Yes, that includes you (obv). Really hope you got a break over the, erm, break. And also hope you’re as ready as we are to leave the dumpster fire that was 2025 behind (because what was that?). ANYWAY it’s 2026 now, and we can’t wait to get back into scouring the interwebs, ripping open everything we find, and making it make sense for you. Alright, let’s get into it.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Nothing quite like a cultural hit to piggyback off when it comes to the world of marketing. And when it comes to Stranger Things, it’s so much more than that. It’s a literal entire marketing universe.

What was once a cult sci-fi hit has morphed into one of pop culture’s most aggressively monetised IP ecosystems. And partner brands are trading on nostalgia plus 80s kitsch to break through today’s crowded calendar.

It all started with Eggos in season 1 (iykyk). And as the latest season comes and goes like a cultural whirlwind, brands from Coca-Cola to fast food and fashion are leaning in hard. They're layering on co-branded merch, limited-edition collabs, and experiential tie-ins that turn fans into walking billboards.

It’s a reminder that entertainment franchises aren’t just content anymore. They’re retail catalysts that drive buzz, social traffic, and real dollars in ways traditional ads can’t touch.

France is opening a formal investigation after a surge of harmful AI-generated deepfakes depicting women, including political figures and public personalities, in nude or sexually explicit scenarios. Lawmakers say this goes beyond satire or mischief. They say it’s a form of digital violence that strips agency from victims and normalises abuse under the guise of “technology.” And they’re absolutely fkn right.

The probe will look at how platforms like X’s Grok handle generated content. It will also consider whether existing laws are adequate to deter creators and distributors of malicious deepfakes. This goes beyond legality. It’s totally ethical (and necessary) to force societies to ask whether current rules can protect individuals in an era where likenesses can be manipulated on a whim.

GUYS please it was just “black November” – then holiday season, can you LET ME CATCH MY BREATH.

Marketers are already booking spots, haggling for premium placement, and touting creative plans. As usual, these range from star-studded celebrity spots to data-driven targeting experiments. Years of inflation and economic pressure have reshaped how brands buy attention. But this year’s ad tracker indicates both traditional TV advertising and cross-platform extensions (social, streaming, experiential) are in play. Brands are currently strategising multi-touch, multi-moment campaigns designed to crack through the usual Super Bowl noise. It feels like a confident season for big-budget storytelling.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

I’m sure we can all agree that if brought up, nine times out of ten it’s a rant about one of its many problems causing the ever-present feeling of impending doom in our society.

A Pew Research Center survey from September found that 50% of people are more concerned than excited about it. Another poll found that just 2% of respondents fully trust AI to make fair decisions. Two percent. That's essentially a rounding error with anxiety.

The reasons to distrust AI are everywhere: environmental cost, energy consumption, job displacement, the existential dread of not knowing what it might become. And look, babes, I get it.

Why? Because we've already broken our own idea machine.

There's a concept floating around that I can't stop thinking about.

Economist Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues published a paper with the extremely unsubtle title "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" They looked across industries from semiconductors to agriculture and found that we now need vastly more researchers and R&D spending just to maintain the same rate of progress.

Anecdotally, I feel this is felt in every cinema showing the ninth sequel to a franchise that peaked in 2004. It's in every brand doing the same Wes Anderson TikTok aesthetic. It's in every "unhinged admin" voice that stopped being funny approximately 47 seconds after it started.

Marketing, advertising, and content have stalled creatively and are now photocopying the same twelve ideas for years and calling it strategy.

Because the Remake Economy isn't just evident in Hollywood.

Yeah, film studios keep remaking old properties because they're "proven IP" with "built-in audiences” (also known as risk mitigation dressed up as creative decision-making.)

But advertising has been doing the exact same thing, just with better jargon.

Every campaign is either nostalgia-baiting or trying to manufacture a "cultural moment" using the exact playbook from the last cultural moment. We've got the same brand archetypes, the same insight frameworks, and the same tone-of-voice guidelines ensuring nobody sounds too different from anyone else.

It’s attack of the clones out here.

A/B testing rewards incremental improvement. Performance marketing punishes experimentation. And stakeholder sign-off means ten rounds of making something safer, blander, more like what worked before.

We optimised creativity into a corner. And now we're stuck there, remaking the same content over and over with slightly different aesthetics. Talk about glitching out.

Here's my hot take: if AI can replicate most marketing content convincingly, that's not a statement about how good AI is. It's a statement about how predictable we've become.

The backlash against AI makes sense emotionally. It feels like the final insult, the proof that creativity has been commodified into something a literal machine can do.

AI didn't make every brand sound identical. We did that with best practices, proven templates, and an entire industry that somewhere along the line decided to stop taking risks.

The real question isn't whether AI can replace human creativity. It's whether we were actually using human creativity in the first place, or just cycling through the same ideas with better production value.

“Everything is a remix.” Until everything fkn sucks.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say AI will "unlock" new ideas or "democratise" creativity or some other piece of empty futurism (blegh!). I'm not going to do that, because AI isn't creative. It's a pattern-matching tool that regurgitates what it's been fed.

But here's what I think it might do: remove the excuse.

You can't blame budget anymore. You can't blame timelines. You can't blame lack of resources or headcount or access. If you feed AI a brief and it spits out something indistinguishable from what your team would have made, the bottleneck was never capacity. It was courage, honey.

Not "performs well in testing" good. Not "on-brand" good. Actually new. Actually interesting. Actually worth someone's attention.

So maybe the best use of AI isn't replacing creativity. Maybe it's making it impossible to hide behind the performance of creativity while doing nothing remotely creative at all.

The test isn’t the tool. It’s what we do with it.

That's true in science. It's true in film. And it's devastatingly true in marketing and advertising, where we've been calling iteration "innovation" for so long we've forgotten what the real thing looks like.

AI won't solve that on its own. It's not going to generate brilliant ideas just because we ask it to. But it might create enough pressure, enough discomfort and enough existential panic that we finally stop remaking what worked five years ago and try something actually new.

The irony is that people hate AI because they think it will make everything more homogenous, more soulless, more the same. But I can’t stress enough, that it was us that already did that.

We built an entire industry on templates and proven formats and risk-averse consensus. If AI breaks that, even accidentally, it might be the most useful thing it ever does.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Recently on TikTok, it's been personified by a season 5 episode of Stranger Things where Holly - after experiencing some traumatic spoilery things I won't get into - screams and sobs to a room of other kids:

"C'mon you have to believe me! Please! You have to believe me! You have to!"

We've all more or less been where Holly is (minus the demonic interdimensional stuff), where we know the truth about something but the people around us just won't buy it. Whether you're finally planning to get your driver's license this year or are falsely accused as the imposter in Among Us, we've all at some point spiralled into panic over not being believed.

Take this sound, film yourself lip-syncing with it and add on-screen text describing a situation where nobody believed in you. Don't forget to really sell it by putting your head in your hand, looking red in the face and appearing on the brink of tears!

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

😲WTF: A very strange monkey
❤How wholesome: Push that car!
🎧Soooo tingly: Waxy Cheeseburgers?
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Harissa Meatball Bowl

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.