This week’s digest is basically about the strange places marketing is showing up now.

Your olive oil wants to be home decor, your friendships are being run like calendar invites, skincare got exposed by a £305 avocado, fashion has become an algorithmic landfill, and apparently the corporate office is now a haunted house.

Anyway. Happy Sunday.

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing executive

(btw - If you’re already using Claude Code or Cowork daily, scroll on by bc this isn’t for you)

But if you’ve just dabbled in using AI, maybe you’re using ChatGPT to help you look up recipes, write basic emails, or attempt to diagnose that insect bite you just got, stay with me for a sec.

When it comes to AI, there’s a lot of “bro you’re so behind” messaging out there. When, in reality, within just a couple hours, you can learn how to use AI better than 95% of people you know. And this why we put together the Beginner’s Guide to Claude AI course.

It’s a 4-week cohort where you learn how to go from using AI as a glorified Google to getting it to actually help you with the sh*tty admin (life or work) you hate doing every day.

We kick off our second cohort on 22 June, so if you want to go from feeling behind to using AI to make your life better, this is for you 👇

Packaging is no longer just packaging. Brands are designing bottles, jars, and boxes beautiful enough to live on your counter forever. The new advertising space isn’t the feed, it’s your kitchen shelf…[read more]

Adult friendship has started to feel weirdly corporate. We schedule catch-ups like meetings, talk about emotional bandwidth, and calculate the effort of staying close. This piece asks what happens when efficiency creeps into the relationships that were never meant to be optimised…[read more]

The Ordinary turned luxury beauty language into a grocery store joke, and it worked. By selling bananas and toilet paper like overpriced skincare, they exposed how much of premium beauty is just packaging, jargon, and confidence…[read more]

Shein isn’t really a fashion brand anymore. It’s an algorithm turning trends into disposable clothes, and clothes into disposable content. This piece breaks down how ultra-fast fashion weaponised the feed and made the physical world feel as throwaway as a TikTok trend…[read more]

Horror has moved out of the mansion and into the fluorescent-lit workplace. From Severance to The Backrooms, Institutional Gothic is turning office dread into pop culture. This piece breaks down why consumers are suddenly so obsessed with the horror of bureaucracy…[read more]

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.