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Just got back from five days in Amsterdam with my wife, and honestly it was exactly what I needed — Van Gogh, a herring sandwich, Rosalía live (now a fully converted fan… honestly a next level performance) and the World Press Photo exhibition, which I always underestimate the impact it has on me.

Room after room of work made by humans who felt something and had to document it at real personal risk, with no algorithm in sight. In my world where all anyone seems to talk about right now is AI, standing in that room was a quiet reminder that the hunger to tell a true story is still out there — sometimes you just have to go find it, which is why I encourage the whole team to disconnect regularly.

Inspired by Sabastian Sawe's first legal sub-2-hour marathon, I went for a run along the canals in my Asics with no route and nowhere to be — which turns out to be a reasonable segue into this week, because the brand on my feet has one of the more interesting business stories in sport right now. A $27M loss in 2020, a brutal positioning call that most boards wouldn't have survived, and now running margins above Nike.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Running has been catharsis for me as long as I can remember. The one place where thinking stops being useful and the body takes over. Just the sweat, the road, the breath. If you've ever woken up before the city does, laced up, and hit the pavement before a single thought could stop you, you know what I mean.

And the brands that understand it too—really understand it, not as a market segment or a lifestyle category but as the specific, private thing it is—are the ones serious runners trust with their feet. That trust is not easy to earn and nearly impossible to fake. Runners know the difference between a brand built for them and a brand that decided they were worth targeting this quarter.

I was a HOKA guy for a decade. When they sponsored me on my walk across India three years ago, I wasn't thinking about brand strategy—the Bondis carried me across terrain that had no business being walked, and that was enough. That kind of performance builds loyalty that marketing can't manufacture.

A few months ago I switched to the ASICS Novablast. Not because of a campaign or a collab or something I saw on Instagram. I had been lurking in the corners of Reddit where serious runners actually talk, and something had shifted. The people logging real miles had moved toward one brand, and all I was seeing was ASICS—Novablast, Superblast, Nimbus, Kayano—showing up in every recommendation thread while the rest of the category argued about colorways and which collab dropped last Thursday.

These weren't casual joggers or weekend warriors. These were runners who understood what I understood: that the right shoe isn't about hype or aesthetics. It's about a brand that gets what running actually is.

That made me want to understand how the beige orthopedic clearance-rack shoe, the one your dad wore with jeans, became the one serious runners trust without being asked to. How did ASICS earn its way into the most discerning conversations in running—not through louder marketing, but through something quieter and more deliberate?

The answer is a six-year strategy the athletic industry largely missed while it was happening, built on the clearest positioning decision I've seen a major brand make in years: ASICS is a running brand. Full stop. Everything else goes somewhere else.

👉 Read the full piece

Getting a ticket in Barcelona—where I live and Rosalía is from—was, apparently, not something that was going to happen. Four dates at the Palau Sant Jordi. Sold out in minutes. The kind of sold out where you refresh the page three times, then stare at your screen wondering if you imagined the window opening at all.

I was almost ready to give up. Then the plot twist: tickets existed in another city, in another country. Amsterdam. I didn't think twice about it—I just let the impulse take over and started planning. A Wednesday night in a city I'd never been to, for a concert I was supposed to see at home. It made no geographic sense and complete emotional sense, which is, I think, the only correct way to make decisions about live music.

What I didn't anticipate was that I'd walk out of a concert feeling like I'd spent two hours inside the Museo del Prado. She had created an amazing paradox: a mass spectacle that functions as legitimate fine art without ever stopping being a concert.

👉 Read the full piece

There's a specific moment when you realize a title sequence has done something to you. Not when you consciously notice the design but when you notice you're watching differently. Leaning in slightly, maybe feeling a little unsettled or even charmed. All before a single character has spoken.

For most of television history, opening credits were contractual formalities. Names on screen, theme music underneath, obligations satisfied. Some shows had iconic themes—Tony Soprano cruising through Jersey while "Woke Up This Morning" builds behind him, The Wire quietly swapping its "Way Down in the Hole" cover each season like a chapter heading—but the visuals were mostly text over footage. Mood came from the music. Visuals tagged along.

That started shifting with Mad Men. Jared Tartaroff's falling figure for Imaginary Forces told you everything about Don Draper's psychology before you'd met him. Then in 2011, Elastic built the Game of Thrones sequence and the brief changed permanently. Ramin Djawadi's theme is iconic—people still hum it unprompted—but the sequence works with the sound off. Clockwork cities assembling across a map that updated every episode based on where the story was heading. Narrative work in real time, the design itself carrying plot. After that, the question studios brought to motion designers stopped being "how should this feel" and became "what can this do."

Today a great opening sequence does more than look cool. It primes the viewer and begins the world-building before a single actor opens their mouth.

👉 Check out the Art of the Title

Sennott's entire body of work explores the exact psychological experience this campaign dramatizes. Shiva Baby, a film about performance and desperation in intimate spaces. Bottoms, which examines visibility-chasing and desire. I Love LA — an HBO show she created about the desperate anxiety of late-twenties visibility-chasing in a city where everyone performs for someone who might matter. Her comedy lives in the gap between what people perform and what they actually feel. The desperate neediness underneath the confident front.

Marc Jacobs didn't cast a celebrity who happens to be funny. They cast a writer whose entire career explores this exact register. That's not a tone you can hire someone to approximate. You either understand it or you don't.

The SubwayTakes reference in the script is the tell. That's not a brand doing research to seem online. That's a writer putting something she actually watches into her work. The difference shows.

Why it matters: Marc Jacobs gave a writer with genuine authorial voice a real brief, then got out of the way. You remember the bag. You also remember other moments from the film—the rat puppet, the invitation under the door—which means the campaign gave you more than the product and trusted that the product would benefit from the company it kept. Most brands want the story to service the product. This one let the product live inside the story.

👉 Watch the campaign