How much of what you own do you actually own? In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at seven stories to think about next week, including:
– BMW selling ad space on your dashboard
– The EU’s AI disclosure clock reaching US brands
– Privacy becoming a retail product
– Gen Z drinking like everyone else after all
– Chance becoming the consumer offer
– The one-person company that hasn’t arrived
– SaaSpocalypse or Rebirth?
// Stories of the Week:
1.) When Brands Remind You About Modern Ownership
How much of what we own do we actually have control over? From the shift to downloaded games over physical disks, which has led to games being deleted or removed – to ebooks rewritten after purchase, connectivity has changed what modern ownership means for control and permanence.
BMW recently reminded drivers of this with a Spiderman themed surprise that backfired for some. From July 27 to August 10, starting a BMW in more than 70 countries brings up a Spider-Man banner on the dashboard’s Control Display. Click it and you get a full-screen animation, backing music and a synced light show, part of the record $309M promotional campaign behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where BMW is the film’s largest partner ever.
The reaction from the activation isn’t just fan excitement, it’s unease. As one person put it on LinkedIn: “It feels brilliant. And wrong.” BMW owners thought they owned every part of their car, but the manufacturer reminded them they didn’t.
If it feels familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this before. In 2014, Apple pushed U2’s Songs of Innocence into 500 million iTunes libraries without asking, and the backlash was fierce enough that Apple built a removal tool and lead singer Bono apologised. The difference twelve years on – BMW’s animation is opt-in, with only an invitation being forced on owners. However the reaction is consistent and even more relevant today. As we move more of our lives onto the cloud, subscriptions and streaming platforms, it’s worth remembering the trade off for this convenience is often control. For brands, it’s worth keeping this in mind when it comes to activating ’owned’ media. As Spiderman once said, ’with great power, comes great responsibility’ – timely for superheroes and car brands.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: The Annoyance Tax
2.) The EU’s AI Disclosure Clock Has Started (And It Reaches The US)
The EU AI Act’s transparency rules arrived on August 2 and Article 50 now requires anyone marketing into the EU to label AI-generated deepfakes, synthetic voices and AI text on matters of public interest. Failure to do so comes with fines up to €15M or 3% of global revenue and there’s no limitation for just those based in the EU. New systems being deployed are subject to the rules now, while existing systems have a four month grandfather period. The rules aren’t just limited to EU companies, as content that reaches EU audiences is subject.
There is also an artistic exception, as deepfakes in “artistic, creative, satirical” work can disclose in a way that doesn’t “hamper the display or enjoyment”. Commercial advertising however, doesn’t qualify – leaving the unclear boundary of creative ’content’ and advertising as potentially contentious space.
More largely, the practical shift is in production. Every studio and agency running generative tools in an EU pipeline now needs a labelling workflow. Whether global brands build towards the stricter EU standard everywhere, or run separate pipelines by market has yet to be seen.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Regulatory Arbitrage
3.) Privacy Has Become A Retail Feature
When we constantly feel like we’re being sold to or tracked, privacy is a product feature.
Sephora has pioneered “leave me alone” baskets and added quiet hours this summer. Walmart runs quiet shopping to reduce sensory overload, while Selfridges has added private personal shopping floors.
DoorDash has evolved this trend further with CringeMart: an in-app storefront for what it calls the ’embarrassing aisle’: UTI tests, laxatives, condoms and the rest of the basket you’d rather not present to a cashier. The insight came from their own data – over 4 million customers ordered these “awkward essentials” through the app in 2025. While brands normally aim to normalize ’awkward’ purchases, DoorDash has seen it as a market opportunity.
Overall, it shows that privacy and disconnection are at a premium. Whether it’s for sensory, emotional or social reasons – the act of being ’left alone’ is a reason to choose a certain retail experience. While brands are constantly aiming to build ’a relationship’ with consumers, giving them space might be the newest way to do it.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Cringe Economy
4.) Gen Z Drinks Like Everyone Else
Marketers often forget the difference between generational trends and lifestage effects: whether a group truly is different from those who came before it, or whether different life stages are just playing out across ages. While BBH Labs famously pointed out that generational cohesion is really a myth, new research that calls into question the ’sober’ Gen Z narrative is still interesting.
IWSR’s latest Bevtrac survey of more than 32,000 drinkers across 19 markets puts Gen Z drinking participation at 74%, up from 66% three years ago and nearly identical to the 76% adult average. So were we wrong about a more sober generation or was this an age effect, not a cohort effect?
Gen Z’s drinking has climbed as more of the cohort passed 21 and aged into disposable income and social drinking occasions. The cost of drinking has become ’smoother’ and the occasions and opportunities to do so have grown – especially as older Gen Z mingle more across ages in older social situations. The growth of non-alcoholic beverages and THC / CBD drinks is real, but it may not be reliant on one generation to power its growth.
Similarly, Boomers who drink fell to 71% with fewer occasions and smaller serves, which IWSR notes is typical for people entering their 60s and 70s. Both generations may show how lifestage, not generational attitudes shape alcohol consumption. Health and money may be in play where marketers assumed explicit attitudes were in charge. While drinking levels are decreasing, it may be more accurate to consider how they decline faster across life stages vs. generations.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Generational Pivots
5.) When Chance Becomes The Offer
The New York Attorney General has called out prediction market Kalshi as a gambling operation, filing suit to seek a potential $36bn in penalties. Kalshi is now fighting 19 lawsuits across the country, arguing its event contracts are federally regulated finance, not state-regulated gambling.
While lawyers will now argue over what counts as gambling, culture and brands are increasingly making every aspect of life a game of chance. Taco Bell Spain is currently offering to potentially pay a year of your rent if your guacamole order wins a draw. US sweepstakes dangle free rent, mortgage payments and even investment properties at a generation locked out of housing.
While Kalshi may struggle to differentiate itself from gambling, so has a large swath of culture, with jackpots and promotions offering more than luxury prizes. As prediction markets open grocery stores and branded contests offer rent, consumers are being asked to gamble to answer more of life’s daily challenges and find more quotidian security. The bigger question in play may not be if Kalshi is a gambling company under a different name, but who isn’t nowadays.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: The Crapshoot Appeal
6.) AI Is Stretching Small Businesses. So Where Are The New Solo Companies?
Are we poised to see a growth in micro and solo companies? Business formations are growing in the US, and alongside them are success stories of single person enterprises making the money you’d expect from more headcount. However, for every success story, there is the reality of trying to do it all on your own. While AI is poised to help empower the individual to do more, can it truly help spur a generation of generalist solo companies?
OpenAI’s new Work at the Frontier research, built on 800,000+ US ChatGPT messages, has seen the foundations of this in something it calls ’task crossover’: people doing work that belongs to another occupation. Within occupation-specific messages, 43.5% crossed job boundaries and the effect was strongest in the smallest companies, where there’s no specialist to hand off to.
However, the spread of tasks being done with AI isn’t evenly distributed. Marketing is the most borrowed-from function, making 8.9% of what non-marketers do with AI. Compared to design, which made up 1.7% of cross job boundary messages, a disparity is forming that shows where we may be more comfortable to ’go it alone’.
These gaps may leave ’solo’ companies either relying on partners, forming a web of skills, or keep solo entrepreneurs from making the ’solo’ offering their main job – relegating it to a side hustle. The second reality is already reflected in US data, as 29.8m American businesses exist without employees, but only 16.5m people say their main job is working for themselves. For now, AI has expanded what one person can do, but it hasn’t what we do for a living.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: The Gig Trap 2.0
7.) SaaSpocalypse or Rebirth?
Silicon Valley has a new AI worry: the SaaSpocalypse – as AI technology that helped supercharge the potential of what a startup can do, turns on the defensible uniqueness of SaaS startups. As Sahil Aggarwal, founder of Rattle, put it: “If two engineers can reproduce your entire product in a matter of a few weeks, then you deserve to be killed.” He has cut his staff from 70 to 15, torn down and rebuilt his product around AI agents to try and find a more defensible market position.
The anxiety and potential carnage from AI replication is broad. Workday, Salesforce and Adobe are down more than 30% from their share price peaks. IBM lost $69 billion in value in a single day. Airtable, once valued at $11 billion, just sold for $1.3 billion. One wind-down service reports that 51% of its venture-backed customers this year were software companies. Above a SaaS conference in May, someone flew a banner over the venue saying “SaaS is dead.”
So is it? It may be more apt to say that it changed its focus. Companies that claim to have found security all share a similarity – they stopped selling tools that help people work and started selling agents that do the work. We may not be seeing a SaaS-pocalypse in the traditional sense, as much as a rebirth – with a new cycle focusing on valuations from what it can empower agents to do over users. Whether this is sustainable or just another chapter in tech ragnarok has yet to be seen.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Speculative Scaling
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Specsavers – “The Testlist”
Hearing loss marketing usually focuses on the risks of clubbing, but UK brand Specsavers has built a club night around it instead. The Testlist is billed as the UK’s first clubbing guestlist for over-50s, and entry comes from taking a free online hearing screener to get on the list. Groove Armada, who have both experienced hearing loss, front the campaign and headline the first night at London’s Phonox in October. With nearly three quarters of over-50s still going to live music, Specsavers found the rare health message that an audience will queue up for.
Burger King France – “Boomer King”
Who says kids menus have to be for children of today? Burger King France has introduced a limited edition menu built for children raised on late-80s and 90s television, with a retro collectible in every box (tapping into 90210, Charmed and others). 90s nostalgia is on show, even if the term Boomers may be unusually broad as an age range here. Burger King isn’t parodying kidulthood, it’s serving it, betting that a generation with disposable income will ignore their cardiologist and pop in for a Whopper.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Nostalgia Economy
Busch – “Baleboards”
When you think creatively, anything can be a media opportunity. Busch, aiming to support Canadian farmers, wrapped hay bales in its limited-edition Farmer’s Pack artwork and stood them along Saskatchewan highways, on the very farms that grow the barley in the can. The followthrough on the idea makes it unique – Busch pays the participating farmers the going rate for outdoor advertising on their land, in a tough season, at peak harvest. The idea delivers on multiple levels, with a PR hit for ingenuity and a genuine value for farmers that every grower in the region will remember for helping them in a tough year.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Micro-Locality
Taco Bell Spain – “Guacabono”
Avocados have unfairly been blamed for the youth home ownership crisis for a while now. From out of touch media commentators, to a talking avocado I helped sell mortgages with in the early 2020s – the green fruit is a well worn scapegoat. However, Taco Bell Spain absorbed the joke and reversed it – challenging consumers to buy anything with guacamole between July 22 and August 9 and potentially win up to a year’s rent. Alongside greater ’everything is gambling’ vibes, Taco Bell takes an existing cultural conversation and puts their spin on it.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Priced-Out Generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYmtqplffbE
Arsenal x adidas – “Arsenal State of Mind”
Football kit launches normally have a formula: players, stadium and then drone shot before ’buy now’. However, Arsenal’s 2026/27 third kit arrives with an unexpected mixed media approach – as the club’s first animated launch film. It blends live action with animated N5 street scenes, including the famous Rowans, and is fronted by Adwoa Aboah, a genuine supporter, alongside Steph Catley, Martin Zubimendi and Noni Madueke. As clubs become lifestyle brands with global audiences, kit launches are feeling as much lifestyle fashion as sport – which the product and approach for this launch puts on show.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Hyperlocal Brand Differentiation
DuckDuckGo – “Normal F***ing Sunglasses”
DuckDuckGo has found a new foil to use against big tech, dumb wearables. While tech sells glasses with cameras and AI, DuckDuckGo launched the Paso Robles: $35 sunglasses proudly featuring no camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind. It’s more than a joke or a protest as they sold out in a week.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: AI Backlash
// Sunday Snippets
// Marketing & Advertising //
– Laura Mercier cut macro-influencer spend from 70% of its budget to a paid collective of editors, stylists and micro-creators, citing eroding trust in influencer content. [Advertising]
– The UK’s financial regulator made an action movie to reach 12.1 million car-finance claimants, out-producing the firms it competes with. [Advertising]
– Jinro has been the world’s best-selling spirit for 25 straight years and just launched its first global campaign, fronted by BTS’s V. [Food & Drink]
– Coca-Cola is telling Gen Z to log off during meals in a global campaign that notably excludes the US (WPP Open X). [Advertising]
– Domino’s is paying customers $5 to stress-test its relaunched website and app, turning QA into a participation event (WorkInProgress). [Advertising]
– Goldfish built imaginative worlds around having no artificial colors for back-to-school season. [Food & Drink]
– MUJI Australia launched its first above-the-line campaign, “Born in Japan,” using reportage-style photography of everyday moments. [Retail]
– Krafton consolidated 16 game IPs under one house brand at Shibuya Scramble Crossing, marketing like a film studio rather than per title. [Media]
– A Starbucks Korea tumbler pun evoked the 1987 torture death of a student activist, and Seoul police raided its headquarters three months after launch. Localization is not translation. [Branding]
– TBWA’s new global identity is built on hand-drawn wobble and imperfect linework, an explicit bet that visible imperfection now reads as valuably human. [Branding]
– Burger King Belgium hijacked the “tanmaxxing” trend by reframing cap and sunglasses tan lines as flame-grill assets and buying OOH only along the coast where sunburns happen. [Advertising]
– 7UP painted a Clapham pub pink to launch its zero-alcohol shandy. [Food & Drink]
// Technology & Media //
– Major publishers are preparing to delist from Google search entirely while individual creators optimize for the same AI answers, with one reporting a 50% jump in brand inquiries from a single ChatGPT citation. [Media]
– Omnicom’s CEO told investors that nobody has priced what AI actually costs to run inside client deals. [Media]
– P&G, Starbucks and Kraft Heinz executives now present measurement as boardroom proof, while 49% of marketers admit their data couldn’t survive real CFO scrutiny. [Media]
– Michaels says shoppers using its Gemini-powered “Ask Mike” assistant convert at more than double the rate of traditional search, with 75,000 conversations since a quiet May launch. [Retail]
– Brands are inviting creators into concepting sessions rather than briefing them on finished content, because prescriptive briefs measurably underperform. [Creator Economy]
– Hilton’s CMO argues that the more precisely brands optimize messaging, the less irrational affinity they earn. [Media]
– Inside Unilever’s 300,000-creator network, AI-driven discovery keeps surfacing the same faces, flattening the diversity that made creator marketing work. [Creator Economy]
– Myspace is coming back, and millennials are already debating their top 8. [Culture]
// Life & Culture //
– Whole Foods is fighting its “Whole Paycheck” reputation from a test kitchen in downtown Austin, where the 365 house brand has grown more than 50% in five years. [Consumer Behavior]
– Five rival UK supermarkets ran one shared campaign against food insecurity, converting £500K in donations into roughly £5.5M of surplus food. [Sustainability]
– Fast Company reports the “manosphere” has already infiltrated the workplace. [Culture]
– NIQ data shows the martini outgrowing the margarita as younger drinkers diversify off the menu default. [Food & Drink]
– Flipkart sold a digital shopping festival with a hand-illustrated newspaper ad recreating Chennai’s Ranganathan Street (22feet). [Advertising]
– The New Bedford Whaling Museum turned a one-star “worst aquarium ever” review into sold-out merchandise, taking 738 orders in a day after CBS covered it. [Culture]
– Bon Appétit asks whether we’ve reached peak pickle, with pickle-flavored product sales up nearly 34% in a year and the flavor now extending to lip gloss and perfume. [Food & Drink]
// 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!
