names are market leaders like Nike in running shoes. However, when asked to recommend a brand, the picks are “mostly smaller brands with a specialist or insider following” like Brooks. Depending on the question, Walmart becomes ALDI and Heineken becomes Sierra Nevada. The leader still makes 83% of recommendation lists, it’s just less often the one primary pick.
The taste doesn’t seem to come from anything brands publish. In three open training pipelines, the shift appears at the preference-training stage, though “the preference data contains almost no brands”. An earlier paper from Northwestern and Boston University found the same pattern, noting that “many large, established brands receive no recommendations at all”, including L.L.Bean, REI Co-op and Black+Decker.
For now, the impact of this nuance is modest for brands. In GWI’s survey for DataReportal, 17% of online adults say they have discovered new brands through AI, 15th of the options and behind search engines at 32%. However, if that share grows, the gap between being named and being recommended looks to become something marketers will rapidly need to unpick.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Agent-Legible Branding
3.) Permission to Be Average, the Antidote to Optimisation
Advertising usually defaults to promising we can be the best version of ourselves, but what happens when more people are too tired to care? Against an increasingly exhausted consumer base, brands are selling a ‘good enough’ version of ourselves.
Dollar Shave Club’s “Perfectly Good Is Perfect” launched on 20 Oct with a spokesperson in an ice bath, a Shake Weight and an infrared mask – parodying the “icons of a culture of self-optimization”. Planet Fitness Australia’s “Feeling Gymtimidated?” mocks ring-light influencers and grunting lifters, while Battlegrounds Mobile India tells players to “think less, play maximum”, and Laughlin, Nevada pitches itself as “a laid-back alternative to crowded, over-planned vacations”.
Each may be in different sectors, but all have found a similar opportunity – selling ‘good enough’ instead of asking someone to aspire to find ‘great’. The “Permission to Be Average” may tap into our current mood. In the APA’s Stress in America 2026 survey – 56% say they have had to lower their expectations for what they could achieve in life, and 59% feel they are doing everything “right” but still falling behind. 72% agree “stress is just something I have to live with”. For a majority that has already lowered the bar, can brands follow suit or are our products held to a different standard than ourselves?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Strategic Joy-Making
4.) Shoppers Stop Believing the Discount
Holiday shopping and sales may be starting earlier, but belief in the value of those sales is eroding. Deloitte has found shoppers plan to spend 28% of their holiday budgets by the end of October, the highest share in six years. However, belief in the sales they’re spending on has halved in a year. In Simon-Kucher’s annual holiday study, only 22% of US adults believe advertised discounts reflect true savings, down from 46% in 2025.
Retailers are split on what to do about it. Target will run a “Deal of the Day” every day from 1 Nov to 24 Dec. Kohl’s is moving to plain “X percent off” signs and $5 to $20 price tiers, with its chief merchandising officer admitting “we haven’t always been as clear about our prices and as clear about value.” In an age of dynamic pricing and deals that are autopsied in social media, brands that can clearly communicate value look to capture distrustful shoppers in and out of the holiday season.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Manufactured Scarcity Fatigue
5.) Anti-Status Is the New Status
Economic uncertainty often causes luxury and the middle class to come together in strange ways. Back in 2008, reports claimed middle-class Brits were sneaking their ALDI and LIDL shopping home in Waitrose bags (though one columnist who went looking couldn’t find anyone actually doing it). Now however, it’s the other way round. Luxury labels are selling plain canvas shopping totes, from £450 at Phoebe Philo to more than £2,000 at Prada, and the $2.99 Trader Joe’s bag they’re riffing on made Lyst’s top 10 products this year.
One trend forecaster calls it ‘anti-status status’: the value is getting the reference amongst middle class cues, not flashing the price tag. Being thrifty looks smart, with frugality a “visible indication of intelligence and good judgement”, and luxury becomes a subtle message amongst an everyday format. It’s the same trick as the designer takes on the Carhartt chore coat: look ordinary while costing a fortune.
Luxury brands aren’t the only ones getting into this contradiction. Canadian brand Porter Airlines is celebrating its 20th birthday with an ‘I Only Fly Economy’ crewneck while rivals pour money into premium cabins, but at 130 CAD for a sweatshirt, there’s still a level of irony attached. The question isn’t if people will buy, but how long until the joke wears thin?
6.) Staged to Prove It Wasn’t AI, Then Parodied by AI
We asked for flying cars, but no one expected what would happen when we saw a demo of one.
Tesla unveiled its new Roadster in a livestreamed demo at a SpaceX site in Texas on 15 Oct. The car drove up a ramp, flipped and landed using thrusters, with Elon Musk claiming the live audience was there to “prove it wasn’t AI”.
However, brands replied within hours. IKEA Taiwan sent a toy car off a bath-towel ramp with the line “Safe, affordable”, flexing that its toy set costs $12.99, against a reported $500,000 Tesla reservation deposit. Domino’s Pizza Uzbekistan flew a pepperoni pizza off the same ramp, DoorDash had the Roadster deliver food mid-air, and Chosun Ilbo credits generative AI for how fast the parodies arrived.
Within five days, the stunt needed a fact-checker. A video posted on X on 20 Oct of a Roadster leaping off a city rooftop is AI-generated, Lead Stories found, with detection tools rating it 99 to 100% likely AI. AI scientist Yann LeCun called the real demo a “marketing stunt”, arguing “the car must be an empty, lightweight shell containing big compressed air tanks”. Stunts like Tesla’s now face the double jeopardy of real world critiques of the stunt alongside artificial and brand parodies. The launch was built to show people something real, but if each parody and AI copy blurs the line a little more, how much of the truth endures?
7.) Young Americans Now Get More News From Instagram Than TikTok
Social media may have started to overtake traditional platforms as the main source of news, however what network is preferred is still an open question.
TikTok’s rise as a news source has been impressive. In 2020, 3% of US adults regularly got news there, alongside 9% of 18 to 29 year-olds. By 2025 that was closer to 20% of US adults and over 40% of 18-29s. However, Pew’s latest figures, released 19 Oct, suggest the climb has stopped. 20% of US adults regularly get news on TikTok, unchanged from 2025, and among 18 to 29 year-olds the share fell to 39%. The move isn’t driven by a shift back to traditional platforms, but instead seems to be movement between apps.
In Pew’s fact sheet, Instagram now leads among 18 to 29 year-olds at 43%, ahead of Facebook (40%), YouTube (39%) and TikTok (39%). Across all adults, Facebook is at 40%, its highest since the series began in 2020. News creators who spoke to Digiday say TikTok has been rougher since its US ownership deal closed in January, with one saying, “I have mentally abandoned it.”
Despite these shifts, social media as a whole hasn’t peaked as a news source. In another Pew survey from 23 Oct, 58% of US adults say social media is an important way they keep up with the news, up from 43% in 2022 – rising to 76% of 18 to 29 year-olds. Yet only 19% prefer it as a place to get news. People may not choose social media for news so much as find it there, with the lack of a strong preference explaining why consumption moves so easily from one app to the next.
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Corteiz x Nike – “How to Make an Advert”
How do you make a perfect shoe ad? Maybe you joke about the process of making a shoe ad. Corteiz and Nike have revealed the Shox R419, named after Corteiz founder Clint419, with a two-minute film about making the advert itself. Despite the ad, there’s no release date yet, only a sign-up page and three colourways: ‘Mystique’, ‘Silver Surfer’ and ‘Black Widow’. The film is a joke about launch films with some serious credentials.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Behind-the-Curtain Hunger
SPECS – “Robert Downey Jr., Chief Customer Experience Officer”
Snap has made Robert Downey Jr. “Chief Customer Experience Officer” of SPECS, its AR glasses, with episodes testing them at work and on the golf course, debuting in a Knicks game and Game 1 of the World Series. Downey says they deliver “on the promise of AR glasses made by a certain techno optimist superhero I portrayed”. Though Snap borrows Tony Stark’s technological heritage, eight weeks before Downey returns to Marvel in Avengers: Doomsday, it now has to ensure the reality of the product can match up to fans’ fictional expectations.
MLB x Marvel – “Avengers: Doomsday”
With Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ looming in December, the studio has taken to the World Series and baseball to drum up excitement amongst charges that recent trailers have been boring. Debuting during Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night, new footage has been intercut in an ad featuring Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, Mariners outfielder Randy Arozarena, Brewers starting pitcher (and Game 1 starter) Jacob Misiorowski, Phillies first baseman/outfielder Bryce Harper and Rays third baseman Junior Caminero.
While only two of the players featured were in the game, the baseball-themed footage from the film, with Reed Richards throwing out the first pitch at Ebbets Field in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap, ties two worlds together. Though baseball players act in the same way I assume Robert Downey Jr. pitches, the combination of the moment and the movie, as well as newer more compelling footage, shows how excitement can come from borrowing across moments.
J.Crew x Please Don’t Destroy – “We take suiting seriously”
For J.Crew’s fall suiting campaign, the comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy work their “first shift” in the Suit Shop at its 19 Bond Street store. Martin Herlihy, who directed it, told GQ the campaign “was J.Crew’s idea”, and Higgins used to shop at the 30 Rock J.Crew “pretty much every Saturday at SNL” when a sketch hadn’t gone well. J.Crew, which says it has “a long history of helping people find their first suit”, leans into humor over sophistication to make their suit offering feel accessible. While only 1/3rd of Please Don’t Destroy remains on SNL, the brand is banking that fans missing the group’s sketches buy into this unlikely combination.
OpenAI – “ChatGPT Voice, UK”
The UK version of the ChatGPT Voice campaign swaps the US campaign’s grandmothers for three grandfathers, who use it to plan a trip to Casablanca and to negotiate in Spanish. With the feeling of Wes Anderson meets the Hatton Garden heist, the campaign injects enough quirk to make people engage with an AI product demo.
Banana Republic – “The Agency”
While J.Crew leaned into comedy with Please Don’t Destroy this week, Banana Republic has tapped Jack Innanen to deliver a one man scripted series. The five-part series is set in “the last travel agency in New York City”, with Innanen playing all four staff, and is released weekly on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. On TikTok, the show’s home, episode 1 had 10 million views and episode 2 more than 3 million by 22 October, with the finale due on 5 November. Banana Republic is betting their ‘fashiontainment’ sitcom can combine their products with the brand’s heritage in journalism and travel.
Whatnot – “Take a Shopping Trip”
Whatnot, the live-shopping marketplace, has leveraged ‘real life’ Whatnot shopper (and New York Giants running back) Cam Skattebo for their first brand campaign. The back crashes through walls into three sellers’ live shows: sports cards, a butcher and vintage homeware. There’s also a cameo by his mum, also a Whatnot shopper (a statistically unlikely coincidence). It’s a big jump from livestreams to primetime football, but the open question is if ‘real life’ usage claims and celebrity endorsement, from someone more known to use his head in contact than shopping decisions, educate viewers enough to drive adoption.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Mass Moment Sports
LEGO x Daft Punk – “DAFT PUNK has entered the LEGO universe”
When all you want is another Daft Punk Tour, can a LEGO set fill part of the gap? LEGO and Daft Punk have announced a partnership built around a LEGO Ideas set of the pyramid stage from the duo’s 2007 ‘Alive’ tour, originally designed by a Belgian father and son to win a 2020 LEGO Ideas music contest. The film plays the duo as minifigures following a holographic red brick across a desert. More of the partnership is promised in 2027 and while none of it is a tour, we may have to settle for taking smaller versions home in the interim. Kidulthood will have to try and fill in a Coachella shaped hole.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Creator Nostalgia Cycles
// Sunday Snippets
// Advertising & Branding //
– Heineken and Amazon have launched ‘Pubscription’, a free service that sorts pubs into streaming-style genres by vibe, with free weekly pints for friends who come along. [Food & Drink]
– Victoria’s Day of the Dead film, in which a hummingbird reminds a family that the people they miss are still with them, has passed 55m views on its own channel. [Advertising]
– Apple Music’s new identity was drawn by sound itself: music by Fred again.. played through a shallow bath of mineral oil, with the ripples filmed and turned into its new look and sound mnemonic. [Branding]
– McDonald’s UK has turned six of its dipping sauces into Halloween face paint, with brushes shaped like fries and a sponge like a Chicken McNugget, and 100 sets to win. [Food & Drink]
– Classic FM has launched its first dedicated Christmas station with Aled Jones thawing out of a block of ice to “Walking in the Air”, borrowing the defrosting Mariah Carey has staged on 1 November since 2023 to start the season of “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. [Advertising]
– The ASA has banned a Nutrition Geeks creatine ad because its before-and-after drawing of a bottom, next to the words “muscle definition”, promised more than creatine’s authorised health claims allow. [Regulation]
– Facebook Marketplace and Netflix sell a “Rom-Com Collection” of second-hand finds in a 60-second meet-cute for the third season of Nobody Wants This. [Advertising]
– Macy’s 2026 holiday campaign, ‘There’s Magic Inside’, casts Melissa Joan Hart as a store “Gift Guide” helping Adam Devine, a self-confessed bad gift-giver, alongside an all-new Santaland at Herald Square. [Advertising]
– Poland’s health ministry says an ad for an alcohol-free beer is still “further advertising” of beer and wants to close the loophole, while brewers say the proposed limits would cost restaurants, media and sports clubs at least 700m złoty a year. [Regulation]
– Victoria’s Secret held its fashion show in Los Angeles on Sunday 18 October, streaming it on YouTube and following it with the brand’s first post-show TikTok Live, alongside a series searching for a new Angel. [Fashion]
// Marketing & Media //
– Netflix has cut its 2026 ad revenue forecast to about $2.7bn from about $3bn, blaming a slower rollout of some ad tools, while adding a Netflix Pixel and more than 20 lower-funnel conversion events to its ad platform. Its ad tier goes to 15 new countries in 2027, starting in March. [Advertising]
– Apple has explained that Safari now blocks companies that turn the email addresses people type into tracking IDs, which it calls a “post-cookie” tracking method. [Advertising]
– More than half (52%) of all UK TV viewing is now ad-supported streaming, 14 of the 26 hours a week streamers watch, according to Roku. [Media]
– Disney has worked with more than 6,000 creators this year, up 30% on 2025, and its VP of creator content calls them “our best digital billboards these days”. [Creator Economy]
– Switzerland’s public broadcaster SRG is about to switch FM back on. Turning it off at the end of 2024 to save CHF 15m a year cost its stations more than half a million listeners. [Media]
– A study of 13,060 influencer posts across six platforms finds the replies under a post carry 3.5 times the exaggeration of the post itself, and that platform predicts distortion far better than topic. [Creator Economy]
– A new NBER paper finds venture capital mostly finances “customer capital”: VC-backed firms that go public spend 15 points more of revenue on sales and marketing than their peers. [Advertising]
– Across 7,768 independent agencies in 14 markets, 64% of those claiming AI expertise publish no evidence to support it, making it the least-evidenced of the 14 disciplines tracked. [AI]
// AI & Tech //
– Citizen Lab confirmed the first known zero-click spyware delivered through targeted ads, which reached the devices of at least 45 Al Jazeera journalists. [Tech]
– While Amazon blocks AI shopping agents, Walmart has launched an “Agent Gateway” for approved agents to search and buy on its site, and from next month “Agent Profiles” will let shoppers see an agent’s purchases separately and set approval rules. [Retail]
– Only 13% of CIOs say AI has delivered significant value, and just 17% have rules for switching off AI that isn’t paying its way, a Gartner survey of 2,002 tech leaders finds. [AI]
– For the iPod’s 25th birthday, Apple Music’s error page now holds a working recreation of the first iPod, loaded with songs from the early 2000s. [Tech]
– The UK’s competition regulator wants Apple to open the iPhone’s contactless chip to other payment and ID apps for far lower fees. Contactless is now 39% of all UK payments, up from 3% a decade ago. [Regulation]
– Microsoft is closing The Garage, the employee maker spaces in about 15 locations where staff turned side projects into products such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller, with some shutting on 23 October. [Tech]
– With Apple’s folding iPhone Duo now on sale, a small cult of iPhone mini owners is nursing phones Apple stopped making in 2023, a model that reportedly never passed 5% of iPhone sales. [Tech]
// Retail, Food & Drink //
– Mondelez’s older cookie brands, Nutter Butter, Nilla and Teddy Grahams among them, are having a breakout year with a handful of SKUs each, while Oreo’s 120 US SKUs slow. [Food & Drink]
– Walmart now sells Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus together for $120 a year, nearly $100 less than buying both, with Peacock or Paramount+ included. [Retail]
– Only 39% of Americans now eat at a restaurant at least once a week, down from 53% in 2019, Gallup finds, while weekly online grocery orders have nearly quadrupled to 15%. [Food & Drink]
– Patagonia now sells used gear next to new on Patagonia.com, in one cart with the same warranty, closing the separate Worn Wear site after almost 160,000 used items sold for about $13m last year. [Retail]
– Ocean Spray is opening a one-day diner in New York that puts cranberry sauce in everything, from stuffed pancakes to mozzarella sticks, to get the sauce off the holiday table. [Food & Drink]
– Teen spending is up 6% even as 70% of teens say the economy is getting worse, and Coach is now the favourite handbag of 60% of teen girls, up from 23% in spring 2024, Piper Sandler’s teen survey finds. [Fashion]
– Japanese chain Yakiniku Like has built a free livestreaming seat in its Shinjuku store, with a lit mirror and an overhead camera rig over the grill, to bring in women who don’t eat there yet. [Creator Economy]
– Amazon plans to hire more than 300,000 US holiday workers, 20% more than in each of the last three years, and from January will give seasonal staff on 30 or more hours healthcare from their first day. [Retail]
– Halloween candy costs over 15% more this year, four times overall inflation, according to an analysis by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and the Century Foundation. Mondelez’s sour gummy variety packs are up 39%. [Food & Drink]
– Nearly four in five Gen Z Americans are interested in buying second-hand clothes, YouGov finds, against 59% of baby boomers, and women far more than men (74% vs 54%). [Consumer Behavior]
– Domino’s is selling its rectangular new personal pizza to gamers through Minecraft Dungeons II, where buyers unlock a “Cheesy Cube” pet, the game’s first co-branded companion, from 26 October in 19 markets. [Food & Drink]
– Etsy now requires every listing to show at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background, after buyers said they couldn’t tell which items involved AI. [Retail]
– Golden Corral has closed at least six buffets this year and is down from 362 restaurants in 2023 to 348. [Food & Drink]
– Hasbro’s Magic: The Gathering passed $600m in a quarter for the first time, up 34%, while its toys grew 4%, and in Japan trading cards and hobby goods now outsell books in Book Off’s used-book stores. In a Harris Poll, 52% of US adults call ‘kidulting’, play for grown-ups, one of their main forms of self-care. [Retail]
– Indian delivery app Zepto built an invite-only “Seoul Street” in Delhi, with Nongshim noodles, a Sprite spice challenge and creators, to test what K-culture fandom can do offline. [Retail]
– McDonald’s China sold a wireless mouse shaped like a box of fries, its shell more than 60% plastic from old Happy Meal toys, in two daily drops of 2,000 at 99 yuan plus loyalty points. [Sustainability]
– Campo Viejo’s London sobremesa dinners get cheaper the longer you linger, from £60 a head to £26.25 for staying 90 minutes after dessert. [Food & Drink]
– Zales has 16 runners training for and racing a marathon in its fine jewellery, “26.2 miles in 26.2 carats”, to argue that jewellery doesn’t need a special occasion. [Fashion]
– Aldi has opened a broomstick parking bay at its store in York, Britain’s most haunted city by Aldi’s own reckoning, for witches doing the Halloween shop. [Retail]
// Sport & Entertainment //
– For its first regular-season game in France, Steelers v Saints at the Stade de France today, the NFL laid a hand-painted end zone by artist Jammie Holmes on a flag-football field beneath the Eiffel Tower, timed to Art Basel Paris. [Sports]
– Nathan Fielder’s Theranos documentary opened to $15m from just 855 cinemas, the biggest documentary opening since Fahrenheit 9/11. [Culture]
– Hay Day cast its new Halloween character by holding a séance at a “haunted” Oxfordshire farm, led by Most Haunted’s Yvette Fielding. [Advertising]
– ESPN’s first Super Bowl will come with an animated alternate telecast set in the Star Wars galaxy, with Anthony Daniels back as C-3PO. [Sports]
– EA is closing BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age since 1995, and ending early work on the next Mass Effect, two months after its $55bn buyout led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. [Media]
– With Singapore’s haze cancelling races, a running club did its Saturday long run inside Marina Square before the shops opened, one member logging 19km. [Sports]
– PlayStation’s film with LISA for her limited-edition DualSense controller passed 62,000 views in its first three hours. [Advertising]
– Australian resale platform Tixel, which caps resale at 10% above face value, says 72% of fans who resold a ticket did so because “life got in the way”. [Consumer Behavior]
– Coastal Carolina played App State in uniforms borrowed from ‘90s sitcoms and Trapper Keepers. [Sports]
– After last year’s Football Manager drew mostly negative reviews on Steam, Sega is letting anyone play the full Football Manager 27 free for a week before it goes on sale. [Branding]
// Life & Society //
– Seeing a green label or message makes shoppers more willing to wait for delivery, a Journal of Consumer Research paper finds, because it turns their minds to the future, so more of them choose free delivery next week over paid overnight shipping. Shoppers with strong green values don’t shift, since they already think that far ahead. [Sustainability]
– The Fed’s triennial survey finds median net worth fell 23% to $33,000 for families under 35 between 2022 and 2025, while it rose 37% for those over 75. [Consumer Behavior]
– Grindr’s Halloween Pleasure Ball, which it wants to be “the gay rival to the Met Gala”, has grown from about 400 guests in 2024 to 700 this year. [Culture]
– For stays booked from 20 November, Airbnb hosts can no longer make guests strip the beds, wash the dishes or take the rubbish out before checkout, though they can still ask for dirty dishes in the sink and used towels in a pile. [Travel]
– Food scents now make up 24% of new fragrance launches, up from 9% two years ago, and perfumers are testing whether GLP-1 users want them, after NIQ found those users spend 26% more on fragrance. [Consumer Behavior]
– Writing in all lowercase is having another moment online, and one linguist thinks people may be doing it “to signal that they’re not AI”, since a chatbot has to be asked to drop its capitals. [Culture]
– Nearly half of US employers expect AI to make college degrees more important over the next five years, against 26% who expect them to matter less. [AI]
– The FTC is suing to block a merger of two of the biggest US playground makers, saying five companies already sell 85% to 90% of the country’s playground equipment. [Regulation]
– Only 41% of US workers have a “quality job”, with fair pay, room to grow, a say and a predictable schedule, the second American Job Quality Study finds from more than 17,000 workers. [Culture]
– Britons are net positive on “picky bits” (+18) and “Maccy Ds” (+15), but not on “cozzy livs” (-65) or “statey funes” (-78), YouGov finds. [Culture]
– JetBlue is selling its first flights only adults can board, but only as part of a $2,750 package for two with an adults-only Virgin Voyages cruise in March, capped at 60 cabins. [Travel]
– Almost 40% of women became mothers later than they wanted, by six years on average, a GfK study for the IVI Institute finds. [Culture]
– In US marriages where both spouses earn about the same, wives still do 4.6 hours of housework a week to their husbands’ 1.9, Pew finds. [Culture]
– Social media sold the laundromat as a passive-income dream; one California owner found she first had to clear drug dealers out of the bathroom. [Consumer Behavior]
– For the first time most US GLP-1 users (54%) take the drugs mainly to manage their weight, and 46% have switched some or all of their clothing brands, an EY-Parthenon survey of 3,602 users finds. [Consumer Behavior]
– A masked ‘London’s Batman’ with 100,000 Instagram followers has handed out £70 fuel vouchers at a petrol station and paid hospital parking fines, and nobody yet knows who he is or who pays. [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!
