In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including:
– Requiem for a Cybertruck
– The Most Expensive Midterm Shows the Limits of Spending
– Christmas Ads Go Handmade
– The AI Shopper Hasn’t Shown Up Everywhere Yet
– Are ChatGPT Ads Worth the Click?
– Child Influencers Get the Right to Delete Their Childhood
– Can You Rebrand a Data Centre?
In addition, we have ads from Argos, John Lewis, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Lidl, Burberry, Levi’s, KFC, Canva, Wendy’s and Gusto, plus our Christmas ads tracker.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) Requiem for a Cybertruck
Was the Cybertruck ever really a viable automobile?
On 6 Nov, Elon Musk wrote on X that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production around the middle of next year “to make room for increased Cybercab [its two-seat robotaxi] production.”
As a product, the numbers for Cybertruck never added up. The 2019 reveal promised a truck for under $40,000, but the first deliveries in 2023 cost $79,990. Against a stated plan for 250k a year, Kelley Blue Book estimated US sales at 38,965 in 2024, 20,237 in 2025 and 11,586 this year to date, totalling about 70,000 in all. Six weeks before those first deliveries, Musk said, “We dug our own grave with Cybertruck.”
As a real life product it may have failed, but as a collectible, it made more of an impact. Owners greeted the news of the production slowdown with “We have an instant classic!”, and one had said he had waited for his truck “longer than the truck line was around”. It “became a cultural symbol, loved, mocked and impossible to ignore,” Torque News’s Armen Hareyan said, even as Bloomberg claimed in July it was “becoming the Ford Edsel of the 21st century”.
It’s also a sign of how far Tesla had drifted from its own plan. Musk’s 2006 “Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” was to build a sports car, use that money to build an affordable car, then an even more affordable one. A pickup that started at $79,990 was a long way from that.
Now Tesla is pricing it as a collectable. The same night it announced the end, it paused orders for the cheapest version, raised the Premium $7,500 to $92,490 and took the Cyberbeast past $100,000, just as it did to the last Model S and X in April. A day later, Musk said the order backlog is “far more than Tesla can make before dismantling the line for Cybercab expansion around June/July next year”.
In Tesla’s eyes, the truck was always more of a statement than a product and arguably, the brand has already moved on. Last month Tesla showed off its new Roadster in a ‘flying’ demo at a SpaceX site in Texas, where it drove up a ramp, flipped and landed using thrusters. Now that Tesla’s picture of the future is a car that flies, the Cybertruck is surplus to any needs, leaving it to become more of a relic for longer than it was actually a buyable truck.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Upgrade Imperative
2.) The Most Expensive Midterm Shows the Limits of Spending
Does more money buy more votes?
Tuesday’s midterms weren’t just historic for the Democratic gains, they were also the most expensive on record. AdImpact counts $11.87bn of political advertising, beating 2024’s $11.2bn. Spending reached $331 per registered voter in Maine, $313 in Alaska and $252 in Iowa.
However, at these amounts, the money seems to have hit a ceiling. In the five states that topped $100 a voter, the side that spent more in four of them lost key races according to AdImpact (Alaska’s Senate race was still being counted). The cycle’s biggest single donor fared no better. Elon Musk and his PAC put nearly $87m into ads in 42 races, and by Wednesday morning had won one and lost 20, with 21 uncalled.
The diminishing result of the advertising spend may have been multiplied by ad fatigue. Voters were tired of advertising before they voted. About three-quarters of Americans say they hate political advertising, and 84% think their community could make better use of the billions spent, in a Harris Poll for Johnsonville, whose own campaign parodied political ads all season. “Running the same ad in front of people 60 times just has diminishing returns,” the head of a nonpartisan election tech firm told Adweek. Ads help the side that airs more “a little bit”, says Vanderbilt’s John Sides, but in most races “the advertising is certainly not the determining factor”.
3.) Christmas Ads Go Handmade
As human craft gets highlighted amongst generative AI, this year’s Christmas ads feel distinctly handmade.
Levi’s ‘Let’s Get Fuzzy’ uses a claymation yeti that took four hours of filming for every second of animation. e.l.f.‘s first holiday campaign is stop motion, and its narrator Alan Cumming told Cosmopolitan it is “the absolute antithesis of where so much of advertising and marketing seems to be going these days.” For Starbucks, the artist “drew every element of the animated world by hand using Sharpies on Starbucks cups”, and Chewy has posted a making-of to show the stitches in its needle-felted puppets. Half of consumers prefer brands that don’t use generative AI in what customers see, according to Gartner, but when everyone highlights craft in similar ways, will it last?
Not every brand has followed this trend. Deutsche Telekom’s press release says the visual world of its film was “created using generative AI”. Even brands that went the hand drawn route are having to bat back GenAI assertions. Dior presented ‘Night in Color’ as hand-illustrated, but within two days viewers were circulating frames with warped lettering and a hand with five and a half fingers as signs of AI. By Saturday, Dior still hadn’t said either way.
While the trade doesn’t seem to be tiring of the conversation, will consumers? Is ‘made by hand’ something shoppers will pay for, or something brands now have to prove to avoid industry blowback?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Human Detection Premium
4.) The AI Shopper Hasn’t Shown Up Everywhere Yet
Are AI agents doing our shopping yet? It depends on what they’re buying.
At Uber, barely. Outside AI agents booked four Uber rides in the third quarter and about 500 Uber Eats orders in Halloween week. DoorDash says agents have sent it only “several hundred” orders.
Inside a retailer’s walls it looks different, at least by the retailers’ own count. Amazon says more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year and spend 50% more than those who don’t, and in November, it let some US customers text its agent to shop, with sponsored products in the replies. Walmart says users of its Sparky assistant spend 40% more per order. Outside agents are being shut out: Amazon blocked a rival’s shopping agent in September.
It seems, predictably, that agent usage figures vary based on how it benefits the agent’s owner.
Outside of conversion however, advice is undeniably an AI impact area. A third of US Black Friday shoppers say they’re likely to use an AI tool for the sales, up from 16% last year. In Japan, where two-thirds of purchases still happen in a shop, the pattern is ‘buy in store, compare with AI’. However, not all impact is positive. Nearly half (46%) of US shoppers who have bought on an AI recommendation returned an item in the past year, most often (36%) because it was ‘different than described’, according to the retail-software firm Blue Yonder.
Comparison, not conversion, is seemingly where AI is helping shoppers, but even there, the outcome is mixed.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Walled-Garden Turn
5.) Are ChatGPT Ads Worth the Click?
ChatGPT’s ads are pulling in advertisers, but the first large study of them suggests they aren’t pulling in much else.
Two researchers tracked 1,898 online shops and nearly 10 billion visits as the ads rolled out country by country, using the EU, where the ads arrived only after their data ended, as the control. In the US, a paid ChatGPT visit earned shops $0.89, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit, and converted at 0.37% against 1.17%.
At search’s rate of return, a ChatGPT ad click would be worth about $0.26, while the largest publicly known account paid $1.72. Of 87 US advertisers that bought both, 73 recorded no sale at all from their ChatGPT ads, and across every country it was 83 of 101. After the ads launched, unpaid ChatGPT referrals to shops fell by about 6 to 8%. “Even ChatGPT’s unpaid recommendations perform substantially better than its paid ads,” says Schulze.
Despite initial difficulty, advertisers keep arriving anyway. Adthena counted 1,082 brands advertising on ChatGPT in June and 6,333 in August. If the clicks are worth so little, brands are seemingly buying on novelty. What happens when this wears off?
6.) Child Influencers Get the Right to Delete Their Childhood
What happens when the child in a sponsored video grows up?
A new California law lets adults who appeared as children in paid family-vlog content demand that it come down. SB 1247 was signed in September and takes effect on January 1st, 2027. It covers paid videos made by a parent or family member, whose content featuring the child is at least 30% of what they post, with nothing seemingly limiting it to new videos. Platforms must offer a clear way to ask and pass requests on to the creator within three business days. The creator then has 10 business days to delete the content or edit the child out, owing $3,000 for each day they’re in violation, plus damages and legal fees.
California’s earlier law, SB 764, protected a child’s earnings. This one makes the content itself revocable, so any brand deal with a family creator now carries a potential expiration date the brand doesn’t control.
7.) Can You Rebrand a Data Centre?
AI was on the US midterm ballot on Tuesday and results were overwhelmingly clear.
Voters decided 41 local measures on data centres in ten states and sided against the data centre in 40 of them, with Harwood, North Dakota the one exception. They approved 27 measures limiting data centres (five of them full bans) and rejected all 13 that favoured them (though results are unofficial until certified). Many won’t halt construction and mainly force builders to offer concessions. In NBC News’s exit poll, 76% of voters opposed a new data centre in their community, and 56% called AI and data centres a crucial or major factor in their vote. Candidates in both parties used data centres against their opponents.
The industry admits it has an image problem. “The visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center, and it’s something that people can say, ‘I don’t want this in my community,’” Meta’s president, Dina Powell McCormick, said on 4 Nov. One answer is a new name, as one AI company has started calling data centres “compute campuses”. However, the issue seems to be more functional than perceptual. ‘Compute’ “means nothing to the ordinary person”, says San Francisco State’s Subodh Bhat, and Dartmouth’s Paul Argenti calls it “lipstick on the pig”.
Data centres look to have the ‘Not in my back yard’ issue found by sectors like nuclear power or manufacturing. Simply renaming them doesn’t change what people already know. Instead new solutions and avenues of agreement are needed before ‘compute campuses’ under any name find an easier environment.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Infrastructure as Political Battleground
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Argos – “Tales of Argos Past”
This year’s crop of early arriving holiday ads have attempted to do a variety of jobs, but none clearer than Argos’s entry. The UK retailer, long known nostalgically for its catalogue and the 90s behavior of circling gifts as a kid, aims to expand its perception beyond toys at the holiday season. In the ad, Richard Ayoade plays a nerdy Scrooge in Argos’s ad, visited by the brand’s mascots Connie and Trevor as Christmas ghosts. Back in the days of circling toys in the Argos catalogue, he never got past the toy section. Now he swaps the 90s Game Boy for smart tech and grown-up gifts, and the catalogue nostalgia of today’s parents is sold back to them.
John Lewis – “Gloria and Pickles”
The John Lewis Christmas ad is the annual poisoned chalice most UK agencies would gladly drink. Delivering something unique, yet familiar, is a challenge that Saatchi & Saatchi took over from Adam and Eve years ago and this year’s continues to be familiar in some ways while different in others.
The 20th entry features Kristin Scott Thomas as Gloria, a grandmother who stops putting cash in cards and builds a ‘Gran Cave’ of proper presents instead, under the line ‘Don’t Give Up on Giving’. Paul Whitehouse voices Pickles, a real 60-year-old Fisher-Price pull-along dog still sold in store, and Sam Fender covers ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ with pupils from his old school and the Easington Colliery Band.
It is peak John Lewis Christmas ad and a further step away from the formula at the same time. The cover song and the much-loved toy are there, but so is a celebrity in the lead role, and Kantar found it funny and less emotional. It scored 5.6 stars with System1, its best since ‘Excitable Edgar’ in 2019. Piers Morgan called it “possibly the worst advert I’ve ever seen”, risking the chance that three ghosts may visit him at midnight.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Heritage Storytelling
Tesco – “The Wrong Address”
Can a retailer use its delivery staff as characters in a Christmas ad, without seeming exploitative? Tesco attempts to in an ad featuring Tesco driver Polly (played by Roisin Conaty) and Lizzie (Anna Maxwell Martin) who sends her Christmas delivery to her old address. The handover turns into a road trip that reunites two school friends, focusing on a singular story after last year’s 11 short films.
Sainsbury’s – “Big Delivery”
In the third year of Sainsbury’s BFG Christmas, the giant takes on a delivery big enough to need him, with Sainsbury’s colleagues delivering aid to an ailing BFG.
Lidl GB – “Lidl Christmas Everybody”
Shaun Williamson reworks Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ in a Lidl Christmas jumper, surprising his neighbours with Lidl food, with Chris Kamara along for the ride. The ad is loud enough to cut through and absurd enough to end up in Lidl’s middle aisle, however a question remains if it lands on the unpolished or aspirational side of the UK holidays.
Burberry – “Wrapped in Burberry”
For Burberry’s 170th year, Pierce Brosnan and Fiona Shaw host a Christmas party at Longleat House, with Cara Delevingne, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union among the guests and golf-buggy races on the lawn. The party aims to be aspirational in a manor without going full ‘Saltburn’ and while questions about the size of the television relative to the manor, may open up worries of Brosnan’s character being ‘house rich and cash poor’, it delivers on the brand’s luxury cues.
Levi’s – “Let’s Get Fuzzy”
A claymation yeti named Gus stomps through a holiday horror film, in a callback to Levi’s 1995 ‘Clayman’, the brand’s first global ad. As highlighted above, it’s part of a craft renaissance amongst holiday advertising and Generative AI, tying together nostalgia with an emphasized human touch.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Artisanal Resurgence Through Craft Visibility
KFC UK and Ireland – “The Doom Burger”
Outside of this year’s holiday onslaught, Marvel has readied itself to destroy the multiverse one brand deal at a time. KFC UK & Ireland have entered the fray by declaring,
“KFC have made a deal with Doctor Doom.” The Marvel villain gets his own burger for Avengers: Doomsday on the same day Dunkin’ launched a deal with Channing Tatum’s Gambit. KFC is notable in that film cues were so obvious in the promotional ad that fans are already decoding them for potential spoilers.
Canva – “What Will You Canva Today?”
Erasing our ex from our lives through technology was literally a ‘Black Mirror’ episode, but now it’s also a Canva ad. In the brand’s recent entry, a woman erases her exes from a good photo with one swipe each, until an “I miss you” text makes her hit Undo. Alongside dystopian cues, it’s also the first of three spots that want to make Canva a verb. Whether that verb goes further than making people vanish is an open question.
Wendy’s – “WendyQuest: Legend of the Four Corner Stones”
AI technology meets 90s gaming nostalgia in Wendy’s latest campaign targeting gamers. Wendy’s has made a free retro role-playing game for Steam, whose villain is Dr. Mechborg of Mech Corp and whose enemies include a ‘Big Mech’ and a ‘Mech Chicken’. It promises real food rewards and lands two weeks before GTA VI, or as Wendy’s put it, “we got a Wendy’s video game before GTA VI.” The game isn’t just a sign of where gaming culture has ingrained in the brand, it’s also a marker of how AI has made the barrier to development, and risky ideas, easier, leaving us poised to see more activations like this over coming years. What was once a funny idea before we got to the ‘real’ parts of a creative presentation is now fertile territory.
Gusto – “The New Big Dream”
Business ownership and aspiration is changing. Though ‘big’ businesses or exciting categories were a common goal, an uncertain economy has created different dreams. Payroll company Gusto reflects this in their biggest creative campaign to date. The 30-second film argues that bigger isn’t the only measure of success, and that a business with your name on the door and customers who keep coming back count too. With ‘boring businesses’ becoming the darling of PE firms and new business owners alike, Gusto is reflecting where changing SMB tastes are going.
// Christmas Ads Tracker //
Every other Christmas ad so far that launched with a film on the brand’s own channel, newest first. For our full list, check out the Sunday Strategy Holiday Ad Tracker.
7 Nov: Lidl GB, Find your Lidl wonderland.
6 Nov: Lexus, December to Remember; The National Lottery, Believe; LOEWE x Disney, The Nightmare Before Christmas (teaser); M&S, The Home of Christmas; Old Navy, Jingle Jet; Waitrose, The Perfect Gift 2 (teaser); JD Sports, Create The New.
5 Nov: Barbour x Wallace & Gromit, Christmas film; LEGO, The LEGO Holiday Workshop; Aldi, Will it be a paw-fect Christmas?; Arsenal, ‘Twas the Season; TK Maxx, Festive Crossing; Walmart, The Ghost of Christmas Presents; Amazon, Joy Delivered; Chelsea FC Women, That’s Proper Chels (teaser); Verizon, Holiday Workshop; Liberty, The Liberty Christmas Chronicles.
4 Nov: Starbucks, Perfect Harmony; Dior, Night in Color; Tesco Ireland, Helping Christmas Feel Magic; Boots, For Gifts They’ll Really Love.
3 Nov: Gap, Give Your Gift; Asda, All of Christmas at Asda Price. Boom.; Mercedes-Benz USA, Holiday Preparation; Sports Direct x Nike, Unwrap Potential.
2 Nov: Very, That’s the Very Thing; Not On The High Street, The Birdhouse; Dogs Trust, Kira needs a happy place; Fortnum & Mason, Christmas film; Kay x Colin Jost, Christmas film; Marc Jacobs, Let It Joy; Gucci x Mariah Carey, Gucci Gift; Beaverbrooks, Here for every Christmas story; e.l.f. Cosmetics, Made To Stand Out; Deutsche Telekom, Take Time to Connect.
1 Nov: Chewy, A Holiday Dream.
// Sunday Snippets
// Advertising & Branding //
– Canva Brazil’s ‘Pague com Slides’ asks people to pitch for a prize in a Canva deck, with a year’s rent, a year of groceries, up to R$15,000 of debt paid off and 32kg of pecorino on offer. [Advertising]
– Food brands are turning their packaging into bag charms, from Kraft’s ‘Pocket Parm’ to Cava’s sold-out takeout bag, as Etsy searches for bag charms rise 27%. [Branding]
– Half of Britain’s Gen Z go to brand events looking for free food and drink, against 26% of Baby Boomers, while only 12% go for the celebrities or influencers, YouGov finds. [Consumer Behavior]
– Shelter’s “This is not a Christmas ad” counts down to the keys of a social home rather than to Christmas. The charity says more than 177,000 children in England are homeless in temporary accommodation, “hidden from view”. [Charity]
– Uber Japan had Osaka rapper Reichi write ‘Switch Up’, a 70-second music video about a day of ordering in and riding out, to remind Uber Eats users the taxi button is already on their phone. [Advertising]
// Marketing & Media //
– Pew finds 62% of Americans now trust information from national news organisations, up six points in a year and up in both parties, while trust in social media held at 38%. Among under-30s it is now about six in ten, up from 51%. [Media]
– Google says Japanese 18 to 29-year-olds now spend more time on YouTube than on every terrestrial TV channel combined, across all their devices, a figure it gave at its own Brandcast ad sales event. [Media]
– 46.9% of internet users aged 16 to 24 now use social platforms as a main way to research brands, though online adults overall are still 74% more likely to use search than AI tools when they do, the Digital 2027 report finds. [Social Media]
// AI & Tech //
– Weekly use of AI tools such as chatbots went from 34% to 51% in a year across six countries, but comfort with news made entirely by AI has “stayed at around 12% to 14%” since 2024, the Reuters Institute finds. Among users, 75% trust the answers they get to factual questions. [AI]
– 77% of board members expect AI to deliver cost savings, but just 3% of organisations beat their savings goals through productivity, Gartner finds, and 85% plan to spend more on AI next year. [Work]
– OpenAI looks to be testing a dashboard that shows businesses how often they appear in ChatGPT’s answers and how many clicks they get, a ChatGPT version of Google’s Search Console. OpenAI hasn’t announced it and it isn’t live yet. [AI]
– After new game pages on itch.io doubled in two months without downloads following, the store removed “a couple terabytes” of AI slop and extended its AI labels to comics, tabletop games and soundtracks. [Gaming]
– Schools that use Google’s classroom software but turn off its AI tools will lose Google Search too, Google says, because “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated”. [Education]
// Retail, Food & Drink //
– Tilray has closed four of its ten US breweries and cut about 28% of its products, moving money into non-alcoholic and functional energy drinks. [Food & Drink]
– Ready-to-drink cocktail sales rose 28% by value in a year and now make up 10% of US alcohol volume, and AB InBev, a brewer, holds 18% of the spirits-based ones. [Food & Drink]
– In an Annenberg survey, 80% of Americans back labelling ultraprocessed food, the most popular of the MAHA-linked food policies tested, and a University of Chicago study puts the cost of a mandatory label at $14 billion a year. [Regulation]
– Michael Kors’ sales on TikTok Shop are running at almost four times its forecast, after its chief executive admitted Gen Z “almost didn’t know who we were”. [Fashion]
– Mondelez is suing Joyride, the candy brand co-owned by YouTuber Ryan Trahan, claiming its Sour Smacks gummies copy Sour Patch Kids’ shapes and packaging. [Creator Economy]
– Only 12% of plant-based milks, yoghurts and cheeses on sale in the UK add iodine, and a study finds that swapping a fifth to a third of dairy for them would raise the share of teenage girls short of iodine from 54% to 65%. [Health]
– Nike is pulling back on Jordan retro releases to make them feel scarce again, and BNP’s Vasilescu estimates “a roughly $550 million sales hit starting in spring 2027” for Foot Locker, where Jordan is about a quarter of revenue. [Retail]
// Sport & Entertainment //
– The NFL has fined Caleb Williams twice, $11,941 and then $23,882, for wearing cleats from Caddix, a brand that says “We’re a team of four people”. Caddix says almost 100 players wear its cleats, and “We don’t pay anybody”. [Sports]
– Blizzard says World of Warcraft: Forever, a version of the 2004 game that stays capped at level 60, had the biggest launch in the game’s history by peak concurrent players and its most returning players ever, though it has not published a number. [Gaming]
– Eurovision has posted all 11 songs for its first Asian contest, to be held in Bangkok, with entries from Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines among them. [Culture]
– The SuperHalfs half-marathon series, which gives a medal for finishing all six of its races, is adding a second six-race series, SuperHalfs Europa, in Naples, Warsaw, Belgrade, Vienna, Riga and Stockholm. [Sports]
// Life & Society //
– Collins has named “mogging”, outperforming or outshining someone else, its 2026 word of the year, ahead of “carspreading”, “ghost job”, “friendslop” and “P(doom)”. [Culture]
– The share of British workers willing to work harder than required to help their employer fell from 69% in 2015 to 55%, the Resolution Foundation finds, while 61% now say choosing their own hours matters to them and only 31% can. [Work]
– Eight of Gen Z’s ten most-driven cars are sedans, led by the Civic, Accord and Camry, and not one is an SUV. [Automotive]
– A 21-country replication with more than 5,000 participants finds Richard Thaler’s mental accounting puzzles “continue to hold true”, from paying more for the same beer from a fancy hotel to chasing small savings on cheap items. [Consumer Behavior]
// 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!
