Gacha toys are catnip for kidults (image: Perry Merrity II on Unsplash)
Agencies
Former WPP CEO Mark Read is organising an invite-only conference, called Prompt, in London to bring business and marketing leaders together with AI startups. ‘What I hear from CEOs and CMOs,’ said Read, according to an article by More About Advertising, ‘is a desire not only to embrace AI but also to know who they should be talking to.’
AdAge has reported a story about Brooklyn editing house Short Ribs charging agencies $30,000-$40,000 to produce an awards case study film. It sounds like a lot of money, but when you factor in the value of awards to agencies and the amount of time that ECDs would otherwise spend crafting videos for juries — nothing changes. It’s still a ridiculous sum. That said, there are people in this industry that charge more for far less. And it’s always nice to see craft being valued. Fair play to them.
Brands
Starbucks’ Korean sales have seen a ‘very significant’ drop after fierce backlash to last week’s marketing campaign. Shinsegae Group, which owns the coffee chain in South Korea, has been heavily criticised for its ‘Tank Day’ campaign, which launched on the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, when troops and tanks were used to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations.
The head of Starbucks Korea was fired last week and a Shinsegae official this week said sales had fallen. Shinsegae is still investigating whether the campaign was an intentional reference to the massacre.
Formula 1 team Alpine will be rebranded to Gucci Racing Alpine from 2027 after the Italian fashion house signed a sponsorship deal — thought to be worth up to £112m over three years. The team will swap its traditional blue colours for black and gold. It’s the first time a luxury fashion house serves as the title partner of an F1 team, and demonstrates how the sport’s popularity, especially among young women, is strategically useful for brands wishing to sell glamour. It also shows the increasing importance of sponsorship to brands amid a fragmented media ecosystem, which you can learn more about at our next event.
Media owners
Meta has released a new group discussion app called Forum, which is formatted a lot like Reddit, with an emphasis placed on asking and answering questions. Or as one Reddit poster explained: ‘It’s basically Reddit, but exclusive to my conspiracy-theorist aunt and people trying to sell broken lawnmowers’.
While there seems little public demand for the app, Meta’s motivation is clear. It wants users to provide insights that can then be cited by its chatbot, in the same way that Reddit has become one of the most cited resources for LLMs.
Meta also confirmed this week that it will introduce add-on subscriptions for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The Plus products will provide a range of exclusive features, such as new stickers on WhatsApp or extending the life of an Instagram Story beyond 24 hours. It’s part of a trend of platforms — including Snap and X — introducing subscription services to boost predictable, recurring revenue.
Streaming viewers wait nine months longer for the return of their favourite shows than they did five years ago, according to a new report. Ampere Analysis found that the average gap between seasons of scripted programmes is 21 months — up from 12 months in 2020. The analysis of 1611 SVoD shows found that the increased delay hasn’t put viewers off — with later seasons of Severance and Wednesday increasing engagement despite hefty wait times — but the report warns that the trend risks ‘fuelling subscriber churn’.
Cyrille Bolloré has urged Universal Music Group to reject Bill Ackman’s proposed $64bn takeover due to low price and Ackman’s management style. Speaking at a shareholder meeting, Bolloré, whose family group controls a third of UMG’s shares, said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, it is as if it has been rejected’. UMG has not yet announced a decision on Ackman’s proposal but it is unlikely to go ahead without Bolloré’s approval. In April, hedge fund manager Ackman said: ‘Without Bolloré, we don’t have a transaction.’
Last month the American Prospectannounced that it would get rid of programmatic ads on the site, arguing that it is ‘built on surveillance and monopoly power: two forces that the Prospect exists to challenge’. A noble stance but also one that seems to be paying off. An article from the Columbia Journalism Review says that in the month since the change, average time spent on the Prospect site has nearly doubled.
Consumers
OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he had been ‘pretty wrong’ about AI’s impact on employment, admitting that the tech has not eliminated entry-level white collar jobs as he predicted last year. Altman said he was ‘delighted to be wrong’, with a personal experiment allowing AI to respond to emails and Slack messages proving to him that the tech is not ready to replace human workers.
Reports this month have been dominated by widespread layoffs in the tech sector, and this week there’s been a big focus on the rise of NEETs. Often AI is floated as an explanation, but the Yale Budget Lab has found no significant changes in occupational mix or unemployment duration in high AI-exposure jobs since late 2022 when ChatGPT launched.
With no AI-induced job apocalypse on the horizon, adults will be free to continue buying toys. Circana data shows that 28% of global toy purchases are now made by adults for themselves, and The Financial Times this week covered the Japanese craze of ‘gacha gacha’ capsule toys. The picture painted is of childless ‘kidults’ refusing to give up the hobbies of their youth, and the market for the mini toys has more than quadrupled since 2021, to $1.2bn last year, according to the Japan Gacha Gacha Association. The country has struggled with declining birth rates — half as many babies being born in Japan compared to 40 years ago — but adults are keeping the toy industry alive.
