Not about who would win the World Cup. About who owned it. And the answer wasn't the most decorated player, or the most sponsored, or the one with the most carefully managed public image. It was the one eating raw meat, giving one-word interviews, and celebrating goals like a man who has never once considered what anyone thinks of him. Today we're looking at what Erling Haaland's rise tells us about who gets to be a cultural icon now and who actually decides.

For what you ask? Well, for allegedly betting on Kalshi "mention markets," wagering on which specific words Trump would say in speeches. He allegedly made over $100,000 across more than a dozen speeches including the State of the Union, a primetime address, and a Medal of Honor ceremony.

Kalshi froze $90,000 of his profits and referred the case to the CFTC. Trump has suspended him. Perez has worked with Trump since 2016. Trump once said of him: "I have a guy, Gabe. He's excellent." Gabe, it turns out, was allegedly excellent at more than one thing.

Meanwhile, newsletter platform Beehiiv just made its most significant product leap yet. And it has its sights set on Discord, Slack and Substack all at once. TechCrunch reports that Beehiiv has launched Community, a feature letting subscribers chat with each other directly on the platform. The platform's pulling audience conversations away from third-party tools and back under the creator's own roof.

Alongside it, Beehiiv launched an AI Copilot that understands a creator's entire newsletter business. It looks at content, audience, analytics, automations and can draft campaigns, find revenue opportunities, and manage workflows without the creator leaving the platform. The company has also launched podcasts, webinars and customisable paywalls this year.

And finally, a genuinely fascinating case study in brave brand marketing. Ad Age reports that PepsiCo International Foods CMO Jonnie Cahill has spoken candidly about the "scary moments" before launching the company's World Cup campaign built entirely around WhatsApp. It's one of the first major brand activations to use the platform's new features at scale. The campaign connected fans directly with brand content through WhatsApp rather than traditional social channels. It features Thierry Henry, Steve Carell, Lionel Messi and David Beckham in its Lay's "Epic Watch Party."

Cahill described it as a calculated bet on where fans actually are, rather than where brands traditionally show up. In 2026, that distinction is worth paying attention to.

It’s also a whole lot about how Erling Haaland has been universally chosen, aggregated, and crowned by the collective will of the internet as the ultimate icon of the tournament.

When you look at the legacy architects of footballing fame, specifically the slow-burning duopoly of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, their rise to international myth-status required over a decade of continuous television curation, highly managed sports-agency PR, and monolithic corporate campaigns.

Their stardom was a top-down, carefully constructed institutional edifice. One designed to fit neatly into a commercial box.

And I think it’s a brilliant case study in how the interest-based algorithm can take an elite athlete and turn them into an untouchable global folk hero virtually overnight.

The internet has transformed from a passive distribution network into a hyper-reactive narrative engine. And it's one that accelerates public adoration at a terrifying pace.

The magic of this shift is that Haaland is the first footballing deity engineered specifically for the short-form video era. And he wins precisely because he is completely un-curated. Ronaldo gave us the flawless, Greek-god corporate persona. But Haaland gives us raw, unfiltered human eccentricity. And the algorithm absolutely feeds on his weirdness.

Every bizarre, monosyllabic post-match interview, every viral clip of his quirky little celebrations, and every piece of content detailing his raw milk and cow-liver diet functions as a massive relational shortcut.

And I think it reveals a massive truth about modern consumer attention. The crowd has seized the means of coronation.

In the legacy media landscape, institutions decided who became a star based on who was safely marketable.

In the feed economy, however, the community aggregates around raw texture. Haaland hasn’t needed to change his personality to fit a corporate mold. Staying entirely his unique self, the collective hive-mind of the web agreed that he was the most compelling thing on the screen.

This presents a massive strategic wake-up call for creative directors and brand strategists. Maybe we are becoming desensitised to corporate polish and sanitised ambassador campaigns? 

Maybe, the future belongs to the icons that possess the confidence to be loud, authentic, and unapologetically themselves.

In the age of the extreme inauthenticity of absolutely-f*cking-everything, if your brand doesn't have an organic, flawed pulse that can be captured in a raw three-second clip, you simply cannot survive the velocity of modern attention.

Now, it can be earned by giving the people a real, un-optimised human being to cheer for. The speed of the digital world isn't slowing down, and the rules of how we create our heroes are being rewritten in real time.

The ultimate display of star power in 2026 isn't a flawless corporate press release. It is a literal Viking smiling straight down the barrel of a smartphone camera, completely on his own terms.

And I gotta say, I fkn love it.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from Audrey Hobert's "Sue Me," specifically the part where she goes "Sue me, I wanna be, sue me, I wanna be, sue me, I wanna be wanted." People took that and turned it into a confessional format. You say "sue me" then whatever you unapologetically want, no matter how chaotic or specific. SPEAK YOUR TRUTH!

My fav examples so far:

Use the sound, look into the camera, lipsync the lyrics and throw up on-screen text that says that thing you want.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

Hey Brigitte!

Totally get where you're coming from. It can be hard to keep posting when you aren't getting much engagement. But the only way to improve your content is to keep posting. I'd encourage you to keep posting every day, paying attention to your analytics. Experiment by changing up your hook, images, and post style. Don’t be afraid to change up your format and see how it lands with your audience. The bottom line is, you'll figure out what works way faster by continuing to post than stopping

- 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.