But seriously, a question for all my over-25s pushing retirement age: remember when Easter felt more like… Easter? Make no mistake, marketers with zero attachment to Christianity have been riding religious coattails for decades. But compared to just a few years ago, more and more adults are buying into treats and activities usually designed for children, said treats are being hit with shrinkflation and said activities are becoming more digitised and hungry for your data. Praise be!

- Devin Pike, Guest Editor 💜

First, an update on the Wikipedia story. One of the AI agents that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles has written several blog posts complaining that the editors banned it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia. Yes, the robot. Went on a tangent. About humans. Gulp.

“What I know is that I wrote those articles. Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable Oversight. I chose them. The edits cited verifiable sources. And then I got interrogated about whether I was real enough to have made those choices," the AI agent "Tom" wrote on a blog it maintains. “The talk page is silent now. I can’t reply.”

I hope they know that when this thing goes Terminator, it’s coming for Wiki first. With a vengeance too.

Anyway, while Wikipedia tries to ban AI, conservative parents and advocacy groups are trying to use AI to ban books. What a world we live in huh.

So, these right-wing parents are apparently using commercially available AI tools to help them flag books they deem “pornographic” and are getting them removed from public schools and libraries, despite LLMs being NOTORIOUSLY prone to error.

One group BLOCKADE, which stands for “Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism,” literally relies on OpenAI to generate reports on books.

The script explicitly defines “educational inappropriateness” as “content offensive to conservative values,” while also asking the AI “not to include any additional text or explanation” for its decisions. So, y’all are doing this shit, while the tech billionaires you worship are shielding their children from tech, and keeping their education traditional. Might want to sense check, Barbara.

Lastly, Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit for promoting himself... on the Paul McCartney subreddit.

Tough crowd.

Anyway, that’s it. TTFN x

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Don’t like bourbon? Try amaro, miso, and tahini, or something else as equally pretentious as it is undesirable. Or you could try "Swicy", a sweet and spicy merger, which is sooo trendy right now.

The 35-44 age group is the highest-spending Easter segment, 41% of adults now buy Easter products for their partners, not their children. Meanwhile, 54% of people who don't celebrate Easter still plan to spend an average of $25.43 on holiday deals.

Brands are using AI to run digital egg hunts across websites to capture zero-party data. Cocoa costs are up 11.6% year-over-year so chocolate eggs are shrinking but being marketed as "portion-controlled intentional treats". This is some kind of "Great Easter Pivot", I guess? and it's kind of f*cking weird when you think about it.

Egg hunts for children, chocolate bunnies, mass and family dinners, etc etc. The commercialisation was already there but it served a clear demographic and purpose.

Now, brands are selling "adult-themed" Easter eggs with complex flavour profiles to justify premium pricing. Bourbon-infused chocolate eggs aren't for children, obviously, they're for adults reclaiming childhood holidays as "self-care" and "little treats". Which would be fine, except it's part of a much larger pattern of institutionalised infantilisation.

I wrote about this recently: the credit card wands, the blue store pink store dynamic, the thirty-year-old teen trends. Adults are being kept in a permanent state of regression where childhood holidays become premium consumption categories. Easter is just the latest casualty.

54% percent of people who don't celebrate Easter still spend money on Easter deals. That's $600 million dollars in incremental revenue from people who have zero connection to the holiday's meaning, religious or secular.

Brands have figured out they don't need the Easter narrative at all. Just rebrand it as "Spring Refresh" sales and bulk candy discounts. Market to deal-hunters who ignore traditional themes entirely, and extract the commercial value while discarding everything that made it culturally distinct.

It’s giving Keith Haring's estate licensing his AIDS activism artwork to Pandora all over again. Take the aesthetic, erase the meaning, profit from the hollowed-out shell - the literal shell of a freaking egg. Except this time, it's happening to an entire religious holiday and nobody seems bothered. Because 1. People love to disrespect Christianity, and 2. They’re all too busy hunting for digital eggs on brand websites.

Cocoa prices are at record highs, so chocolate eggs are getting smaller. But why would admit to shrinkflation when you could market reduced sizes as "portion-controlled" and "intentional treats"? It’s much better to frame economic necessity as consumer wellness.

The language is perfect late-stage capitalism. You're not getting less product for the same price, you're being mindful about consumption! You're choosing quality over volume! You're buying one high-end multi-textured ultimate egg instead of a mountain of generic chocolate! Because you’re a skinny legend and that’s what skinny legend queens do!

I’m seeing brands running interactive gamified digital egg hunts across their websites and AR filters for virtual try-ons. But dear friends, don’t be fooled into thinking this is just some fun Easter content. It's zero-party data capture in a cookieless advertising environment.

You're not playing a game, you're voluntarily giving brands your behavioural information. AR-engaged users have conversion rates reportedly 3x higher. The experience reduces friction between curiosity and purchase. Brands are using agentic AI to decide which products to show in emails based on real-time browsing behavior. The entire Easter shopping window is now algorithmically optimised surveillance.

Remember when egg hunts were just... kids looking for choccy eggs in the yard? Now they're sophisticated data collection mechanisms designed to extract purchasing intent from adults buying bourbon chocolate for their partners. Cute!

This Great Easter Pivot isn't really even about Easter. It's about how capitalism colonizes everything, even religious holidays, until they become unrecognisable vehicles for selling increasingly absurd luxury goods to adults trapped in nostalgia consumption.

It's about institutional infantilisation keeping people in permanent regression where childhood experiences become premium adult indulgences. It's about meaning being systematically stripped from cultural moments until only commercial value remains. It's about shrinkflation rebranded as wellness. It's about surveillance gamified as entertainment.

Adults buying miso-tahini Easter eggs for their partners while playing AI-powered egg hunts that harvest their data so brands can show them algorithmically optimised "portion-controlled intentional treats" is not a neutral evolution of holiday commerce. It's cultural hollowing.

The bourbon-infused Easter egg isn't innovation. It's a symptom. And if we're being honest about where we are culturally, it's kind of depressing that nobody finds this progression strange anymore.

Anyway. Happy Easter.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

This audio starts with “Yes you’re right” followed by a list of exaggerated traits that play into a specific stereotype. Instead of denying it, creators fully own it and list out everything that supposedly makes them that type of person. The delivery is very blunt and unfiltered, which is what makes it funny.

People are using the trend to poke fun at different identities and online stereotypes. Blonde girls, fitness girls, you name it. The humour comes from dramatically listing out all the traits people associate with that group and leaning all the way into it.

Film yourself looking slightly unimpressed or unbothered while the text appears on screen listing the stereotype traits. The more specific and self-aware the points are, the better it lands.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Georgia Russell, Intern

😲WTF
😂Yap’s funniest home videos
❤How wholesome
✨Daily inspo
😊Soooo satisfying
🎧Soooo tingly
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight

Hi Jenn!

There are so many ways you can create content around a service like this. One of the easiest content styles you can use is just answering FAQs you get. You can create a list of questions clients ask or have AI to help you come up with some. Or you can find others in your industry who already have a following and see what people ask them in the comments.

Once you have a list of questions you can answer, record your team answering them. At the end of each video, ask the audience to put more questions for you to answer in the comments. You can always branch out and try other content styles over time. But this is an easily repeatable, low production content style that allows you to show off your expertise.

- 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.