the newsletter, every issue.
Eight hundred and eighty-five editions of yap, sat in one place. One long read every friday morning. Always free.
Eight hundred and eighty-five issues.
Your personalisation strat is creeping people out (and you probably don’t even know it)
Personalisation crosses into surveillance when customers feel watched instead of helped. Brands optimise for metrics that don't capture creepiness like when retargeting ads follow you for months or emails reference offline conversations. Helpful personalisation is transparent about data use, respects boundaries, and gives control back to users. The gap between what brands think is valuable and what feels invasive is where trust dies.
Are we living in a post-culture era? And would you know if we were?
Ask five people under 30 what defined the last decade and you'll get five different answers. Ask someone over 60 about the 1960s and they'll all say The Beatles and JFK. This fragmentation signals a post-culture era where shared cultural reference points have dissolved into algorithmic bubbles and niche communities. Culture has become content and algorithms decide what matters instead of human critics.
You don’t need a million followers to make it as a creator (and the data proves it)
The creator middle class is now viable with 45.6% of creators earning between $10K and $100K annually. Success in 2026 means building community over chasing virality, focusing on niche content, and developing long-term brand partnerships. You don't need millions of followers to make real money as a creator anymore. Depth beats reach and thoughtful content for specific communities wins.
Marketing as social care: brought to you by Flavor Flav.
Flavor Flav invited the disrespected US Women's Olympic Hockey team to Vegas after Donald Trump shat on them. He called on brands to help and they flooded in with support for flights, hotels, entertainment, and beauty needs. This proves marketing doesn't need year-long campaigns to do good. Sometimes the most powerful response is seeing injustice and using your platform to fix it immediately.
Happy situation monitoring day to all who enjoy monitoring the situation
Monitoring the situation is 2026's defining meme about awareness without action. The phrase uses corporate speak to acknowledge crisis while doing nothing about it. We're living through polycrisis with multiple catastrophes happening simultaneously while being documented on the same devices we use to shop and socialise. The meme captures helplessness, dark humour as coping, and the shift from activism to observation.
How to make sure you get all the content you need from your next shoot
A Pinterest board is not creative direction. Real creative direction starts with strategy by answering what the shoot is for, what assets you need, and which platforms you're distributing on. Without pre-production work like detailed shot lists and mapping offers to platforms, you'll spend thousands on beautiful images that don't fit your actual marketing needs.
The Staples Baddie has a marketing lesson: just do the video
A Staples print specialist started posting TikToks about services customers don't know about like custom mugs and stamp making. One ASMR video got 765,000 likes and drove measurable store traffic increases. Her anti-strategy is not overthinking content and just talking authentically about things she's passionate about. No content calendars or approval workflows. She proves that corporate marketing can't manufacture the authentic enthusiasm employees naturally have.
The new G cometh.
Mobile World Congress 2026 is hyping 6G but we've seen this before with 5G. The promises were revolutionary with self-driving cars, remote surgery, and smart cities. Five years later we got slightly faster internet that's sometimes available. The gap between promise and reality follows the same pattern as Tesla's self-driving, the metaverse, and early AI hype.
What are dark forests of the internet (and why are people retreating to them)?
The public internet has become hostile with bots, AI slop, and constant surveillance. People are retreating to private internets called dark forests where real humans gather in invite-only spaces outside algorithmic chaos. This movement rejects the scale and reach playbook for depth and genuine connection in communities of 20 to 200 people who actually want to be there.
You can do anything. But you’re becoming nothing.
We live in an era of impossible contrasts where infinite choice and access haven't brought freedom or belonging. The promise that more equals better has curdled into constant fragmentation and exhaustion. When you can be anything, do anything, and access everything, the self fragments into nothing. Maybe the solution isn't optimising every choice but accepting the freedom in not becoming something at all
Not everything is about you and that's ok
The bean soup theory explains how social media has killed our ability to accept that not everything is designed for us. People now weaponise personal preferences and identity to demand that creators and brands cater specifically to them. If something doesn't resonate with you, the solution is simple. Scroll past it and find what actually is for you.
There's no better time than now to touch grass
The touch grass movement is gaining ground as adults organise hide and seek competitions, singles wrestling events, and combat rings at parties. These deliberately offline activities require presence and physicality. They're modern carnivals where you can suspend being a serious adult and just play for no reason other than joy.