What happens when the services and institutions around us take their eye off their core reasons for being? In this issue of Sunday Strategy, we look at five stories to think about next week, including:
– Restaurants are about everything but the meal
– An age of decadence that forgot pleasure
– The inconvenient AI carbon count
– Greater AI understanding and lower AI trust
– Shopping bots that aren’t clear on what they’re selling
In addition we have ads from KFC France, Monzo, ESPN, the University of Lincoln and Modelo.
// Stories of the Week:
1.) What Happens When Dinner Becomes About Logistics
As diner habits have changed post pandemic, restaurants have adapted to optimize and keep pace. However, in the pursuit of an optimized survival strategy, restaurants are increasingly looking like logistics companies.
In 2025, three out of every four US meals were consumed off site – increasingly making restaurants a distribution hub for delivery apps over a dining experience. While catering to a new audience of delivery drivers, restaurants are also thinking about how to streamline the experience for the 1/4th that are dining in. This shift has made them look more like logistics experts, seeking out greater data, insights, automation and technological advantage. What would have been expected for UPS is now common place for dining.
Data providers like Toast, the software running inventories and payments for 164,000 restaurants, are giving owners insights into demand before it occurs. On days in 2024 when Taylor Swift played Miami, eateries within twenty miles recorded a 27% surge in omelette sales as fans loaded up on protein. When Beyoncé played Atlanta a year later, hard seltzer and late-night orders spiked, peaking at 4am.
However, Toast’s chief marketing officer Kelly Esten wants to push further into the dining room itself, with transcription on waiters’ handhelds, cameras to flag when a table needs something, and face recognition so staff can offer a regular “the usual” as they sit down. Optimized yes, but I didn’t expect the Olive Garden to be flirting with becoming a ’surveillance state’.
London chain Dishoom’s Brian Trollip puts the challenge precisely: “The casual dining element of the sector has disappeared, because it’s no longer casual to decide to go out to eat any more.” When leaving the house includes a taxi, the babysitter and the bill, the cost of the occasion is steep. However, is the answer greater technology and innovation for those still dining in, or do restaurants risk losing the humanity and discovery that sat at the core of their value?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Efficiency Reckoning
2.) The Anhedonia Economy
Are we in an age of decadence without pleasure? Have we managed to strip the joy out of daily life? That’s the argument made in the Guardian this week – that while we have excess and luxury all around us, we’re increasingly hollowing out the enjoyment from these.
From a decline in daily reading for pleasure, so looksmaxxing or GLP-1’s turning eating into something to be managed, have we flattened our lives to optimize them? Even nicotine pouches, a symbol of unhealthy stimulation in brands like Zyn, are becoming a delivery mechanism for non-nicotine substances that provide caffeine, melatonin, focus or even teeth whitening. In a modern age of self-improvement, even decadent pleasures are repurposed – but does it leave space for something that doesn’t ’progress’ us forward in our lives?
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Efficiency’s Hidden Costs
3.) The Carbon Nobody Wants to Count
Marketers’ solution to the carbon footprint of AI is seemingly…to not measure it. A recent survey of 200 senior marketing leaders in the US and UK, run by carbon accounting firm 51toCarbonZero, showed 88% believe AI is growing their carbon footprint (42% significantly so), but only 36 have measured that impact (8% haven’t measured it at all). Though 85% say they’ve made ’moderate to significant’ progress in cutting organizational emissions – you can’t cut what you don’t measure or acknowledge.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Performative Optimism
4.) People Understand AI Better, But Trust It Less
The assumption with AI has always been that familiarity would increase positivity. If people use it and get to know it, the suspicion around it would fade. However, after two years of increases that proved this hypothesis right – Americans are cooling on AI even as more understand it.
Gallup’s latest research shows that 70% of Americans call themselves ’knowledgeable’ about AI, up from 64% in 2024. However the share saying AI does more harm than good rose from 31% to 39% during the same period.
Demographically, the shift is clearest amongst younger users. Among 18 to 29 year olds, ’harm over good’ went from 36% to 47% in a single year. Their trust in businesses to use AI responsibly fell from 30% to 20%, and the share with no trust at all climbed from 29% to 41%. More widely across all adults, 79% now expect AI to cut US jobs, and the share who think it will create them collapsed from 14% to 5%. Adoption and approval have split and in its wake, there’s a growing gap of uncertainty that use alone won’t fix.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Machine Credibility Gap
5.) The Shopping Bots Are Not Sure of Their Own Claims
One aspect of AI shopping agents we haven’t considered, is if they’re confident sales people.
Ask Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping to find boots or fly-fishing reels ’Made in the USA’ and it will tell you it does not have access to that information. Reword the prompt to “in the USA” and it produces a list. The data is there, but how you ask unlocks it. Walmart’s Sparky first declined to assess made-in-America claims in a shopping cart, then ranked the same products from “high confidence” to “low confidence” when asked again.
The finding, which was found by both the Center for Law and the Economy, the policy centre and the WSJ Leadership Institute highlights a challenge – confidence in AI agents to consistently sell. For brands that meticulously review and align their claims, the uncertainty will raise a concern in how intermediaries carry on their message.
This story is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Phantom Value Gap
// Ads You Might Have Missed:
Monzo – “Get Busy Living”
Fintech product demos don’t normally have an emotional appeal, but Monzo’s latest campaign takes ten short films, narrated by Olivia Coleman, and puts the features in the middle of real life. From ’under 16 accounts’ to joint accounts and a ’salary sorter’, functional benefits get an emotional wrapper that anchors them in the lives of customers. For a brand that grew to 15m customers through being different from other banks, the emotional appeal takes a functional message and executes it in a better way.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Humanized Efficiency
KFC France – “Pickle Club”
KFC France shows a pickle isn’t just a topping, it’s an aspect of personality. From July 29, a pop-up inside Marseille’s Maison Mère à Côté offers three sets of pickle press-on nails handcrafted by French nail artists, on-site pickle manicures, pickle mocktails and a menu that runs to a Pickle Burger and a Pickle i-TWIST. The activation takes something more suited to your TikTok feed and puts it out in the world as a fashion cue.
Modelo – “Modelito”
Product visibility is normally a creative consideration, not the creative idea. However Modelo has put one of its smallest products (a 210ml Modelito bottle) on one of Mexico City’s largest billboards – making it simultaneously hard to spot, but hard to ignore – thanks to the negative space and PR. Agency GUT Mexico City mounted branded binoculars nearby so passers by can get a closer view – with its message ’great taste in a small size’ clearer with some visual assistance. While the billboard didn’t easily deliver the message to passers by, it uses the OOH as a foil effectively – doing something IRL that most brands would have done as a CGI OOH content play.
University of Lincoln – “Get Real World UsefUL”
With university education under greater scrutiny to prove its value, many organizations are doubling down academic credentials or ivory towers. However, the University of Lincoln has taken a more colloquial approach in its latest campaign – featuring everyday situations (like moving a couch) that could benefit from the applied know-how of a Lincoln graduate.
The strategy is distinct vs. others, but opens up questions about whether the university comes across as more of a trade or technical school than it would like. However, given greater pragmatism amongst prospective students, this may not be as much of a risk as it seems.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Lived-Experience Authority
ESPN Fantasy – “Bonding Season”
With the NFL pre-season looming, fantasy football is ramping back up and with it, as ESPN points out, a chance to actually bond with those around you, free of having to figure out a novel way to engage others. ESPN’s 80s-style ad champions the power of sport to help bring likely and unlikely people together, with fantasy football adding the dimension of trash talk.
With sports as one of the last live viewing experiences that provides wide ranging engagement, ESPN’s tongue in cheek ad touches on a wider truth: that in today’s culture, nothing brings people together like (fantasy) sports.
This ad is part of a trend Airgo tracks: Spectacle as Belonging
// Sunday Snippets
// Marketing & Advertising //
– Degree renamed three New York subway stations “Sweat Central”, “Boiler Room” and “Molten Core”, and made co-branded MTA deodorant sticks redeemable for a free subway ride. [Advertising]
– IKEA Belgium has stopped pricing products and started pricing feelings, at €0.00000063 per jump for joy and €0.00000000076 per butterfly. [Advertising]
– Jameson has replaced Diageo as the NFL’s official spirits sponsor in a multiyear global deal. Parent Pernod Ricard grew organic net sales 0.1% last quarter on soft US and China demand. [Food & Drink]
– Spider-Man: Brand New Day cast Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha to talk about heroism. The 40-year-old former electrician saved all seven of Spain’s shots on target at the World Cup. [Advertising]
– Commonwealth Bank put its financial-abuse campaign in fitting rooms, bathroom stalls and doctors’ offices rather than on broadcast, choosing privacy over reach. [Advertising]
– Fiat sold 13 cars in Australia in June and 144 across the half, fewer than Ferrari or Lamborghini, and has now suspended passenger-car imports. Ehrenberg-Bass says Chinese competition was a factor and years of marketing absence did not help. [Branding]
– Pop Mart opened a Labubu bakery in Singapore running at an estimated 15 to 30% gross margin against toys at 72%. [Retail]
– On has just launched its first global brand platform, Run On Clouds. [Sports]
// Technology & Media //
– A Chinese memory chipmaker floated at plus 466% and reports emerged that China had broken ASML’s lithography monopoly, sending the Kospi down 11.5% in a day and Nvidia below Apple. [Tech]
– Omnicom posted 6.1% core organic growth in its first quarter after absorbing Interpublic, with media and experiential up more than 10% each while advertising revenue declined. [Media]
– News Corp is suing the search engine Brave for allegedly masking crawlers and passing near-verbatim content to AI firms, having taken $250M from OpenAI and $50M a year from Meta. [Media]
– Amazon’s advertising segment reached $19.8B in Q2 on the back of a live-sports land grab. [Media]
– Spider-Man: Brand New Day scored Hollywood’s second biggest debut ever. Tom Holland’s non-alcoholic beer brand BERO timed limited-edition Spider-Man cans to the release. [Media]
– Does AI have a fiduciary duty to the people it advises? [Regulation]
– 92% of consumers say AI-generated content has made it harder to tell whether a website is legitimate, and nearly three in four have mistaken a real site for a scam because it was slow or glitchy (Pantheon and Dynata, 1,000 US adults). [Consumer Behavior]
// Life & Culture //
– American grocery volumes fell for a fifth straight month in June, down about 2% year on year while prices rose 2 to 3%, according to Bain and NielsenIQ. [Consumer Behavior]
– A Sydney study café charges $7.50 an hour after three free hours, with 126 people inside at 6pm on a Wednesday. An Australian study café shows how nightlife has collided with productivity and entrepreneurism. [Culture]
– Three quarters of US adults now support all-day school cellphone bans, with more in favour than opposed for the first time (Pew). [Culture]
– Renewables outpaced coal worldwide for the first time, supplying 34% of global electricity (Pew). [Sustainability]
– Dazed spoke to young American men drifting away from MAGA politics. [Culture]
– A New York Times columnist asks whether all this staring at our own faces is messing with our heads. [Culture]
– Global consumer confidence rose to 49.0 in July, a third straight monthly gain with all four sub-indices up together (Ipsos). [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!
