Not always comfortable things. Not always appropriate things. But things. You remember them. The ones that got talked about at school the next day, that made your parents change the channel, that somehow managed to be completely tasteless and completely unforgettable at the same time. Look at your feed now. Safe. Sterilised. Beige. Today we're asking what actually happened to bold, provocative advertising, and whether the answer is moral progress, corporate cowardice, or just the algorithm deciding it doesn't like skin.

Meta is facing a lawsuit that makes its AI-driven layoffs sound significantly more sinister than a simple restructure.

Reuters reports that 26 former employees have filed a federal lawsuit accusing Meta of using AI-powered tools (including its internal "Metamate" assistant and AI token usage dashboards) to disproportionately target workers with disabilities or who had taken medical leave when selecting people for its May 2026 round of cuts. The plaintiffs allege Meta relied on productivity metrics and AI usage rates. And this directly disadvantaged anyone who had missed work due to illness, disability, or family care.

Meta's response: "Workforce management and organisational decisions were and are made by people, not AI." The irony of that sentence, given the lawsuit, is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, someone used a festival stage to say what a lot of people have been thinking. TechCrunch reports that Lorde stopped mid-set at Madrid's Mad Cool Festival to deliver an unscripted verdict on AI smart glasses: "Increasingly in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real. You don't know if someone is wearing sunglasses or if they're wearing those f'ed up f'ing… Can I just say, for the record, f**k the glasses. Don't get the glasses. Not sexy."

The moment landed particularly hard given that Ray-Ban, a festival sponsor and Meta's AI glasses partner, had a presence at the event. Not to mention Blackpink's Jennie, a Ray-Ban Meta ambassador, performed immediately after Lorde's set. Meta sold over 7 million AI glasses in 2025. Maybe vanity will succeed where privacy concerns couldn't.

And finally, OpenAI is projecting $14 billion in losses this year and has decided the solution is branded merchandise. TechCrunch reports that alongside its new $230 Codex Micro keyboard, OpenAI dropped a ChatGPT-branded basketball for $70 under a campaign called "Pause. Play. Prompt." which was described as "a physical reminder that creativity doesn't just live on our screens."

There is also a $175 quarter-zip that "reminisces on our days in academia." OpenAI did not elaborate on which days in academia those were. The basketball costs the equivalent of 56 million GPT-5 input tokens, if that helps provide context.

We all remember the cultural reference points of the early 2000s (assuming you are nearing your 30s, and if not, I don’t wanna hear about it ok just, save it.)

It was the era of the hyper-sexualised Carl’s Jr. commercials. The provocative Tom Ford for Gucci photography. And the scandalous, maybe even a little traumatising Lynx body spray campaigns.

(Anyone else remember the one where the mosquito bit the guy wearing Lynx, and the frog ate the mosquito and the old French man ate the frog legs and all of them were banging like it was going out of fashion??? Yeah. Genuinely traumatising when you’re 8 years old.)

And granted, looking back, a lot of it was undeniably tasteless, tacky, and objectifying (not you, Tom Ford. You’re safe.).

But it undeniably possessed a raw, high-octane energy.

I’m not saying it's a bad thing, but I’m also not saying it’s good.

Advertising now exists in neutralised blandness. The imagery is safe, sterilised, and coated in a layer of corporate vanilla. Which raises a fascinating and slightly taboo question that modern marketing departments are likely too scared to discuss:

The immediate, lazy cultural assumption is that the rise of digital conservatism and the "trad-wife" aesthetic has forced marketing to become boring. We assume a neo-modest gatekeeper has stepped in to clean up the airwaves. But if you pull back the curtain on the advertising industry, you’ll quickly see that narrative is completely wrong.

Marketing hasn't been conquered by a puritanical backlash; it’s been house-trained by a matrix of social movements, algorithmic policing, and corporate risk aversion.

The decrease in overt sexualization largely stems from the upstream consequences of the #MeToo movement and comprehensive feminist critiques. Brands didn't back away from the male-gaze playbook to appease conservative traditionalists.

They did it to avoid massive public backlashes and institutional boycotts from an audience that refused to tolerate the cheap and dangerous objectification of women any longer.

But alongside that societal reckoning lies a much colder, psychological reality: audience desensitisation.

Comprehensive behavioural studies have long highlighted that highly sexualised imagery actually acts as a massive distraction. Consumers get so caught up in the provocative nature of the visual asset that they actually experience complete brand amnesia. They remember the skin, but completely forget the actual product or the company paying for the ad.

Overt sex, it turns out, is an incredibly inefficient way to drive a conversion. Go figure.

Modern digital advertising relies entirely on the infrastructure of monolithic platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok. These networks enforce incredibly strict, automated content-moderation filters.

The moment an ad asset contains too much skin, an suggestive caption, or a slightly provocative edit, the software flags it. Then it restricts its reach, or demonetises the campaign entirely. To survive in a platform-dependent economy, brands have been forced to design for the machine. They produce "safe-for-work" campaigns because any alternative results in instant distribution death.

Brands are trapped between the preceding era of woke capitalism and the current wave of intense cultural polarisation. And they're terrified of stepping into the culture war crossfire altogether.

It’s not about a moral stance. They are merely trying to minimise liability having realised that in a hyper-sensitive, hyper-monitored market, the safest way to protect a quarterly balance sheet is to produce content so entirely uncontroversial that it is incapable of offending a single soul (an entirely impossible feat in this day and age but you get the gist.)

Because, it’s not like we live in an era of moral righteousness lol. One look around and you can tell that we’re far from that. This is more like … how do you say… systemic corporate cowardice.

But, when the entire market defaults to vanilla out of fear, safety itself becomes a form of white noise. So maybe this neutralised landscape presents an incredible contrarian opening. And LOOK I am not in anyway saying revert to the cheap, exploitative objectification of the past.

But I do think there’s opportunity to reclaim raw human edge, authentic tension, and bold artistic expression that refuses to be watered down by an automated safety filter.

We’re only human. Sex, or maybe sexuality and sensuality still sell. Have the creative audacity to make your audience feel something real again.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Beyoncé's 2013 single "Partition," where she describes arriving at the mic with no notes, no preparation, and somehow pulling one of her most iconic songs straight out of thin air:

"I didn't have a pen and paper, I got to the mic I'm like 'oh, press record! Uh-uh-uh driver roll up the partition, please...'"

Creators are lipsyncing to the audio to celebrate any moment they came up with something genuinely great completely on the spot. No plan, no prep, just pure instinct.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound. Add whatever you pulled off brilliantly without a single second of preparation as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

Hey Aisha!

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.