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Three separate calls this past fortnight, all circling the same question: how do we get found on ChatGPT? Not Google. ChatGPT. A year ago nobody was asking me that. Now it's the thing keeping brand leaders up, and honestly, I understand why — because somewhere along the way it became my search too. I can't remember the last time I typed something into Google with any real hope. I just ask, and I take the answer.

Which got faintly absurd a few months back. My wife and I set up a garden, and there I was one Saturday crouched over the tomatoes, phone out, photographing a sad-looking leaf to ask ChatGPT what was eating it. Dirt on my hands, asking a chatbot about my own soil. I'd gone outside to get away from the screen and brought it straight back out with me.

Away from the desk, it's been late nights in front of the World Cup — the European kickoff times are brutal and I've paid for every one the next morning, but I wouldn't trade a single one. There's still nothing like it for pulling people together. What's caught my eye is who's actually winning the marketing: not the official sponsors who paid hundreds of millions, but the brands who didn't. Levi's turned a covered-up logo into a global talking point. Heinz got its stadium ketchup taped over and spun it into an "Unofficial Stadium Ketchup," then a six-pack with Heineken. The non-sponsors have pulled nearly double the engagement of the brands who wrote the cheque. Guerilla marketing is back. 

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Somewhere this week, a customer of yours skipped Google entirely, asked ChatGPT what to buy, and acted on the answer it gave — no links, no page of blue results, just a confident recommendation and a decision made. They never saw the brands left out of the response. Maybe yours was one of them. And here's the part that should keep you up: you'd have no way of knowing.

That's the quiet problem facing every brand right now. The front door to discovery has moved, and most marketing teams are still standing at the old one, optimising for a page their customers have started to skip. AI and its agents drove an estimated $262 billion in retail last holiday season, and the buyers arriving from those answers converted 31% higher than any other organic channel — a channel almost nobody is tracking, let alone trying to win. Ranking on page one and being visible to your customers used to be the same thing. They aren't anymore.

The uncomfortable bit is how few people have noticed. Only 16% of brands are watching this at all, which means the position is still open — for now. Citation authority compounds the way domain authority once did in the early days of search: slowly, then all at once, and then it's settled. The brands earning it this year will be very hard to shift in two. The ones that wait will spend a fortune trying to buy back a visibility they could have owned for the cost of paying attention early.

👉 Read the full piece

A couple of months ago we started renting a plot on the outskirts of Barcelona, a strip of land shared with five other families and a man named Román who has firm opinions about tomatoes and looser ones about property lines. I go on Saturday mornings. I kneel in rows that are never quite straight and pull snails off the lettuce one at a time, and somewhere around the third row my phone goes off in my back pocket — a calendar reminder for a meeting I meant to decline. I read it with dirt under my nails, standing in the mud, deciding whether to answer.

I went to a garden looking for distance from the inbox. What I got was the inbox, outdoors.

I understand the pull of going further than a shared allotment. My feeds lately are full of farm stays on the Costa Brava with names like Casa Tierra and Finca Lenta, four days without a signal for the price of a flight to Lisbon. There's no wifi. You milk something, learn the name of a heritage grain, go to bed when it gets dark because there's nothing else to do, and come home talking about it the way people used to talk about ayahuasca, except the substance now is dirt. The photos are always the same, too: a single tomato on a wooden board, soil still on its skin, posted the second the phone finds signal again, battery already down to 9%. I have caught myself halfway through a booking more than once.

None of this is new. We've been selling the countryside back to city people since the Romantics decided shepherds were more honest than bankers. But the current version feels like it's answering a different question, and it took kneeling in my own mud with a calendar invite glowing in my pocket to work out which one. It has very little to do with the soil.

👉 Read the full breakdown

Design has spent the last decade sanding away every edge until nothing is left to catch on: aluminum chassis, sterile glass, palettes with the human error scrubbed clean out. This month's list is a small revolt against that smoothness, and it starts with a bar of soap someone split by hand using a piano wire, so no two bars are the same weight and the corners only round off the longer you hold one under water.

The rest of the list keeps making the same case with harder evidence. Frama topped its new fragrance bottle with a solid marble cap heavy enough to complicate freight costs and bottling-line machinery, purely so it lands on a nightstand with a thud that feels permanent. Leica cut the screen out of its newest camera altogether, betting that not being able to check the shot immediately is what actually makes someone a better photographer.

None of it is nostalgia. It's a bet that an algorithm can spit out a thousand flawless mockups a minute, but it will never explain why a person would choose the harder, slower, heavier way to make something — and that the difference is the only thing left worth noticing.

👉 Read the full piece

A pitch meeting, a group of creatives, and a nun. Everyone in the room hedges except her — she says the word nobody else will, the bleep cuts in, and Wild's logo lands in the exact gap the word left behind. The censor isn't hiding the joke. It's delivering it.

Natural deodorant has a problem the category doesn't put in ads: most of it doesn't really hold up, and everyone who's switched knows the mid-afternoon doubt that comes with it. Brands talk refillable cases and clean scents instead. Wild built a whole commercial around saying the unsayable part out loud, four words at a time, through the one person in the room you'd least expect to say them.

Dollar Shave Club ran a version of this in 2012, when a line about their blades helped build a company that sold for a billion dollars. The swearing got the attention. The willingness to be honest in a category built on dodging the truth is what actually sold it. Wild found its own way into that same trade, funnier for arriving out of a nun's mouth.

👉 Watch the campaign