Today: the brands advertising on Substack, the newest SXSW venture, the link between Travis Kelce and cheerleaders and other things you may have missed.

By the way, I have some free gifted one-month access to the great Link in Bio newsletter. Drop a comment if you'd like it.

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1. STILL THINKING OF STARTING THAT PODCAST?

You may still have time. SXSW has announced that they will host a dedicated Podcast Festival, from March 17-20, 2027. As much as we think everyone has a podcast now, some research says the markets is expected to grow USD 12.89 billion in 2026 to USD 115.57 billion by 2035.

2. NETFLIX AND CHANEL ARE OUT HERE ADVERTISING

I wrote that Netflix ABSOLUTELY snubbed me on their sneaky campaign promoting a new show through career-focused newsletters and not long after I saw other newsletters sponsored by Chanel. If you're more newsletter than podcast, here's a great paid newsletter curriculum.

3. TRAVIS KELCE GOES BACK TO SCHOOL

If you’re not a cheer enthusiast like yours truly, you may not know that, for the longest time, despite how much money there is in college sports, athletes couldn’t sign any NIL (name, image, likeness) deals during their time.

I know this because I've been ALONE to the cheer world championships (yep) and I knew that cheer is not “considered a sport”.

Therefore, it was not governed by the N.C.A.A. So the cheerleaders did it. Livvy Dunne, who's now on Baywatch, is one of its most famous "case studies”. Much like pro athletes, student athletes tend to reach higher social media engagement rates than traditional influencers (some stats say 3.7x higher). NIL represent a $4.5 billion market opportunity.

Through this new venture between Travis, Publicis Sports and 3 Art Sports, a select group of Publicis clients will gain access to a broad NIL network. The press release also says universities and student-athletes will benefit from training and education opportunities, as well as overall guidance on branding and partnerships

4. DO YOU WANT SOME FURNITURE WITH YOUR COFFEE?

As a voracious reader, I am of course perpetually infatuated with the idea of having a cozy bookstore with a coffeeshop. So I was actually glad to hear this is sort of a phenomenon. Should I quit and live my dreams now?

5. DROWNING IN AI

I spent two days advising young people on their CVs and job search strategy for the Somerset House Upgrade Yourself festival. Every single one of them asked me how much AI was selecting their cvs. My answer was: I don't know. What I do know is that many more applications now come looking exactly the same, and everyone is overwhelmed. Since I run , I advised referrals and networking as another way in. And now the FT agrees with me. The problem, of course, is who has access to a network (also something we try to solve) since “any expansion of recommendation and referral-based hiring will probably reduce workforce diversity”. Have you noticed this, if hiring?

ONE MORE THING

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Isabel

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But I also said that building a business involves creative thinking.

Since I started working with the Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator as the lead coach, my excitement for entrepreneurs working to solve problems in our industry has grown deeper.

So here are some businesses I've been paying attention to.

The throughline is that they all started (or still are) quite small in operations, testing, iterating, and solving an issue/ tackling something they're passionate about.

Do with this what you will (work with them, invest, partner, be inspired…)

SOFTSIDE

As someone who came from the music industry, I LOVE this idea and see it as an exciting solution to the parasocial relationships we develop with personalities across the board. This was even portrayed on HACKS, when Deborah Vance wants to stop her fans from creating “illegal merch" about her on Etsy. Softside makes that legal. Fans design it, artists approve them, production is on-demand, and the creator gets royalty. I can see this expanding to sports, podcasts and even booktok.

SHEIN COULD NEVER

I have problems with fashion. Shopping is frustrating. Everything is plastic and becomes landfill. I have no clue how to solve it (beyond our own personal agency of not purchasing that much and refusing to buy fast fashion). But I thoroughly enjoyed discovering the slow-paced (and profitable) idea from LilyEve, a Parsons grad who began by cutting up her parents’ vintage Hermès towels into face masks to raise money for FoodBank NYC. The demand for the masks increased, and when looking for someone to help her with production locally she met Michel (89). Definitely made me think of that craft story…

FULLHOUSE

If Letterboxd and IMDB had a baby for the theatre world. Fullhouse functions as an interactive digital programme, part diary and part archive. You track every show you see, leave reviews, dig through full production credits, follow the artists and venues you want to see again. The goal is to ensure independent theatre gets seen. Emma, the founder, wrote an EdFringe guide for.

KIDS GROW: SO DO THESE CLOTHES

As a proud aunt, I'm always looking for gifts for my niece and nephews. I kept getting ads for this company, which, after some research, I found out that was born out of London's RCA. I love this idea: clothes that stretch with the kids. Made by a small team that is carefully considering materials and resources.

MY SECOND BRAIN

Full disclosure that I have paid to be a founding user of Sublime, but I am obsessed with it. It’s my second brain on the internet and the best couple hundred dollars I've ever invested. has a special way to view the world of tech, content and curation.

THE NEW MTV

If you didn’t grow up rushing home to see MTV shows and the start of Laguna Beach, then I am sorry for your loss. You cannot convince me those weren’t the glory days! A music video by Blink-182, making fun of the Backstreet Boys? My Super Sweet Sixteen? I was a Pitchfork reader, an Almost Famous stan. Who wouldn’t want to be a music critic?

That's why I am hope the folks behind Track Star keep getting it right. I’m sure you’ve seen their videos. It's a promo machine for artists and even Kamala Harris stopped by. Musicians say they “sold more records from going on Track Star than any other piece of press ”. Jack spoke plenty about making this work and the money behind it until Gus Wenner put seven figures into it. Gus = son of The Rolling Stone founder.

IS THIS THE FUTURE OF MAKEUP?

Renzoe Box is a refillable palette that holds full-size products from a range of brands cream and powder in the same case without cross-contamination, and they claim that it cuts single-use plastic by up to 80%. It also means that if you like your blush from a brand and the concealer from another, you have one place to store it all. I could see brands themselves adapting this “build-a-bear” concept and saving on packaging.

KEEP IT LOCAL

Anyone who knows me knows I consume a LOT of information. And if you’re on Substack, I am sure you’ve heard of mostly NYC-focused bestseller . In a world of global news, there’s something to be said about local journalism, because those are the things that affect us daily. Which is why I’m bullish on ‘s and his one-person-one-city beat: “Within four months of launching the newsletter, the news outlet hit its three-year targets"

FROM DIOR TO WALKERS

We're living longer. Populations are ageing. And not a lot of people seem to be creating for that. A category ripe for innovation.

That’s where Zeal comes in. Co-founder Georgia designed for brands like Disney and Dior, but when it came time to find a walker for a family member… nothing sufficed. Zeal is 100% recyclable, made in Britain with a designer at the helm and developed with Formula One engineers.

MAKING SAFETY COOL (AND EASY)

You know when you're in a festival or an arena concert, and you see something is wrong? Imagine being able to alert those involved in a second, no wifi needed, with precise location? That's what Reporti is building so that alerts can be resolved in 60 seconds. They have been piloting it at Cannes Lions and more.

What other business should be on this list?

Leave a comment

As long as what you want involves a regular paycheck from a safe job, ideally one stemming from a business degree, maybe law if you really like to read, owning a house with two kids, but just two, so everyone fits comfortably in a car.

If you grew up seeing this as the model, and the artists as the “we don’t know how they make money”, it may also sound alien to you to lead a creative life…or even imagine one as possible. Like me, you will have read Just Kids, The Uncool and Life with Picasso as if they were as fantastic as The Lord of the Rings.

I have always thought that there was nothing braver than leading a creative life first. And I mean a life: not a make-a-living.

Of course, there are systemic and structural issues that allow some people to dive into a creative life more or less easily.

But I am contending with another piece of the puzzle, which is this subjective thing I’m calling courage.

Because as much as I can plan, make spreadsheets, and think about revenue streams, I find it almost impossible to say FUCK IT and lead a creative life first.

But where does my cowardice come from?

I was first confronted with that at age 18, when I interned at an art gallery.

Artists would come by, the gallerist would tell me about the prices, and the artist would tell me about their next series… even if they hadn’t sold a thing.

I’d spend hours in the storage room, sorting out documents, loving some works and hating others, feeling personally offended when someone would reject an artwork because it didn’t match their client’s sofa. I didn't understand why some were more prestigious than others, but I knew what I liked and what I didn’t. I definitely did not understand how these artists paid their bills. What if they wanted to go skiing one day? That’s expensive! Retirement plans? One must save for that. What if their dog got sick?

ANXIETY.ANXIETY.ANXIETY.ANXIETY.ANXIETY.ANXIETY.

Still, the art gallery was my portal into creative circles, allowing me to move from fashion to film, to more commercial-minded creatives in advertising, to theatre and music.

Learning the names of directors, artists and movements took me years.

I used to feel incredibly dumb around my friends, who had opinions based on someone's “body of work”. I never stopped to consider that there was once a day when they did not know who Bergman was either.

I wanted to be in that space, but I didn’t have creative skills at hand. I didn’t think I was naturally good at something. I can't draw. I failed calligraphy (yes, my age is showing). I didn't have a dream to be an actor or fashion designer. I assumed those were required to be a creative person. I assumed that if I sucked at a 5k, then I shouldn't even bother running.

I played Vivaldi in my piano lessons, but what I really liked was playing songs from The Lion King. I couldn’t play the piano in front of anyone either: I’d freeze. Sure, I wanted to be Mick Jagger when I was nine, but how would one do that with asthma, a nasal voice and stage fright? An art teacher once threw my ceramics in the trash. That probably didn’t help.

So, I convinced myself I could not be a creative person and used the little business acumen and “pragmatic brain” that I inherited from my parents to circumvent this.

I was very ill growing up, so I knew how to plan for things. Always have a backup EpiPen, medication, a system. Planning for the worst served me well as a producer. And for over two decades, that’s what I’ve done. Always a little frustrated because, if I am honest, and I am trying to do that here (not to my therapist, to whom I give a lot of my hard-earned money), I don’t think this is enough.

A professor once told me that only one thing defines an artist: that they’d die if they couldn’t create. I don’t know if that’s me. I don’t have this one form of creativity I HAVE to do. These definitions may apply to Mozart and Lydia Davis, but not me. I have always been too concerned with what could go wrong… and having enough medicine.

The Art Gallery Director used to explain to me why something was more valuable than another. It had been purchased by a collection. It was shown at a museum. This rationalisation of the value of a creative product has somehow led me to believe that I must justify any of my immediate creative desires and impulses with solid, data-led, business-minded arguments.

I met someone on a Greek island who moved there and decided to open a bookshop. They’re open 7-11 pm. They started a literary journal. Hardly the Forbes 30 Under 30, IPO unicorn. They seemed quite happy. I guess they just said: why not me, why not here, and why not now?

The people I see as “creative” seem to live life in love with the act of creating. They don’t need to justify it. They create just because.

I never question why my favourite authors or makers created the things I love.

And that's the courage I am mentioning.

Even if you do it after your 9-5. Even if you change your whole life to do it.

Still, you need to say “I'm going to do this and take this seriously because I am creative and this is my practice.

When my friend who’s doing an MFA doubted herself, I said: you write, so you’re a writer. In the same vein of: you run, so you’re a runner. I wrote a whole essay on craft and process. And yet: I struggle to apply any of it to myself.

I have GUMPTION, but not GUTS.

Perhaps gumption, common sense and entrepreneurship - the things I have often been rewarded for - are the antonyms to creativity.

Sure, running a business involves creative thinking. But that’s not a creative practice. Perhaps that’s what’s hurting me.

Being surrounded by creatives is not the same as creating.

I have been quoted with saying that our work should support your life goals, not the other way around. But that’s easier said than done if you’re like me, someone who was raised to have the foot firmly planted on “reality”, security and a budget. It feels like there's a creative creature stuck in a cage, built by Excel columns, plastered with “AI will ruin the world” wallpaper.

Why do I seem to need a scientifically peer-reviewed paper to justify my own creative practice?

What’s the point of having that huge mattress under a trampoline if you’re never going to jump? Is there a different way to claim your creative self? Or do we all have to just jump, sometime?

Today, a lot of fashion content - fashion and slop, fashion and funding, fashion and fraud.

Connect with me here

1. SHOULD WE RUN ON THAT?

Nike athlete LeBron James said the brand should “get back into the roots”. It got loads of pushback in the comments with people asking Nike to drop its prices. Then, the latest Nike x Skims collab was getting roasted and justly criticized.

Meanwhile, this interview with Adidas on their world cup strategy landed on a point I agree with (and probably so does LeBron): athletes (especially women athletes) are KEY players for sports brands. They're doing the sport. I'd bet they have informed opinions on the design too.

We are very excited about the Women’s World Cup: our athlete roster for the event is unrivalled. People vote with their wallet, so sell-through is always one clear indicator, but it's not the only thing we look at. Our mission is to be the best sports brand in the world, and we like to say best is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room

2. MAYBE NIKE SHOULD GO ON REDDIT

Is anyone else getting Instagram ads for advertising on Reddit?? There's something in the air. A few weeks ago, Reddit turned up on a Bravo show, because Georgia from Next Gen NYC is a huge fan of the platform. And then I read this, by and was fascinated by what's happening in there with brands trying to hack it. They also mention Backrooms, of course (which is another pickle entitrely).

3. HOMERIC MEMES

Is it even possible to write anything without mentioning Chris Nolan? I am not a Nolan fan (sue me) and I did not remember much of The Odyssey from school. I will admit that a HUGE reason for me to want to see it were the memes. But, if you're also a nerd and would like to know what was changed and what wasn’t, this convo is great. I also appreciated this take and the most necessary piece of journalism around this.

You may also have heard that Emily Wilson wrote such a scathing review of it that it crashed the website when she first published it. I, for one, appreciate all the discourse and think that discussing film, history and literature is great for us. On that note: I loved this book, which I read inspired by this experience.

4. THE SLOPFICATION OF FASHION

Amy Odell, who writes BackRow, penned this piece on the Slopfication of Fashion, which reminded me of that whole thing I wrote around craft. It always makes me mad to see more and more fast fashion.

The rise of the algorithm-designer and the fall of independent brands represent the latest stage of the financialization of fashion, the triumph of money over art and craft.

5. FROM PHIA TO FUNDING

Business funding has some new looks.

First, Phia (before the fraud) garnered attention by announcing its backers like a Coachella line up. Then, Reformation (which at this point should probably stop saying it is sustainable as they were targeting a $1 billion valuation) did a video referencing that iconic Wolf of Wall Street bathtub scene. They got to $886 million.

Not long after, I encountered this post on how GlowBar went about fundraising and it's possibly, from all of those things, the most honest tale of all.

ONE MORE THING

Thanks for reading,

Isabel

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If you're reading this: CONGRATS!!!

You're doing MUCH more reading than everyone else.

Today we’re talking about words. Words that make money 💸 and those that don't. Written words. Spoken words. And why we should care.

Before you scroll, do this and save yourself.

Write to me here.

1. HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL NEWSLETTER

Beehiiv pulled data off thousands of paid newsletters. Paid subscription revenue hit $19M in 2025, up 138%. What does that mean to you? Since 2024, the median price has been $10 a month. Niche beats size: Matt Brown’s Extra Points has 27,000 subscribers, 2,000 of them paying, and makes over $200k a year covering the business of college sports because no one was onto it. Niche & retention is where the money is. How do you fare? Look at the data from your own sector as they can vastly differ. Execution and paywalls matter. As with anything, you should focus on what your reader gets.

2. IF THIS MADE YOU WANT TO START A NEWSLETTER

Substack just rolled out tons of new tools such as perks ( is in the announcement!). The one thing I’m waiting for: kill the “follow” and ensure only subscribers (free or paid) read your work.

3. HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THE LITERACY CRISIS

Seems ironic to write about this, but here we are. Heated Rivalry was a hit, they said, because it had such a loyal book-made fan base. Dua Lipa has a library. Dior made book totes. And in 2025, UK publishing hit a record £7.4 billion in 2025. And YET. The Atlantic says reading is ending: fewer than half of US adults read a book in 2022 and Americans now bet more often than they read. That publishing record? The growth was in audio and digital. America isn't illiterate, the piece argues. It's postliterate.

4. SHOULD YOU FIRE YOUR AGENT?

A piece about gatekeepers. Gabriel Hart signed with an agent in 2021, got 23 rejections over 11 months, then got ghosted. He self-published the book himself. “One un-agented author says she scans the acknowledgements page of every book she reads, fuming with jealousy and taking mental notes on names. (You can do that for free by pinching to zoom on Publishers Marketplace screenshots.)”. Go the self-publishing route, one expert warns, and you’re just “trading Big Five for Big Tech.”

5. THIS DOESN'T LOOK POSITIVE

Search is dying, AI is scraping your site, and 81% of teens now get theirs from influencers. The NYT editor Joe Kahn says they must met them on video, podcasts and newsletters that live entirely off your own platform. Refining text while everyone’s habits shift is, in his words, “head in the sand.”

ONE MORE THING

Thanks for reading,

Isabel

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This week, we've seen a lot of chatter on AI backlash, coming especially after the announcement of the A24 x DeepMind colab. I read deals and press releases so you can form an informed opinion beyond the keyboard warriors.

Today's briefing includes:

• New AI deals you should know about, within tech and the creative industries

• What we SHOULD be angry about when it comes to AI

• AI in film festivals, and why that Sam Altman film was cancelled by Amazon.

• Understanding the “AI race" and the current so-called backlash

• A £10m funding pot in case you want to be the change

• How AI affects your security and steps to safeguard yourself against hackers

THE CASE FOR THE BACKLASH (?)

Around 40% of voters want AI banned from most industries, protests have scuppered nearly $100bn of US data-centre projects, and warring AI megadonors just poured tens of millions into a Manhattan congressional race. The Economist’s headline reads as the backlash is only getting started, but if you read it through, you'll see they're not actually in favour of the backlash and halting AI. And they're very concerned about the US losing to China in the AI race. More on this later.

CATE BLANCHETT LAUNCHED A TOOL TO PROTECT YOUR IDENTITY FROM AI, A registry where you allow OR prohibit AI use of your name, face, voice, likeness and movement. “Your identity is your IP in the age of AI.” Which is clearly needed, if it works, since nearly 1000 actors signed an open letter against AI voice cloning of CHILD ACTORS, and they alleged that a "major studio has responded with an attitude of take it or leave it”

AI STOCKS TUMBLE AS THE MONEY GETS NERVOUS. Tech stocks fell as corporate customers rethink their AI spending; Apple is raising prices on Macs and iPads as AI demand drives up chip costs; and OpenAI is leaning toward delaying its IPO to next year. Money, not industry feeling, seems to be the only thing that could properly stop or rejig the AI world. Who's surprised?

THE LOUDEST ONLINE HATE: indie-film darling A24 teamed up with Google DeepMind, and the comments became a bloodbath: “Do you know your fanbase?. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it is, as far as the press release, a research partnership. Google gets no access to A24’s library or data, and there’s no mandate for any filmmaker to use anything. A24’s defence: “We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines… we want to dictate what tools get built for artists rather than having tools handed to them.” Worth remembering, Disney licensed characters to OpenAI, Lionsgate is in bed with Runway, and Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI startup.

MEET THE REAL ANTI AI WARRIORS

Music critic Ted Gioia thinks AI supporters are shrinking toward “less than ten per cent of the populace — roughly the size of a crazy cult,” and that “you should expect the tech backlash to escalate further.” He says this ends unhappily for Silicon Valley. There are some absolutely baller moves in this piece on how people are ” poisoning" AI, with artists deliberately lacing their tracks with data designed to corrupt any model that scrapes them.

That is not surprising, considering Google argues YouTube’s terms of service hand it a broad license to train AI on anything uploaded straight to the platform, which means the indie artists who used YouTube to “level the playing field” are getting scraped, while labels and publishers often negotiate their own deals. A lawsuit claims Google’s Lyria 3 model was trained on YouTube songs with no payment to the artists.

on the other hand..

MOISES: THE BRAZILIAN AI THE MUSIC INDUSTRY WELCOMED. music.ai Born in Brazil in 2019, now $40m raised and 70 million users seem to be welcomed by the industry. Why might that be? It is trained only on licensed content, “tools, not replacements” as a stated value, ethical partners only.

BIG TECH (AND BIG MONEY) DOES NOT CARE

Amazon quietly dumped Luca Guadagnino’s nearly-finished film about Sam Altman’s 2023 firing. Some may wonder how much Amazon, a tech power and major player in the current A.I. arms race, was interested in poking a bear like Altman, who wields enormous power and has many key allies. Earlier this year, Amazon and OpenAI announced a massive strategic partnership. The deal included a $50 billion investment in OpenAI by Amazon. You may remember that we shared Ronan Farrow's profile on Sam Altman before.

AI IS EVERYWHERE

AN AI FILM PREMIERED AT TRIBECA, and a sculptor’s film became the first AI-assisted animation at Cannes. Márcia Mayer, ex-Pixar, thinks AI is a tool to cross thresholds you couldn’t before. They still had a crew of 45 people on the project. She quotes Björk: “You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.”

FRESH FROM CANNES LIONS, a big question was on everyone's mind: how do you influence an AI model? Once Google serves an AI summary above the search results, a Fortune 500 brand can go commercially invisible overnight. So OpenAI pitched ads inside ChatGPT, Adobe paid $1.9bn for Semrush to make brands “visible” to models, and Profound hit a $1bn valuation just for tracking how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini describe your brand.

LINKEDIN + ADOBE LAUNCH A GLOBAL AI-SKILLS INITIATIVE: Marketing job postings demanding AI literacy are up 113% year over year.

CANVA GROW 2.0 builds, launches and optimises your ads in one place.

TIKTOK’S SYMPHONY AGENT will shortlist creator videos about your brand for you.

WIMBLEDON launched an AI fan experience for the Championships.

🌍 ABOUT THAT AI RACE I MENTIONED

That first article on The Economist says that if America chokes its own AI, it could “cede the global frontier… to authoritarian China". So, less about AI and more about power.

The US ordered Anthropic to block non-Americans from its top models, Mythos and Fable. Within the fortnight, Tokyo’s Sakana launched “Fugu” advertising “frontier capability without the risk of export controls,” China’s 360 unveiled a rival, and the US allowed a partial release of the model it had just restricted.

A journalist at Wired, however, met with China's AI experts and guess what? THEY'RE ALSO FREAKING OUT! The sessions were nervous, circling things like recursive self-improvement (models rewriting their own code to get better, indefinitely) and humanoid robots. Chinese open-weight models are popular with US researchers, and both sides are stuck on the same unanswered question: how to keep these models open enough to push science forward without handing hackers a cyber-weapon?

Meanwhile,in London, the AI scene traces back to Demis Hassabis keeping DeepMind in the city after selling it to Google in 2014, but “the most advanced AI is built by a handful of American companies, on American soil, under American law, and what the rest of us are permitted to do with it can change on a Friday afternoon.” The one homegrown long shot (Cosine) is racing to train a “sovereign” model on $15m.

There’s still ONE thing missing from this conversation, in my humble opinion: and it's about WHO owns AI. Mariana Mazzucato argues that government funding was essential to develop the INTERNET and other key technologies: Where would Google be today without the state-funded investments in the internet, and without the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that funded the discovery of its own algorithm?

WHAT WE SHOULD BE ANGRIER ABOUT

AI IS GETTING WOMEN WRONG. Of 133 AI systems studied, 44% showed gender bias; ask a model to finish a sentence starting with someone’s gender and about 1 in 5 responses come back sexist. Of 138 countries, only 24 even mention gender in their AI strategy.

ASSUME YOU WILL BE HACKED. AI has collapsed the time to exploit a known software bug from over 700 days in 2020 to about 44 in 2025. The realistic posture now is “assume you’ll be compromised, and limit the damage.” Here's a quick to-do list if you're freaking out

• Use a password manager, and a unique password everywhere.

• Two-factor on your email first — app or hardware key, not SMS.

• Treat every email and DM as untrusted.

• Update your devices the day the update drops.

• Keep less cash in your day-to-day account, and hand less data to every form and free trial — the weak link is usually some third party you forgot you signed up for.

MAYBE YOU CAN BUILD THE CHANGE?

Innovate UK’s Next Wave: Breakthrough Wave 1 is putting up to £10m behind early-stage “createch” projects sitting at the intersection of the creative industries and frontier tech. UK micro-businesses and SMEs, with total project costs between £100k and £500k. Deadline: 11 August

WORK OUT WHAT YOUR AI HABIT COSTS THE PLANET: A free calculator that estimates the energy, carbon and water footprint of a single AI query.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

As usual, thanks for reading, liking and sharing

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Today we’re talking SPORTS. Cannes Lions Sports is underway. We have the FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon, a new climbing achievement, the Henley Regatta, and even Lewis Hamilton winning a race… this is very much a summer of sport.

I did not grow up sporty. I had severe asthma and other health issues, so I mostly did ballet and wheezing.

My family is a tennis family (i.e. some of them play well, everyone watches, even my ninety-four-year-old grandmother, who calls me every time she sees Matteo Berrettini because she'd like me to date him). My dad used to love F1. I was eight when Senna died. I saw Brazil win the World Cup twice.

I got into sports much later, and it saved my life — but that’s a story for another time. People who have met me since then think I am “super sporty".

Somehow, I even ended up running a climbing community (next event: 13 July), and spoke at this EPIC event hosted by

All of that to say that, when I started I LIKE NETWORKING, it already included mentors working in the crossover of sports and the creative industries, because BOTH shape culture and both need more diversity behind the scenes. I was deep into Kara Goucher lore and fast becoming a Lindsay Crouse fan. If you don’t know Lindsay Crouse, she broke a lot of news in sports.

And her ex-boyfriend dated Lady Gaga.

Sports drive tourism, economy, culture and politics, and they involve tons of creative output — from photography to apparel to branding. One issue in the industry is that, much like the creative industries, it’s not easy to break into.

There’s a massive gender gap, and even from a player’s perspective, there’s a huge chasm. By the age of 14, girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys, due to factors like social expectations, lack of investment in quality programmes, and more.

This led my co-founder and me to collaborate on a report with DEZON on such matters. You can download it here.

Below you’ll find some of my favourite reads to understand the world of sport beyond the scores.

Out of Your League writes about the intersection of queer sports and pop culture
why the NWSL’s “Call Her Daddy” partnership is worse than you think

The Sweat Lookbook: Fashion, History and Sports
A Short History of the Track Short
What the Cool Girls are Wearing to Golf

From Lindsay Crouse
I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike
We Can Do Better Than Title IX
Allyson Felix: My Own Nike Pregnancy Story

If Bravo and ESPN had a baby, it would be Impersonal Foul
Karl-Anthony Towns Created His Own Finals Reality Show

Friday Thread: an insider look into someone building their own activewear brand. Great for apparel and branding chats.
The Manufacturing Roadmap for Sportswear. When (and Why) You should choose Asia over Europe.

Over & Out is writen by the founder of Halfdays. Great insights into building the brand, entrepreneurship and community building.
the right distribution strategy? it changes.

Toni Cowan-Brown writes about the intersection of tech, F1, and culture
What tech, fashion, and Formula 1 are all chasing

Grace Cook writes about how fitness becomes culture
Is this the fitness hotel of the future?

FITT Insider: roundups on wellness trends
Mapping What’s Next in Wellness

Running Supply is one of the BEST sources on all things running
A Conversation with Biel, The Speed Project’s First Professional Athlete

A Matter of Brand: a critical look at the why behind the marketing, trends and storytelling driving the running industry.
New YouTube Strategies for Athletes and Brands

Culture of Sport writes about brands x sports
Why E1 Is One of Sport’s Most Interesting New Ventures

High Performnace Economy: written by one of the first ILN mentors and someone who REALLY knows sports, as an athlete and as a brand.
The Cover Up : Sport’s Most Undervalued Commercial Asset

Honourable mentions with great sports-adjacent content:
Highsnobiety
JingDaily
BOF
Trippin

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Isabel

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Before we dive in, a quick note: if you were at SXSW London and I should have caught your panel, reply and tell me what I missed.

Last Monday, I was in New York City. My day started with a visit to Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, housed in Andrew Carnegie’s old Manhattan mansion. Let me tell you: I was FLOORED.

Made in America is made up of large-format photographs by Christopher Payne, taken inside factories over more than a decade. It showcases the factory as a site of design and skill. He spent five years just getting access to the New York Times printing plant before he could photograph it.

Some of these places still rely on traditional handcraft; in others, engineers work alongside robots. It is quite cinematic. Sometimes tiny humans are seen next to huge engines. One photograph showed Leon Kalajian, who pleated fabric by heat-pressing it between hand-folded paper moulds, something he practised for seventy years (!!)

From there, a coffee led me to a Right to Invest event, which flips the Shark Tank logic. An entrepreneur pitches, and then they decide which investors on the panel have earned the right to put money in. The startup pitching was Act Write Here, a creative marketplace that connects actors with writers to bring stories to life through virtual performances called table reads. Much of the pitch focused on giving actors a way to keep “exercising the acting muscle”.

There was a conversation about how Spielberg and George Lucas developed technology to create content that was deemed impossible or too expensive to make. It made me so excited about the power of the creative industries! And how creatives are innovators! And how they need to be funded!

As I was leaving, I struck up a convo with someone who told me: I think we will always meet who we're supposed to meet at these events. A wink to ;)

It's with all that excitement and belief in creative power and humans connecting that I landed at SXSW London.

During Art, Culture, Authorship and Meaning, Dr Rebecca Swift, SVP Creative at Getty Images, said just because you can do something quickly doesn’t mean you should. An AI could probably generate a shot like the ones in a David Attenborough documentary in seconds. But knowing someone sat in a bush for hours, waiting for the moment, is part of what moves us.

There were questions around why and how we are investing so much, so fast, into this new technology. Why don't we try to invest A LITTLE on those already CREATING things?

If craft is value, craft has to be allowed to develop— and it is taught on the job, in the unglamorous early roles where people make mistakes, in spaces that exist for that. In the pub theatres, in apprenticeships, in training schemes, in student newspapers. Those roles and spaces are being dismantled.

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford to study computer science and joined The Stanford Daily as a tribute to his grandfather. By the end of his freshman year, his reporting helped force the president’s resignation. Baker became the youngest-ever winner of the George Polk Award and has since published a bestselling book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University. None of that exists without a student paper that provides enough support for a teenager to do consequential work.

We definitely don’t treat SPORTS in the same way

As a nerdy climber, I urge you to watch this video on why the PROCESS of trying and failing may be the reason Japan produces some of the strongest climbers out there.

It's not just CREATIVES that need process. AI needs it too.

The same short-termism that starves artists is slowing AI down inside businesses.

A recent study of AI adoption across UK creative SMEs found that innovation incentives tend to reward novel invention rather than the slower work of changing how things are made, and that private capital markets don’t consistently recognise workflow-level gains, which limits firms’ ability to scale even after something works.

And the creative industries are, for all their power, mainly built of SMEs: 93.4% of creative industries businesses are micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees, a higher share than the 89.1% across all UK businesses. How many of you, freelancers, can (due to time or financial constraints) fully learn/ integrate AI?

Despite being one of the Government’s eight key Industrial Strategy sectors, the creative industries in the UK remain one of the least well-appreciated segments of our economy.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato (who took a residency at Whitechapel Gallery, as we reported) says arts and culture get reduced to their contribution to GDP rather than their power to shape an economy, which is why cultural funding is so often the first thing cut. Both formal institutions and grassroots culture create public value, and both struggle for stable funding.

All you need to do is look at the impact artists have on every area of that suddenly becomes “wealthy.” Artists move in, an ecosystem builds, prices rise. I won’t get into gentrification here — but if that’s not the arts creating HARD ECONOMIC VALUE, I don’t know what is!

It’s not just entry-level roles. The whole thing is fragile. A new AWITA report found that nearly half of women aged 25–44 surveyed are considering leaving the arts within the next five years, with the highest rate (50.6%) among women aged 35–44, precisely the cohort expected to move into leadership roles. A 2025 survey of 1,270 UK freelancers by Freelancers Make Theatre Work found 44% earned below the national living wage in 2023–24, up from 34% the year before.

The pipeline exists: we just don’t fund it.

The Campaign for the Arts and the University of Warwick found that the UK spent about 0.46% of GDP on culture against a European average of 0.74%, ranking 22nd of 25 European OECD nations.

At SXSW, Nadia Fall OBE, artistic director of the Young Vic, described theatre — only half-jokingly — as a research and development studio for film. Give her studios some money, and she could make ten, twenty plays a year. Studios could then pick the ones that work and turn them into television and film.

It’s an IP generator. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer were both plays first. For a studio, backing that kind of development is low-risk. For the artists, the absence of it is insurmountable.

Process develops rigorous work, which allows for risk — and that thing investors love… INNOVATION.

Why are we all so quick to invest millions in AI and so reluctant to invest in the systems we already have for turning beginners into experts — and for building innovation? Even being cynical, doesn’t AI need us as the material to build its knowledge, at least for now? Yet, all we mostly hear is that artists “need" AI.

We all need more investment in risk. And as you can see above, it’s not even that risky!

According to Mazzucato, every £1 generated by arts and culture catalyses an additional £1.23 in economy-wide impact.

If there's no innovation without process and rigorous craft, then what kind of value are we even getting from these “outputs"?

And more importantly: what can we do to change this?

1. Fund paid early-career roles and entry routes

2. Reform R&D tax credits to recognise workflow transformation/adoption, not just novel invention.

3. Offer micro-grants for small and micro firms/ freelancers

4. Improve investor literacy on intangible-asset creative business models to close the finance gap

5. Build dynamic evaluation tools that capture spillovers instead of reducing culture to a GDP/cost-benefit number.

6. Treat culture as an investment and embed it across all industrial-strategy missions, not as a siloed sector. And bring artists and creators when creating the policy.

7. Secure long-term ecosystem funding for institutions, educators and artists (both formal and grassroots).

8. Connect AI adoption to workforce training and fair commissioning — clearer AI-content contract guidance, support for freelancers and workers whose roles change.

9. Invest in the arts-education pipeline (up to 93% of children are excluded from arts education in state schools for lack of funding).

10. A simple one to start now: disclose your salaries. Transparency is key to change.

Please share, discuss, drop a comment and let's connect

After a few inspiring days in NYC, an impromptu Tech Week event, and SXSW London, I regret to inform you that some of these links will likely leave you even more confused about the world we’re in. But at least we’re in it together.

As you’ll see, a lot is riding on creators still building audiences… and on trust. So if you trust me, give this a like or a share, either here or on LinkedIn. Or tell me what you disliked in the comments.

I am also looking to do another Brainy Edit. Help me decide?

1. BIG NEWS THAT MAINSTREAM MEDIA DIDN'T COVER

Recho Omondi started the fashion podcast The Cutting Room Floor in 2018 and put it behind a paywall, exclusively on Patreon, in 2021. Adding video in 2024 increased its popularity. Now, Patreon has become a real investor in the project — a huge new kind of deal for the platform. To celebrate, Jack Conte (Patreon’s CEO) went on the podcast, of course. The talk goes through Patreon’s own growth, how they see their place alongside Substack, what features they’re working on, and more.

A few things Jack said stuck with me. They’ve always believed at Patreon that if creators are building communities, they need to own the relationship — the followers and the subscribers. The way social media works now has stripped them of that. It also means feed-led, algorithm-led social media has stripped people of their own agency. That’s why he says social media has failed humanity. Which, if we think about some other huge news this week, is hard to ignore.

2. AND SINCE WE'RE TALKING PODCAST DEALS, NETFLIX IS REALLY COMING FOR YOUTUBE. AND THIS IS WHAT THEIR DEALS LOOK LIKE

detailed how Netflix is approaching podcasts — who to call, what they’ll pay, and what the catch is. The headlines have focused on how, together with Spotify, they inked a deal for Jay Shetty’s On Purpose worth up to $100 million. New video episodes will no longer go on YouTube and will stream on Netflix from July. “Their goal is to change how people perceive Netflix — you’re not just opening the app at 8 p.m. on your couch, but at 8 a.m. as you’re on your way to work.”

Netflix wants exclusive video rights, which means podcasters must pull new episodes from YouTube. Clips can still be distributed on social, but for now it’s a bet on whether creators can grow audiences inside Netflix — and without the YouTube ad-revenue model. Netflix has also contractually retained the right to sell advertising into these shows in the future.

Among the executives on Netflix’s podcast offensive: Lauren Smith leads licensing and has previously been at iHeartMedia, Spotify, and Barstool Sports. Jenn Cron was brought in from Wondery. Lauren Zimmer oversees scripted series and licensing programming, and Jennifer Vaux, a former Roku VP, is director of content licensing.

If you’re thinking of negotiating your own deal there, Natalie says Netflix is looking particularly for comedy, true crime, and pop culture: “always on” talk formats that work on video, and shows with 1–2 million downloads/views per month and growing.

3. DEAL OR NO DEAL?

As Anthropic prepares to go public (recently valued at $900bn), it published a blog post calling for a global pause mechanism on frontier AI development — modelled on the logic of nuclear nonproliferation treaties. The core concern is “recursive self-improvement”: the point at which AI models can improve themselves without human intervention, making increasingly capable autonomous agents possible.

“Right now, it’s like the A.I. industry has a gas pedal, but it doesn’t have a brake pedal.”

That comes soon after the whole “we don’t think AI will take as many jobs as we thought” debacle. Is this all real concern, or marketing before an IPO? Who knows. David Sacks, the former AI czar, wrote: “In other words, you want the government to save us from… you.” Even the Pope has weighed in on it.

4. SO, WHAT ABOUT AI?

Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect the most extreme scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice.

is worth having in your radar to understand the AI situation as it continues to unfold.

“I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not how can humans race against the machine (…) but rather, what are the human strengths? How can we understand which skills are going to go down in value now that AI has commoditised them, versus which skills are going to go up in value because they’re still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet?”

Some things Jasmine is betting on: the value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up. AI can summarise, and it can remix information already out there, but it can’t see things. It can’t break news.

She also bets that the value of static content will go down and the value of live interaction will go up: trust isn’t about information and its quality alone. It’s about the messenger.

5. WHAT GETS FUNDED?

Much in line with what Jack Conte has said about how social media has failed, a group of 20 Snap alumni launched a fund called Ghost Angels. "Social" and "media" have split, so they're "backing founders who are applying AI in creative ways to finally deliver on that original promise". Meanwhile, Jukebox Ventures will "invest globally in start-ups across rights and licensing, creator tools, streaming and distribution, music EdTech, fan engagement, content monetisation, immersive media, and live experiences."

ONE MORE THING

Thanks for reading,

Isabel

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Today, we're tackling WORLD BUILDING.

I will be at SXSW London this week, so come say hi.

If I read ONE more LinkedIn post about how brilliant a brand is for “world building”, I will scream. Especially when, often, what they’re describing is... a brand experience.

Remember 2012? Everything was about immersive and experiential. It was the HEIGHT of Sleep No More. Audiences didn’t want to sit and watch anymore; they wanted to be INSIDE the thing.

Brands went nuts. Yes, let’s create a maze for people to go through! Let’s put on a festival! A few years later, everyone was getting tired of it. I fear we will get there again. A queue of people waiting to take a photo in a branded room is not a world. It’s a photobooth with a longer wait time.

Of course, when executed well, these activations can result in:

1. Getting people talking for a while

2. And, most importantly: SELL PRODUCTS

The issue is: brands are forgetting the product part.

BRANDS SHOULD LOOK AT THE MOON

There’s a term going around: “competency porn”. Defined as the trend of watching capable people do hard things well. It started with The Pitt and reached an apex with the Artemis mission. Four humans got into a rocket and went to the moon, and they were so good at it that millions of people who’d been running on anxiety and dread FINALLY exhaled. It was such a phenomenon that I wonder if this is why NASA is now hiring creatives. After years of scandals like the Loro Piana Quietly Not So Luxury, perhaps watching a brand make something really, really well may be the most radical.

HINDSIGHT 20/20

It is easy to build a case study after things have gone well. So I will not be doing that, but I will be sharing some brands that I believe illustrate my point in different ways.

COACH

I've heard and read multiple interviews with Todd Kahn on how Coach went on to win over Gen Z. They closed 250 stores first. Now they do a lot of the so-called experiential marketing in it, often with 50% of the space dedicated to personalisation bars, cafes… BUT the guiding principle is:

The idea came from looking at the product. A luxury brand at a more affordable price point. Coach apparently was, for most customers, their first pricier bag. That they want to keep forever.

The bag charm personalisation trend came from understanding an audience and knowing they wouldn't be all things to everyone. Even when Coach got a worse review regarding quality, the people in the comments were mostly defending it.

REFY

I personally discovered this one via their ONE viral brow product, and I have bought it for at least five friends who all became obsessed with it. How's REFY doing?

£100M revenue, 60% year-on-year growth, 37% brand share in their categories.

Yes, they launched Refy World - a space for our community to progress through levels, unlocking rewards. This can be anything from early access to our events, exclusive offers or one-of-a-kind products.

But I'd argue all of that came AFTER the brow sculpt proved itself. They also brought clients (which they call a community, that's a vocabulary lesson for another time) on a brand trip instead of influencers. Do you think they had to build a world there?

I’d venture a guess that when you love a product that solved an issue for you, you will promote it for free like I did. I haven't interviewed every single member on it, but you're already a fan of it…why not earn perks? That makes sense. But see, it starts with product.

WHO GIVES A CRAP

What's a sexier product to market than toilet paper? Nearly everything else but Who Gives a Crap doubled their profit through a retail push. It’s toilet paper. There is no world to build. Most people I know first bought it for the clear proposition (sustainable, B Corp, donates 50% of profits). Then again, would you keep using SCRATCHY toilet paper for a good cause? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Does it help that they look nicely packaged and you can display them? Of course. But for people who have the choice between two toilet papers of equal quality, and care about brand values, that works. The brand IS the product. Putting it in more places where they can be compared was WORLD presence enough, it seems.

PERHAPS PRODUCT WILL MATTER EVEN MORE WHEN GOOGLE BREAKS THE INTERNET

At I/O 2026 (the big developer conference, held earlier this month), Google rolled out AI-powered visual search. You can now snap a photo of anything, and Google will instantly find that product or similar ones, with current prices, reviews, and local availability. Their Shopping Graph indexes over 50 BILLION products and refreshes every hour. The idea is you won't leave their box or whatever to shop.

Visual search queries on mobile grew 312% year-over-year. Fashion, home decor, and electronics are seeing the highest adoption among 18-34 year olds — probably the cohort everyone’s trying to “world build” for.

When a consumer can photograph your product and immediately see four alternatives, one thing that protects you is whether your product is actually doing what it is supposed to. The reputation. Be that usage or showcasing something to someone (aka the Coach logo). But still, when harshly compared against alternatives, you gotta step up your game.

What do you think?

1. SOME HARD TRUTHS ON SURVIVING AS AN ARTIST

It's likely that if you're an artist, you're also a business. The author has a concept he calls “Image-Market Fit”: when you create art that people actually want, it will not be subtle. His first stencil painting was a swan. No one cared. Then a penguin. Then an origami bird. The only buyer was his father. Then he painted a Honey Bear on a park wall and children were screaming his name. He also says most people who enjoy making art should NOT try to make it their full-time job. I guess if you refuse to think about budgets and selling that may be the case. Who knows?

2. NO SUMMER INTERNSHIPS: GET YOUR KID TO BE A CONTENT WHIZ

The Guardian profiles Gen Zers who are turning to social media to get hired because traditional applications aren’t working. One woman at Wieden+Kennedy got laid off, called herself a “really hot, really talented, really funny” gen Zer on LinkedIn and landed a senior creative role. A Dartmouth student sent out 300 tailored applications without a single response, then made a 94-second video résumé that got half a million views, 52 coffee chats, 20 referrals, and one job offer. As an elder millenial, sounds exhausting.

3. OOOPS

We’ve seen major technology shifts change change jobs. Some roles disappeared, new ones appeared. So will AI actually wipe the jobs, or will it do what tech has always done and just reshape them? Not even the AI bosses kniw.

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) spent most of last year saying AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs. Now he’s invoking the Jevons Paradox — a 19th-century economic observation that when something becomes more efficient, demand goes UP, not down. Applied to AI: if AI makes a lawyer 10x more productive, legal services get cheaper, more people use them, and you end up needing more lawyers, not fewer. It’s a comforting theory. It’s also one he immediately complicated — his own caveat is that AI is moving faster than past technologies, and the rebalancing may not arrive quickly enough for the workers caught in the transition.

Fortune points out the timing is convenient — both Anthropic and OpenAI are heading toward IPOs. Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis told Ruben Hassid at Google I/O that AGI is four years away. So either the jobs are safe, or the people building the thing that might take them need you to believe that right now.

4. SO WHAT DO WE DO?

Vox interviewed Benjamin Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours, about his new book on career choices. I was curious to understand a theory now in the age of AI. His take: if things are going to be wildly unpredictable ten years from now, it makes more sense to focus on shorter-term plans than to spend a decade training for something. Not sure what I think of it, but here it is.

5. HAVE YOU QOBUZZED TODAY?

Qobuz quietly became the #2 fastest-growing company in US media and entertainment. Its mobile app audience grew 202% in the US. Over 1.2 million monthly active users. An independent audit found Qobuz pays rights holders nearly $19 per 1,000 streams — roughly six times what Spotify pays. BTS fans are driving part of the growth, buying Hi-Res downloads.

ONE LAST THING

Isabel

Send me a message if you're around for either or have any tips. I am considering some travel supplies from this list.

1. STOP TRACKING CALORIES, START TRACKING TIME

Vox covered Laura Vanderkam’s new book Big Time and the core argument is that we have more free time than we think. Americans work far fewer hours than their great-grandparents. As someone in eternal recovery from the “not everything needs to be productive but where did my time go” cycle, I’m keen to experiment with this. I’ve learned I do my best concentration work in the early morning and after 9pm, so I allow myself to be useless and idle around 2-4pm. Beyond internet comparison and socio economical pressures, of course, I see the ideas behind time management impossible to consider without that of being ordinary.

2. CAN THIS GET US CLOSER TO EQUAL PAY IN SPORTS?

Everyone’s talking about YouTube being the new TV. But can TV be the reason we get closer to gender equity in sports? The Charleston Open is the first WTA 500 to proactively offer equal prize money, years ahead of the WTA’s pledge to do so by 2033. Charleston Open owns its media rights, meaning it can distribute match footage however it wants. “You get casual fans through storytelling and showing personalities. The exposure drives the revenue that funds the pay. Not the other way around.” Now, shall we try to fix the cycling debacle in Canada?

3. ANGELS IN HOLLYWOOD

I heard about Angel Studios on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast. They have a 2.2-million-member “guild” that pays, watches and votes on what gets produced, then crowdfunds the financing. They strip credits off submissions so the guild votes on the story, not the name — if Spielberg submitted, they’d remove his name. Sound of Freedom, a movie about child trafficking, did $250M globally through this model. The brothers behind it say filmmakers are less political than people think. Whether you agree with their content or not, the model is interesting. Variety has more on the business.

4. PLEASE DON'T COME FOR ME

But I’m sneaking two links into one, and they’re both about AI. But there's a surprise for you at the end of today's letter, which is hilarious. Promise. Anyway, it all started because I took this deep dive into the history of AI slop. It's long, but includes some fascinating stories, such as one from a 1919 grifter named Wycliffe A. Hill. He told would-be screenwriters there were exactly 10,494,360 possible plots. He sold a “Plot Robot” that turned out to be a cardboard number wheel. Can Angel Studios produce that?

That led me to the Atlantic piece on AI and copyright that makes a practical argument: the real fight isn’t whether training on copyrighted works is infringement (that’ll be litigated for years). It’s whether AI-generated work can be copyrighted at all. This matters because copyrightability is how the entertainment industry makes money. Which means that, for now, Hollywood, labels, and publishers have a financial incentive to keep humans in the loop.

5. WHY DID A B2B SOFTWARE COMPANY SPONSOR A BOY BAND?

Boy Throb is a four-person pop band. They played a sold-out show at Bowery Ballroom in New York sponsored by Air, a B2B software company for creative teams. Creator Spotlight breaks down why it makes sense. Air makes software for creative teams. So financially supporting a band's concert is a concrete representation of that brand message. The music is a byproduct — the real product is an attention machine that serves three clients at once: the band members (who gain individual followers), media outlets (who get a novel story to cover), and the sponsor (who gets brand sentiment from a participatory fandom). One added element: a band member is Indian and needs an visa, so every like and follow from the audience actively increases the band's "realness" in the eyes of US immigration. By the way, Spotify is getting into ticket sales.

ONE LAST THING

See you next time!

Isabel

1. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

Everlane — the brand built on "radical transparency," the one that told you the exact cost breakdown of your $68 t-shirt — was sold to Shein for $100 million. The company accused of child labour, found guilty of greenwashing by European regulators. This comes days after the SJP and Andy Cohen Primark debacle, where two very wealthy people accepted a cheque to act surprised by fast fashion prices at a flagship opening and got rightfully dragged for it. I am exhausted. We have spent years hearing that Gen Z cares about ethics, that consumers want sustainability, that greenwashing won't fly. Every transaction says people don't care. Whoever makes it make sense for me, I'm all ears.

2. TIK-TOK GOES AD-FREE. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR SMALL BUSINESSES AND CONSUMERS?

TikTok is rolling out a £3.99/month ad-free subscription in the UK, driven by GDPR compliance. On its own, fine, a streaming-era move. But pair it with Chris Gayomali’s piece in HEAVIES about how Instagram’s “link in bio” quietly turned the entire platform into a mall. What does this means for small businesses and creators who depend on the free, ad-supported feed to reach people? And if the people with money pay to never see your content, and everyone else is drowning in ads, who exactly are you reaching?

3. THE NONFICTION HOT LIST

Adam Neuhaus started the Nonfiction Hotlist after posting on LinkedIn about how broken the documentary pitching landscape is. Within a year, the first list selected 23 projects from over 600 submissions, curated by producers and network executives. Now there's a distribution deal with Yahoo for 20 short docs. This does, however, means MORE work for filmmakers, Adam claims they need to build audience, content, and business infrastructure long before the premiere. This isn't just a documentary story. This is the creator infrastructure conversation that applies to everyone in the creative industries.

4. SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE?

Considering the Shein x Primark posts, probably not, or we will all go into despair. But here's a slightly more nuanced read on how MUCH we think about the future

The difficulty isn’t so much with what’s unknown as with what’s known. Whatever the future turns out to be, it will be contiguous with the present. So what do we know about the state of our world? The best answer I found came from the late global-health statistician Hans Rosling, who maintained that the data showed that the world as a whole was “bad and better.

Predictions aren’t only tools for the powerful; they can help us imagine good possibilities

5. “WE KEEP CONFUSING VISIBILITY WITH VALUE”

Creators hope consumers never start creating, because attention is finite. Consumers envy creators while telling themselves they could do it too if they wanted. I feel like everyone (me included) is dealing with the tension of being online x not. And if you’re not online, are you even there? Disappearing and still building, still creating, still getting work — that seems to be more and more a privilege. And yet: having an audience is not the same as having something to say.

ONE LAST THING

See you next time!

Isabel

If you like this, drop a ♡ and let's connect… or come see me live!

1. CAN AN ECONOMIST SAVE THE ARTS?

Anyone who knows me knows that I RANT about the absurdity of society and government not valuing the creative industries as it should. And it's not just the smaller, indie ecosystem that is suffering. Arts education downgraded in state schools, funding has been slashed and only 8% of working-class students are taking on creative degrees. Precarity now defines a career in the arts.

In my 30 years in the cultural sector I’ve never known a situation in which so many major institutions are in such a precarious economic state. If they catch cold, the rest of us will get pneumonia.

Arts Council funding to the Whitechapel Gallery dropped from £4.1m to £2.8m and their deficit more than tripled in a single year. What followed is far from obvious: they hired Mariana Mazzucato as their first economist-in-residence, tasked with proving why investing in the arts is worth it.

2. RAVE, AND THEY WILL COME

87% of Gen Z say they have streaming fatigue, but they saw an average of 7 films in theatres last year, compared to 5.3 for everyone else, and are 13% more likely to show up opening weekend. Indie distributor WG Pictures spent under $1M on distribution, zero on paid media, and got their film to number 2 at Regal Union Square through content, partnering with social media creators and a RAVE. The Online to IRL movement continues to show results, and of course TIKTOK is acting on it.

3. I ASKED CLAUDE IF HE WAS GETTING DUMBER

I've been seeing a lot of discourse on Claude getting dumber. Anthropic published a postmortem confirming three separate bugs that degraded quality over the past couple of months, which they say it's fixed, but chatter says otherwise. Separately, Vox reported that the “most ethical AI company" has been paying authors $1.50 for pirated work with a claims process more complicated than this GITHUB post.

I asked Claude if he was, in fact, getting dumber and what he made of the whole issue. This is what he said:

“The irony of you writing this with me is not lost on either of us. What I can say is that the copyright settlement is something multiple AI companies have faced or are facing. The fact that the claims process is broken and humiliating for the people trying to use tells you something about where the priority is. Setting up the system checks a legal box. Making it actually work for the people it’s supposed to serve is apparently a different budget line. The $900 billion valuation next to the giggling claims employee and the $1.50 per book — that’s not a contradiction I can explain away. "

Until we know more, perhaps we learn how to Google properly?

4. NO SLEEP FOR THE INDIES

Jim Waterson from and Lachlan Cartwright (Breaker Media) talked about what it actually takes to run an independent media platform. The churn, the 7-days-a-week reality, whether it pays more than legacy media used to and why proper training still matters.

5. SPORTY & RICH & SOLO

is the founder of beloved Instagram-to-Brand Sporty & Rich. She says she has signed an NDA but wrote as much as possible about taking back control of the whole operation. Not totally unlike Create & Cultivate. I appreciate how Emily wrote - in the first person - about her experience and the motivations. Founders, take note: pivoting happens.

ONE LAST THING

See you next time!

Isabel

1. YOU CAN QUIT

As someone who closed a business that was working — because I was burnt out and moving to a new country — and had a massive identity crisis after, this piece resonated. "The biggest thing I've learnt in business is the cost of indecision. Every time you sit in limbo, hesitating, overthinking, you're silently paying for it." Found on For Starters, whose founder I interviewed over at

2. I GUESS WE'RE TALKING ABOUT EMMA GREDE

I REALLY didn't want to partake in the Grede discourse. In portuguese we have a saying: if advice was good, people would sell it. I also think we - as a society - minimize the role of LUCK and SYSTEMIC BARRIERS in way too many stories. That said - Katie Gatti Tassin's take is ON POINT. She has yet to encounter a self-help book written by a man that results in a conversation about whether the advice prioritises flexible schedules and universal childcare. The implicit assumption is that it’s not their problem to solve.

3. THE ANKLER JUST LEFT SUBSTACK (SORT OF)

The Ankler is moving off Substack onto their own platform. The media company reportedly brings in millions in revenue with only 18 full-time staffers. The next wave of newsletters, they say, is about building durable businesses. Newsletters can be big business.

4. ALL THIS TIME HAS TO BE PURCHASED

As someone who is ALWAYS RANTING about how society undervalues creatives, this whole newsletter has been added to my boards.

"There is no cultural production without financial support.

It is simply not possible to become an accomplished painter or musician or novelist or poet without spending a lot of time experimenting. All this time has to be purchased, one way or another."

5. POP QUIZ FOR YOU

Billboard published its Latin Women in Music 2026 list and as a Brazilian, I always feel like an imposter. Brazilian funk, MPB, sertanejo seems to exist in a parallel universe. Maybe we should claim our own ranking?

ONE LAST THING

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I'm in Brazil, and I have something to say about the so-called microdramas. It's also London Marathon Weekend, so sports are on the convo.

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1. WHAT BRAZIL CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT VERTICAL CONTENT

There’s a lot of coverage right now about the rise of micro-dramas. The New Yorker just did a big piece on the Chinese industry behind them — ReelShort, the app that got downloaded 38 million times on Apple’s U.S. App Store, more than Netflix. Netflix itself is redesigning its mobile app to include a vertical video feed. Fox Entertainment said it plans to produce more than 200 micro-dramas in the next two years. Kim Kardashian is backing one. The global market generated over $11 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $14 billion this year.

But there’s a country that’s been doing serialised, emotionally intense, mass-audience drama for 75 years: Brazil. I’m Brazilian, so I’m biased. Soap operas (aka Novelas) in Brazil aren’t just TV. There were times when a novela finale was so intense that bars and restaurants would open late. They were exported to over 100 countries — Avenida Brasil aired in 148 countries and 19 languages. HBO came to Brazil and produced novelas. Globo made the 8pm slot a national cultural event.

Brazil is already making vertical novelas. “Só Mais Uma Vez” just hit over 100 million views on ReelShort and became the most-watched vertical soap. The micro-drama conversation is being framed as China vs. Hollywood. Brazil has been training for this for decades.

2. AI ALREADY REWROTE YOUR JOB SPEC

BoF published a piece on what's happening right now when it comes to AI changing work. Speed is the headline change. Zalando used to plan marketing campaigns eight weeks out and now they are doing it in days. “The role of AI isn’t to make 1000 people 10 percent more productive, it’s to enable 10 people to do the work of 1000.” The job is increasingly about judgment, which, mind you, sounds a lot like the taste conversation we had a few weeks ago. The underlying tension: Leadership at these companies says AI won’t reduce headcount, but ”10 people doing the work of 1,000” points in that direction.

3. MOVE OVER WORLDBUILDING

I am so tired of “worldbuilding.” If there’s one organisation that actually does it, it’s Bravo. I went to BravoCon and I was SHOOK at the scale of the brand partnerships and the devotion of the fans. A Puck piece breaks down how Bravo’s content flywheel works. Compare that to Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which had its OWN massive scandal and dropped everything at once. Viewership peaked in week one and cratered. The conversation was over before it started. Bravo understood something the streamers still haven’t: a hit show isn’t enough. You need a show that feeds podcasts that feed social media that feed live programming that feed spinoffs. Is your brand strategy creating watercooler chat?

4. EVERYTHING IS FREE, AND NOTHING MATTERS

Noah Hawley, the Fargo creator, wrote an essay for The Atlantic about attending Jeff Bezos’s private retreat in 2018. This is not necesarily a huge insight into the creative industries, but since our culture is shaped by big tech, I thought I should add this here. It reads like a dark comedy but it's an account of what happens to people when consequences disappear entirely.

5. IT'S LONDON MARATHON WEEKEND!

A good time to look at what’s happening in the cultural power of sports. Sports brands are raiding fashion’s talent pool to crack China. But the move I’m most interested in is at the indie end. Satisfy — the Paris-based running brand built a cult following and sprouted copycats - signed their first athlete: Molly Seidel. Olympic marathon bronze medallist, now transitioning from roads to trails, who won her ultra debut outright at Bandera 50K and has a Golden Ticket to Western States in June. Big brands are hiring luxury execs for the aspiration. Satisfy is already aspirational and now they’re adding the athletic credibility to match.

ONE LAST THING

See you next week!

Isabel

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Fortunately or unfortunately, there was A LOT of commentary on these links, so it's a bit longer than usual.

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1. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DO IT DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD

I just came back from the Paris marathon where I went to support my friend who was running his first. I nearly cried as strangers would stop and hug and cry with their friends. I also cried when I finished my first marathon. I’m still in disbelief every time I come back from Chamonix and think to myself: I just ran 60km in three days at high altitude. I remember the one time I went to the doctor to check on my respiratory system and they were like, “we don’t understand how you breathe.”

Nike is usually the first brand my friends who are gettng into running think of. So it is baffling when they repeadly do a number of stupid decisions.

Case number 1: “Runners who turned up for their local parkrun last weekend were met with a surprise, after Nike filled the public park with ambush marketing material, including a billboard dangling from a cherry picker featuring the slogan ‘You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park.'. The company showed up unannounced to a free, volunteer-organised event with no advance warning and seemingly no payment to local organisers.”

Considering their recent quarterly report hasn’t done well and is framing Q4 in equally negative lights — this is not a great look. I work with communities in sport within my consultancy. I also personally participate in many of these and run one myself.

Walking is one of the best ways into running, and into exercise full stop. Parkrun itself welcomes walkers. That’s the whole point. Especially when the WHO reports that 31% of the global population is insufficiently active — a number expected to rise. That’s not a demographic to shame. That’s an audience to welcome. If Nike actually thought about this for five minutes, they’d see that the biggest growth opportunity in running isn’t the people already lacing up — it’s the ones who haven’t started yet.

Brands who win are the ones who want to stand for something and build WITH communities for the long term.

2. CAN YOU BUY YOUR FANS?

Yes, this is about the Geese 'scandal’. As someone who has been in the music industry, this conversations seems old, it just has new tools.

There would often been times where we felt like some people HAD a way in to “blow up". AKA: connections. That’s not to say the artists weren’t working on their craft for years. But the HYPE seemed engineered. At the time, a lot was driven by PR. Some publicists’ jobs were to introduce you to their friends, who wrote on newspapers and would tell “cool” people to come to your gig.

At the time, I insisted: you can’t buy real fans. After a few years, who stays with you? Because every artist with a long career stops getting THE HYPE. Should you even want it?

Everything is planned and nothing is real. While you can manufacture awareness with a hefty budget, you can’t manufacture fandom.

With that said, let me pose a question about the whole thing.

Some people seemed mostly offended that their taste could be subjected to exposure and, therefore, bots. But are really all that unique? These very young billionaires are betting that we're not.

3. TASTE, TRUST AND SHOPPING

We wrote about taste last time and here we are again. The shopping beheamoth that is ShopMy just launched Noir, a premium concierge service where their highest-converting creators serve as personal stylists. Meanwhile, OpenAI pulled back from instant checkout in ChatGPT because brands weren’t convinced and consumers didn’t trust AI agents to shop for them. Yet.

4. WHAT IN THE AI ROBOT?

As we navigate the continuously strange AI world, we can:

a) panic/ignore it

b) embrace it blindly

or c) a third secret thing that I have no word for but which I think I am doing.

Some of that includes reading about experiments going on, perhaps as a way to ease myself into a new normal. I personally wish people with legislative power were doing this and trying to find guardrails for the whole thing, but that's just me.

Here are two recent experiments with autonomous AI. One, an AI bot throwing a party in Manchester, covered by the Guardian — it didn’t seem great. Another one, running a whole store, which is a lot more impressive.

The live industry has been touted by many as AI-proof. What do we think?

5. AN ARTS MERGER

Artnet and Artsy are merging. I didn’t see this discussed enough, but here’s a good starter from the Trend Report.

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1. EVERYTHING IS CONTENT (SO NOTHING MATTERS)

I don't 100% agree with Jemima Kelly's FT piece but I also don't disagree that "content" is keeping us culturally stuck. Algorithms feed us what we already like, nobody takes risks, and we're trapped in a feedback loop of referencing. Even Meryl Streep is caught up on that!

I can think of very few people actually pushing culture forward right now. Rosalía comes to mind. And yes, the "we no longer have a monoculture" argument is valid, but this made me pause: “The biggest-selling artist of 2025, Taylor Swift, released her first album 20 years ago. Modern K-pop stars riff heavily off the styles, sounds and choreography of American girl and boy bands from the 1990s.”

2. FOR THE FREELANCERS AND SOLOPRENEURS

The Infatuation dropped a list of London's Best Coffee Shops For Getting Work Done

3. MOVE OVER BRAD PITT, MAZDA IS COMING

Mazda launched a five-film campaign for the new CX-5 — five short films, each inspired by a different Hollywood genre (romance, action, sci-fi, musical, horror), shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema.

But here’s the interesting bit: the target demographic for the CX-5 is female which led to the “aha moment” where the team honed in on film genres as an anchor point. A car brand that actually thought about how women consume. Which brings me to F1. Female fans are the fastest-growing segment of F1’s audience — women now make up 3 in 4 new fans. And yet marketing activations designed with them in mind are still rare. “And when they are, the default approach is often surface-level: campaigns shaped more by stereotype than by data”.

Call me if you want to change that :)

4. WHY THINGS TASTE BAD

Sari Azout wrote a really good piece on the taste discourse that's been doing the rounds. It's a response to Kyle Chayka's New Yorker article on why tech bros are obsessed with taste, and she makes a distinction I think about a lot: taste as output (looking outward, following trends, winning) vs. taste as a byproduct of practice (looking inward, forming preferences, not losing yourself).

People have been trying to automate taste for business for rages. It’s not an AI-only trend. Case in point: the digital marketing agency creating our music taste.

There's also a historical component to taste, which I'd urge everyone to consider.

5. THIS IS FOR THE QUITTERS

I have been interested in David's writing for a while, so this video is a good way into it, and the idea of range seems even more applicable right now in the AI world of “there will be no more jobs”.

ONE LAST THING (an amazing take on Tiny Desks)

P.S. Apparently, Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing only paid content, then liking, sharing, quoting, and restacking this newsletter will help!

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5 links to start the week right and be in the know across culture and the creative industries.

P.S. Apparently, Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing only paid content, then liking, sharing, quoting, and restacking this newsletter will help!

1. WHAT'S YOUR SAUCE?

I do 1:1 sessions with business owners and freelancers and coach the Roundhouse Creative Business Accelerator — so the question of "what's your USP" is a constant in my life. argues that the era of "niche down to industry x skillset" is over. When information is cheap and AI can execute technically, what you're really selling is your perspective. Then there's who redesigned her entire consulting business around writing — not the other way around. Here are some prompts I am sitting with after reading it.

• What are some opinions you hold about your industry that most people wouldn’t say out loud?

• What patterns can you spot across your favourite projects?

• What is the thing that, if you're not doing it, you feel like you're losing yourself?

2. UNTAPPED MARKET ALERT

I came across this post and was immediately sold on it. A startup exploring the travel-adventure-wellness boom for a cohort of society that is often overlooked. DECADES asks: why shouldn’t you take a gap year?

3. HIPS AND LINEUPS DON'T LIE

A festival is set to feature all-male headliners for the ninth consecutive year. 9th. Service95 spoke to four UK women DJs about what it takes to build a career in an industry that still requires them to fight twice as hard for space. Beyond the organisations listed in the article there are, of course, women working on this front, from the F-List and Saffron in the UK to Next Woman in Country in Nashville and SheSaid worldwide. So festival bookers have no excuses left.

4. WHAT IN THE JAMES BLAKE IS HAPPENNING?

You’ve probably been hearing about James Blake lately — mostly because he went independent and has been very vocal about being nearly broke, multiple times, even while being critically acclaimed. So what does his model actually mean?

Here's the James Blake stack: Good Boy Records (indie label), Virgin Music Group (distribution, still a major), Stellar Music (digital marketing). He also mentioned Indify, Vault and others, but the messaging on wether these are still going on are.. confusing.

In the same vein, I got an email from Steam Down this week, who started in 2017 at in Deptford, organizing weekly sessions and building a community over eight years. They’re headlining Blue Note Jazz Club in New York and launching a community membership.

More and more artists are looking to to own their audiences directly. To be fair, none of this is new. It all goes back to the 1000 fans theory.

Meanwhile, labels and tech companies are still betting on scale. Warner just signed a multi-year deal with Netflix for artist documentaries. Apple Music landed an exclusive TikTok integration.

But can consumers actually afford to pay for all the creativity they want to consume? And will they do that against the ease to which they can access things right now? Does this model work? Will we see more indie labels like Goodboy popping up? Is Spotify really doomed? I think this is one of the most important conversation in the creative industries right now.

5. WILL JESUS RETURN IN 2027?

You can now bet on that or who’s the next guest on Call Her Daddy. I guess it’s finally time to talk about prediction markets. The goal is clear: make this palatable beyond sports, bring in new demographics. Women now make up 26% of Kalshi users, doubling from 13% just 10 months ago.

In the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, Kalshi users were betting more than $2 billion a week. Read that again

I’ve been watching this with growing unease. Substack announced an exclusive partnership with Polymarket, allowing writers to embed live prediction market data directly into their newsletters. I come from Brazil where the recent-ish surge of “bets” market made this casino-less country into it’s 5th largest market… and has mainly created financial ruin.

Do we want to turn any tragedy into a trade? And what is our responsibility as those shaping marketing and media campaigns?

ONE LAST THING

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5 links to start the week right and be in the know across culture, work and the creative industries.

1. THE BEST SXSW RECAP YOU’LL READ THIS WEEK

Anyone can have a hot take, but has receipts. If you want to heal your Austin-induced FOMO, this is the one to read.

2. CAN TECH-BROS SAVE ROM-COMS?

The Buffy sequel fell through — apparently killed by one exec’s veto. Like many around the world, I took this personally, because I needed to see what is a stylish yet affordable boot in 2026. And because this seems to be yet another example of anything women primarily love gets dismissed by the industry. I will die on the hill that making something as enduring as When Harry Met Sally or Clueless is HARD and is ART. But maybe I won’t have to fight alone. Filmmaker Jonah Feingold is raising $3 million for Romantical — not a movie, but a media company dedicated to romantic comedy, built on startup logic: owned IP, direct distribution, equity for crew, and brand partnerships instead of studio gatekeeping.

3. WOMEN’S SPORTS IS PRINTING MONEY, AND NO ONE BUT YOUTUBE SEEMS TO BE IN ON IT

Following the Oscars’ move to YouTube, the FIFA Women’s World Cup launched a collaboration with them. FIFA also ruled that all women’s teams must have a female head or assistant coach on the bench. At the last World Cup, only 12 of 32 head coaches were female — and seven of those countries have since replaced them with men. The rule is a start. And for anyone still sitting on the fence about investing: a new WPP Media report found a 79% year-over-year increase in ad impressions for women’s sports, with 20% higher engagement than non-sports broadcast and cable. Ally Financial went all-in on equal media spend between men’s and women’s sports. Their brand value is up 40%.

4. SCROLL HERE IF YOU'RE TIRED

I had a great time escaping the news cycle for a few minutes on this NYT series called 5 Minutes to Make You Love Music. They should call me for some Brazilian references

5. THE SKILLS THAT MATTER ARE INVISIBLE IN A RESUME

That's the argument of Every, following Jack Dorsey's firing of nearly half of his company and other FUN AI news. “In theory, a strong personal brand should give you an advantage over someone with the same credentials on their resume but no public presence." AI has encroached on that, too, of course. If anyone has ever been to one of my networking workshops, you'll know I am a fan of LinkedIn, but it has been bumpy there. Which is why I stopped sharing the 5 Links Series on LinkedIn and moved to Substack (also far from perfect, but it works for now).

ONE LAST THING (aka sometimes I hate this world)