No, literally. That’s an actual stat. And it says a lot about our industry right now. Because advertising used to be about being memorable. Challenging assumptions. Ya know, grabbing attention. But in the last decade, optimising for the lowest possible CPM has become the only metric that matters. Which leads to ads that, sure, aren’t offending anyone. And ok, they’re broadly relatable. But they also happen to be boring AF. So if you can manage to actually entertain, you’re seriously winning (the bar is in hell guys). [Read more]

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

I’m sorry, but out of ALL the people you could pick a fight with, why would you choose Pope Leo? Not only is he the first American pope, but he’s also cool asf and has tons of public support. The president’s lengthy social media attack for being too liberal and too "weak on crime", combined with whatever that AI slop was, have crystallised a shift in opinion among many Catholic conservatives.

"I pray that all of this will clarify for people that we don't look to a national leader, we don't look to those who have the most money or the most weapons. We look to Christ," says Bishop Joseph Strickland. Strickland was previously a supporter and participated in a prayer event to "consecrate" the president's Mar-a-Lago home. It’s not just this confrontation that has support of Catholic leaders; the conflict with Iran over the last six weeks has prompted condemnation from church leaders.

"I do not believe this conflict meets the criteria of a just war. I stand with the Holy Father and his call for peace. This is not about politics. It's about moral truth," he told the BBC, saying the scale of death and suffering faced by innocent civilians meant the war could never be viewed as "just". Cool now say it louder for the far right-wing corner of the internet. I think they may have missed something.

Moving on, TikTok just published its first transparency report on EU hate speech removal, and the numbers are pretty good… The report shows that in the last quarter of 2025, 96.3% of content they removed was taken down before anyone had reported it, using advanced moderation tech and safety teams to combat hate speech and hateful behaviour.

In the second half, the platform received 56,549 user reports of illegal hate speech content. This corresponded to 30,128 unique pieces of content. Which isn’t that many when you think about it, but A for effort. TikTok is also investing in media literacy on things like the Holocaust and LGBTQI+ rights and safety to better moderate the space. Not bad.

Lastly, more than 70 organisations are demanding that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. For obvious reasons; like handing stalkers, abusers and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public. The coalition, includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and damn I hope they win. Please. We don’t need more dystopia tech right now.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Not because it was offensive or because it said anything wrong.

But because it was dull as f*cccck.

Someone had spent money on that, and signed off on it… and then it entered the world with all the cultural resonance of a wet paper bag.

That's kind of where we are.

But it’s really not when you read the headline stat doing the rounds from Peter Field and System1: 50% of ads are currently less engaging than watching cows graze in a field.

A literal 30-second clip of a cow chewing grass. More compelling than half of what brands are putting money behind.

If that doesn't make you want to lie down on the floor for a minute, I don't know what will.

To understand how we ended up here, you have to go back to the early 2010s, when "efficiency" became the dominant religion of marketing.

Programmatic buying arrived. And suddenly, the whole game shifted from "how do we make people feel something" to "how do we reach the most people for the lowest CPM." Creative storytelling got quietly demoted. And data-driven targeting got the big shiny corner office.

The thing is, while brands were perfecting the science of reaching people, the internet was busy perfecting the art of holding them.

TikTok's algorithm doesn't care about your media spend or your targeting parameters. It cares about whether someone watched your video all the way through, whether they watched it twice, whether they sent it to their group chat at 11pm.

The metric is retention, the currency is amusement, and it turns out those are very hard things to buy your way into.

So you ended up with this widening gap where a user's organic feed is genuinely, relentlessly entertaining. And then an ad interrupts it and it's like someone turned off all the lights. The chasm isn't subtle at all. It’s like, the entire experience now.

But dull advertising is not just a creative problem—it's a freaking expensive one.

Research shows that brands running low-engagement campaigns have to spend significantly more on media to achieve the same business results as entertaining ones. We're talking upwards of £9.8 million extra per campaign. The "safe" choice is, financially, not safe at all. It just feels safe because the risk is spread across a thousand small forgettable moments rather than one big swingable one.

And the flip side of that is equally compelling.

Peter Field's analysis of the IPA database found that "fame" ads, the ones that get people actually talking, generate 6.1 times more share growth than rational, information-heavy campaigns. Six times, dude. From making something people want to share with each other.

Don’t be mistaken, that's not a creative indulgence, babes. It’s a business case.

This is where it gets interesting, and also where a lot of brands fumble it, because "be entertaining" is not an actionable brief. Obviously. It gets interpreted as "be unhinged," and suddenly every brand account is doing a bit that doesn't suit them and it reeks of desperation and tomfoolery.

The brands doing this well, your Duolingos, your Ryanairs, your e.l.f.s, aren't simply “being chaotic” for no good reason.

They've made a clear decision about what kind of entertainer they are. And they commit to it with a consistency that eventually feels like a personality. Duolingo leaned into the passive-aggressive guilt-trip owl and ran with it until it became a cultural reference point because it’s a whole character with a worldview.

It doesn't work and it makes you look like someone who doesn't understand the room. Like at all. It makes you the online equivalent of socially inept and no one is inviting you to any parties after that.

Entertainment has to come first.

The relationship gets built there. The transaction, if it comes, comes after. That's just the basic social contract of the platform.

Which makes it sort of funny that we're here.

The internet told brands exactly what it wanted. It demonstrated, loudly and repeatedly, what it found interesting and what it scrolled past without a second thought. And for about a decade, a significant chunk of the industry looked at that information and decided the answer was more retargeting.

The cow-grazing stat is funny to me, in the bleak way things are funny when they're also a little bit (or a lot) true. But it's also a useful data point. It tells you exactly how far the gap has gotten and how much room there is to do literally anything interesting and stand out.

The bar, genuinely, has never been lower. That's either a damning indictment or a wide open door, depending on how you want to look at it.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The scariest things in life don't have jump scares. They just show up uninvited and kind of just stay forever?

Today's sound comes from Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away", and people are using it to list their actual top 5 horror movies, except none of them are films. They're just... life. A specific year that did damage. A birthday that hit different. That one guy. Old me. Falling in love. Should I keep going? It's the kind of list that makes perfect sense to everyone even though nothing on it is explained.

Use the sound, post a photo or video, and overlay your list. Keep it vague, keep it specific enough to sting, and let the audio do the rest.

A few ideas to get you started: 

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😲WTF: How is this reallll?
✨Daily inspo: Be kind to yourself
😊Soooo satisfying: Weird but kinda nice
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Burgers with a twist

Hey Brandon,

As humans, we have a natural appreciation for talent. So you're in a good position to make content people want to watch because you have a talent to share! My advice is to do some research on the platform where you want to build your audience. See what content formats other people have used to successfully showcase their skills.

Don't just look for content you enjoy—look for content that has gotten good viewership and engagement. Once you've got some source material, figure out how to replicate that content style for yourself. It's important to pay attention to the on-screen text, camera angle, and other details from your source material, then try to match it as well as you can.

You will likely need to do a good bit of experimenting, but if you start by re-creating a piece of content that has already performed well, you will find out what works much faster than just doing what you think might work.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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.