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I watched the Louis Theroux manosphere doc this week and I am still thinking about it.

Not because of the men he found but because of what made them possible. These platforms didn't set out to radicalise anyone. They just optimised for attention, and some very cynical people figured out how to use that first.

It's a good reminder of what attention actually costs when nobody's asking that question.

On a lighter note, we posted our Airbnb spec ad this week. There are a lot of AI spec ads floating around lately. Some are great. Most blur together. We just wanted to remember what it feels like to work without guardrails.

The brief wrote itself once we found the tension: solo travel is booming, loneliness among adults is quietly at a crisis point, and over 70% of travelers want to know who else is coming on an experience before they book. Airbnb was sitting on all of that and not saying anything about it. So we did.

A brief nobody asked us to write, built entirely from footage strangers shot for completely different reasons. The full piece walks through how we got there.

If you've got a brand you love and want to see what we'd do with it — send it through.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

I deleted Instagram fourteen months ago and it's one of the best decisions I've made. What's interesting is that it made me feel bad in a way I couldn't metabolise — a specific kind of hollow. Not sad, not angry, just slightly diminished every single time I opened it, and eventually I decided that particular transaction wasn't working in my favour anymore.

Leaving required something I didn't fully appreciate at the time. It required having lived before social media existed and having a before to compare the feeling to. Enough self-awareness, accumulated over enough years, to recognize what was happening to my nervous system and name it. The confidence to absorb the social cost of not being on it. All of that, and I still found it hard. For months afterward, my thumb kept moving to where the app used to live on the screen, reaching for a feeling that was always one scroll away and never quite arrived.

A thirteen-year-old boy with his first smartphone has none of that. He has an algorithm, and the algorithm got there first.

The manosphere is not a subculture anymore. It's in classrooms in Australia, Britain and America, in the phones of boys who have never heard the word but are already fluent in the language, and in the political mainstream of the most powerful country on earth, where men who traffic in its ideas have been photographed at inaugurations and welcomed into the White House. We keep discussing it as though it's still approaching, and the boys it has already reached are not waiting for us to catch up.

It enters through the reasonable door of self-improvement — fitness, financial freedom, how to carry yourself in a world that seems designed for someone else and routes the audience, gradually and deliberately, toward something called the red pill. Named from The Matrix, the idea is that you've been asleep inside a comfortable lie, and waking up means understanding that feminism stripped men of purpose and identity, that mainstream culture was always rigged against them, and that the men willing to say this are simply the only honest ones in the room. Andrew Tate sits at the top of this world — the man who took an ideology quietly growing in the corners of the internet and dragged it, by sheer force of provocation, into the mainstream. His name is known by parents who have never opened TikTok, discussed in schools, in parliaments, in courtrooms.

This ideology has been growing in the specific places mainstream culture abandoned — in the loneliness of young men, in the collapse of the structures that used to tell a boy who he was and what his life was for, in the moments when the algorithm knows more about what you need than anyone who loves you does.

Louis Theroux has always had a rare gift. He doesn't shout, doesn't attack, but simply observes and asks quiet questions until people reveal who they actually are. In Inside the Manosphere, which arrived on Netflix this week, that approach exposes something deeply uncomfortable: not just the men he finds in Ibiza, Miami and New York, but the world that made them possible and the platforms that made them rich.

Harrison Sullivan, HSTikkyTokky to his 240,000 followers, lives in Spain because he crashed a McLaren in Surrey and decided sunshine beat jail. He sells boys investment products the FCA has flagged as illegal and profits from OnlyFans creators while telling his audience that women who do OnlyFans repulse him. Myron Gaines, who hosts Fresh and Fit, tells Theroux he can't be a misogynist because he loves women and understands them, then becomes visibly uncomfortable the moment Theroux asks his girlfriend a single gentle question about their relationship. He ends the conversation before she can finish her thought. Justin Waller, who has a partner, two children, a third on the way, and a philosophy he calls one-way monogamy, changes the subject when Theroux observes this seems considerably riskier for her than for him. The camera stays on her face for a moment after he does.

For all the talk of leading men, the content is overwhelmingly about women — rating them, ranking them, resenting them — which is a peculiar preoccupation for men who claim to have transcended them entirely. The more they speak, the more obvious it becomes: the confidence is performative. Real strength doesn't need to shout this loudly or this constantly. The loudest voices in this world are so often its most fragile.

👉 Read the full analysis

Spec ads have been a thing in the production and agency world for as long as I can remember — filmmakers and creative teams building unsolicited work for brands they admire, partly as a portfolio play, partly because client work has guardrails and sometimes you just need to remember what happens when you drive without them. We've been wanting to do one for a while at Lento, and when we finally carved out the space between client projects, we decided to do it right. Not a quick edit over a weekend. Not a sizzle reel with a logo slapped on at the end. A full campaign — strategy, creative brief, storyboard, produced anthem film — for Airbnb Experiences, built with zero production budget and no original footage.

The constraint was intentional. We wanted to see if we could build something that felt like a real campaign from the thinking stage through to a finished film, using only stock and archival footage never shot for our story. Every clip in the final piece was made by someone else for a completely different purpose — a salsa class filmed as a travel vlog, hostel rooftop b-roll from a cinematography reel, a group cooking class documented by someone who was probably trying to sell cookware. The challenge was turning those disconnected fragments into something that felt unified, emotionally coherent, and true to how Airbnb should show up right now. Watch it below!

👉 See our creative process

In 2017, a 28-year-old rapper walked into an Under Armour meeting and left with something no musician had negotiated before — an ownership stake in a publicly traded company, full creative control over a sneaker designed from scratch, and equity that appreciated with the stock price. Most people in that room had heard his music. Few understood what they were dealing with.

A$AP Rocky spent his teenage years on Tumblr studying fabric construction and the architectural logic of Rick Owens draping — a second education, invisible to everyone watching the music. By the time Chanel named him their first-ever male ambassador in November 2025 (for a brand that doesn't make menswear, shot by Michel Gondry on Manhattan streets), it wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention. He'd been following creative director Matthieu Blazy from Bottega Veneta — not the brand, the designer. That's a different kind of loyalty.

The full piece breaks down exactly how the model works across three partnerships — Guess, PUMA, Under Armour — and why scarcity, when it's built on genuine expertise rather than manufactured mystery, compounds instead of fades.

👉 Read the full analysis

A man sits on a mountain of 22,353 spoons. They're real — production couldn't source enough in one city and had to send runners across the filming location to find the rest. The man on top looks entirely at peace with this.

Graza launched in 2022 without a media budget. Handwritten notes to influencers, product seeded to pet stores and toy shops on the theory that those customers cook. Sold out DTC in a day. Whole Foods called. Four years later: fifth-largest olive oil brand in the US, 28,000 retail doors, almost nothing spent on paid media. The squeeze bottle was the ad. Every oil-in-pan TikTok shot had one, and a neon green squeeze bottle on someone's counter said more about their taste than any campaign could.

Mayo doesn't work like that. Hellmann's has 150 years and every diner table in America. You can't seed your way past that. So nice&frank went looking for real numbers: 150 formulas, tested more than 150 times each. Someone did the maths. 22,500 spoons. One tester who sniffs, one who tastes — in the spots, they're twins. The precise olive harvest window becomes a seesaw. The absurdism isn't invented. It's what genuine obsession looks like when you refuse to make it cinematic.

Why it matters: Most brands in Graza's position would have made the olive farm video. Good light, wooden boards, someone with cheekbones explaining sourcing. Brand director Kali Shulklapper saw it immediately and killed it before it existed. The 'Seriously Serious' platform they built instead does something harder — it puts quality and personality in the same frame without either eating the other. The spoon mountain is the argument: we care this much, and we're not going to be boring about it. At 22,353 deep, that's a defensible position.

👉 Watch the campaign