Hi {{ first_name | default: there }}

Cannes wrapped this week, and for all the flak it cops — the rosé, the yachts, the reheated panel takes — it's still the one week a year the most talented people in this industry are in the same place arguing about what's coming next. This year, as you'd expect, that argument was mostly about AI. Last year the question was what AI would replace. This year the mood turned the other way, toward the thing the machines keep failing to fake.

The Ordinary took the Health & Wellness Grand Prix for swapping the periodic table for the beauty industry's emptiest promises — "age-defying," "wrinkle-erasing" — the kind of joke about marketing language no AI model would think to make. And the work that travelled didn't all come from the usual places: Puerto Rico and Peru walked away with two Grands Prix each, small markets outpunching networks ten times their size on the strength of an idea.

We had a small stake in the week ourselves. The case study films we produced for Initiative Media UK picked up a Bronze Lion for Best Use of Media Insights & Strategy, on a NatWest campaign. And the Nike "Journey Home" film we made for them was shortlisted for Best Use of Events & Stunts — no small thing in a room this size.

So that was the week. A quiet admission that AI is already settled into the furniture. AI is the floor now — which is the problem, as Scott Galloway put it on stage: when the same tool takes everyone to the middle, the middle gets crowded. The work that won mostly won by climbing out of it. That's the bet behind our latest spec, too: Don't Disappear, the campaign we built for the brand the GLP-1 category forgot to make.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

She's three months into a GLP-1, the scale is down twenty pounds, the compliments have started arriving — and she's standing in front of the bathroom mirror at seven in the morning running her hands over a body that's smaller and somehow less hers. The muscle went with the fat. Her energy disappeared around week four and never came back. Everyone around her is celebrating a number she can't quite feel good about, and she can't say so out loud, because how do you complain about getting exactly what you asked for?

That's the person the entire GLP-1 category decided not to talk to. About one in eight American adults has now taken one of these drugs, and the market answered with diet apps in clinical whites and pale greens, calorie counters that inherited the pharmacology's only instinct — subtract — and never asked whether it was the right one. The medication creates the conditions for the body to change. Nobody built the thing that builds the person who has to live inside that change.

So we did. VERVE is the brand we invented for the category that forgot to make it, and Don't Disappear is the campaign behind it — a sixty-second film, no client, no budget, every frame of it stock footage. What we found when we went looking for the angle was that the whole category sells less, because less is what the drug delivers and the marketing only ever learned to echo it. We went the other way, and the reason why is the part worth reading.

👉 Read the full piece

I was at dinner a few weeks ago, someone said everyone was obsessed with a show I'd never heard of, and when I admitted it, nobody else at the table had heard of it either, and not one of us thought that worth remarking on. Each of us had our own everyone by then, our own obsession, our own feed we'd long since stopped apologising for.

I went home and looked for proof the way you do, pulling up the most-streamed songs on the planet expecting to recognise at least the top of the list, and recognised nothing — not a title, not a name, though every one of them carried its casual hundreds of millions of plays. The sting I was braced for, the one where you realise the party moved on without you, never arrived, because there turned out to be no party to have missed: only a long column of strangers, each trailing a crowd of millions I'd never see, none of those crowds aware that any of the others were there.

We remember the years when this couldn't happen as a kind of golden age, which is the part worth handling carefully. The night the last episode of MAS*H aired in 1983, a hundred and six million people watched it at the same time, more than half the households in the country, and they did so not because the taste of the era was better but because there was simply nowhere else to look. You cannot assemble that number now, and the reason isn't that nothing is loved that much anymore. It's that whatever is loved is loved alone, each of us certain our own corner is the whole room.

👉 Read the full piece

At Loewe's Spring/Summer 2025 womenswear show in Paris, Jonathan Anderson took his final bow in tears, and three months later confirmed what the tears had already said — after eleven years turning a quiet leather house into one of the most influential names in fashion, with revenues roughly quadrupled on his watch, he was leaving for Dior. That handed Loewe the problem most companies only ever face in private and usually too late: the creative who built your best decade walks out, and you find out, on a schedule, in front of everyone, how much of what he made was ever actually yours to keep.

The reflex when your best person leaves is to tell yourself everyone is replaceable, which is the line you reach for precisely because you suspect it isn't true. Fashion has been running the experiment in public, and the recent results are not reassuring — Gucci without Michele, McQueen without Burton, Lanvin still paying for an exit it never recovered from. Each house lost the person and its identity in the same week, because the two had never been separated in the first place.

What makes Loewe the interesting case is that Anderson, who had every incentive to keep the vision personal and portable, spent eleven years quietly doing the opposite. The award he founded carries the house's name and not his. The codes that were once his signature became the institution's. He built the whole thing to stay when almost nobody in his position does — and the reason he did is the part of this story worth sitting with.

👉 Read the full piece

The interesting thing happening in independent type right now is that the personality has moved inside the letterforms. No texture overlays, no forced italics, no elaborate graphic system doing the work a typeface should be doing on its own — the character now lives in the glyph itself, in oversized ink traps and eccentric terminals and structural tensions you only notice up close.

Here are four worth licensing this month. Klim's Mānuka, dense and monumental, that merges into a single architectural block when you pull the tracking tight and loses the magic the moment you open it back up. Dinamo's Laica, a semi-serif built around a quiet argument between two calligraphic traditions, familiar from across the room and far stranger up close. Plus a high-contrast editorial serif and a brutalist grotesque, with the specific brands each one is actually built for.

If your last three projects reached for the same safe geometric sans, this is the one to read.

👉 Read the full breakdown