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I was at an entrepreneur event last week when someone showed me the latest marketing innovation they were using to promote their brand: AI-generated UGC. And it made me feel genuine unease with his enthusiasm.

The entire value of user generated content is that people trust it because they know nobody's getting paid. The moment a brand manufactures it, that's gone. It's just an ad with a different label.

Reddit works for the same reason. People still go there to find recommendations because they know the person posting isn't on a payroll. TikTok Shop is proving the same point at scale — two thirds of consumers now use it as their primary product discovery engine because the recommendations feel real. Google just announced Universal Cart embedding commerce into Search, YouTube and Gemini around the same insight: people buy from people they trust aren't being paid to sell to them.

Which is what makes the gap so expensive. The content is already being made — customers filming themselves, posting honest opinions, recommending products to people who actually trust them. Most brands are missing the majority of it because there's no system to find it, score it, or put it to work.

We take a look a we look at Archive, the platform helping brands do exactly that — and the results from the brands that have already built the operation are hard to argue with.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

There is a coordinator somewhere inside a marketing department right now screenshotting tagged posts into a Google Drive folder with no naming convention, no usage rights attached, and no record of whether any of it has ever converted a single buyer. This is not a small brand fumbling through its first year. This is how UGC gets handled inside marketing departments at brands you would recognise.

The gap between how brands talk about customer content and how they actually manage it is one of the more embarrassing open secrets in marketing. Everyone agrees it outperforms studio-produced ads. The data on that has been settled for years. What hasn't been solved is the operation — the capture, the scoring, the rights, the deployment. Most brands are still doing that part manually, which means most brands are missing the majority of what their customers are already making about them.

We spent time this week with three brands that have actually built the infrastructure, all of them using Archive — a platform that captures tagged and untagged customer content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, scores it by performance, and turns a chaotic pile of clips into a ranked, searchable library the team can actually use.

Ketone IQ ran a two-week test and came out with 29% more revenue from content sitting unused in their library. She's Birdie got $10,000 a month back in production costs from material their community had already made for free. POPFLEX found out Taylor Swift had been wearing their product through Archive — not through a publicist, not through a tagged post anyone happened to catch.

👉 Read the full piece

Maude makes a candle designed to smell like the Yorkshire moors. You can buy the matching sex oil. Both are officially licensed Wuthering Heights merchandise — tied to a 2026 film of an 1847 novel about a man so warped by class humiliation he ruins three generations out of spite. By the time the candles hit Bloomingdale's, the only thing not collaborating with Wuthering Heights was Wuthering Heights.

Crocs put donuts on your feet. Arc'teryx set off fireworks on a sacred Tibetan mountain. Cheez-It made Baconator crackers. Walk into any shop right now and try to find a product that isn't collaborating with something.

The move used to be a shortcut. McDonald's couldn't buy Gen Z credibility, so it rented Travis Scott for a month and sales swung from an 8.7% drop to a 4.6% gain. The industry watched that work and decided the trick was the two logos meeting — not the cultural transfer that made them necessary to each other. Now everyone's doing the move. Nobody's doing the math.

This week's piece breaks down why the collaboration playbook collapsed, the one question that separates a real partnership from marketing theatre, and why somewhere in a warehouse there's a candle that smells like a moor nobody has ever stood on.

👉 Read the full piece

My best friend was traveling to Asia, and since I'm currently living in Indonesia and she was flying literally millions of kilometers to get here, I figured I could use a few days off to meet her in Thailand. I told myself I was going for her. You think you're going for the beaches. You tell your team it's a "recharge." But the moment I hit the humidity of Bangkok, I understood why I'd really come. I went for the food.

I found the true power of branding in places that looked like they hadn't seen a paint job since the late nineties. And honestly? That's the point. We live in a world that's getting more homogeneous by the day — every café, every hotel lobby, every brand refresh trending toward the same safe, palatable nowhere. These stalls don't do that. They look exactly like what they are, for exactly the people they serve. That's not a lack of branding. That's branding that actually knows itself.

It's also why I love travelling so much. Walking through the streets — the sights, the sounds, the colours, the completely different relationship with typography, the logos that were never designed by an agency — all of it goes into the bank. That's how you build taste. You can't develop a reference library sitting at your desk.

👉 Check out the travel design diary

A giant baby appears at a bedroom window and a couple's careless decision detonates into a full-blown monster movie tearing through Sydney. That's how Four Seasons opens "The Rise of the STIs" — and it's the first sex-health campaign in a decade that Gen Z might actually choose to watch.

The numbers behind it are grim: only 16% of young Australians have ever been tested for an STI, and syphilis and gonorrhea cases have more than doubled. A decade of guilt and moralising got us here. Four Seasons threw all of it out and made something weirdly entertaining instead — AI-generated monsters with a deliberate early-90s clumsiness, grotesque enough to register, charming enough to hold.

Why it matters: AI didn't make the idea — it made the idea possible. Cinematic monster sequences through a major city used to be locked behind budgets only category leaders could afford. Now a challenger brand's ambition can outrun its spend, which quietly rewrites the rules for everyone competing against bigger players. And it poses a sharper question to every brand, government, and NGO still writing briefs on cold data: if entertainment is now the only reliable way into Gen Z health communication, what happens to the ones who haven't figured that out yet?

👉 Watch the campaign