the newsletter, every issue.
Two hundred and forty-seven editions of yap, sat in one place. One long read every friday morning. Always free.
Two hundred and forty-seven issues.
Are brands ghosting Pride Month in 2026
Corporate brands are retreating from Pride Month in record numbers and it is not a coincidence. Marketing teams are choosing safety over solidarity, and Gen Z and Millennial consumers are watching closely. Here is why safe marketing is dead marketing.
The corporate office is the new haunted house
The haunted mansion has been swapped for a fluorescent-lit office. A new cultural subgenre called Institutional Gothic is dominating pop culture right now, and it tells us a lot about what consumers actually want from brands. Here is what it means for your content strategy.
The algorithmic void of ultra-fast fashion
Shein isn't a fashion brand. It's an algorithm that turns clothing into content and outsources the damage to underpaid workers and overflowing landfills. This piece breaks down how ultra-fast fashion weaponised social media, why the slow fashion counter-narrative collapsed, and what that says about consumer culture.
The Ordinary just set up a stall selling £305 avocados (and it's some of the best anti-marketing we've seen)
The Ordinary built a fake luxury supermarket and sold an avocado for £305. It's a brilliant piece of anti-marketing that exposes the deceptive language beauty brands use to inflate their prices. And it permanently changes how shoppers see every luxury skincare counter they'll ever stand in front of.
We've turned our friends into coworkers
We've started running our friendships like a business. We schedule coffee weeks in advance, talk about emotional bandwidth like it's a data plan, and quietly calculate the ROI of every relationship. This piece is about how corporate logic crept into our private lives and why showing up anyway is the only radical thing left.
Help! My olive oil is trying to become a vase!
The most valuable advertising space in 2026 is not a billboard or a TikTok feed. It is your kitchen counter. Brands have figured out that if they make their packaging beautiful enough to double as home decor, you will never hide it in a cupboard again.
The internet is officially a psychological thriller
The internet has gone from dodgy spam folders to AI voice clones, deepfakes, and algorithms designed to keep you scrolling until 3am. Both the technology and the creators using it are manufacturing reality for profit, leaving us burnt out and cynical. Media literacy is no longer a nice-to-have. It is active digital self-defence.
Algorithmic mysticism is on the rise; should we be trading cold data for corporate magic?
The internet was supposed to make us more rational. Instead, it has become the world's best engine for mysticism and meaning. For marketers, this digital re-enchantment signals a shift from cold optimisation to building brands with narrative, ritual, and depth.
Is branding everything blinding us to the consumer?
Platforms are targeting people mid-divorce based on their data, and brands are calling it an opportunity. It is part of a wider pattern of turning raw human experiences into tidy market categories. This piece asks whether chasing the next hyphenated economy is clever strategy or just a fast way to lose trust.
Did we curate the fun out of the feed?
Social media used to feel like a neighbourhood where a half-baked thought could start something real. Somewhere between the death of Twitter and the rise of the perfectly lit OST Reel, we traded organic digital communities for a polished content production machine. Getting back the soul of social media means being willing to post like a real, messy person again.
Luxury rage: who is Matieres Fecales really mocking?
Matieres Fecales showed up to Paris Fashion Week with a collection mocking the ultra-rich. The internet loved it. But when the ultra-rich are buying the clothes, who is actually being mocked?
Your AI "voice" sounds nothing like you. Here’s why.
Most people think their AI-written posts blend right in. A journalist who reads LinkedIn for a living says it’s way more obvious than you think. From arrow lists to filler phrases, the signs are everywhere, and they make your content sound like everyone else’s instead of you.