Sex, much like money, makes the world go round. And the next generation are having less of it.

And this isn’t about having babies FYI.

So, today I’m kicking off my first limited essay series, this subject will be a three‑part Digress special about the future of sex, and I should warn you we’re going to digress often. Porn, dating apps, incels, OnlyFans, sex toys, Andrew Tate, grey divorce, AI-generated partners, the economics of young people living at home, and the purchasing power of people over fifty.

Image credit: The Daily Express

Eventually, I want to reach a question I can’t stop pondering, what if sexual pleasure didn’t require another person?

What does that mean for humanity, business, economics and world order?

But before that, we need to trace how we arrived here, because something quite odd is unfolding in the realm of sex.

For decades, marketers, governments, and probably our parents believed a fairly simple script for growing up. You grow up, leave home, meet someone, have sex, marry, buy a house, have children, and accumulate stuff. Eventually the kids leave, you retire, and pop culture largely stops focusing on your sexual life.

Of course real life never followed that neat pattern, but whole industries were built around a version of that path. Dating, home purchases, furniture, cars, banking, insurance, travel, alcohol, contraception, weddings, baby products, and supermarkets weren’t just selling to a particular age group. They were selling to a supposed life stage, which is why I find today’s changes so intriguing. Life stages are shifting, younger adulthood seems to be slowing down on one end, while later adulthood seems to be accelerating on the other. In between, technology is rewriting what sex, intimacy, and relationships can look like.

The generation we imagine is characterized by widespread sexual activity.

There’s a deeply rooted belief in popular culture that young people are having vast amounts of sex, and the reasons are fairly clear.

• They have Tinder, Hinge, Grindr and Feeld

• They can view pornography on their phones

• They engage in more open discussions about sexuality, gender, and sexual identity

• They encounter OnlyFans, sex-positive creators, and sexual wellness brands

The awkward moment of entering Ann Summers for a hen party purchase has given way to discreetly delivered, well-packaged vibrators arriving in the post. By almost every measure of access, sex should be easier.

Yet some statistics point in the opposite direction. Emergency contraception prescribed through NHS sexual health services in England has fallen sharply over the past decade, and hormonal contraception provided through sexual and reproductive health services has also declined. Those figures require careful interpretation because contraception is increasingly obtained through other channels, including pharmacies and primary care, but the broader behavioural changes deserves examination alongside what seems to be happening to sex itself.

British research comparing the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles shows that the median frequency of sex among 16- to 44-year-olds dropped between 2001 and 2012. At the same time, a growing share of respondents said they would like to be having sex more often. The United States shows similar warning signs, especially among younger men, with one major study finding that 30.9% of American men aged 18 to 24 reported no sexual activity in the prior year from 2016 to 2018.

Source: Science Direct

So we have a generation with unprecedented access to sex that does not necessarily translate into unusually high levels of actual sex. There isn’t a single explanation for this, and we should avoid forcing one, but economics is likely part of the conversation.

It’s hard to have sex when your mum is downstairs

There is a tendency to treat dating as if it exists in a separate realm from economics, when in reality housing matters for sex, employment matters for sex, disposable income matters for sex, and privacy definitely matters for sex. More young adults are living with their parents for longer, while housing costs, rents, and the challenge of establishing an independent household have fundamentally changed the economics of your twenties.

That change affects far more than where someone sleeps. If leaving home happens later, relationships may develop differently. Cohabitation unfolds differently. Hosting a partner happens differently. Marriage happens differently. Children happen differently. Even a one-night stand becomes more logistically complex when one person has to explain why there is a stranger making toast in your parents’ kitchen at 8 o’clock in the morning.

This is why demographic marketing is becoming less useful. A 25-year-old in 1996 and a 25-year-old in 2026 may technically belong to the same demographic segment, but their lives can look completely different. We are still building large parts of the consumer economy around the assumption that age reliably predicts life stage, even as that relationship grows messier.

Meanwhile, your parents are undergoing a renaissance.

What strikes me most is that while brands chase youth culture, a substantial behavioural movement is taking place at the far end of adulthood. People are living longer and healthier lives, divorce occurs later - dating apps targeted at older adults have grown and travel, wellness, and experience brands increasingly cater to people whose children have left home and who suddenly have time, money, and freedom again.

Crucially, this is a consumer group with real economic clout. UK consumers over 50 drive hundreds of billions in household spending. They also account for a large share of traditional television viewing while remaining notably underrepresented in advertising. Marketing has long treated older people as though desire fades once you’ve paid off the mortgage and booked your first cruise, but the reality is far more nuanced.

The notion of the “empty nest” may need updating, because for some it isn’t retreat at all but the start of a second adulthood. The children go, the mortgage may be smaller or paid off, disposable income rises, long marriages end, dating resumes, people travel, experiment, and meet new partners. Suddenly, the demographic once thought to be aging out of culture could be among its most engaging participants.

So who exactly is behaving their age?

This tension recurs for me. A 23-year-old might live with parents, have little disposable income, watch pornography, use dating apps, and have limited partnered sex, while a 58-year-old might own a home, have substantial disposable income, be recently divorced, use a dating app, take a solo holiday, and begin seeing someone new. Which of them is the true “sexual consumer”? The answer used to seem obvious, and I’m not sure it does anymore.

The implications extend beyond Durex and Tinder. It affects travel, as people travel to meet partners and increasingly travel alone. It influences hospitality, because dating creates occasions. It shapes housing, since relationships have historically formed households. It touches finance, because marriage, divorce, and single-person households alter how wealth is built and spent. It influences beauty, fashion, and wellness because attraction and identity are closely tied to consumption, and it affects food, drink, and entertainment since relationships shape rituals around eating, socialising, and the stories we tell about love, marriage, and desirability.

If the timeline of adulthood moves, the consumer economy built around that timeline must move as well. I suspect this helps explain why generational marketing feels so limiting. Asking how to market to Gen Z or how to reach the “silver pound” treats these groups as separate briefs, when the more compelling question is what happens when one generation’s adulthood is delayed while another’s is extended.

Then the internet arrived. There’s another factor making this story more complex, the last three decades haven’t just altered when we have sex. Today’s young people can encounter explicit content before ever sharing a first kiss. When you really consider it, that amounts to an extraordinary social experiment.

Pornography can offer a sexual education before any personal experience, dating apps introduce the notion of an endless marketplace of potential partners, OnlyFans turns sexual attention into a direct commercial exchange, and social media circulates millions of opinions about what men want, what women want, who should pay for dinner, how many people someone should have slept with, and what supposedly makes someone “high value.”

The algorithms don’t necessarily reward nuance, which is why figures like Andrew Tate matter. I don’t think Tate started a crisis in relations between young men and women; it simply shows there was already an audience and that the internet became adept at locating, linking, and monetizing it. Young men who feel rejected, lonely, or unsuccessful can now find entire communities that blame women, while young women can find communities blaming men. Both sides can consume thousands of pieces of content that confirm their worldview without meaningful interaction with the people they’re being taught to distrust, and then we load everyone onto the same dating apps and wonder why dating feels exhausting.

Sex has moved from behaviour to content. Perhaps the biggest change in thirty years is that sex is no longer just something we do; it is something we watch, swipe through, subscribe to, perform, sell, and have suggested to us by algorithms. Increasingly, it is also something technology can simulate, which begins to blur the line between consuming sexual content and feeling as though someone is paying attention to you sexually.

OnlyFans interests me particularly because it narrows the distance between sexual content and the person consuming it. Traditional pornography involved performers and audiences, whereas creator platforms can make the relationship feel much more personal. The person can message you, respond to you, and craft something specifically for you. The experience can start to feel less like consuming pornography and more like receiving customised sexual attention. That distinction matters when we think about what comes next, because AI can go much further.

If pornography separated sexual stimulation from a real person, and OnlyFans introduced personalized attention at scale, AI could introduce something entirely different: a sexual or romantic interaction that can continually adapt to you. The question behind all of this is a larger idea I want to explore over these three essays.

For most of human history, sex and intimacy required another person, and another person is inconvenient. They have desires, boundaries, moods, insecurities, and expectations. They can reject you, disappoint you, want sex when you don’t, or not want it when you do.

Being intimate with someone requires communication, negotiation, vulnerability, and compromise. Technology increasingly offers alternatives that reduce some of that friction. Pornography provides sexual stimulation without a physically present partner. Sex toys deliver physical pleasure without a companion.

OnlyFans can provide personalized sexual attention without a conventional relationship. AI companions can increasingly offer flirtation, validation, and simulated intimacy without the emotional negotiation that comes with another person. None of these on their own signals the end of relationships, and this isn’t a call for a tech-driven moral panic about sex. What intrigues me is what happens when the most frictionless form of pleasure can be experienced alone, especially since consumer culture has spent decades conditioning us to expect personalization in almost every other area of life.

Your Spotify is tailored to you, so are your Netflix suggestions, while your TikTok feed learns what keeps you watching and your Amazon homepage anticipates what you might want next.

For years we’ve built a consumer economy where the ideal product becomes more responsive to the individual, so it isn’t surprising that sex and intimacy could follow the same trend. If that happens, the effects won’t be confined to the bedroom. They could influence dating, relationships, households, fertility, housing, travel, hospitality, entertainment, and even the fundamental ways people organise their lives around one another. That’s why I don’t view the future of sex as a story about sex alone.

It might ultimately be about whether we still need each other as before, and what happens to society and the consumer economy if that answer starts to change.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is the key to winning in this game.

Charlotte x

P.S I’m officially hosting my first live Digress event, I’m so excited. Think elevated book club (without books), meets Kardashian style dining, meets chatter about strategy, psychology and human behaviour. The event is on me obvs, and I’m super keen to have some readers present.

You can express your interest in attending in the link below.

Sign me UP!

Lets get into it!

‘‘Every ‘class’ has a tipping point’’

I said that on a strategy planning call this week that I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about since.

I don’t mean a single moment where millions of people collectively decide they’ve had enough. I think it’s normally much slower than that, and probably far less obvious while it’s happening.

It starts with a throwaway comment. Something somebody says at dinner, in the office or in a WhatsApp group. Then you hear a version of it somewhere else. Then again. Eventually, something that initially sounded like an individual frustration starts sounding like a shared one.

And eventually those frustrations start changing behaviour.

They change what people buy, where they live, whether they have children, how they educate them, what they think they can afford and, eventually, how they vote.

That’s the bit I’m interested in.

Because when we talk about huge societal shifts, we have a tendency to start with the outcome. I think we should be spending much more time looking for the thing that moved underneath it.

**For the purpose of this essay, I’m using traditional terminology around class as a social construct.

Source: The Sociology Guy

The tipping point is rarely the thing itself

For parts of the working class in Britain, immigration has become one of those pressure points.

I don’t think necessarily because immigration itself explains everything people are experiencing, more so because it has become attached to a much bigger feeling around scarcity.

• Housing is expensive and difficult to access

• Public services feel stretched

The things people were told would be available to them increasingly don’t feel available.

When that happens, people look for an explanation.

Whether that explanation accurately reflects the underlying economics is a different question. From a human behaviour perspective, the perception itself matters because perceptions ultimately influence decisions.

There is a line connecting this to something I’ve written about quite a lot: the death of aspiration.

I think about the rise and fall of the Girlboss, but also the endless videos from millennials essentially saying the same thing in different ways, ‘‘I did everything I was supposed to do, so why doesn’t my life look like the life I was promised?’’

And I think this is where we sometimes misunderstand economic dissatisfaction. It isn’t always about whether somebody has literally become poorer. It can be about the gap between the life they expected to have and the life their income now buys them.

In Middle America, petrol has become another version of this.

Gas prices are interesting because they turn something enormous and abstract, like inflation, into something you can physically watch changing in front of you. Nobody feels GDP while they’re driving to work, but they absolutely remember what it used to cost to fill the car.

That memory matters. It gives people a personal benchmark for the economy that is much more powerful than being told inflation is improving.

For wealthier groups, the tipping points look completely different. Geopolitical instability, war, taxation and market volatility can feel distant for a very long time until they begin touching businesses, portfolios, property and assets.

But there is one group whose tipping point I think we’re talking about far less.

The middle class.

And maybe that’s because there hasn’t been one dramatic moment.

The maths stopped working

The middle-class bargain was always relatively simple.

If you worked hard, got a good education, built a decent career, bought a house, gave your children a good education, saved responsibly and paid into your pension, eventually you would reach some version of security.

That was the deal.

And it wasn’t only an economic deal, it was a deeply emotionally charged one.

All of those things represented progress.

• The house wasn’t simply somewhere to live, it was an asset that was supposed to appreciate while you paid it off

• Education wasn’t only about what your children learned, it was supposed to increase their access to opportunity

• The pension represented the idea that after decades of work, there would eventually be a point at which you could afford to stop

For decades, the middle classes were sold the idea that sacrifice today bought security tomorrow.

I’m increasingly interested in what happens when that stops being true.

Private school and the difference between income and wealth

One of the things that really made me think about this in Britain was VAT on private school fees.

I went to grammar school in the Home Counties, so the private school versus grammar school versus state school conversation was constant when I was growing up.

I’m Black (obvs) and was raised by parents who were laser-focused on education, and education was never really discussed as simply what happened in a classroom. It was mobility. It was access. It was the belief that where and how you were educated could materially alter what happened to you next.

Which is why the numbers around private education since the introduction of VAT are so interesting.

VAT at 20% has applied to private-school education and boarding fees since January 2025.

By June this year, the Independent Schools Council said the number of children attending independent schools had fallen by around 30,000 since January 2025, describing it as the largest reduction since its records began.

The price movement is even more striking.

In January 2024, the average private day-school fee among ISC schools was £6,021 a term. A year later, including VAT, it was £7,382.

That’s an increase of 22.6% in a single year, compared with increases of 8.4% the previous year and 6.4% the year before that.

Annualise the newer figure and you’re looking at more than £22,000 a year for one child, before you even start talking about uniforms, trips, transport or everything else that comes with school.

And this is where I think we confuse two completely different things in Britain.

Having a high income and being wealthy are not the same thing.

Private education obviously includes incredibly wealthy families, but there has always been another group sitting underneath them. Dual-income professional households earning good salaries but stretching themselves to afford the fees because education is one of the things they believe is worth sacrificing elsewhere for.

A household can have two very good salaries coming through the door and still have an enormous mortgage, childcare, school fees, commuting costs and all of the other expenses attached to the life they have built.

On paper, they look rich.

In reality, there might be surprisingly little room for anything to go wrong. The VAT debate has made that distinction much more visible.

• If you have significant assets, you have insulation

• If you simply have a high income and high outgoings, you have cash flow

Those are very different forms of financial security.

There has also been a lot of noise around school closures. The Independent Schools Council has said more than 100 institutions ceased operations following the introduction of VAT, although other analyses using official records produce considerably lower numbers and point out that new independent schools have also opened.

I actually think that disagreement makes the wider point more interesting rather than less. I’m less interested in arguing that VAT alone caused every pupil departure or school closure than I am in what the response tells us about financial elasticity.

Because if thousands of families suddenly reconsider a purchase we culturally associate with wealth when its price increases, perhaps some of those families were never as wealthy as we assumed.

Keeping up with the Joneses

There is another image I haven’t been able to shake.

Food banks have increasingly talked about working people needing support.

And I think that matters because it challenges the visual language we’ve traditionally attached to financial hardship.

Someone can have a job, be well dressed, pay a huge amount of tax and look completely financially stable from the outside while still struggling with what is happening inside their household finances.

I wonder if middle-class financial distress is particularly difficult to spot because part of the identity of the middle class has historically been about appearing okay.

We were literally raised with the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”

You don’t see someone’s mortgage renewal when you meet them for dinner. You don’t know what’s sitting on their credit card. You don’t know whether the family holiday went on finance, whether the school fees have become impossible or whether two people are sitting at the kitchen table after their children have gone to bed deciding what they can cut next.

The life can look exactly the same from the outside while the financial foundations underneath it have completely changed.

Which means the decline could be much further along than we’re admitting.

America has its own version

In America, healthcare is one of the clearest examples of how this squeeze works.

Employer-sponsored health insurance is supposed to be one of the great benefits of having a stable professional job. Yet the cost of providing those benefits continues to climb alongside everything else.

Recent US labour data showed private-sector health-benefit costs increasing around 6% year on year, roughly twice the rate of wage and salary growth. Employers were spending close to $20,000 per worker on family-plan coverage in 2025, while employees themselves were contributing around another $7,000.

Think about the psychology of that for a second.

You can be employed, insured and earning more than you were a few years ago, while the cost of maintaining the thing supposedly protecting your family eats further into the value of that employment.

Then there is housing.

For generations, buying a house was one of the main mechanisms through which the American middle class created wealth. You bought, paid down the mortgage, accumulated equity and eventually had an asset that gave you some security and potentially something to pass down.

When that becomes harder, it isn’t only a problem for people trying to buy a house today. It potentially changes how wealth gets created and transferred tomorrow.

And we’re already seeing the middle class itself shrink.

This has been happening for more than 50 years

In 1971, 61% of Americans lived in middle-income households.

By 2023, that figure was 51%.

But there’s an important bit of nuance in those numbers.

The missing 10 percentage points didn’t all fall down the economic ladder. The proportion of Americans in lower-income households increased from 27% to 30%, while the proportion in upper-income households increased from 11% to 19%.

So this isn’t a simplistic story where everybody in the middle got poorer.

Something else happened too.

The middle became smaller while the distance between different parts of society became larger, and Pew found that middle-class income growth failed to keep pace with the growth enjoyed by upper-income households.

That is far more interesting to me.

Because class isn’t only about what you can afford in absolute terms. It’s also about where you believe you sit relative to everyone around you, what you believe your work should buy you and whether you feel yourself moving forwards or backwards.

Which brings me back to something I think about constantly when building strategy.

Start at the source and understand its motion.

We’re very good at looking at behaviour and describing what people are doing. We’re less good at going far enough backwards to understand what changed underneath them that made that behaviour make sense.

And when you do go backwards, I don’t think the story here is simply “everything is expensive.”

It’s that some of the mechanisms people relied on to move upwards have become significantly more difficult to access.

So what actually is the tipping point?

Maybe every class does have a tipping point, but the tipping point depends on what that class believes the system was supposed to give them.

For working-class communities, it can become a question of scarcity and who gets access to jobs, housing and public resources when there already doesn’t seem to be enough.

For wealthier groups, it can become a question of insulation and what happens when money no longer feels quite as capable of protecting you from geopolitical instability, taxation or economic uncertainty.

But for the middle class, I think it’s something different.

It’s mobility.

It’s the gradual realisation that the ladder you were told to climb is becoming harder to climb regardless of how closely you followed the instructions.

And I think that’s where this conversation becomes much bigger than another cost-of-living story.

People will tolerate an extraordinary amount if they believe the sacrifice is leading somewhere. They’ll work longer, spend less, take on the mortgage, pay the school fees and keep putting money into the pension because underneath all of those decisions sits a very basic belief that life will eventually become easier.

That their children might have more than they did. That the sacrifices they’re making now will eventually translate into something.

For decades, aspiration kept people climbing.

Maybe the real tipping point isn’t when people become poorer. Maybe it’s when they stop believing that climbing gets them anywhere.

And if hope goes with it, what exactly is left?

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is the key to winning in this game.

Charlotte x

P.S Some news from me…..

I’m off to Banff, Canada!!

The lovely folks at The Gathering Festival have booked me to give a keynote (and a few other things) at this year’s 3-day festival in Canada, and my excitement levels are through the roof.

I’ll be talking all things future customer, and presenting some of my new behavioural theories that help brands and businesses think about the source, rather than chasing relevance.

For anyone who doesn’t know it, The Gathering is North America’s premier brand festival, hosted annually in Banff, a three-day immersive experience blending bold conversations, networking, and learning. Basically the CMOs and brand leaders behind some of the world’s most iconic names, gathering (pun intended) in the Rockies.

The speaker line-up for 2026 is a bit nuts. Skims, Heinz, Liquid Death, ELF, Coca-Cola and Fanatics, to name a few.

This year’s theme is “Only the Bold Begin” - which I love.

So yeah, you’ll find me in the mountains in October.

Taste has now become the go-to word for 2026, as many of us predicted and as we discussed in The Digress last year when we found that people were using the term “authenticity” as a cop out to avoid doing the harder work of actually having a point of view.

Authenticity became a placeholder and a buzzword brands hid behind when they didn’t know what they actually stood for.

“We’re authentic” became the marketing equivalent of “I’m a nice person” on a dating profile…It tells you absolutely nothing.

So the industry moved on and the new word is now ‘'taste’’.

And yet what I find really interesting is how most people can’t actually describe what taste is, how to find it, where it comes from, how to develop it and how to hire for it.

And in the age of AI, how do we even begin to define it?

Today’s essay is focused on exactly that.

This is a topic I’m particularly passionate about because after nearly a decade of running The Fitting Room, most of you will know that part of our unofficial motto, apart from moving with speed, is if it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right, no matter how good the data looks on paper.

For us, that’s how we’ve landed our best clients over the years and kept a pretty strong retention rate. We didn’t have a flash website (we’ve actually just launched one) or the biggest team but because we had taste and we knew what to say yes to and more importantly, what to say no to.

So most of what follows comes from my own subjective, biased, 20-years-in-the-industry thoughts on how to find taste, where it originated from, why AI has made it the most valuable skill in branding and what it actually looks like when a brand has it versus when a brand is pretending.

Let’s get into it.

So what is taste?

This is harder to answer than it should be and I think that’s part of the problem. Ask 10 marketers what taste means and you’ll get ten different answers, most of which will circle around vibes, aesthetic and “you know it when you see it,” which is fine as a feeling but useless as a strategy.

Taste, at its most basic, is the ability to discern and to tell the difference between something that’s good and something that’s just fine.

It’s also the ability to look at 10 perfectly good options and know that 8 of them aren’t right because taste is as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

Taste became a weapon

At some point, taste stopped being about what you preferred and started being about what your preferences said about you. What you ate, wore, what art you hung on your walls, how you spoke, what music you listened to, all of it became a status signal.

“Good taste” was defined by whoever had power. Aristocrats set the standard, then the church set the standard and later, fashion houses and literary critics and magazine editors set the standard. Design publications told you what a “well-appointed” home looked like and if yours didn’t look like that, well, now you knew where you stood.

There’s a French sociologist called Pierre Bourdieu who wrote a whole book about this called Distinction. His argument, in simple terms, is that taste is never neutral. He believed Taste was a marker of cultural capital that reinforces class divisions. The things you consume and how you consume them mark you as belonging to a particular class, a particular world. When someone says they have “refined taste,” what they’re actually saying is: I’ve been exposed to the right things, trained by the right references, and I know the codes.

I digress but think about how this plays out in branding right now. When a luxury brand makes something intentionally inaccessible, the logo smaller, quieter design, the price higher, waitlist longer, they’re selling a taste signal.

Now it’s an identity

But that was before. Now there’s less gatekeepers and when the gates came down, something happened that Bourdieu and others probably didn’t see coming.

Taste stopped being just about class and became about identity.

Once you didn’t need proximity to elites to develop an aesthetic sensibility and you could learn it from Vogue, blogs, then Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest boards , “aesthetic” mood boards taste became something people used not just to signal status but to signal who they are.

But when taste got democratised through algorithms, it also got homogenised meaning Instagram interiors all started looking the same. (The same bouclé sofa. same arched mirror, dried pampas grass. ) Fashion cycles sped up until trends lasted weeks instead of seasons. “Clean girl aesthetic” and “quiet luxury” and “old money style” became searchable categories rather than actual expressions of personal taste.

If everyone’s living room looks like the same West Elm showroom, what exactly is your taste saying about you? Nothing. It’s just trend compliance dressed up as personal style.

And I think the reason is that most brands are following references instead of developing taste. They’re looking at what worked for someone else and copying the aesthetic without understanding the thinking behind it.

That’s not taste. It’s basically just trend-following. The irony is that there’s actually very little real competition out there if you have genuine taste.

AI didn’t kill taste. It made it expensive.

AI can now produce content, visuals, copy, layouts, brand systems, even music and video, at a speed and cost that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

There’s nothing wrong in using AI to assist you as previously discussed in one of my previous essays but when execution becomes cheap and abundant, the thing that becomes scarce is actually judgment.

The ability to look at those ten perfectly fine options and know which one is actually right and the ability to say no to something that’s technically correct but has no soul is the danger here.

The Atlantic put it well, in the age of AI, taste is less about having perfect answers and more about knowing what to ignore. I’d go further and say taste is now the most important editorial skill in branding.

After 20 years in this industry, I believe taste is about to become the most important hiring criterion in creative industries.

There’s no single benchmark anymore instead there are multiple taste economies running in parallel, each with their own codes.

The old taste signal was exclusivity. “I only consume high culture. I only wear this. I only eat there.” It was narrow by design but research on contemporary cultural elites shows that the new taste signal is about range. The person who can pair a vintage Margiela jacket with New Balance trainers and talk about both Tarkovsky and Love Island with equal fluency, that’s the new version of “good taste.” It’s about how confidently you move between worlds, not how many worlds you shut out.

Think about what that means for brands. The old luxury playbook was about gatekeeping, making people feel like they needed to earn access but the new taste strategy is about fluency helping people move between contexts with confidence.

So, why should brands care?

You knew this was coming.

• Taste is your moat. When every competitor has access to the same AI tools, templates, content generation capabilities, what differentiates your brand is judgment. Can you say no to things that are good enough but not right? Can you hold a point of view under pressure to produce more, faster, cheaper?

• Your hiring needs to change. Stop hiring for software skills. Look for portfolios that show restraint as much as ambition. Look for people who can tell you why they made a choice, not just show you the output.

• You can’t A/B test taste. This is the trap I see everywhere. Brands love data because it feels objective but taste is subjective and contextual by nature. Data tells you what performed. It won’t tell you what was beautiful, what felt right, what built the kind of long-term brand equity that doesn’t show up in this month’s dashboard. The best brand decisions often look wrong in the numbers before they look right in the culture.

• Taste is now consumer identity. This is the one most brands are missing entirely. Your customers aren’t just buying products, they’re curating lives. Every brand they choose is a taste signal, a statement about who they are, what they value, what tribe they belong to. If your brand doesn’t function as a taste marker, if choosing you doesn’t say something meaningful about the person choosing you, then you’re competing on price and that’s a race to the bottom.

How to actually develop taste

I know some of you are reading this thinking “Great Charlotte, but how?”

• Slow down: Stop consuming at the speed of the algorithm. Save fewer things but actually revisit them. Ask yourself what specifically makes something feel good versus lazy, intentional versus default. Once a week, look at five things you genuinely responded to and write one sentence about why. Not “this is cool.” Why is it cool? What choice did someone make? Over time, that’s how instinct becomes judgment.

• Build references, not opinions: The people with the best taste aren’t the ones with the loudest opinions. They’re the ones with the deepest references. Read excellent writing, study strong brand systems and pay attention to why certain spaces, campaigns or products feel balanced and others feel off.

• Use AI but never let it decide. AI is brilliant for generating options, use it for that if you want but your job is to edit. Generate 10 options, cut 8 and refine the remaining two until they actually feel like something.

• Talk about it. Taste gets sharper in conversation. Not “that campaign was great” but what specific choice made it work? What would have ruined it? Articulating preference is how instinct becomes a real point of view and a point of view is the only thing that scales when everything else can be generated.

@katina.bajajWill coolness / taste be the most important status symbol? Does it correlate with our society’s drive for creativity and innovation? Big questions - curious to talk about them and track what happens! #creativity #taste #psychology #ai #coolness #tech #research #neuroscience #psychology #womeninstem #mentalhealth #creativelife

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The uncomfortable question

I want to end with something that’s been sitting with me because I think it needs to be said even though it makes the whole argument messier.

If taste is becoming the most valuable skill in branding and developing taste requires time, exposure, access to good references, mentorship and the financial stability to say no to bad work… then aren’t we just rebuilding the old gatekeeping under a new name?

Bourdieu argued that taste was always a class signal. The people with “good taste” were the people with access to the right institutions, the right education, the right cultural exposure. If the new competitive advantage is taste and taste is developed through privilege, then we haven’t democratised anything. We’ve just given elitism a rebrand.

I don’t have a neat answer for this and I’m suspicious of anyone who does.

What I do know is that the internet has genuinely expanded access to references and cultural literacy in ways that previous generations couldn’t imagine. A kid in Nairobi with a phone and genuine curiosity can now develop a sharper eye than someone with an art history degree from Central Saint Martins and no instinct. I’ve seen it because I’ve hired those people. Some of the best taste I’ve encountered in the last five years has come from people who had zero formal training but obsessive curiosity and the discipline to study why things work.

But I also know that the freedom to develop taste, the time to slow down, the ability to say no to work that pays but compromises your standards, the luxury of building a reference library instead of just grinding, that’s not equally distributed. And pretending it is would be dishonest.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

P.S On Friday I launched a second essay that drops every fortnight called ‘Founder Fridays’. The first one explored aspiration vs access. Let me know what you think.

P.P.S I’ve been shortlisted for B2B Creator of the Year. You can vote here.

WELL. I’m so excited to launch Substack number two of the week. This will be a fortnightly essay that explores why I decided to build an agency (todays essay unpicks some of that), running and growing an agency, scaling into new countries, the how we got here, how we get to what’s next and the messy parts that sit around being a business owner.

This week I want to talk about aspiration and ambition and what happens in society when it disappears.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I am, in many ways, the classical millennial. Entirely raised on pop culture. Entirely shaped by it.

I grew up watching Sex and the City, The Hills, Ugly Betty and The Devil Wears Prada on repeat. Looking back, it’s easy to dismiss these shows as glossy fantasies that sold unrealistic versions of success, but I think that’s missing something important about the role they played for an entire generation.

For many of us, these weren’t simply television shows. They were introductions to worlds we didn’t know existed.

I didn’t grow up around people who worked in advertising agencies, fashion magazines, publishing houses or media companies. Nobody sat me down and explained what a publicist did or how somebody became an editor. Yet somehow I knew these jobs existed. I knew there were women building careers in these industries, leading teams, making decisions and creating lives that felt exciting and expansive.

Whether those portrayals were realistic almost feels beside the point. What mattered was that they gave us something to imagine ourselves into - for most of my teens and twenties this was a huge part of my personality.

I don’t think society talks enough about the role popular culture played in creating ambition. Before social media, before creator culture and before every career path became endlessly documented online, television often acted as a window into possibility. It introduced people to industries, lifestyles and futures that may never have existed within their immediate environment.

The aspiration wasn’t necessarily to become Carrie Bradshaw or Andy Sachs. The aspiration was to understand that there were multiple versions of adulthood available to you.

That’s what made those stories powerful.

It’s also worth remembering just how big these cultural properties actually were.

The final episode of Sex and the City attracted more than 10 million viewers in the United States alone, making it one of HBO’s most successful programmes at the time. The show didn’t simply entertain people. It influenced fashion, retail, tourism and consumer spending. Luxury brands saw demand surge after appearing on screen, while New York itself became part of the fantasy being sold to audiences around the world.

Then there was The Devil Wears Prada.

Produced for around $35 million, the film generated more than $326 million globally and became one of the defining workplace films of its generation. Nearly twenty years later, it remains culturally relevant enough to justify a sequel, while fashion editors, journalists and publicists still cite it as one of the reasons they entered the industry in the first place.

The Hills did something similar for publishing and fashion. Lauren Conrad’s internship at Teen Vogue became one of the most famous internships in popular culture, helping turn fashion publishing into something young women actively aspired towards.

What fascinates me isn’t the commercial success of these shows.

It’s the fact that they made careers look interesting.

👉🏾 Not easy.

👉🏾 Not always enjoyable.

But interesting. And that matters more than people think.

Because when was the last time a television show made somebody want to become a magazine editor?

👉🏾 Or a publicist?

👉🏾 Or work in advertising?

👉🏾 Or move to a city they couldn’t afford with nothing but ambition and a slightly delusional belief that it would all work out?

Somewhere along the way, we’ve moved from aspiration to access. And I want to explore want that means, because I think it’s nuanced and actually more complicated that people know.

The internet has democratised information in ways that are genuinely remarkable. Today, you can learn almost anything about almost anyone. You can watch a day-in-the-life video from someone working at a global agency, hear a founder explain exactly how they built a business or follow the career journey of somebody ten years ahead of you.

In theory, that should have made ambition stronger.

I’m not convinced it has. Access and aspiration aren’t the same thing.

Aspiration requires imagination. It needs enough distance for us to project ourselves into a future that feels bigger than our present. Access pulls everything closer. It removes the mystery. It exposes the mechanics. It replaces mythology with transparency.

👉🏾 We know how much people earn.

👉🏾 We know how they got promoted.

👉🏾 We know when they’re burning out.

👉🏾 We know how often they question whether any of it is worth it.

The curtain has been pulled back on almost every industry.

And while that’s undoubtedly made certain things more equitable, I sometimes wonder whether it has also made it harder to dream.

After all, aspiration has always been built on selective storytelling.

The problem isn’t that we’ve become more honest. The problem is that we’ve become very good at dismantling myths without creating new ones.

Previous generations often aspired towards careers. Increasingly, younger generations appear to aspire towards people.

It’s a subtle, but important redirection for career behaviour.

For decades, popular culture encouraged people to imagine themselves as magazine editors, music executives, fashion buyers, journalists, publicists and advertisers. Today, many of the most visible examples of success are individuals whose careers are built around themselves.

The creator has become the aspiration.

In many ways, it makes perfect sense. Creators are some of the only people still packaging ambition into compelling narratives. They are visible, relatable and accessible in ways traditional industries often aren’t.

But aspiring towards a person feels fundamentally different from aspiring towards a possibility.

And perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people feel simultaneously informed and directionless. We have unprecedented visibility into how other people live, yet often less clarity about what kind of life we want for ourselves.

At the same time, younger generations are entering one of the most uncertain employment markets in years.

Graduate jobs are becoming increasingly competitive. Entry-level roles are shrinking. Entire industries are being reshaped by automation, AI and economic pressure. In the UK, youth unemployment remains significantly higher than overall unemployment, while employers continue to report reducing junior hiring in favour of experienced talent.

Just as traditional career pathways become harder to access, the cultural stories that once made those pathways feel desirable have largely disappeared too.

Perhaps that’s why creator culture has become such a powerful aspiration engine.

Creators haven’t just replaced celebrities. In many ways, they’ve replaced the career archetypes television once gave us.

Which brings me back to aspiration itself.

I mean aspiration in its simplest form, the belief that there are opportunities, careers and futures beyond your current circumstances. The belief that there is somewhere else you could go. Because when people stop believing that, it leaves a void. Economically, culturally and socially.

Aspirational stories have always done more than entertain us. They’ve expanded our understanding of what might be possible. And while we’ve spent years celebrating the democratisation of media, I increasingly wonder whether the next conversation is about what we’ve lost along the way.

Because for all our access, transparency and visibility, I’m not convinced we’ve replaced what aspiration used to do.

Millennials were raised on aspirational careers.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are increasingly being raised on aspirational people.

And I’m not sure we fully understand what that means yet.

Would love to know what you think?

I’m off the rewatch Scandal for the 2393838 time, because Olivia Pope, no explanation needed. Lol.

Have a great weekend y’all!

Charlotte

xoxo

P.S If you’re looking for something to heat up your career, the legends over at Tracksuit have just launched Tracksuit University. An educational programme that focuses on translating ‘‘marketing speak’’ for the boardroom. Despite what the internet may tell you, budget sign off and ROI are still heavily focused on what they always have been. This will help you talk that talk. Let me know what you think.

Learn more

P.P.S I’ve been shortlisted for an award! OMFG! ‘‘Business/ Finance Creator of the Year’’ at the ITV bCreator Awards 2026.

Vote here!

OK BYE!

She was a millennial woman and the primary purchasing decision-maker in her household. Every brief and campaign was optimised around her and it’s largely because of two things.

First, the data, female consumers account for nearly 60% of US retail discretionary spend, so brands naturally followed the money. Second, and this is the part that doesn’t get discussed enough…men, and it was almost always men, manufactured insecurities in women, and we, due to a combination of social pressure, limited representation in science and advertising, and in many cases economic dependency, bought the solutions.

We didn’t buy them because we were naive but because the people selling to us had studied women’s psychology, social anxieties and relationship dynamics so thoroughly that the problems they invented felt entirely real.

The example I keep coming back to is underarm hair. Before 1915, removing it wasn’t even a concept for most women and then Gillette launched the Milady Décolleté razor with an ad in Harper’s Bazaar declaring bare underarms a “necessity” and body hair an “embarrassing personal problem.” They didn’t respond to a market, they actually built one.

Within a generation, the idea that women’s body hair was unsightly was so embedded it felt biological even though it wasn’t.

I’ve written about this before the way brands and governments have always found ways to sell women a version of themselves that keeps them spending. The manufactured insecurity playbook is well-documented.

What’s less discussed is what happens when that same energy turns toward men because something has shifted.

And the question I’ve been asking myself is this the early stages of the same playbook? The product is positioned as the solution to an insecurity the consumer may not have felt acutely until the ad surfaced it. That doesn't make the products useless, many of them work, but it means the male wellness boom deserves the same scrutiny we've learned to apply to the female version. But what I find interesting is that most often than not it’s men doing the selling.

The male grooming industry has grown from roughly $21 billion globally in 2016 to $61.6 billion in 2025. Wellness is no longer a female-coded word, men are signing up for therapy, cold plunges, supplements and sleep tracking at rates that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

And have you seen the cosmetic surgery headlines? Men now account for 16% of all cosmetic procedures globally, with Botox and filler bookings for men rising year-on-year.

The term “Brotox” exists, which tells you everything about where we are culturally.

Of course, context matters here.

Younger Millennial men grew up being told, finally, that it was okay to go to therapy, talk about their feelings and take care of themselves. Gen Z men grew up watching male beauty creators, building skincare routines as a default, treating grooming as self-expression rather than a weakness.

And the acceptance and legalisation of LGBTQ+ rights, thank God, has meant more men are open about their love of fashion, self-care, wellness, makeup and beauty in ways that were either hidden or impossible before.

So when you layer cultural shifts onto economic ones, you get a change in consumer psychology and behaviour. And that creates opportunity.

Which begs the question not enough marketing teams are asking seriously: was the male consumer ever actually disengaged, or did an entire industry just stop knowing how to see him?

What prompted me to speak about this now?

Earlier this year, Unilever acquired Dr. Squatch, a men's personal care brand built largely through humour, community and podcast advertising. Rather than spending years trying to win over a younger male audience organically, Unilever bought a brand that had already earned its trust and attention.

Brands are coming to us at The Fitting Room wanting to “crack the male market” as if it’s a locked door, rather than a space they just never seriously entered.

The brands paying attention right now are quietly building some of the most durable male consumer relationships in the market.

Let’s talk about how and why.

“Men are lonely” became a business model

Let's talk about the epidemic that every newspaper seems unable to stop writing about: male loneliness.

Research from The Standard shows one in five men ages 18 – 26 have taken leave to address their mental health challenges. That’s higher than any other generation in the workplace and it might signal a cultural shift.

Everyone has their theory on why it's happened but whatever the cause, the bottom line is that this so-called epidemic has produced an influx of business plans and pitch decks some genuinely aimed at improving men's mental health, others that seem far more interested in capturing a wallet than making an impact.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic. The data on men is stark: roughly 1 in 7 men report having no close friends, a number that has risen fivefold since 1990.

For brands, that’s commercially underserved emotional territory.

The early movers are instructive. Evryman runs weekend retreats where men gather to talk about the things they traditionally don’t, grief, isolation, purpose. What started as a wellness experiment is now a subscription-based community business with returning cohorts and a growing waitlist.

A cluster of AI-powered friendship apps, Kndrd, 222, Alyke, are facilitating in-person connection through interest-matching, built for a demographic that’s least likely to cold-start a relationship but most likely to show up if the context is structured for them.

The Black barbershop has been a community institution for over a century. After emancipation, barbering was one of the few professions that allowed Black men to own businesses and serve their communities freely. By the 1920s, the barbershop was already doing everything the “third place” brand conversation now claims to have invented, hosting political debate, offering therapy without calling it that, building intergenerational bonds and providing a space where Black men could be themselves when most public spaces were segregated or restricted.

What brands like Blind Barber have done is recognise the commercial architecture underneath that cultural institution and build a business model around it, in-shop events, branded product lines, the kind of recurring foot traffic retail brands would kill for. There's nothing wrong with that but when the industry celebrates the barbershop renaissance as a discovery, it's worth naming what was always there and who built it first.

The barbershop works because it has an embedded ritual. You go on a schedule. You see the same people. You have a reason to be there that isn't explicitly "I want connection." That structure is the product and it extends naturally into apparel, product ranges and content, all built on earned trust rather than paid acquisition.

Men and podcasting

While social media conversations often focus on female consumer communities, many male consumers are spending hours each week inside long-form creator ecosystems built around podcasts, YouTube shows, livestreams and newsletters.

A host recommending a product to two million loyal listeners can operate more like scaled word-of-mouth than a traditional media placement. Podcast audiences often spend hours with the same creators, which creates a level of familiarity and trust that standard ads rarely achieve.

That’s one reason brands like MANSCAPED, Hims and AG1 were able to build substantial awareness and market share through podcast and creator ecosystems.

But some of the most efficient channels for reaching male audiences can also create brand safety risks. The line between “speaks authentically to men” and “gets associated with controversial online culture” is thin, contested and constantly shifting.

Several brands have faced backlash not because of their own messaging, but because of the creators they partnered with, hosts whose humour, political commentary or audience culture created reputational risk.

The brands navigating this best are becoming more disciplined: tighter creator vetting, shorter partnership commitments and diversified channel mixes so no single voice becomes synonymous with the brand.

The brands navigating this well are now building tighter creator vetting, shorter partnership commitments and diversified channel mixes so no single voice becomes definitional.

The ones that aren’t are finding out the hard way.

Now, the honest question about the loneliness economy is whether any of it is actually building durable business, or whether “male loneliness” has become the kind of trend language brands dress up surface-level plays in.

And the answer is: both.

Harvard research published this year found that many emotional wellness apps may be doing more harm than good with users forming deep emotional attachments to AI companions that substitute for, rather than facilitate, real connection. Some users reported feeling closer to their AI companion than to any human friend. When the product designed to solve loneliness becomes the thing that sustains it, you're in the dependency business.

The retreats and structured environments gaining real traction work precisely because they push people toward each other, not toward a screen.

Most men according to research aren’t looking for ongoing vulnerability programmes., they want a low-pressure reason to show up somewhere and connection is what happens after but it needs to be made accessible.

The “men don’t shop” myth was always a category problem

Men spend approximately 40% more per transaction than women globally once they decide to buy, though that figure deserves context because men spend disproportionately on electronics, vehicles, and big-ticket categories that naturally inflate transaction size. A man buying one $800 laptop and a woman making ten $50 purchases look very different in per-transaction data but represent comparable spending.

The “men don’t shop” narrative was never really about frequency or intent but one could say it was rooted in bias that got mistaken for a behavioural insight. Brands built their acquisition funnels around the categories women over-index in, apparel, beauty, home, wellness, then pointed to the numbers as evidence that men weren’t engaged consumers. Maybe they were engaged but just not with you.

What the data actually shows is a consumer who shops less often but with higher intent, higher basket value and, on the surface at least, stronger retention. Men are more brand-loyal than women, 67% versus 59%. But that number needs a caveat most marketers skip: a meaningful portion of male “loyalty” is actually inertia. Men often don’t switch brands because they don’t care enough to evaluate alternatives, not because they’re deeply attached. That’s a fragile foundation and I can admit that.

Once a genuinely better product arrives at a comparable price, or once a brand does something to break the relationship, that loyalty disappears faster than the acquisition data suggested it would.

The strategic implication is sharper than “men are loyal, invest in retention.” It’s this: men are hard to acquire but easy to keep until you give them a reason not to be and brand attachment for men tends to be product-specific, not brand-wide.

Gillette is the cautionary tale here, and it’s a good one to understand properly. In 2019, the brand launched “The Best Men Can Be”, a campaign addressing toxic masculinity that became one of the most controversial pieces of brand marketing in recent memory.

The campaign wasn’t wrong in its values but perhaps it was wrong in its model. It assumed male consumers wanted their brand to have an opinion about their behaviour. Most of them didn’t and that distinction, between a brand that understands you and a brand that lectures you, is the difference between building loyalty and burning it.

The irony, of course, is that this is the same brand that manufactured female insecurity for profit in 1915. Gillette spent a century telling women what was wrong with their bodies and then it tried to tell men what was wrong with their character no matter how well meaning it was neither approach was about the consumer but both were about control.

One last thing worth saying brands spent a century manufacturing insecurity in women and calling it aspiration. The male consumer is now being welcomed into the same economy with warmer language and better UX, but some of the underlying mechanics are identical. The opportunity is real but so is the responsibility to not repeat the playbook while pretending it’s something new.

So what does this mean if you're working in brand or strategy?

• If you lead with "join our community," you're asking men to opt into something emotionally loaded before they've experienced anything. That's where the resistance can come from but lead with a structured occasion, a recurring event, a format, a ritual, and they show up for the thing, not the belonging. The belonging is what they find once they've been there a few times. Nobody walks into a barbershop saying "I want to be part of a community they go for a haircut on a schedule and then the community accumulates in the margins.

• The Gillette lesson isn't "don't have values." It's "don't confuse your brand's opinion with your consumer's need." Men will buy from brands that understand them but will leave brands that lecture them.

• The male wellness boom happened because three structural shifts converged at once and each one removed a different barrier. Telehealth removed the waiting room. For a demographic that avoided doctors partly out of discomfort, friction was the real obstacle, not apathy. Hims now has 2.4 million subscribers, spending an average of $74 a month and the broader US telehealth market is growing at nearly 24% annually. These platforms just made it possible to act on it without sitting in a waiting room, making eye contact with a receptionist or saying the words out loud. The product was privacy and convenience.

• The men driving the wellness boom are disproportionately higher-income and digitally fluent. A 24-year-old in London with a Hims subscription and a therapist lives in a different consumer reality from a 24-year-old tradesman in Sunderland. The market shift is real, but it's not evenly distributed, and brands that treat it as universal will build products that only speak to one slice of the male population while claiming to speak for all of it.

@tfrcharlotteThe gender gap nobody’s talking about 🧐 #genz #marketing #gender #business #women

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

Today’s newsletter might upset a few people or perhaps it might just say what we’ve all quietly been thinking.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and thought, why not. So here it is… I think there’s been a lot of hype around Gen Z but I think they will be the forgotten generation.

They were, dare I say, an experiment. Kind of like when brands first discovered influencer marketing and threw budgets at anyone with 10k followers and a ring light, hoping something would stick but it was never the final act.

I believe Gen Alpha will be the actual change-making generation.

Now, before you come for me, of course we must give credit where it's due. This generation has shaken things up. From normalising conversations around mental health and gender identity to making brand transparency a non-negotiable, to single-handedly turning creator culture into a legitimate career path and economic engine, Gen Z took the foundations that we millennials set around purpose-driven marketing, diversity and social accountability and took them all the way to the boardroom.

But there have also been some… questionable moments.

From the siren and mob wife aesthetics that got people fired from their corporate jobs, to the "I quit" TikToks that burned bridges in real time, to de-influencing somehow becoming its own form of influence, this was also a generation that was figuring it out.

And that makes sense, because realistically, the older half of Gen Z didn't grow up with the internet from birth. They got their first smartphones at 12, 13, or maybe 14. Much like us millennials, they too had to adapt to a digital world that was still being built around them.

They're digital adopters, not digital natives…there's a difference.

Gen Alpha, on the other hand, had an iPad in the pram. They were swiping before they were speaking and like I said in my last newsletter, I don't think employers, brands and marketers are ready for what's coming.

I spoke with an agency founder the other day who actually hires (contract basis) Gen Alpha, ages 14 to 16, for TikTok edits and viral video production, working alongside their parents and the local council (you have to get government permission for under-16). When I asked them why Gen Alpha specifically, they said: “Because they’re so in the know it’s almost scary. They understand virality intuitively and you’ll be surprised the people behind some of the most viral edits on socials are that young.”

But then they said something that stuck with me even more: “They’re also a very misunderstood generation. More misunderstood than Gen Z ever was.”

And that got me thinking If Gen Alpha is already being underestimated at 14, what happens when they enter the workforce at scale? What happens when they start spending their own money? And what happens to Gen Z when they do?

So today, we’re unpacking all of it.

We’ll be covering:

• Why Gen Z might be the next Gen X and what that actually means)

• The data behind Gen Z’s “checked out” consumer behaviour

• Where the Gen X parallel holds and where it breaks down

• What Gen Alpha’s rise means for your brand strategy right now

• How to rethink generational investment as a portfolio, not a bet

The Gen Z Hype: How Did We Get Here?

Before I make the case for Gen Z being forgotten, let’s talk about how they became the most obsessed-over generation in marketing history.

It started around 2015/2016. Millennials were ageing out of the “young consumer” bracket and the industry needed a new protagonist so enter Gen Z. The first generation to grow up with social media baked into their adolescence.

And brands went all in.

Every pitch deck led with Gen Z and most agencies built a Gen Z arm with entire conferences dedicated to “cracking” them. TikTok went from a lip-syncing app to the centrepiece of global media strategy practically overnight because that’s where Gen Z lived. Purpose-driven marketing, which millennials had started pushing for, became non-negotiable because Gen Z demanded it louder.

And brands scrambled to prove they had values, that they cared about sustainability, and were on the right side of social issues, not because it was the right thing to do but because Gen Z would punish them publicly if they didn’t.

The investment was pretty insane to watch.

Now, this isn’t new. Every generation gets more attention than the other especially in marketing but this was different.

Gen Z’s estimated spending power hit $984 billion globally and brands chased it like it was the last gold rush and entire product lines were designed, marketed, and distributed through channels that only existed because Gen Z used them.

But with all of that investment, attention and hype… now The Robin Report is now calling them “The Checked-Out Generation”. Gen Z shoppers are spending 19% less than the average FMCG spend. More than 79% wait for sales and only 21% pay full price. They’re overwhelmed, many are still living at home and the labour market they’re entering has been described as “no-hire, no-fire.”

The aspirational marketing that brands built empires on? Dead. Some young consumers don’t see their future in influencers wearing Balenciaga to frolic around Paris when they have more in common with the person behind the McDonald’s counter. And 91% of 18-to-25-year-olds say mainstream pop culture is a thing of the past. So you can’t even target them as a cohort anymore because they every other generation they’re now so fragmented.

So the question I keep asking is this: if the generation you poured billions into targeting is checked out, price-paralysed and fragmented beyond the reach of traditional segmentation… are you trying to understand how to properly reach them or will marketers just give up?

Which is what led me to the Gen X comparison because this has happened before.

The Parallel No One’s Talking About

Some of you might be reading this and thinking, “Why Gen X though? What’s the connection?”

Gen X, born between 1965 and 1980, are now regularly called the “forgotten generation.” Only 5% of influencer campaign spend targets them, despite the fact that they account for 27% of global consumer spending. They’ll be the consumer spending leader globally through 2033, surpassing $20 trillion in purchasing power.

And yet most brands act like they don’t exist.

Gen X had their own hype era. In the early ‘90s, after Douglas Coupland published Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the marketing industry lost its mind over this generation.

They were the MTV generation, the grunge kids and the anti-establishment consumers who were going to reject everything Boomers stood for. Brands threw money at them.

There was so much commercial interest in “Generation X” as a demographic that Coupland himself was offered huge sums to act as a marketing consultant for his own generation.

He turned it down and famously refused to create an ad for Gap.

In other words, the exact same pattern: A generation gets labelled, the industry builds an entire narrative around them. Billions flow towards understanding and capturing them and then… the next generation shows up, the spotlight shifts and suddenly they’re invisible.

That’s exactly what I think is happening with Gen Z right now.

Both generations got structurally sandwiched between louder cohorts. Gen X sat between Boomers, who dominated the cultural conversation through sheer numbers, and Millennials, who rewrote the rules of brand-consumer relationships. Gen Z sits between Millennials, who forced companies to care about values, purpose and community, and Gen Alpha, who will be the first fully AI-native consumer cohort in history.

Now I’m not saying it’s a carbon copy, the parallel isn’t exact and I’d be lazy to pretend it is.

Gen X was forgotten because they sat in the middle of a media transition (analogue and digital) belonging fully to neither. Gen Z’s version of being forgotten is actually the opposite..they’re not going to be overlooked because they’re quiet. I think they’re overexposed to the point where their distinctiveness is vanishing. When everyone does short-form video, creator-led discovery and social search, those things stop being “Gen Z behaviours” and start being just… how things work.

Gen X was ignored but Gen Z is being absorbed. Different paths, same destination: the generation in the middle doesn’t get the monument.

Both entered adulthood into disrupted economies, Gen X after the early ‘90s recession, Gen Z after COVID gutted what had been a promising job market. Pew found only 18% of Gen Z teens were employed compared to 41% of Gen X teens at the same age. Both generations share an economic pessimism, a sense of having been dealt a worse hand than the generation before them.

But culturally Gen Z actually looks more like Millennials. Their political views, their stance on diversity, their expectations of government, that all tracks closer to Millennials than to the ironic detachment that defined Gen X.

So Gen Z is economically Gen X, culturally Millennial and in their media habits, something completely new.

And that contradiction is exactly why some people still find them so hard to market to and exactly why I think the industry might eventually throw its hands up and move on to the generation that’s “easier” to understand, which brings us back to Alpha.

But Wait… Isn’t This Just What Happens to Every Generation?

Now I know some of you are reading this and thinking, “Charlotte, aren’t you just describing a pattern that happens to everyone? Won’t Gen Alpha eventually be forgotten too?”

It’s a fair pushback.

But after I gave a talk on this recently, someone sent me a message. They reminded me of Douglas Adams’ three rules for how we interact with technology:

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Read that again and think about it in the context of generational marketing.

The person who messaged me called it the “Mair-Adams theory” which honestly made me laugh but the more I sat with it the more I thought… he might be onto something.

The idea is simple: it’s not just about who a generation is. It’s about how old they were when the big stuff happened.

How old were you when social media took over? When AI went mainstream? When the economy collapsed? That timing shapes everything.

Gen Z were between roughly 5 and 20 when social media exploded. Old enough to adopt it, young enough to be shaped by it but not born into it. They experienced the shift and lived through the transition. That’s Adams’ rule two: new, exciting, revolutionary, build a career in it and many of them did. But that also means they carry the memory of what came before. They know what life without TikTok felt like and they adapted.

Gen Alpha? They were born after the shift. Social media, creator culture, AI-assisted everything, that’s just the water they swim in. That’s Adams’ rule one: normal, ordinary, the way the world works. They don’t need to adopt it or adapt to it. They don’t even think about it. It’s just… reality.

And that’s why I think the impact pattern skips. The generation that lives through the transition does the hard work of normalising the new thing but the generation that’s born into the new normal is the one that actually builds on it, without looking over their shoulder at how things used to be.

Some generations become blueprints.

They set the terms that every generation after them gets measured against. Millennials were a blueprint, they broke that model and rebuilt it around values, authenticity, and digital-first experiences.

Every marketing strategy written since 2010 has been a response to Millennials in some way, whether it’s chasing them or deliberately doing the opposite.

And then some generations are bridges. They move things forward, but they don’t set the template. They’re the transition, not the destination. That’s where I think Gen Z sits and that’s where Gen X sat before them.

Gen Alpha has a genuine claim to being the next blueprint generation and it’s not just hype. They are the first generation born entirely into a digital-native world. They don’t know a world without AI assistants, algorithm-driven discovery, or creator economies.

They already represent $28 billion in direct spending, and among 11-to-14-year-olds, 48% discover products through influencers, rivalling in-store discovery.

That agency founder I mentioned earlier isn’t hiring those 14-year-olds because they’re cheap but they understand the grammar of digital culture in a way that even the sharpest Gen Z creators have to think about.

So no, I don’t think every generation gets forgotten. I think the ones that build the infrastructure get forgotten and the ones that set the blueprint get remembered. Gen Z built the infrastructure and Gen Alpha will set the blueprint.

Remember the Gen Alpha Piece?

I digress but if you’ve been with this newsletter for a while, you’ll remember when we wrote about how we called Gen Z lazy and now we’re doing the same thing to Gen Alpha. That piece was about the cycle of generational moral panic, how every new cohort gets slapped with the same “entitled and workshy” label by the ones above them.

And I want to be fair here, because this isn’t a Gen Z takedown. Pew Research shows Gen Z is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in history, on track to be the most well-educated and they’ve driven climate activism at levels that rival Millennials. They normalised identity fluidity, made authenticity a baseline brand expectation and turned values-led purchasing into standard consumer behaviour.

But here’s the thing about making something normal. Nobody remembers who did it. Gen X made dual-income households, latchkey independence and early tech adoption the default. Nobody credits them.

So, Why Should Brands Care?

If you’re a CMO or a brand strategist reading this, the question isn’t “does Gen Z matter?” Of course they do. The question is a different one entirely: are you investing in Gen Z because the data supports it or because the narrative does? Because right now, those are two very different things and a lot of brand budgets are following the story instead of the numbers.

Here’s how I’d rethink generational investment if I were building a brand strategy today. Think of it as a portfolio, not a single bet.

Gen Z spend is maintenance. They’re already in your funnel and they know who you are but they’re price-sensitive, sale-dependent and increasingly ad-resistant. The return on chasing new Gen Z customers is flattening. Stop treating them as a growth market and start treating them as a retention play. You need to be offering genuine utility, fair pricing, and consistent transparency. This isn’t the generation you impress with a campaign but the generation you keep by being consistently decent.

Gen Alpha spend is R&D. They’re 15 and under but they’re already influencing billions in household purchasing decisions, from what’s on the dinner table to where the family goes on holiday. The brands building AI-native discovery, creator-educator partnerships and spatial commerce right now are placing bets that won’t pay off for five years. But when they do? The early movers will own the infrastructure of the next consumer economy and if you’re not already paying attention to the 14-year-olds who understand your platforms better than your social team does… you’re behind.

Gen X spend is the arbitrage opportunity everyone’s sleeping on. This is the most under-served generation in marketing and it’s not even close. If you’re looking for ROI right now, today, this quarter, this is your gap. Gen X needs you to be competent, trustworthy and respectful of their time. Lower creative bar, higher conversion potential. It’s almost too obvious, which is probably why everyone’s ignoring it.

The mistake most brands are making is treating generational strategy like a single bet. Pick Gen Z or pick Alpha or pick whoever the trend report told you to pick but it’s not a bet. It’s a portfolio and right now, most portfolios are dangerously overweight on Gen Z hype and criminally underweight on Gen X value and Gen Alpha futures.

What Comes Next

Gen Z might not become the defining generation of this era in the way the marketing industry predicted. Instead, they might be the bridge generation. The ones who normalised digital culture, identity fluidity, and economic scepticism so completely that Gen Alpha could be born directly into a world shaped by those shifts, without ever knowing it was different.

@tfrcharlotteHave we really thought this through? 😬 #business #marketing #ai

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

Ownership has become one of the most talked-about concepts in entertainment and marketing over the past decade. We celebrate the artists who fought for it: Taylor Swift re-recording her catalogue to reclaim her masters, Prince writing “slave” on his face to protest Warner Bros or Chance the Rapper proving you could build a career without ever signing a deal.

These stories get held up as proof that ownership matters and they’re right. But they can also create a slightly misleading narrative: that ownership is something you fight for after you’ve made it, a battle waged from a position of strength.

The creator economy has its own version of this problem, and in many ways, it’s more precarious. The power imbalance shows up earlier. A creator can sign away their IP before they’ve fully understood what they’re building or how valuable it might become.

That’s what happened to Alfie and Regina.

In 2019, Alfie Richards and his wife Regina moved to China and built the biggest Western couple account (Alfie的Angel) in the country. 10 million followers across Xiaohongshu, Douyin, weibo and others. Over a billion views, live broadcasts with 40,000 concurrent viewers. Two people, no team, building something from a house share that turned into a genuine cultural phenomenon.

Then the agency they’d signed with in the early days refused to release the IP rights.

They’d signed the deal before they understood what they had and by the time they realised, the contract meant that everything ( the account, the brand, any future extension of it) belonged to someone else.

They walked away, moved back to the UK and worked regular jobs for a year.

Five months ago, they went back to China to start again from zero.

Their story is the most dramatic version of a problem that’s structural across the creator economy and with TikTok’s recent deal with Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media signalling that platforms are about to push harder into creator-led storytelling, more people are going to enter this space without understanding what they’re signing.

The Hoorae deal is exciting because it represents platforms investing in creator-owned narrative but it also raises the stakes, the bigger the opportunities get, the more important it becomes that creators understand the contracts attached to them.

I sat down with Alfie and Regina to talk about how they built their brand, how they lost it and what they’re doing differently now so we marketers, creators and founders can learn from their experience.

HOW IT STARTED:

What made you decide to start creating content together?

Regina: “I was planning to go back to China once I graduated from university. But while we were together, I just wanted to document our life together. The culture was and still is so different, so there were so many funny things that would happen between us. I thought maybe one day, if we break up, that could be a memory for me that I could look back on. I had never dated someone like Alfie before. It was almost considered taboo where I was from.”

That instinct, to document rather than perform, is exactly what made it work. The content worked because it wasn't engineered and it was the perfect timing because in 2019, cross-cultural couple content on Chinese platforms was virtually untouched.

Alfie: "It was the whole Blue Ocean scenario, we were essentially the only ones doing it at that scale.”

The reception was mixed and landed almost entirely on Regina. Within the cultural context, she was the one who’d crossed a line, not Alfie. That dynamic matters for Western marketers to understand because audience reception on Chinese platforms operates within a completely different cultural framework. What reads as a charming love story in the West can read as a controversial in China.

Alfie: “There was a cultural shock element, it was like, you’ve betrayed the Chinese guy, you can’t find someone and there you are with this foreign guy. But we also had tens of thousands of people inspired by our relationship and how we were doing something outside of the norm.”

WHEN IT GOT REAL

When did you realise this could be more than just content?

There's a distinction between audience and community, a theme we explored in previous newsletters. A follower count is passive because it tells you how many people tapped a button but it doesn't tell you whether any of those people would do something for you in the real world.

Alfie: "We went to this Chinese theme park and a fan came up, a high school kid, about 17. We mentioned we couldn't get into a sold-out show. He volunteered there and just got us in. No hesitation. It blows my mind. You produce videos online that connect so strongly with people that when they see you in real life, they want to help."

“And we’ve also heard success stories from other people who’ve been inspired by our content. It’s not just entertaining them but teaching them that it’s okay to fall in love with someone different.”

As they scaled, their approach shifted too. Early content was spontaneous, cultural misunderstandings, hopping on trends, joking about China winning Olympic medals while the UK didn't but they deliberately pulled back on volume in favour of quality.

Alfie: "We would rather post five super great videos rather than thirty kind of rushed. The output went down but the standard went up, and I think that had a bigger impact on growth than volume ever did."

THE DEAL THAT TOOK EVERYTHING

This is the part that should make every creator and every brand manager pay attention.

In China, the dominant model for managing creator talent isn’t the Western-style agency, it’s the MCN (Multi-Channel Network). There are tens of thousands of MCNs operating in a multi-billion dollar market.

They function as a hybrid of talent management, content production and commercial brokerage, scouting creators early, developing them at scale and monetising across brand deals, livestreaming and e-commerce.

And critically, in some case, particularly at the early stages, contracts have historically favoured the network, with varying degrees of control over content, revenue and IP. That dynamic has started to shift as top creators gain leverage but it’s still a defining part in the system.

This is the structure Alfie and Regina signed into.

Talk me through the decision to sign with an agency.

Alfie: "It was a very desperate decision. We were in super early days. Still living in our house share. We'd not long just met. The creator economy was still in its infancy it wasn't the mainstream thing it is now. They were very good at spotting whatever they spotted at that moment in time, catching us before we even knew what we were doing. They offered monetary support, growth opportunities, brand deal access and we didn't make the decision based off of us understanding our own opportunities. I think that was probably our biggest fault to date."

What did the contract actually give them control over?

Alfie: "Everything. If we started a YouTube channel, they would have owned that. An Instagram account. Even a makeup brand, anything we built under that name, or connected to it, they would have owned. We were completely restricted in what we could do outside of the agency's ecosystem."

Analyses of MCN-related disputes in China suggest that creators rarely succeed when trying to exit contracts through the courts. Outcomes tend to favour contract enforcement, which, combined with how many agreements are structured, can leave creators with limited leverage, especially early in their careers.

The result is a system where the balance of power often sits with the network, not the individual.

What happened as the account grew? Did the relationship with the agency change?

The agency, according to the pair, also had a pattern of downplaying their value keeping the talent feeling small so the network stays in control. And the content that actually drove the growth? That was Alfie and Regina.

Regina: “The most popular viral content all came from us. It’s all because of the way we are, our dynamic, our personalities, the way we interact. The agency helped more on the managed side, the brand deal side. But the content that built the audience, the videos that went viral, the things that people actually connected with, that was us.”

The agency provided commercial infrastructure and that has value but the contract was structured so that the people who created the value couldn’t keep it.

What would you say to creators who are where you were five years ago?

Alfie: “Creating goes a lot deeper than how many views you’re getting and how many followers you have. You are actually impacting real people’s lives…Just really value what you actually have. No matter how small it is. Do not let someone come in and pull the wool over your eyes because they can see the potential before you can. Because that’s pretty much, in a nutshell, what happened to us.”

WHAT CHINA GETS RIGHT THAT THE WEST DOESN'T

To understand what Alfie and Regina are going back to, you need to understand how differently the Chinese digital ecosystem operates.

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has over a billion users and is built around short-form virality and trend cycles. Xiaohongshu, often described as a cross between Instagram and a product review site, skews 70% female and dominates in beauty, lifestyle and travel content. Weibo functions more like Twitter, real-time news, trending topics, broader demographics.

And then there's live commerce.

China's livestream shopping market hit $682 billion in 2023 and is forecast to reach $1.1 trillion by 2026. The US market was roughly $50 billion in the same period. Alfie and Regina were doing live selling in China in 2023 but western brands are still treating it as experimental.

Alfie: "Things here are so rapid. The second something new pops up, overnight, everyone's on it. It's like a tsunami. Whereas in the West, something new comes up like TikTok Shop and a couple brands test it, but then they're like, ooh, I'm not sure. They wait and wait and wait. Two years later, oh, now we'll do it. That hesitation costs them years of first-mover advantage."

The reason social commerce works at scale in China is because of its infrastructure. People use their phones to pay for everything, show their ID, book travel and run their daily lives. Buying through a live stream isn’t a new behaviour, it’s embedded in how the country already operates.

Regina: “China’s hit the West with the UNO reverse card. They used to be this developing country and now industries are worth billions in months, not years.”

STARTING FROM ZERO, AGAIN

What does the rebuild look like now?

They’re five months back in China. Instead of one shared account, they run two. Regina focuses on beauty and lifestyle on Xiaohongshu, a deliberate play for the platform's core demographic.

Alfie runs content about learning Chinese and life as the husband, which performs on Douyin's broader, trend-driven audience. They appear on each other's pages but each owns their own IP.

Two accounts doubles the surface area for brand partnerships while eliminating the single point of failure that destroyed them last time. They're also diversifying into Western platforms, so they're no longer China-dependent.

Without an agency handling brand deals, they manage commercial relationships directly harder work but every penny goes back into content and building toward the long-term plan: their own product brand. Something they could never have done under the old contract.

When Regina launched her new account from nothing, old fans searched across platforms to find her. They followed, messaged and they said how much they’d missed the content. That’s the real stress test for community. When you strip away the platform, the algorithm, the follower count and the brand name, who comes looking for you?

Alfie: “It made us realise, we can’t just disappear, because there are truly people out there who used to watch us and who actually care.”

WHAT CREATORS SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS

• Negotiate based on trajectory, not current position. The agency saw Alfie and Regina's potential before they could see it themselves and structured the deal to capture that future value at today's price. Every creator with genuine traction, even modest traction, should assume that what they're building could be worth significantly more in two years than it is today. That doesn't mean rejecting every deal. It means building in mechanisms that reflect growth: sunset clauses that trigger renegotiation at follower thresholds, revenue-share structures that shift as the account scales and hard limits on how long the agreement lasts. A deal that made sense at 50,000 followers shouldn't still be governing your life at 5 million.

• Own your infrastructure, not just your content. The conversation about creator ownership tends to focus on IP, who owns the videos, the brand name, the account. But the infrastructure underneath the content is just as important: your audience data, direct relationship with brand partners and your presence across multiple platforms.

This story matters beyond the creator economy because the creator economy isn’t a niche anymore. Everyone is creating content now. Teachers are building audiences on YouTube, doctors are growing practices through Instagram and parents are monetising family life on TikTok. Building a personal brand has somehow become an insurance policy for careers, the thing you do alongside your job so that if the job disappears, you’ve got something that’s yours.

Except it might not be yours.

In all the excitement, the growth hacks, viral moments, brand deals, the dream of turning content into a living, it’s easy to skip past the structural questions. Who owns this account if things go wrong? What am I actually signing? What happens to what I’ve built if I want to walk away?

@tfrcharlotteFantastic advice!! 🎯 #influencers #react #business (@bran_flakezz is an ICON)

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

A lot has happened in the last week alone.

• Justin Bieber gave us a full circle moment at Coachella, singing alongside his homemade YouTube videos, the same ones that made him famous at 13. But of course, as with everything on the internet, it divided people. Some called it lazy. Others pointed out that if a female pop star had done the same thing, she’d have been torn apart for it and just like that, a Coachella set became a conversation about double standards for male versus female pop stars.

• Emma Grede found herself in the headlines again after she shared that her kids get three hours of her time on Saturdays. Cue the discourse. This is a topic I’ve written about many times, the impossible standards placed on working mothers and the choice women should actually have without being crucified for it either way.

• And did you watch the reboot of Malcolm in the Middle? We’ve now had That’s So Raven, Sex and the City, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, am I wrong to desperately want Girlfriends or even My Wife and Kids to make a return? The only problem with some reboots is how often we find ourselves comparing them to the original. Maybe some things just need to be left alone?

This week, however, we’re talking about the biggest story in media right now and one that most people outside of tech haven’t even heard of. OpenAI just acquired TBPN, a talk show built by two founders and 11 people that somehow turned printed tweets and suits into a $30 million media business.

We're going to unpack my theory of why most podcasts will fail in the next 10 years unless they start functioning like a newsroom.

This is inspired by the sheer volume of misinformation spreading through trusted voices right now… Big podcasters like Steven Bartlett, Tana Mongeau, Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman have been repeatedly called out in the press and online.

Newsrooms, as imperfect as they are, operate around a set of principles that podcasting has never had to adopt: editorial oversight, fact-checking, source verification, corrections policies and the basic understanding that if you're going to reach millions of people, what you say should be defensible.

Most podcasts skipped all of that and for a while it didn't matter and now it does.

I've been thinking about launching a podcast with my best-friend so I've been deep in this world, researching the space, studying what works, what doesn't and trying to figure out whether the people who say "the podcast market is oversaturated" are right or whether they're just the same people who said blogging was dead in 2015 and newsletters were over in 2020.

And then I watched how ShxtsnGigs podcast founders (despite their controversy last year) quietly built a $2M+ business and I thought okay, the market clearly isn't dead.

But it’s not that simple either.

Everyone has a podcast now… Your favourite celebrity, CEO, politician and the kid who bullied you in year 8 probably has one about mindset.

The question isn't whether podcasts are popular, obviously they are. It’s whether the ones that work are different from the ones that don't and what that means for anyone whose job involves building an audience, a brand or a business.

How Did We Get Here?

In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic and released a full advisory calling social disconnection a public health crisis on par with smoking. Robert Putnam wrote about the decline of community institutions in Bowling Alone back in 2000, but the decline has accelerated since with young adults reporting fewer close friendships than any generation before them.

Between remote work, economic downturn and a social life mediated by screens, people are spending more time alone than at any point in modern history.

And into that void steps a voice in your ear, every week, for an hour. Someone who sounds like a friend so that parasocial relationship that used to be reserved for television hosts and talk radio DJs is now taken over by podcasts hosts that feel like friends.

And it works because the need it serves (connection, familiarity and the feeling that someone is talking to you rather than at you) has never been greater.

Then there's the trust gap and I don't just mean in politics, I covered that in the last newsletter, what I mean is trust in journalism is at historic lows.

Edelman's Trust Barometer has been tracking this for years and the reality is people don't trust institutions anymore…they trust individuals.

And what's the most individual medium in all of media? A person talking into a microphone for an hour.

This is why people are choosing a fitness podcaster over their GP, a finance creator over their financial advisor, a parenting podcast over their paediatrician.

Authority used to flow from position and accreditation but now it flows from consistency, relatability and the feeling that someone is being honest with you.

That has consequences, good and bad.

The democratisation of expertise means more diverse voices and more accessible knowledge but it also means misinformation travels through trusted channels with no institutional filter. When your favourite podcast host, the one who feels like a friend, says something confidently about health or finance or politics, the parasocial trust means you're less likely to fact-check it.

And then there was the audio-first generation shift.

Voice notes at some point replaced text messages, audiobooks outsold ebooks and Spotify Wrapped became a cultural identity marker. There was a broader behavioural move back toward voice and away from visual overload, a generation exhausted by screens choosing a medium that lets them close their eyes.

@hebaglow @hebaglow ♬ tokyo radio '99 (Slowed) - loss of interest

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A Very Brief History of the Podcast Boom

Podcasting has existed since 2004, when Adam Curry and Dave Winer basically invented the format and Ben Hammersley coined the word "podcast" in The Guardian, a throwaway portmanteau of "iPod" and "broadcast" that somehow stuck.

Apple added podcast support to iTunes in 2005 and for the next decade, it was a niche medium. Something you stumbled across rather than sought out.

• 2015: Marc Maron interviews President Obama on WTF. A sitting president on a comedian’s podcast. That was a big deal at the time. We had no idea what was coming.

• 2017: The New York Times launches The Daily, proving that news podcasts could match the pace of the 24-hour cycle and reach millions.

• 2019: Spotify goes all in, acquiring Gimlet Media and Anchor FM for $340 million, then signing Joe Rogan to a deal reportedly worth $200 million. Podcasting suddenly has serious corporate money behind it.

• 2020–2022: The pandemic. Everyone’s at home and podcast consumption surges but so does podcast creation because everyone stuck at home with a microphone and an existential crisis thinks “I should start a podcast.” (Be honest, you considered it.)

• 2024: The “podcast election.” Trump appears on 20 podcasts during the campaign. His Rogan interview gets 46 million YouTube views. On election night, Dana White thanks podcast hosts by name and just like that podcasting officially becomes political infrastructure.

I digress.

Why Podcasts Need to Start Thinking Like Newsrooms

In December 2024, the BBC’s Global Misinformation Unit investigated Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO, one of the biggest podcasts in the world, and found that across 15 health-related episodes, each one contained an average of 14 harmful claims that directly contradicted scientific evidence.

Joe Rogan, still the biggest podcaster in the world, has been called out for spreading debunked claims about AIDS, telling listeners they’re living in a “cooling period” while misrepresenting the climate research he cited, and repeating what Wladimir Klitschko publicly called “Russian propaganda” about Ukraine.

Lex Fridman interviewed President Zelenskyy and framed questions around Russian propaganda talking points. Columbia Journalism Review described his approach as "anti-journalistic” and yet he's interviewing heads of state.

So what would it actually look like for podcasts to function more like newsrooms? Podcasts have hosts Googling things mid-episode and saying "I think I read somewhere that..." Newsrooms have editorial oversight, someone above the presenter who can say "we can't run that, it's not substantiated."

• Podcasts have a host, a guest and a publish button yet newsrooms have legal review for sensitive content.

• Podcasts have a disclaimer that says "this is not medical advice" before proceeding to give medical advice for 90 minutes. Newsrooms have corrections policies formal, public processes for acknowledging when they got it wrong.

None of this is to say newsrooms are perfect. They have their own biases, blind spots, history of getting things catastrophically wrong but they were built around a principle that podcasting has never been forced to adopt: that influence comes with responsibility and responsibility requires structure.

The podcasts that survive the next decade will be the ones that build editorial credibility into their production process because audiences are getting smarter, regulators are paying attention and the misinformation lawsuits are coming.

One thing TBPN has done relatively well is function, to an extent, like a newsroom.

The TBPN Acquisition Story And Why It Matters More Than You Think

John Coogan and Jordi Hays launched TBPN, originally called Technology Brothers, in late 2024. Their growth hack was unique: find an interesting tweet, print it on paper, hold it up on camera while wearing suits and react to it.

Then quote-tweet the original poster with the video.

The contrast between high-end production and the low-tech act of printing a tweet made it impossible to scroll past. The featured accounts, often with massive followings, would retweet the videos, exposing the show to hundreds of thousands of new viewers.

Within 14 months, they were drawing over 130,000 simultaneous live viewers, had hosted Zuckerberg, Nadella, Altman and Benioff, and were on track for $30 million in revenue with 11 people and no outside capital.

Then OpenAI bought them.

But how did they built an audience of investors, tech founders and stakeholders? They functioned like a newsroom

Not in the traditional sense…as far as I’m aware they weren't filing FOI requests or running stories past a legal team but they operated with the kind of editorial discipline that most podcasters don't even think about.

Their editorial process was a 6:30 AM meeting where they spent nearly three hours debating and sharpening their arguments before going live at 11 and their version of accountability was admitting on air when they didn't know something or got it wrong the day before.

Hays said it directly: "We make content for 200,000 people in the world. These are people that run companies, that invest and that work at the most important tech companies." They knew exactly who they were talking to, which meant they knew exactly what they couldn't afford to get wrong. They weren’t chasing virality but credibility.

Every single day after the show, they'd debrief: what worked, what was too slow, what needed better information and then they'd adjust for the next day. Hundreds of micro-improvements stacked over a year.

This is exactly why politicians want in, why brands should be thinking harder about it, and why the medium deserves more scrutiny than it typically gets because the same intimacy that makes podcasts the most effective trust-building medium in media is also the thing that makes them the most effective vector for uncritiqued influence. There's no editor between the host and the listener's ear, no fact-check banner.

And with 61% of podcasters now planning to use AI for editing or content generation…this might become an even bigger issue.

And why i think those that start functioning like a newsroom or taking bits and pieces from how they function will survive.

So Should You Start a Podcast?

This is the question I get asked constantly and the honest answer is: it depends on why you’re doing it.

I wrote in my last newsletter about the forced entrepreneurship era, how our generation is being pushed into building our own things because the traditional structures that were supposed to support us simply haven’t. Podcasting fits into that. It’s a tool for people who are tired of waiting for permission, tired of algorithms deciding who gets heard and ready to build something that’s actually theirs.

It's also, and we should be honest about this, a product of the main character era. A decade of social media has trained an entire generation to believe their perspective is worth broadcasting and their hot takes deserve an audience.

But, and this is the big but, it only works if you treat it seriously and remember that niche beats scale. TBPN didn't try to be CNN, they made content for 200,000 people. And those 200,000 people were exactly the right 200,000 people.

If your brand serves a specific audience with specific needs, a podcast that speaks directly to them, even if it only reaches a few thousand listeners, might be more valuable than a social media presence that reaches millions but converts nobody.

@tfrcharlotteWhat is happening with Media Literacy? 🤯 #culture #business #media

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More on the podcast soon….Watch this space.

Trump gave Jake Paul his “complete and total endorsement” for political office at a Kentucky rally, even though the 29-year-old hasn’t announced he’s running for anything.

Gen Z influencer Deja Foxx ran for Congress in Arizona at 25 on a campaign built almost entirely through social media.

And did you know that before Volodymyr Zelenskyy became president, he literally played the president on a Ukrainian TV show called Servant of the People?

A comedian who played a ‘schoolteacher accidentally elected president’ ran for the actual presidency and won in a landslide. You genuinely couldn't make it up.

Today’s deep dive is looking into the blurred lines of entertainment and politics.

Somehow we went from politicians being buttoned-up career bureaucrats who wouldn’t dare show personality, to Kennedy introducing the televised debate and changing the game forever and then suddenly Reagan, an actual Hollywood actor, walking into the White House and proving that the camera mattered more than the policy paper.

In the six decades since Kennedy vs Nixon aired to 70 million Americans, it seems like anyone can run a country now. Actors, wrestlers, reality TV hosts, comedians. Well, anyone apart from women it seems, given the long and painful history of female candidates constantly losing against “less qualified men,” but that’s a whole other newsletter.

We’ll unpack:

• How politics became entertainment and entertainment became politics and why the creator-to-politician pipeline is the next evolution

• What the UK and US governments are actually doing with influencers right now (and why journalists are furious about it)

• What this means for marketers, brand strategists and anyone whose job it is to understand how influence really works

But first, let me take you back to a TikTok I saw last month of a sitting president doing a signature dance with a YouTuber whose been accused of many, many things.

Now, if you're reading this and thinking "this feels like satire" I want you to hold that feeling because Black Mirror wrote this episode in 2013. It was called "The Waldo Moment." A cartoon character runs for political office as a joke, nearly wins, and the show asks what happens when entertainment and politics become indistinguishable.

Thirteen years later, we're living it. Except it's not a cartoon but a YouTuber with 20 million subscribers.

What I want to make clear, by the way, is Jake Paul is not an anomaly or a unique story. Reagan was an actor, Schwarzenegger was a bodybuilder and Trump himself was a reality TV host.

Every generation has its version of the entertainment-to-politics pipeline and in 2026, the medium is just social media. The difference this time is reach and control. Reagan needed NBC, Schwarzenegger needed Hollywood and Trump needed The Apprentice and then Twitter but Jake Paul and many others need nothing except a phone and an algorithm.

The barrier to entry is very low…which can be liberating and scary.

Both Sides Are Doing It

On the right: MAGA influencers were given White House access, invited to briefings and used as primary distribution channels for the administration’s messaging.

In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi handed binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of right-wing influencers in the Oval Office, who then walked out of the West Wing carrying them for the cameras.

The contents, it turned out, were largely already public documents. But the image of influencers physically carrying government files out of the White House said everything about where the power now sits.

Several administration officials had large followings as online influencers before joining government and the entire communications operation for the White House was described by one journalist as “all offense, all the time.”

On the left: Democrats invested heavily in creator partnerships during the 2024 election too.

Influencers were given formal roles at the Democratic convention for the first time.

Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania appeared on over 24 podcasts in 2025, politics, sports, pop culture, and created “Credentialed Creator Access Only” sections at his campaign events.

According to reporting by journalist Brandy Zadrozny, a secretive group approached influencers offering to pay them to make content questioning a progressive candidate’s credibility.

In other words, dark money isn’t just flowing through TV ads anymore but through creator partnerships that the audience may never identify as paid political content.

Meanwhile, in Downing Street:

The UK is having its own version of this conversation and it’s moving faster than most people realise.

Since 2024, the UK government has hired 215 influencers across departments, rising from 89 in 2024 to 126 in 2025.

At a press conference where Rachel Reeves warned about tax rises, two personal finance influencers were given front-row seats. The strategy is coordinated by a dedicated New Media Unit in the Cabinet Office, around 20 people whose entire job is building relationships with digital content creators.

Now, I want to be fair here. Governments communicating through the channels where people actually spend their time makes sense. If more people watch YouTube than the six o’clock news, and they do, then reaching them there isn’t unreasonable.

But at the same time as Downing Street and White House is inviting influencers in, it’s cutting journalists out. The number of daily lobby briefings has been halved. The afternoon briefing, where journalists could ask unlimited questions, has been eliminated.

Some sessions are being replaced with press conferences designed for "specialist journalists and social media content creators."

But there’s a clear difference between journalists and social media content creators from accountability, regulation and codes of conduct.

The journalism lobby body said it best: this "limits access to government scrutiny." And scrutiny, in case anyone needs reminding, is kind of the whole point.

The Global Picture:

In the Philippines, influencers and celebrities running for political office is practically a tradition. The 2025 midterms saw multiple vloggers, beauty entrepreneurs, motorcycle content creators and reality TV stars on the ballot. The line between entertainment and politics was never very firm there but social media has accelerated it beyond recognition.

What This Is Really About (The Marketing Bit)

The reason politicians use influencers isn't primarily about reach but about trust or more specifically, it's about authenticity laundering.

When a politician appears on the BBC, the audience knows it's political. They have their guard up and apply a critical filter but when the same politician appears on a creator's podcast, or in a TikTok, or at a Downing Street breakfast that gets turned into Instagram content, it feels like a conversation between friends. The political messaging gets laundered through the creator's perceived authenticity so the audience absorbs it without the filter they'd apply to a political broadcast.

This should sound familiar because this is exactly what brands do with influencer marketing. When we put a product in a creator’s hands, we’re borrowing their trust to sell our message. When a government puts its messaging in a creator’s content, it’s doing the same thing.

The difference is that when a brand does this, there are rules. The ASA requires disclosure, the #ad hashtag exists (however imperfectly enforced) and there’s at least a framework of accountability.

When politics does it? There's almost nothing. An influencer can be paid by a political campaign, produce content that looks organic and the audience has no reliable way of knowing.

We keep talking about the attention economy but attention is cheap, you can buy it with a rage bait post or a controversial take. Trust is what's actually scarce and right now, trust is being spent faster than it's being earned, in marketing and in politics. The brands that protect trust rather than exploit it will have the most durable advantage of the next decade.

What this means for you as a brand or marketing manager is If you work with creators professionally, you need to understand that the space they operate in is no longer commercially neutral, it's politically contested and your brand's association with a creator now carries political risk as well as brand risk.

@tfrcharlotteHow do we get past this? 🤔 #government #culture #society

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte x

The P&L reset on April 1st and honestly I’m excited for what’s ahead. But before we look forward, let me take you through what we’ve been up to at The Fitting Room, because we’ve been busy.

• We onboarded around 11 new clients.

• Delivered multiple campaigns, including the now-viral spin on the McDonald’s burger trend for German Doner Kebab and Wendy’s UK, with the videos pulling in 1.5 million views across TikTok and IG.

• For London Fashion Week, we took Wendy’s somewhere no one expected, the runway…bringing burgers to the catwalk and everyone loved it.

On a personal note, I did a run of interviews, spoke on several stages and was named in Advertising Week and Fortune magazine’s inaugural ‘Great Minds Think Unalike’ list for 2026.

Oh, and I started filming a new TV series that’ll be coming to your tellys later this year. More on that when I’m allowed to say more.

In other words, it’s been a big quarter.

And there’s one conversation that Vogue, Glamour and my entire TikTok feed seem to be having right now: the girlboss return. So let’s get into it because as someone who runs a business, employs a team, just came off a quarter like that and has spent the last few years watching the internet tell women what era to be in…I have some thoughts.

Analysis: Let’s talk about the girl boss

The internet spent years dismantling girlboss culture. There were dozens of think pieces and memes created and eventually lazy girl jobs, soft life, quiet quitting and snail girl era took over.

And look, I got it. Parts of girlboss culture deserved to be interrogated. It turned feminism into a brand identity and told women the system wasn’t broken, they just weren’t working hard enough to win inside it.

But these new trends have ignored the fact that the vast majority of us still have to work. The cost of living didn’t get the memo about the soft life and rent didn’t quiet quit and while “lazy girl job” made for a great TikTok, it was always more of a vibe than a viable long-term financial strategy for most women.

Let’s be honest about what the soft life (the version that went viral) actually requires. It requires either generational wealth, a partner bankrolling the lifestyle or a financial safety net that most women simply don’t have.

In the UK, median weekly pay for women working full time was £710 in April 2025. Housing costs are still climbing, dual incomes are a necessity for most and the anti-ambition era was always going to be temporary because the economics never supported it.

So now, predictably, the pendulum is swinging back.

But the deeper questions are: is the girlboss back? Or has she simply evolved into something more honest? And did she ever really disappear?

Today’s edition of The Digress is going to walk through the entire arc, the rise, the fall, the anti-ambition era and the comeback, with the data to back it up.

And then we’re going to talk about what this actually means if you’re a marketer, a strategist, or anyone whose job it is to understand what women want right now.

The Rise, the Fall and the Rebrand

Remember how I wrote about how governments, brands and media would start using propaganda to get women to have children and get married again? Remember that article while you read on, as it’s relevant.

For now, let’s talk about the ambition gap because it’s the most misunderstood stat in this entire conversation.

The 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn Women in the Workplace report, the largest study on women in corporate America, now in its 11th year, surveying 9,500 employees, found something notable. For the first time, there was a measurable ambition gap between men and women. 80% of women said they wanted to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86% of men. At entry level, the gap was wider: 69% of women versus 80% of men.

Headlines wrote themselves. “Women don’t want to climb the ladder anymore.” “The ambition era is over.”

Except that’s not what the data actually showed.

When McKinsey controlled for career support, sponsorship, stretch opportunities, manager advocacy, the ambition gap disappeared entirely. At every career level. Women who received the same support as men were just as ambitious, just as eager to advance, just as committed to climbing.

The problem wasn’t that women stopped wanting more. It was that the systems around them stopped helping them get it.

Only 31% of entry-level women had a sponsor, compared to 45% of men. Only half of companies surveyed were still prioritising women’s career advancement, part of a multi-year decline. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women were. For women of colour, that number dropped to 74.

So when someone tells you women have opted out of ambition, ask them: opted out, or been pushed out?

The DEI rollbacks sweeping through corporate America are pushing forward the problem and Trump’s executive orders have gutted federal diversity programmes. Amazon, Google and Goldman Sachs have scaled back or dismantled DEI initiatives.

Black women are bearing the edge of this. In April 2025, Black women lost 38,000 jobs in the US, with their unemployment rate climbing to 6.1%, the highest increase of any demographic group that month. The support structures that were meant to address decades of underrepresentation are being pulled away at the exact moment they were starting to make an impact.

This matters for marketers because the story you tell about women and work shapes the products you build, the campaigns you run and the assumptions baked into every brief.

Which makes me wonder: did the girlboss era ever really die or did the media just start reporting on something else?

Women Are Building Anyway

While the cultural conversation was busy debating whether women should lean in or lie flat, women were starting businesses at the highest rate on record.

In the US, women now account for 49% of all new businesses, a 69% increase from 2019 to 2024. New business applications were up 37% in January 2026 compared to January 2025, the largest year-over-year increase since 2021. There are now 14.2 million women-owned businesses in the US, generating $2.8 trillion in annual receipts.

In the UK, 1.8 million women are running businesses, the highest share ever recorded.

Women-owned businesses have grown 43.5% faster than male-owned businesses over the past five years.

But , and this is the big “but”, women are still getting roughly 2% of venture capital. In the UK, female founders secured just 1.9% of total VC investment in 2024. Women-led businesses received just 5.8% of all UK investments. When women did get loan finance, they received an average of £174,000 compared to £507,000 for male-led counterparts.

So women are building faster, scaling harder and getting funded less. The girlboss was accused of failing but part of the reason she “failed” was that she was set up to.

Less equity, more scrutiny, higher expectations and when she made the same mistakes male founders make every day, she didn’t get a second chance. She got a takedown piece.

The Comeback Founders

Which brings us to 2025 and 2026, and the women who are back.

• Audrey Gelman, formerly of The Wing, opened The Six Bells, a boutique hotel in upstate New York. It’s smaller, quieter, more personal and no venture capital.

• Ty Haney returned to Outdoor Voices, the athleisure brand she founded and lost control of, while also building TYB, a blockchain-based loyalty platform that raised $11 million.

• Yael Aflalo, who founded Reformation, launched a new fashion label. Steph Korey Goodwin returned to building in public.

The common thread is that every single one of them has retained more control this time. Less VC dependency, smaller scale and stripped of the “I’m going to change the world” branding that proved unsustainable when the world demanded perfection from them but not from their male counterparts.

As Vogue put it earlier this month: the question isn’t whether the girlboss is back. It’s whether we’re entering a Girlboss 2.0 and what will be different this time.

The original girlboss era required women to be the brand. To be visible, polished, aspirational and always on (and there’s nothing wrong with that per se), but this time, the founders making comebacks seem far more interested in being operators than ambassadors.

The Labelling Problem

In this new era, we must be aware of the labelling problem. Every era creates a new archetype for ambitious women and every archetype eventually becomes a trap.

The 1980s gave us the “career woman”. power shoulders, briefcase, childless. The 2000s gave us the “mumpreneur.” The 2010s gave us the girlboss. The early 2020s gave us the tradwife, and then the internet served us the “burnout feminist” and the “soft life advocate” and the “lazy girl”, each one a neatly packaged identity that works beautifully as a hashtag but collapses under the weight of real life.

They shape how investors evaluate founders, how hiring managers assess candidates, how brands decide who their customer is. When the dominant narrative says “women don’t want to work anymore,” that becomes the brief.

But the data says something different entirely. Women are building at unprecedented rates. They just aren’t all doing it in millennial pink and they aren’t calling it girlbossing.

I digress but there’s a point here that Glamour made in a recent piece on this topic: every time we create a new label for how women should relate to work, we’re not always describing reality and then we punish women for not fitting the box we built for them.

Men don’t get this treatment.

A male founder who’s demanding is “in founder mode.” A male CEO who pivots after a failure is “resilient.” A woman who does the same gets a narrative arc that ends with exile.

And it’s one of the reasons why, even as women build at record rates, the public story about women and work keeps lagging behind the reality.

So What Does This Mean for Marketers?

1. Stop marketing to the archetype…Market to the contradiction.

Women in 2026 are ambitious and boundaried. They want to build and rest. They’re starting businesses at record rates and they’re sick of hustle culture. The brands that will get those women as customers will be the ones that hold both truths without forcing women to pick a lane. If your brief says “she’s either a girlboss or a soft girl,” your brief is wrong. She’s both on the same Tuesday.

2. The ambition gap is your brief.

McKinsey proved that when women get equal support, they’re equally ambitious. If your brand serves professional women, the message isn’t “we’ll help you hustle harder.” It’s “we see the gap between what you want and what you’re getting, and we’re here to close it.” That’s a very different brand story.

3. Watch the comeback founders, they’re showing you the future of brand building.

The women coming back are choosing substance over aesthetic. If you’re in brand strategy, this matters: the next generation of successful women-founded brands will look less like The Wing and more like a company you haven’t heard of yet, because the founder isn’t performing for your feed. She’s building for her balance sheet.

4. Don’t repeat the Gen Z mistake.

We spent years writing off Gen Z as lazy and entitled. Then they grew up, started spending and brands had to scramble to catch up. If you’re already writing off the current crop of women who are “opting out” without looking at why, you’re making the same error. They’ve just stopped performing for an audience that wasn’t supporting them.

5. If you’re not thinking about the race dimension, your strategy is incomplete.

The girlboss era was built by and for white women, and the backlash disproportionately hit women of colour. The DEI rollbacks are disproportionately affecting Black women, and the “comeback” narrative is, so far, overwhelmingly white. If your brand talks about empowering women without specifying which women — and without understanding that the barriers are not evenly distributed — you’re building on sand.

The girlboss isn’t back, not in the millennial pink, venture-backed, “I’m going to change the world” sense. What’s back is something less catchy but more durable: women who are ambitious, pragmatic, tired of performing and building anyway. They’re doing all this in a political moment that is simultaneously telling them to lean in, lie flat, go home, have babies and also somehow close the pay gap on their own.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte x

Miley Cyrus returned to the Hannah Montana set this week, sparking a huge wave of 2000s nostalgia online. Everywhere you look, there’s a reboot or reunion. TikTok videos are starting with prompts like “Remember when we used to…” or “What were we like in the 90s?”, and they’re racking up millions of views. The trend is about collective memory, comfort and revisiting a simpler, pre-social media era.

@cynthianixonOh… I remember her 💓

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Analysis: What do we really know about Gen Alpha

The oldest Gen Alpha are now 15, almost 16 and yet, whenever they come up in conversation, people still talk about them like they’re toddlers or little kids with no agency.

But that’s far from the reality.

At 16, we were sneaking onto MSN Messenger, burning CDs and genuinely believing MTV Cribs was an accurate representation of how adults lived. Their 16 looks nothing like ours. Some are already building audiences in the millions, shaping trends and influencing what ends up on the shelves at Sephora before they’ve even sat their GCSEs.

And much like the 2008 crash rewired how millennials think about money, jobs and trust, Gen Alpha are being shaped by their own set of defining moments in real time. They grew up during Covid, watched their parents work from kitchen tables while their classrooms moved to screens, saw Gen Z navigate a job market where a degree doesn’t guarantee much and are watching millennials burn out and move back home.

And they’re taking notes.

I think it’s important for anyone reading his to understand that this newer generation understands far more than we give them credit for.

Much like every generation that comes after the next, they learn quicker and growing up on social media means, unfortunately or fortunately, depending which side of the coin you look at, they’re more exposed to things than any generation before them.

On one hand, that exposure means some are tech savvy, already earning millions before their 13th birthday, building audiences, coding, creating content that rival production studios would be proud of. Ryan Kaji, a Gen Alpha creator, reportedly earned around $27 million at a young age from his YouTube channel.

Gen Alpha creators are already influencing product trends in major retailers like Sephora, with brands like Drunk Elephant and Bubble seeing significant traction among tweens driven by TikTok and YouTube discovery

On the other hand, as the manosphere discourse showed us earlier this week, it also means they can be more susceptible to harmful content, Andrew Tate-style figures pushing misogynistic rhetoric to boys as young as 10, algorithms serving rage and outrage before they’ve developed the critical thinking to process it. The declining literacy rates and growing AI dependency don’t help either.

There are also growing concerns about declining attention spans and physical activity with schools reporting rising demand for mental health support.

This generation is simultaneously the most commercially sophisticated and the most vulnerable and if you’re in marketing, it should be the thing keeping you up at night.

Today’s Focus

Today’s newsletter is focused on what we really know about Gen Alpha, how marketers can best reach them, the responsibility we have as storytellers to help, not exploiT, this generation and why I believe if we’re not careful, we’ll make the same mistakes we made with Gen Z.

What mistakes, Charlotte?

As someone with a Gen Z sister, I may be somewhat biased, or some could say, in the know on how they actually operate, but remember all those headlines? “Gen Z are lazy.” “Gen Z don’t want to work.” “Gen Z are entitled.” Entire think pieces written about how a generation of people in their early twenties weren’t behaving the way older generations expected them to.

Fair enough, some of the things a small group did were a bit odd. But looking back, and looking at the extensive research we did as a company, were they lazy or ahead of their time? Were they entitled or had they simply been exposed to enough economic instability, institutional failure and digital transparency to see through the systems that previous generations accepted without question?

And now, funny enough, Gen Z are the very people raising millions, starting groundbreaking startups, reshaping entire industries and doing things that many of us could never have dreamed of at their age. Gen Z’s share of US consumer spending has more than doubled since 2020 from 2.6% to 6.1% in 2025.

I bring this up to say Gen Alpha might do things we don’t understand but perhaps this time it’s worth taking a step back to understand before we judge.

Let’s pause the hot takes for now and really try to understand them.

The Numbers:

Here’s what we actually know.

Gen Alpha, born between 2010 and 2024, is projected to become the largest generation in history, with an estimated 2 billion members globally and expected to make up around a quarter of the global population by by end of this year.

What’s clear is the influence they have: over 40% of parents say their Gen Alpha children shape household spending in some way, with 9% saying they influence most of it.

Collectively, they reportedly influence hundreds of billions in annual family purchases across food, travel, tech and fashion.

But brands that still treat them like an afterthought are going to wake up one day and realise this generation already has opinions about them formed years before anyone in marketing bothered to ask.

The Sephora Kids Conversation:

You can’t talk about Gen Alpha and brands without talking about Sephora Kids.

Over the past two years, Gen Alpha tweens, some as young as seven, have been flooding Sephora and Ulta stores, buying anti-ageing skincare, retinol serums and products with active ingredients designed for adult skin. They’re already driving billions in beauty spending, much of it influenced through social media hauls and creator-led content rather than traditional advertising.

The internet had a lot of opinions.

Store employees complained about disrupted displays. Adult customers filmed themselves shopping alongside 11-year-olds with overflowing baskets. Dermatologists raised concerns about retinol on young skin. Parents were either defending their kids or being publicly shamed for not saying no.

This is the aspiration-to-consumption pipeline starting at age eight. The same algorithmic exposure that drives adult purchasing, “Get Ready With Me” videos, influencer recommendations, creator-led brand launches, is now shaping children’s desires before they’ve finished primary school.

A child watches a creator they admire use Drunk Elephant. The algorithm serves them more, they want it, they ask their parent, the parent, often a millennial who understands the creator economy, either says yes or negotiates.

But parents still decide…they haven’t lost power. That dual decision-maker model, child’s desire meets millennial parent’s approval, is different from anything we’ve marketed to before.

And this is the first generation where marketing literacy develops before purchasing power. They can identify a brand, evaluate a product and advocate for a purchase but they can’t yet fully evaluate the persuasion techniques being used on them. That gap is where the responsibility sits.

The “iPad Kids” Narrative vs What’s Actually Happening

Let’s address the elephant in the room or rather the iPad in the room.

Gen Alpha gets dismissed as “iPad kids”, shorthand for a generation supposedly zombified by screens, incapable of real-world interaction, destined for shortened attention spans and social deficits. The narrative is everywhere and it’s lazy.

Yes, screen time is high. PwC found average recreational screen time is 3.6 hours daily, more than double time spent outdoors or reading.

But PwC also found something the “iPad kids” narrative conveniently ignores: these kids are smart and sophisticated. They’re earning their own money, researching things before asking for them, negotiating with patience and building fluency with AI tools most adults are still figuring out.

When asked what matters most in life, they ranked family first (71%), friends second (43%), happiness third (31%). Social media came in at 5%. Fame? 2%.

Compare that to the assumptions most people make about them. We’ve built an entire discourse around what we fear they’re becoming and ignored what they’re actually telling us about who they are.

Every generation gets defined by the anxiety of the one before it. Boomers worried Gen X watched too much TV, Gen X worried millennials were entitled and soft, Millennials worried Gen Z were phone-addicted narcissists and now Gen Z and millennials together worry Gen Alpha are screen-dependent robots.

The worry is always the same.

What Brands Get Wrong

1. Stop treating them as a monolith. A 7-year-old and a 15-year-old are not the same consumer. Numerator’s data shows spending shifts dramatically by age bracket from toys and snacks at ages 1–5, to apparel, electronics, beauty and fast food by 11–14. “Target Gen Alpha” is about as useful as “target everyone between 2 and 16.” It’s meaningless without age-specific behavioural insight.

2. Understand the dual decision-maker. Unlike every other segment you market to, Gen Alpha purchases go through two layers: the child’s desire and the parent’s approval. Millennial parents evaluate products on safety, durability and values alignment. Sustainability functions as a credibility signal it increases the likelihood that a product a child wants actually gets bought. If your product only appeals to the child, you’ll never get through the gatekeeper. If it only appeals to the parent, the child won’t ask for it. You need both.

3. Don’t confuse influence with income. Gen Alpha influences $500 billion in family spending but they don’t have $500 billion. Their economic power is mediated through parents. That’s a fundamentally different dynamic from marketing to Gen Z or millennials who have their own wallets. The $5.5 trillion spending projection by 2029 assumes the economy cooperates and as we discussed in last month’s newsletter on the death of the aspirational customer, that assumption deserves scrutiny.

5. The responsibility question is real. Here’s the bit I want to say directly to anyone in brand strategy reading this. Gen Alpha’s commercial sophistication does not mean they’re equipped to handle everything the market throws at them. A 10-year-old who can research a product, compare prices, and advocate for a brand is still a 10-year-old. Their brains are still developing and their capacity for critical evaluation of advertising, parasocial relationships with creators and manipulation is still forming.

As David Ogilvy said decades ago: “The consumer isn’t a moron. She’s your wife.” Well, in this case, the consumer isn’t a moron, she’s someone’s daughter and she’s ten.

One More Thing:

In last month’s newsletter, I talked about what I called The AI Class Gap, the idea that the divide isn’t just about who has the jobs but who has the literacy. That divide is widening not between generations but within them.

Gen Alpha is where this becomes most visible. Some kids are growing up with AI as a native skill, using ChatGPT for homework, building in Roblox, learning to code at 10. Others don’t have access, don’t have guidance and are consuming algorithmically served content without any framework for evaluating it.

If brands and marketers want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, it starts with understanding that “reaching Gen Alpha” is a growth strategy and a responsibility.

@tfrcharlotteDid they MASSIVELY miss the mark? 🤷🏽‍♀️ #monster #marketing #branding

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

And my first thought was: this is the sequel to the newsletter we wrote last year on the death of the middle class and the aspirational customer.

Pop culture has been giving us the answers to these type of questions for years, by the way.

• Elysium imagined a world split between an orbital paradise for the rich and a ruined Earth for everyone else.

• The Hunger Games built a narrative around districts that produced everything and a Capitol that consumed it.

• Squid Game dramatised what happens when economic desperation meets entertainment spectacle.

Severance might be the most relevant metaphor of all: workers cut off from context, executing tasks without understanding the bigger picture.

If Nobody Can Afford to Buy, Who Are You Marketing To?

Last year, I wrote about the death of the aspirational customer, the buyer who stretched for luxury and bought into identity, status and dreams.

The data pointed in one direction: in 2024, the luxury sector reportedly lost tens of millions of aspirational customers, aspirational spending fell year-on-year and graduate salaries had largely stagnated or declined in real terms over the past two decades, even as minimum wages rose.

That was the economic picture twelve months ago but it’s much worse now because of the rise and advancement of AI.

As always, I know there’s already so much doom and gloom out there and you don’t want negativity on a Sunday morning. This isn’t that. It’s about asking important questions that I don’t think enough people are unpacking.

If there’s anything I’ve learnt running my business the last 10 years, it’s that you must always be forecasting. We experienced what Covid was like, god forbid another tragedy like that happens again, but if it did, would we be prepared?

In this case, it’s about AI. We’re seeing the impacts across every industry and we can’t ignore it. But instead of panicking, we can start asking, pondering and planning ahead. That’s what this is.

The Two-Class Economy

Chris's video was provocative. He referenced medieval class structures and the idea that AI is being used to hollow out the middle class. If you strip away the conspiratorial framing, what you're left with is actually just... economics.

In 2025, US employers announced over 1.1 million job cuts, the highest since the pandemic and AI was directly cited in 55,000 of them. CEOs from Amazon, Salesforce, Ford and JP Morgan Chase have publicly stated that many white-collar roles will disappear.

Computer science graduates now face 6.1% unemployment, nearly double the rate of philosophy majors. The degree that was supposed to be the safest bet is suddenly one of the most vulnerable.

The point Chris was making is that we’re heading toward a bifurcated economy. A world where there are people who own or control AI systems and benefit enormously, and a much larger group whose economic position is being steadily eroded.

On a side note: I find it interesting that when the conversation of AI comes up, we always talk about the intellectual gap that Gen Alpha might face because some kids will grow up relying on AI while others won’t have access.

But very rarely do we discuss the gap currently happening among us millennials and Gen Z. People are divided. There are those adamant that AI will not be used in their business or life, from ethics to climate change, and there are those using it to make a lot, and I mean a lot, of money.

So the gap that we talk about our kids experiencing? It may come from us. The parents, the aunties and uncles.

I digress

The Consumer Spending Question Nobody in Marketing Is Asking

Modern marketing runs on the middle-ground buyer. The person willing to stretch for a better version of themselves but what happens to that person when their job is restructured around an AI copilot and their salary is cut 20%?

The World Economic Forum projects 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030. They also project 170 million new ones will be created, a net gain of 78 million. Sounds reassuring until you read the fine print: "the net gain means nothing to a 34-year-old financial analyst whose role is restructured and whose salary is cut, even if she retains her job title."

So what will the impact be? AlixPartners surveyed over 13,000 consumers globally and found spending intentions have already swung downward, even high-income consumers, who last year said they'd spend more, are now projecting a decline.

Groceries are emerging as one of the more resilient categories, while discretionary spending becomes harder to justify. When a trip to Whole Foods or M&S Food Hall starts to feel like a treat, you know something has shifted.

Think about it like this: if you’re a brand that sells to the middle, not ultra-luxury, where do your customers go when the middle disappears?

Ghost GDP and Why Marketers Should Care

The Citrini Research essay introduced a concept I can't stop thinking about: "ghost GDP." When a company replaces 700 customer service agents with an AI chatbot, the company saves millions but those people no longer have salaries to spend on rent, food, clothing, subscriptions, or, crucially for us, the products and services that brands are trying to sell them.

This is the bit that I think most commentary is missing. Everyone's diagnosing the death of the middle. Very few people are asking what comes next.

From what I can see, there are three emerging consumer futures starting to take shape. I’m calling them the three lanes.

Lane 1: The Barbell Economy. Ultra-rich spending more at the top. Everyone else trading down at the bottom. The middle just... empties. We’re already seeing this in retail, in property, in hospitality. Brands that sit in the middle, not luxury enough, not value enough, are the ones getting squeezed hardest.

Lane 2: The Access Economy. People stop owning and start renting, leasing and subscribing. Luxury becomes temporary access rather than permanent ownership. Think about how Netflix replaced DVD collections, Spotify replaced iTunes libraries, car subscriptions are replacing car ownership for younger consumers. The aspirational purchase becomes the aspirational experience something you access, not keep.

Lane 3: The Creator Economy as the New Middle Class. This is the one that fascinates me the most. As traditional employment changes, people replace lost income with content, side hustles, digital products, freelance work. The “new aspirational class” isn’t defined by a job title or a salary bracket but defined by leverage. By the ability to create, monetise and adapt using AI as a tool.

Last year, I ended the aspirational customer piece with advice for staying relevant. This year, the stakes are higher.

Some brands built entirely on aspirational spending will not exist in five to ten years. The “affordable luxury” category, the one that depends on middle-class consumers stretching upward, is being structurally undermined. If that’s where your brand sits, you need to make a choice: go up, go down, or redefine the value proposition entirely. Staying in the middle hoping things stabilise is not a strategy.

Every purchase now needs a reason. Consumers aren't just deciding whether to buy they're narrating their spending to themselves. Not "I want it" but "I deserve this," "it will last," "it's worth it." The brands that make it easy to justify, through quality, durability and values alignment, will win over the ones still selling aspiration for aspiration's sake. If your marketing can't answer the question "why is this worth it right now?" you've already lost the sale.

@tfrcharlotteWhat are we going to do? 🤨#Uk #business #finance

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On a side note…

Next week I’ll be speaking at Advertising Week Europe, sitting down on the Innovation Stage with Michael C., Managing Director of The Wendy’s Company UK.

We’ll be getting into what it really takes to take an iconic global brand and make it culturally relevant in a fragmented market, from balancing performance with long-term brand building to creating work that actually travels beyond paid media.

If you’re around, come by and say hi.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

Happy Sunday, everyone. Welcome back to The Digress.

This month has been interesting. A startup CEO admitted to lying about his revenue and then rage-baited his response into millions of views, Selena Gomez turned 415 million people into her "close friends" to sell a podcast and two of our favourite former child stars sat down to talk about something Hollywood still hasn't properly reckoned with (inappropriate age gap relationships)

But today, we're focusing on something that connects all of these stories and it starts with a meme you've probably seen flooding your feeds.

Analysis: Welcome to the Brand Khia Asylum

If you're even slightly chronically online, you'll have seen the term "Khia Asylum" recently. If you haven't, allow me.

The Khia Asylum is a fictional internet prison named after rapper Khia, known for her 2002 hit ‘My Neck, My Back.’ It’s where pop stars deemed culturally “irrelevant” are jokingly ‘sent’ to live in obscurity.

The idea started as a Stan Twitter joke: a tier list of artists on X in May 2024 placed Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, Bebe Rexha and Ava Max at the bottom, marking them as having ‘fallen off’ despite past success.

What makes the concept so ‘sticky’ is that it’s not even about talent or sales but about cultural relevance measured by whether people are actually talking about you.

And of course my brain immediately thinks what if we applied this to brands?

The Brand Khia Asylum

Think about brands that are globally recognised but culturally invisible, millions of followers, polished campaigns, massive budgets, yet their work rarely travels, start group chat debates or appear in a screenshot captioned “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS.”

They would be considered in the Brand Khia Asylum because a brand can be a household name and still feel like furniture: present, visible but largely ignored in cultural discourse.

As perfectly notes, smaller, more agile brands can read culture quickly, adapt and show up in the right moments often with just a fraction of the budget.

So what do you do when you're culturally invisible? When the algorithm has forgotten you? Well, if 2025 taught us anything, it’s that some brands decided the answer was: make people angry as perfectly said in ‘s recent carousel on how brands deliberately toy with our emotions..

“Rage bait,” Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025, refers to content deliberately designed to provoke outrage and drive engagement. Its use reportedly tripled over the previous year.

It’s a high-risk strategy because outrage grabs eyeballs but it can also erode trust if it feels inauthentic or misaligned with the brand’s identity. The brands that pull it off successfully don’t just shock for shock’s sake, they tie provocation to a clear purpose, cultural relevance or product story, turning attention into engagement rather than just noise.

American Eagle's "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" campaign, a pun on "genes" that critics called tone-deaf at best, eugenics-adjacent at worst, saw their stock jump 10–24% after launch.

E.l.f. partnered with Matt Rife despite his history of sexist comedy. Sabrina Carpenter's album cover was designed to provoke. She never properly addressed the backlash but the discourse did the work for her.

All of these campaigns made people angry.

And none of them, in my opinion, happened by accident.

Behind them are experienced CMOs and brand strategists who understand a simple truth about the attention economy: outrage travels further than approval.

• Think pieces get written.

• News outlets pick it up.

• YouTubers make reaction videos.

• And people buy.

The product doesn't need to be the bestseller, it just needs to be the thing that gets people talking, which drives traffic to the rest of the line. Skims isn't a brand that occasionally stumbles into controversy but what it does do is bake in low-level provocation into its content strategy, knowing that confusion and mild outrage convert to attention and attention converts to sales.

For all the outrage around the face-shaping wrap, it reportedly sold out within minutes.

Before you read on, one thing I have to note about the Khia Asylum: it mostly targets women.

Look at the original tier list, Bebe Rexha, Ava Max, Camila Cabello, Madison Beer, Kim Petras, Zara Larsson, Katy Perry. It’s overwhelmingly female. Male artists who “fall off” don’t get the same treatment, nobody’s making tier lists for Ed Sheeran, Stormzy or Post Malone.

This matters for brands too.

If your framework unconsciously mirrors the Khia Asylum ( ignoring or “punishing” brands that don’t fit a trendy mold) you risk sidelining products with real value and missing opportunities to connect with audiences.

The Great Escape Plan

Like with anything there’s a spectrum.

In February 2025, Duolingo staged a viral campaign announcing that its beloved mascot, Duo the owl, had “died”, depicted as being hit by a Cybertruck.

The stunt sent mentions of the brand soaring, with social analytics showing a roughly 25,000% spike in conversation on launch day and over 45,000 uses of the hashtag #RIPDuo.

The campaign resonated widely online, with celebrity reactions (including from Dua Lipa) helping push the moment.

Duolingo tied the narrative to in‑app engagement, encouraging users to collectively earn tens of billions of XP to “bring Duo back,” which eventually happened as part of the story arc.

In short, they gamified grief and it worked. People weren’t necessarily offended or angry about it but it did cause concern.

Was Duolingo shutting down? What was happening?

Why Now? The Economics of Desperation

The rage bait marketing is a symptom of something structural.

Organic reach on social media is functionally dying. Facebook pages now reach roughly 1–2% of their followers, Instagram sits around 9% and even that’s generous. LinkedIn company pages reach about 1.6% of followers, down 15% from late 2023. The platforms have become pay-to-play ecosystems. They make money from ads and they want you to buy ads.

At the same time, content saturation has risen. Millions of posts compete for attention every day. So brands are desperate to not be a one hit wonder.

As one marketing strategist put it: “Brands have recognised that they can game the system, the system being the algorithm, to get attention, and free attention at that. The way that they’ve learned they can get this cheap, easy, free attention is through ragebait, but it’s fleeting and it’s volatile.”

Rage bait is a hack for an economic problem because controversy is free but free isn’t the same as cheap. Rage bait doesn’t cost ad spend BUT it can cost you something much more valuable: brand trust.

The Political Playbook Brands Borrowed

Brands didn’t invent rage bait, by the way, politicians did or at the very least, they perfected it.

The Trump White House has effectively transformed its communications operation into what one journalist described as “all offense, all the time.” AI-generated images of the president as the Pope, as Superman, as a Jedi. 160 Truth Social posts in a single five-hour session. Content deliberately designed to provoke, dominate the news cycle and force opponents into a reactive position. This isn’t accidental. It’s a strategy.

And it’s being copied.

Meanwhile, some political accounts on X that post divisive conservative content have been revealed to be operated from outside the United States, including from regions such as Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, according to reports after X introduced a location transparency feature. Analysts say some of these accounts appear financially motivated, showing how outrage‑driven content can be profitable regardless of geography.

The marketing industry watched all of this happen and thought: we can do that too.

But here’s what brands consistently miss about political rage bait: politicians have a fundamentally different relationship with their audience than brands do. A politician’s “customer” is a voter who has already chosen a side. The rage affirms them.

A brand, by contrast, is trying to sell to the broadest possible audience. When you rage-bait as a brand, you might energise one group but you’re actively pushing away others.

The Duolingo Exception And Why You’re Probably Not It

Now, I can already hear some of you thinking: “But Charlotte, Duolingo killed its mascot and it was the most successful campaign of the year. So rage bait works.”

And you’d be partly right but here’s what separates Duolingo from the rest:

1. Build before you burn. Duolingo didn’t start with chaos. They spent years building a character, a voice, and an audience that trusted them to be weird. The brands that can pull off provocative marketing are the ones that have already earned the right to be provocative. If your brand has no established personality and your first viral moment is a controversy, you haven’t escaped the asylum.

2. Be culturally literate, not culturally reactive. Brands need to learn to actually read culture, which means understanding things before they happen or when they’re still nascent, not scrambling to react after they’ve peaked. The brands that will win understand the political, social, and cultural undercurrents well enough to shape their marketing. That means having people in the room who understand Stan Twitter and Westminster and TikTok’s algorithm and the macroeconomic pressures your consumers are feeling.

3. Understand the difference between standing on business and starting fires. “Stand-on-Business Marketing” is where you’re vocal about what you believe, who you’re speaking to and willing to take the heat if it comes as a byproduct of your message.

But the goal isn’t outrage..standing on business is. Think Nike’s Kaepernick ad. Their core customer base saw themselves in it. The “controversy” was a byproduct of conviction, not a substitute for it. When American Eagle and e.l.f. attempted similarly provocative campaigns, many customers expressed confusion and disappointment, suggesting the work didn’t resonate with their core audiences the way Nike’s did.

4. Invest in owned channels. If organic reach is dying on platforms you don’t control and those platforms are increasingly optimised for outrage, the answer isn’t to out-rage everyone else. The answer is to build channels you own eg. newsletters, communities, podcasts and direct relationships.

Rage bait might get you out of the asylum but it won’t keep you out.

5. Audit your cultural relevance, not just your brand awareness. Are people actually talking about you? There’s a difference between being in someone’s feed and being in their group chat and be honest about the biases baked into how you’re measuring relevance, the Khia Asylum teaches us that our frameworks for “relevance” are never neutral. So you need to question them.

@tfrcharlotteWhat's wrong with the hospitality industry? #hospitality #marketing #branding

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Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

I came across a whole series the other day of someone visiting local makeup artists and rating them on cleanliness, skill level, time management and overall experience. Think mystery shopper meets content creator. At first glance it seems like a great idea, finally, some accountability.

@itsdeexo1Part 4| Rating UK Service Providers - My experience with TouchedbyKanda .. was the glam worth the wait ? 🤔 Welcome to my new series of rating UK service providers I! Let's see who's ACTUALLY delivering 10/10 service, quality and professionalism. If you're searching for the best UK MUAs, hairstylists, nail techs, lash techs with REAL results and honest reviews you're at the right place! No gatekeeping, just real ratings. - - #ukmua #londonmua #touchedbykanda #softglam #makeupreview

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But let’s talk about how we got here and where this is actually going, because we need to be mindful not to cross a line and I don’t think enough people are talking about this.

The origin story

This whole trend comes off the back of a wider conversation that started a few years ago. People were sharing their horror stories from booking with what many described as “IG baddie” service providers. Those with massive followings, really strict policies, some demanding a £100 fee if you’re five minutes late

The thesis was simple: how can you charge me this much when your quality of work doesn’t match?

And it made sense because a lot of us have had that one experience where you saved up, booked the appointment, showed up excited and left feeling like you’d been finessed. So when people started calling it out publicly, it felt like a collective exhale.

Finally, consumers had a voice and the tools to use it.

By some estimates, videos tagged with beauty service reviews or “testing my MUA” content have racked up hundreds of millions of views across TikTok alone. It’s become its own genre of content. Some creators are getting free trials to promote businesses, while others are gaining six-figure followings purely by reviewing local service providers.

When accountability became content

At first, the reviews were targeting a specific type of provider, the overpriced, over-hyped and under-delivering kind. But much like anything on social media, the trend accelerated really quickly. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the “baddies” charging extortionate prices being filmed and reviewed. It was everyone.

Aunties doing hair from their kitchen, students offering lash services from their uni flat to make extra money and small nail techs working out of converted spare rooms.

People who never asked for visibility and were just trying to make a living.

And like a snowball, before you know it, their business is plastered all over social media. They were being “rated” by strangers and some were even cancelled or forced to justify themselves with their own series of response content and evidence.

A small business that was quietly thriving on word-of-mouth referrals could now find itself in a full-blown PR crisis because one creator with 50K followers decided to make them their next “honest review.”

The consequences are real. We’ve seen providers lose bookings overnight after a single negative review video goes viral. Others have had to shut down entirely because the court of public opinion online moved faster than they could respond.

Of course, this isn’t about people not holding brands accountable. There are plenty of cases where businesses genuinely deserve scrutiny, when racism, discrimination or exploitation occurs. Think restaurants exposed for racist policies, salons criticised for discriminatory service or brands misrepresenting workers’ conditions. Creators documenting these issues online provide transparency and accountability, which is incredibly valuable.

But why now? The psychology behind the scroll

Part of it is the rise of what people dubbed “FaceTime content”, this era where people feel they can just jump on social media and chat to their followers like friends. Sharing their honest thoughts, no filter and little consideration for the consequences. It feels authentic and like you’re just having a conversation. But the reality is, you’re broadcasting to thousands, sometimes millions, and the impact of your words isn’t the same as venting to your group chat.

@guythompson.me#facetime content is some of the most popular video on social media because it feels real and raw and unfiltered. Often we try to make our social media content too polished because we’re still thinking like it has to be a single Instagram post vs an everyday chat. Treat social media like FaceTime @charitycroff #contentcreator #socialmedia #strategy #confidence #mindset

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There’s also something deeper at play. We’re living through a cost-of-living crisis. People are spending more carefully and expecting more for their money. That’s completely valid but what’s happened is that reasonable consumer expectations have merged with the attention economy. Holding a business accountable gets you views and views get you followers and followers get you brand deals. So what started as genuine frustration has, for some, become a content strategy.

There’s a parasocial element too.

Followers feel like they personally know these creators so when a creator says “this MUA was terrible,” it feels like a verdict from a trusted friend. That’s incredibly powerful and dangerous for the person on the receiving end.

And then there’s the transparency trap. We’ve been conditioned to expect radical honesty from the brands and people we follow. But transparency without compassion is just public humiliation dressed up as consumer advocacy.

TikTok drives 40%+ of Gen Z product discovery

The Hanifa effect

If you want to understand what this culture can do at scale, look at what happened to Hanifa.

For those unfamiliar, Hanifa is a fashion brand that became widely known during the pandemic. The founder built something genuinely innovative, the brand went viral for a stunning virtual runway show featuring 3D “ghost models” that showcased their designs without a single physical model on stage.

The brand carved out a real space in fashion: form-flattering garments with inclusive sizing up to 3X, colourful and playful, built by and for a community that felt seen by it.

For over a decade, Hanifa operated with a loyal, passionate customer base. The kind of brand people championed.

Then came November and the brand ran a major annual sale. Some items were listed as preorders with longer shipping timelines noted in the descriptions. But production delays from manufacturers caused some orders to stagnate. While some customers received their garments on time, others were left waiting, weeks stretching into a month, then two.

And that’s when social media did what social media does.

Videos started popping up across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Frustrated customers voicing legitimate concerns about delayed shipping. But the conversation didn’t stay there. It snowballed into a full dissection of the brand, the fabrics, the sizing, accusations of prioritising influencer relationships over regular customers. What started as “where’s my order?” became a months-long public trial.

The founder, who had just given birth in December, left maternity leave to manage the crisis. She issued public apologies, expedited orders, processed refunds. According to her, every order from that sale was eventually fulfilled but it didn’t matter. The criticism kept coming. Her name trended for nearly two months.

She later shared that she’d spend her nights crying in one room, then wiping her face to go be present for her newborn in the next. She described the experience as going straight from postpartum into crisis management without ever fully processing either.

@officialhanifaA personal update regarding Hanifa Friday/Black Friday orders. 🤎 I wanted to sit down and speak to you directly. We take full accountability for the frustration caused by recent delays. For any order related questions, please email us at info@hanifa.co #hanifa

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Eventually, the brand announced it was pausing production indefinitely. Not permanently but indefinitely. The founder spoke openly about needing space to reflect, to protect what matters to her, and to allow herself to be human.

What struck me most was something she said about accountability: you can hold someone accountable without being cruel. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about the problem and got personal.

What’s actually dying here

So let’s bring this back to the question I started with. What I think we’re witnessing is the death of grace.

Accountability is important and necessary but so is grace. The willingness to allow people, especially people running small businesses, to make mistakes and correct them without it becoming a public spectacle.

We’ve created an environment where a single shipping delay can unravel over a decade of goodwill.

The founder of Hanifa said it plainly: founder-led brands operate under a different kind of scrutiny and when you’re a Black woman, the margin for grace is thinner.

Small businesses are now having to factor in “social media risk” the same way corporations have PR teams on retainer. But most of them don’t have PR teams. They don’t have crisis communications strategies. They have themselves, their craft, and whatever community they’ve built, which, as we’ve seen, can turn on them overnight.

Where do we go from here

• A lot of what happens with some brands is because of a communication gap. Customers don’t hear anything for weeks and by the time they respond, the narrative had already been written for them. Your silence will always be filled by someone else’s version of the story. Even a simple “we hear you, here’s what’s happening” buys you more time and goodwill than going quiet and hoping it passes. Treat customer communication with the same urgency as you treat fulfilment.

• Own the narrative before someone else does but know the trade-offs. There's a lot of advice out there about showing your face, sharing your story and letting people in. And yes, that can build loyalty. But it can also make you the target. Some founders are so deeply connected to their community and it can actually make the backlash more personal. So when building your business think about controlling what information is out there and making sure that when people search your name, the first thing they find is something you put there.

• Diversify where your community lives. Email lists, WhatsApp broadcast groups and a base of repeat clients who’ll vouch for you without being asked. If TikTok is the only place your community exists, you’re one algorithm change or one viral video away from losing everything. The businesses that survive this era are the ones that don’t rely entirely on platforms they don’t control for their reputation or their revenue.

• Build a response framework now. Not a corporate PR playbook, just a simple plan. If something goes viral about your business tomorrow, what do you do in the first 24 hours? Do you respond on camera or in writing? Who’s in your corner? Most small business owners have never had to think about this. Now you do. And having even a rough framework means the difference between responding and reacting.

• Factor in social media risk as an operating cost. The same way you budget for packaging or marketing, you need to account for the reality that public scrutiny is now part of doing business online. That might mean investing in better communication systems, tightening up your policies or simply having someone you trust who can advise you if things escalate.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

I’ve spent over a decade working in branding and marketing. When I see multiple labels making similar bets at the same time, I stop asking “why this artist?” and start asking “why now?”

Why are girl groups, specifically, the thing right now? A few of my theories: capitalising on nostalgia and something I’d argue is an underrated signal, girl groups as a recession indicator. More on both of those shortly.

But the recent news of Manon taking a hiatus from KATSEYE pushed me to ask a question I've been sitting with for months. If girl groups are making a comeback, has the system actually changed?

Girl groups, much like boy bands, though I'd argue they face an entirely different set of vulnerabilities, are a marketing decision first.

Branding truly is in everything. What bands wear, who stands where in the press shot, who's centred in the campaign image, who gets the brand deal feature and who leads the single rollout. They are commercial decisions made by adults in boardrooms and those decisions shape not just how an artist is perceived but how a certain type of fan feels permission to treat them.

Girl Groups Are a Recession Indicator

The Spice Girls launched in 1996, as the UK was still recovering from a harsh early-90s recession. Five women, bright colours and a message simple enough to put on a lunchbox, “cheap” to merchandise, easy to market across demographics and perfectly engineered for a public craving escapism.

We are in a period of huge economic uncertainty from the job market, politically, socially and consumers are also exhausted. People are nervous and historically, when people are nervous, they reach for comfort.

Loneliness is also at an all-time high for both men and women. By introducing girl groups who represent unity and friendship, labels can inspire a generation of women to buy into the fantasy of sisterhood, shared identity and belonging. Social identity and tribalism are powerful forces in marketing and branding and bands have always understood this intuitively.

The Spice Girls gave you Scary, Sporty, Baby, Posh and Ginger someone for everyone. TLC had T-Boz as the cool one, Left Eye as the wild card and Chilli as the romantic. They were deliberate entry points designed so that you’d find someone you identified with, connect with them and then buy.

Outside of being comfort content, girl groups are also one of the most cost-effective formats in the music industry. One group generates five individual fanbases, five merchandise lines, five distinct audience entry points. You write one song and attach five different faces to it and the content machine runs itself. The casual listener can have a favourite and the hardcore stan can dedicate their entire online identity to the group.

And what about boy bands? Well, think about why boy bands really thrived back in the day. They were often branded as heartthrobs, young girls fangirling and going crazy. But with declining marriage rates and falling birth rates, that dynamic has quietly shifted. Women today might find you attractive but they’re also asking: what are your values? What do you actually stand for beyond your looks? Men in music finally have to be more than just a pretty face. The boy band playbook is being rewritten in real time.

Does Nostalgia Play a Part?

A significant portion of the people buying BLACKPINK concert tickets, streaming Little Mix content and emotionally investing in KATSEYE are Millennials, the generation that grew up on the Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child and TLC. Of course, younger Gen Z fans are a large part of the mix too but the nostalgia factor works with those who experienced the late-90s and early-2000s girl group wave firsthand.

Brands have understood this for years. Disney remakes, the Friends reunion and the Spice Girls tour in 2019 that outgrossed most current acts. Nostalgia marketing works because it doesn’t have to sell you something new, it just has to remind you of something you already loved.

Girl groups sit perfectly in this space. They can activate existing fans, who now have adult disposable income and will happily spend it, while at the same time introducing the format to a new generation discovering it for the first time. They’re being structural about who has money and what they’re willing to spend it on.

Loneliness is the new market:

Gen Z is frequently described as one of the loneliest generations on record. Social media has given them connection but not always a sense of community. A generation that grew up online often reports feeling more isolated than those who grew up without it.

Into that gap, fandom has stepped. For a significant number of young people, stanning a group is a community, sometimes even a lifeline. It’s the reason to be in group chats at midnight, to travel across the country for shows, to have something in common with strangers you’d never otherwise meet.

Social Identity Theory, a framework I come back to constantly in my work, tells us that humans define themselves partly through the groups they belong to. When traditional community structures erode, church, neighbourhood, even close-knit friendship groups, people find alternatives.

Labels are building communities, whether or not they fully understand the responsibility that comes with that is the harder question.

TikTok Changed the Architecture of What Gets Rewarded

A solo act needs one person to be interesting all the time. The multi-member format was built for pre-algorithm entertainment but it turns out it’s also perfectly suited to the algorithm era.

Are Labels Already Building for Gen Alpha?

This is the question I keep coming back to. If Millennials are being served nostalgia, and Gen Z is being served community, what’s being built for Gen Alpha right now?

Gen Alpha is the first generation to have grown up entirely post-smartphone and post-TikTok. They don’t distinguish between content and life the way previous generations sometimes did.

And the labels are absolutely aware of this.

What I don’t know, and what deserves serious scrutiny, is whether the industry is also examining the risks it’s building into those structures. Because the same architecture that creates belonging also creates targeted hate.

History repeating itself?

Historically, the face of the group wasn’t always the most talented. It was the most marketable. Have you ever listened back to some of your faves and thought... wait, they never sounded like that before? Or been genuinely shocked to find out they were lip-syncing the entire time?

Back in the 80s and 90s, ‘marketable’ meant conventionally pretty, commercially palatable, non-threatening and, dare I say it, white, or at minimum, light-skinned. And this wasn’t just an issue in mainstream white groups, it also played out inside Black girl groups too.

Take the Supremes. Diana Ross was centred and prioritised almost from the start. Florence Ballard, a founding member and arguably the group’s original driving voice, was pushed out by Berry Gordy and died at 32, broke and on welfare. Mary Wilson spent decades in the shadows.

And then Destiny’s Child, where the media’s favourite question for Kelly Rowland wasn’t about her talent or her vision, it was always whether she felt threatened by Beyoncé, or if she was living in someone else’s shadow. Questions that followed her well into her solo career.

The last major wave of Western girl groups brought us Little Mix and Fifth Harmony, and their trajectories still haunt the narrative.

The Question Behind the Question

Manon. She was recruited, positioned in the background (as seen in some music videos) and then there was the pattern of being absent from brand campaigns, the volume of abuse and the indefinite hiatus announced weeks after their biggest moment.

I’m not assigning blame because hey…who knows what truly went on.

When a label builds a fandom architecture that depends, at least in part, on conflict, comparison and outrage to drive engagement and that architecture tends to land hardest on the Black member of the group, at what point does ‘we didn’t intend this’ stop being a sufficient answer?

Because Normani showed them, Leigh-Anne showed them and the industry has had multiple, highly visible case studies…it just hasn’t consistently acted on them.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

Just the other day, a 70-year-old AI-generated content creator went viral, every outfit, pose and wrinkle perfectly generated, fooling thousands of followers. It made me wonder how many creators we follow are not who they seem, just people behind a screen trying to make a quick check.

But in this economy and job market, is that necessarily a bad thing? someone asked in the comments.

Today’s Substack is about AI and the creator economy, the good and the bad. The conversation was inspired by our very own British “Gossip Girl,” Emily Willcox, a former finance consultant turned content creator with 700k followers.

Emily has turned to LinkedIn (like a lot of other influencers, hello Patricia Bright!) to weigh in on the changing media industry, asking the question on everyone’s mind: “Will AI replace me?”

It’s almost mad to think no industry is immune when it comes to the advancement of tech. Just the other day we saw Primech AI debut Hytron, an autonomous robot that cleans bathroom, toilets, mirrors, floors, the lot, at CES 2026.

Suddenly “we don’t need humans doing our cleaning.”

And now there’s news that AI-generated deepfakes could flood the 2026 midterm elections so convincingly that federal agencies are scrambling to keep up.

But what about the creator economy specifically? Because this isn’t a small corner of the internet anymore. Goldman Sachs estimates it’s worth $250 billion and could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027.

There are over 207 million content creators worldwide but what’s most surprising is 84% of creators are now using AI tools, with top earners using them twice as frequently.

Emily’s post asked what a lot of us have been thinking: if fake people are reviewing real products, at what point does that become false advertising? The FTC seems to agree it’s a problem their 2025 updates now require virtual influencers, avatars and synthetic voices to follow the same disclosure rules as humans, with penalties of up to $51,744 per violation.

She also clocked something that deserves way more airtime, the AI-generated models being sold by business gurus are overwhelmingly white and hyper-sexualised. As she put it, is that really the default idea of “human” now?

And it got me thinking, whatever happened to authenticity, the buzzword of last year? Did we just forget about it?

The comment section was predictably split between hope and existential dread.

Industry reports estimate the virtual influencer market at roughly $6 billion in 2024, with strong projections toward nearly $46 billion by 2030.

As someone who’s worked in media and marketing for the last 10 years leading my firm, The Fitting Room, I’m not naive to the fact that this industry has changed in ways that will make it harder for upcoming marketers and content creators.

But as someone who’s built a brand (300k+ followers) in the last two years that has taken me places I could never imagine, I believe it’s still possible to stand out in an AI-generated world.

I wanted to hear from the people actually doing the work, the ones who’ve built audiences from scratch and who now have to reckon with the fact that a chatbot could theoretically do their job. So I interviewed a few of the top GenZ and millennial content creators:

The Crutch for a Leg That Was Never Broken

Joel Marlinarson, a TikTok creator and global brand strategist (80k+ followers), called AI “the new crutch to a leg that was never broken.”

“The idea that AI is the one-stop solution to overnight success is a symptom of our culture. Audiences will naturally struggle to identify what’s real and fake, partly because it’s so nuanced. You’re seeing and hearing more influencer voiceovers that follow textbook ChatGPT sentence structures.

“Yes, the voice itself and editing is real but AI has become the new crutch to a leg that was never broken and many can’t let go. Then there’s flat-out deepfakes and influencer personas who do not exist. These receive 95% of the Anti-AI airtime but so much is already slipping under the radar. I expect that radar will be scrapped entirely very soon and as you suggested, the default reaction to content will always be ‘this is fake,” he added.

There are entire companies being built to automate what used to require a human face. Platforms like Influency and TwinTone.ai let brands generate full UGC-style videos in minutes, talking heads, product demos, even “relatable” testimonials, without hiring a single creator. Then there’s MakeUGC.ai, which quite literally promises AI-generated user-generated content at scale.

Where do you personally draw the line with AI in your own content? There's a big difference between using it as a tool and letting it replace the thing that makes your content yours how do you think about that balance?

“I use AI as a second pair of ears when ideating but ultimately large language models treat you like you are their master. I’m aware of it. I don’t need a back scratch. ChatGPT will often tell you what you want to hear and sugarcoat lukewarm ideas. The democratisation of these tools is making every brand, business and creator mesh into the same beige tone of voice.

“I don’t want that for myself. If everyone is using the tool and getting the same outputs, then how do you expect one to get different results? I never use AI to write an entire post. I also do not use AI to generate a raw idea. It’s usually to develop or flesh out the skeleton of an existing idea which I know has potential but needs serious work.”

The view from the brand side:

Ndamu, a luxury lifestyle UGC creator (100k+ followers) who also has a career in advertising says a lot of the ‘high value’ brands she works with don’t want AI influencers because it destroys trust between them and their consumers.

“There’s also the issue of data and information security. When you feed AI company strategy or campaign details, it raises concerns about where that information goes and who has access. Many companies simply aren’t comfortable giving that kind of sensitive data to AI tools.

“So, in my view, AI isn’t really a barrier to new creators because not all brands are rushing to replace humans with AI influencers, which means there’s still plenty of opportunity for authentic content if you genuinely invest time and effort into it.”

According to a 2025 study from the World Federation of Advertisers, only 15% of major brands have even experimented with virtual influencers, while 60% say they have no plans to adopt them and among those, 96% say consumer trust and authenticity concerns as the core reason for hesitation.

@thisisndamuA random day in the life in London🤍 Champagne (…prosecco) before breakfast then I use products from @SPACE NK @Caudalie @LANEIGE UK @Kate Somerville dinner in my room with my new bestie (peaaccee) #fyp #luxury #londonhotel #luxurylifestyle #blackgirlluxury #blackgirlluxurytiktok #ukstaycation #london #harrods #Vlog #dayinthelife #londonvlog

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Ndamu, who predominantly works with luxury hotels, beauty and golf brands, shared that she rarely uses AI in her content, the only exception being a hair-styling video, since she isn’t confident with styling her own curls. Beyond that, she doesn’t use filters and her content is fully authentic.

She believes that if creators do use AI, it should be a tool to enhance rather than replace their work. Small tasks like cleaning up a background, removing clutter or tidying edges are fine, ways to improve presentation without sacrificing authenticity.

But not everyone sees AI as a threat:

One creator and social media consultant I spoke to, five years into building a deeply engaged audience and advising global brands, offered a more layered perspective.

“To me, I’ve seen AI simply as another creative medium,” Temwa Love said. “Like stop motion or advanced editing tools. I’ve personally used AI to assist with scheduling, series planning and script refining, but never to author my content.”

For her, there’s a clear line. “The real struggles, tone of voice and lessons along the way are so powerful and not worth compromising. The content has to come from me.”

Temwa has spent the last five years building a following of 500k+ with her husband. The mother of three went from creating couples content and securing massive brand deals to now also advising global brands and doing consulting work to diversify income.

When advising leaders building authority online, she pushes them further into “humanity” not automation. “I encourage them to lean further into human touch-points (like) in-person events.”

And that’s where human connection still comes in. AI can help you schedule, plan, even write scripts but it can’t replace the energy of being in the same room as your consumers, exchanging ideas, reading the room and just having fun. People are craving that community and content creators should capitalise on that - I mean we’ve seen it happen already with YouTubers doing tours, podcasters hosting intimate nights or brand trips with listeners.

And for creators just starting out? Temwa doesn’t think AI makes it harder just different.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

There are companies who won’t hire you because they prefer AI and there are companies that will.

Corporate leaders mentioned “storyteller” or “storytelling” 469 times during earnings calls in 2025, up from 359 the year before.

And we’ve all seen the headlines about how content creation is the new thing on B2B. The reality is things have changed but I don’t think the competition is as big as people make it seem. There’s more content yes but how much of it is of value.

Companies that spent billions building AI that can generate content at scale are now spending millions hiring humans to cut through the vaguness. Even ChatGPT and Anthropic are hiring human editors.

So, will AI take EVERYONE’s job? No. But it’s important to understand you can’t just be about execution, you now need to be about strategy, taste, nuance, data and creativity. I don’t think it’s enough to just be one thing anymore. The idea of being skilled in just one area of marketing or content creation is gone.

At least that’s my thoughts.

What struck me most was the chaos we all seem to be experiencing. One scroll, you’re at a wedding celebration; the next, rage bait about politics, then a TikTok trend gone wild.

This is all a window into how polarised attention has become and how every story online, big or small, can spark a hundred different reactions. Nothing captured that better than Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl leaving America somewhat divided. On one hand you had the likes of Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, Jessica Alba and Lady Gaga, who literally learned salsa for the occasion, rooting for him.

Latinos were crying online because finally, finally, they felt truly seen on the biggest stage in American entertainment. A Puerto Rican artist, performing almost entirely in Spanish, headlining the halftime show with sugar cane on stage, a real wedding, and a message about Puerto Rico’s power grid crisis woven into the choreography.

But on the other side of the internet? Trump called it ‘absolutely terrible’ and some Republican congressmen have even called for formal inquiries into the broadcast, arguing it crossed lines of decency. Meanwhile, conservative groups staged their own alternative halftime show.

But zoom out for a second and this stops being about Bad Bunny. The performance wasn’t the story, the reaction was and what it revealed is that every cultural stage is now a political one, whether you intended it to be or not.

For brands, this matters because if a 13-minute halftime show can split a country in two, neutrality is no longer a position.

The whole thing reminds me of when Nike chose to have Colin Kaepernick as the face of their “Just Do It” 30th anniversary campaign in 2018.

People burnt their shoes. There were videos all over social media of consumers literally taking scissors to their socks. Police reportedly begged locals to donate the merchandise to the homeless.

It was… a lot.

And while many said Nike would fall from grace, their stock price actually hit an all-time high within ten days of the campaign launching. Their market value rose by £6 billion, as reported by Fortune and online sales jumped 31% in a single weekend, according to Edison Trends.

And if we dive deeper into this year’s Super Bowl, you had DoorDash team up with the king of petty, 50 Cent, in a particularly spectacular ad that, if you’re chronically online like my team and I, you would understand every single dig he gave to his “enemies.”

But I’m not surprised they caught onto the cultural moment especially when their Head of Social is Zaria Parvez, previously from Duolingo.

DoorDash gave their social team full autonomy, a Super Bowl-level budget, and said go! That trust led to over 20M+ organic impressions, 50M+ UGC impressions, trending on Twitter twice and 350+ earned PR placements, according to Zaria herself who wrote a blog post about it all.

On today’s letter for The Digress we’re unpacking what the hell is happening on the internet from brands speaking like humans but staying quiet when consumers need humanity, Amy Poehler winning the first ever Golden Globe for… none other than a podcast to the BBC doubling down on YouTube and so much more.

This will end with some of my predictions. Some realistic, others maybe just fantasy.

Politics Has Always Shaped Marketing

I think one thing that’s an important reminder is that politics has always had a massive influence on marketing.

From the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, where Kennedy’s calm, tanned composure on television basically invented the idea that image matters as much as substance, to Reagan borrowing the entire visual language of consumer advertising for “Morning in America” in 1984.

Politics and marketing have always been dancing together. So Trump using his social media to shape narratives and attack brands isn’t something new. I wrote about his debate with Kamala Harris and how their use of podcasts was telling of the times we’re in (here).

Now we’ve seen Keir Starmer using similar tactics. He appeared recently in a video using a Lil Uzi song.

Interesting analysis by Jesse Owusu, music marketing agency owner, who said:

The Podcast Got Its Golden Globe Moment (Who’s Next?)

When Amy Poehler walked up to accept the first ever Golden Globe for Best Podcast in January, presented by Snoop Dogg no less, it felt like a cultural coronation.

Her show Good Hang, which launched via The Ringer on Spotify in March 2025, beat out SmartLess (co-hosted by her ex-husband Will Arnett), Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, The Mel Robbins Podcast, Armchair Expert, and NPR’s Up First.

Poehler’s acceptance speech was peak Poehler: “I have great respect for everyone I am nominated with… except for NPR: just a bunch of celebs phoning it in. Try harder.”

The Golden Globes adding a podcast category is an acknowledgment that audio is now a pillar of the entertainment industry and the door this opens is wider than people realise.

• If you’re a founder, a branded podcast isn’t a vanity project anymore. It’s a trust-building channel that just got legitimised by the biggest awards show in entertainment. The barrier to entry is still low but the upside just got higher.

• What’s next? A Premier League manager doing a weekly tactical breakdown on Substack? A rapper dissecting historical beef and inviting everyone involved to talk about it? Drake and Kendrick sitting in the same room, hosted by an OG? The biggest names in entertainment are going to realise that owning their own platform is the smartest move they could make or they’ll get taken over by us normies.

• If you’re a media company, prominent journalists are going to keep leaving especially if they’re underpaid, undervalued and under-resourced. The BBC’s Amol Rajan left the Today programme to start his own content company. The journalists with genuine voice and perspective will build audiences that rival their former employers. If you’re not creating an environment where your best talent wants to stay, they won’t.

Reality TV Is Eating Brand Content (And I’m Here For It)

One trend I’ve been loving is what Rachel Karten calls “spectator social” brand content that feels less like marketing and more like a reality show.

Modern Animal, a veterinary care company, has racked up over 50 million views in three months by mic’ing up their vets and filming multi-camera footage of them interacting with animals.

No one talks to camera or sells you anything. You’re just watching real people do their jobs with care and personality. Commenters regularly say it’s their new favourite reality show. Their Creative Producer Zoe Taylor, who came from the sports world, applied the same “mic’d up” format that works for NFL and Wimbledon but to veterinarians.

Reality TV works because viewers develop parasocial relationships with the cast. When brands create that same dynamic, where your audience feels like they know your team, trust follows naturally.

My prediction is more brands will start experimenting with ‘day-in-the-life’ style content across industries you’d never expect, law firms, restaurants, SaaS companies, even B2B consultancies. Reality TV-style storytelling is coming for every sector and the early adopters are going to reap the rewards.

YouTube Will Dominate Everything Including the BBC Apparently

The BBC just announced a landmark strategic partnership with YouTube, original content for the platform, up to 50 new channels in the next twelve months, and YouTube-first programming aimed at children and young adults. This is the BBC. The institution that basically invented public service broadcasting going to YouTube.

Because in December 2025, Barb (the UK’s ratings authority) reported that YouTube’s UK audience of 52 million surpassed the BBC’s combined channels at 51 million for the first time. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2026 priorities letter confirms the platform has paid over £100 billion to creators in the past four years.

And politically, YouTube has become one of the most important platforms. Trump understood this in 2024 going on long-form podcasts that lived on YouTube, Starmer is experimenting with it. Politicians, media publications and brands are all doubling down this year.

What this means for you:

The BBC deal should be a wake-up call. If the UK’s most established public broadcaster has accepted that it needs YouTube more than YouTube needs it, where does that leave you?

Kai Cenat and the Creator Economy Growing Up

If you’re not paying attention to Kai Cenat you’re missing perhaps the most important signal in modern marketing.

The 24-year-old is the most-followed streamer on Twitch with 20 million followers, was named to TIME’s inaugural 100 Creators list and in January uploaded a video titled “I Quit” that had millions of fans in genuine panic.

Turns out he wasn’t quitting, he was launching a luxury fashion label called Vivet, developed with legendary stylist Law Roach (the person behind Zendaya’s transformation into a fashion icon), manufactured in Italy.

He’s also started daily literacy livestreams, reading aloud to improve his reading skills and educators are crediting him with normalising reading challenges among young audiences.

This is the creator economy growing up. We’re past the era of influencer merch drops on blank tees.

My Predictions for the Rest of 2026

Right. Here’s where I stick my neck out. Some of these are grounded, some are a bit spicy, and some might be pure fantasy. But what’s the point of a newsletter if you can’t have a bit of fun?

AI agents will start making purchase decisions. Kantar reports that 24% of AI users already use an AI shopping assistant (from their Connecting with the AI Consumer report) and three-quarters regularly seek AI-driven recommendations. Generative Engine Optimisation is the new SEO.

Micro-communities over mass reach. Their data also shows brands using knowledge-sharing micro-community platforms in China achieved 25% higher marketing ROI. Will we see more brands building reddit channels?

That’s this week’s Digress. Like I said, I’ve had fun with this one — but I know I’ve probably missed things. What are you seeing? What cultural shifts are making you rethink how you approach your work? Drop a comment, reply to this email, or DM me. I genuinely want to hear it.

Charlotte x

In a panic, she'd tried to fast-track her own relationship and got rejected. So there she was, spiralling, humiliated, watching everyone else's life move forward while hers fell apart.

But her friends didn't need to be called because they were already there, across the hall, down the stairs, always available. When your support system lives within a 30-second walk, you never have to ask "are you free?" You just knock.

It’s a luxury Gen Alpha may never experience.

This topic was inspired by the number of new friendship apps being created. First we had Bumble BFF back in 2016, then Hey! Vina, Friended, Wink and now there's Peanut for mums.

Each one niching down to address specific needs, mums, fitness lovers, book clubs, even astrology-based matching but the reality is the demand is only there because of the loneliness epidemic. Something I’ve spoken about times many before.

Scroll just a few seconds on TikTok and you’ll find videos of friendship breakups, people crying about being “lonely in my 30s” and desperate “where do adults make friends?” searches.

Why It’s Mainly Women Talking About This

The interesting part is it’s mainly women talking about this. Interesting but not surprising, I mean, where is the time?

Back in my mother’s day, which, albeit was not perfect, community looked different. It looked like neighbourhood coffee mornings, church groups, staying in the same town for 40 years, having time during the day to maintain friendships because women weren’t also the breadwinners.

Now? Women are working full-time, managing households, doing school runs. Their girlfriends live abroad because everyone moved for work or across the country because that’s where the affordable housing was. Or there’s social media where you can keep up the illusion of closeness despite it not giving the same support when your life is actually falling apart.

But don’t get it twisted, it’s not just women. Men are lonely too, even if they don’t always admit it. In fact, the share of men reporting no close friends at all has jumped from about 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021.

Over the same period, men with six or more close friends dropped from 55% to 27%.

Research also shows that while men experience similar levels of loneliness as women, they are less likely to turn to friends for emotional support and often have fewer regular interactions with close friends.

We're more educated, more "successful," more independent than any generation before us and more alone.

So, the friendship recession is worth talking about. It's a space brands have been able to capitalise on with brand activations like Bumble's "BFF mode" launch events, wellness brands hosting "connection circles" and even Lululemon launched community run clubs where people could meet other runners.

But I've also seen some brands double down on selling us solutions that... let's just say it's complicated.

@friendslovesti want what they have🫶🏻 #friends #friendsedits #friendsedits #monicageller #chandlerbing #rachelgreen #phoebebuffay #joeytribbiani #rossgeller #fyp #foryou #viral

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When Brands Try to "Fix" Loneliness

I’m not here to say all brand responses are “bad”, some have genuinely helped people.

Yes, Peanut has helped isolated new mums find their people, especially immigrant mums or those who relocated for their partner’s career. Women have met genuine best friends on Bumble BFF. I’ve seen the Reddit threads, the success stories, the “she was in my wedding” updates. For women who moved to a new city for work or became parents far from family, these apps can be actual lifelines.

But I often wonder whether we've turned friendship into another job. You're swiping, curating a profile that's the right amount of "chill but fun," scheduling "friend dates" like interviews, keeping conversation momentum going with strangers, managing the ghosting when someone stops replying after one coffee.

And like dating apps, they work best for people who already have the time and emotional bandwidth. If you’re working 60-hour weeks and doing school runs, when exactly are you swiping through potential friends?

The apps aren't creating the problem but they are treating a systemic failure (economic mobility destroying communities) with an individual solution (download this, try harder, swipe more). And when it doesn't work? It feels like you failed at friendship, not that the system failed you.

It's worth noting this hits different communities differently too. If you're Black or Brown, you're navigating predominantly white friendship apps where you might be fetishised or othered.

If you're queer, you're filtering for safety and acceptance on top of compatibility. If you're working class, the assumption that "let's grab coffee" means a £15 outing adds another barrier.

The friendship recession is universal but the solutions aren't equally accessible.

The Cost of Connection

Then there’s the Instagram version. The matching pyjamas at sleepovers, the aesthetic Galentine’s brunches with charcuterie boards, the coordinated outfits at wineries.

I love a good girls trip but when friendship requires production value, we’ve set the bar at unreachable for most people and if you can’t keep up with the aesthetic? You just... don’t try.

How People Are Actually Solving This And What Brands Can Learn

I'm also seeing women get creative about this in ways brands haven't caught onto yet.

In cities across the country, people are reviving old forms of community in new ways, front‑porch hangouts, people literally just sitting outside with a drink while neighbours stroll by and say hello, churches are even getting involved hosting days out for the youth (whether or not you’re a “believer”.) There’s no group chat, pressure or performance.

Across social platforms, there are tiny trends that make perfect sense when you think about it:

• People scheduling consistent “standing dates”, the same 30 minutes every week to FaceTime a friend while doing mundane tasks like folding laundry. It’s not glamorous but it’s reliable connection.

• Low‑pressure social formats, like silent book clubs or community reading nights, where people show up, read or do something simple and then talk afterward.

How Brands Could Actually Help

Right now, most brand activations treat loneliness like it’s a problem you can swipe away, schedule or buy your way out of. But people are already inventing real ways to connect, often low-key, low-cost, and imperfect.

Brands could actually support that, instead of raising the barriers:

Here’s what that could look like:

• Lower barriers instead of raising them: Community shouldn’t require a credit card, a weekend commitment, or matching outfits. If you already have loyal customers, why not reward them with ways to meet each other, join small gatherings or participate in micro-communities, instead of giving them another discount on a product?

• Support organic connection instead of orchestrating it: Think: providing the stoop and the wine, not scheduling and managing the event. Facilitate spaces where connection can happen naturally, virtual co-working rooms, low-pressure local meet-ups or even a dedicated corner in a café where people know they can just show up.

• Acknowledge the systemic issue: Don’t sell another “self-care” product when loneliness is the real disease. Your £45 candle won’t cure isolation. Instead, show your audience that you see the bigger picture that the lack of local community, the economic pressures and the life changes driving isolation are real.

• Make it okay to be imperfect: The bar for friendship has become photo-ready and expensive. Brunches need charcuterie, sleepovers need matching pajamas, events need TikTok aesthetics. What if brands normalised low-effort, consistent connection instead?

Rachel joked about this on Friends when sperm donors were “unusual” and taboo.

But today, women are living their truth openly. Single parenthood is no longer a quiet workaround but a choice, with high-profile figures like Anne Wojcicki pursuing motherhood this way.

Abortion rates are part of this story too. In England and Wales, they rose 11% in 2023. Not as a moral debate here but as evidence of women now having the option to opt out of motherhood entirely if their financial, social or personal circumstances aren’t right.

That level of agency would have been unthinkable just decades ago.

I recently saw a tweet that said the moment women were given more freedom, the ability to work, get educated and control their own bodies, marriage and birth rates began to decline.

Which begs the question: was women’s dependence on men ever natural, or was it deliberately engineered through laws, social norms and economic structures?

Is it really a coincidence that at a time when women are advancing across education, income and asset ownership (shoutout to the Financial Times for actually investigating this), traditional institutions like marriage and family formation are stagnating?

And while there are women who want the kids, the marriage and the picket fence, and there’s nothing wrong with that, a large portion of women’s version of living well looks different. It’s buying homes with friends, holidaying more than any generation before, entering male-dominated fields and dominating them, and above all, having choice.

So why are we talking about this now?

Because any shift in consumer behaviour and psychology forces brands, companies and governments to adapt. And if history tells us anything, when systems feel threatened, they respond with massive budgets and very deliberate messaging.

Let’s look at how this happened and how systems built on women’s lack of choice reacted once that choice arrived.

For most of history, survival was legally male-adjacent

In many places, women couldn’t own property in their own name until the late 1800s or early 1900s. In the UK, women couldn’t get a mortgage without a male guarantor until 1975, the same year it became illegal to fire women for being pregnant.

So when people romanticise the 1950s–60s housewife era, they’re romanticising a time when women largely had no alternatives. Nostalgia is selective. It edits out the bad parts.

This is why the tradwife trend in 2024–25 sparked such a mixed response. Younger audiences often remember the aesthetic, the tidy kitchen, the perfect dress, the smiling mother. What’s erased is the coercion, the lack of options and the way some women’s value was tightly bound to domesticity.

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1940s–50s: Rosie the Riveter to Stepford Wife Speed Run

During WWII, governments needed women to work. “We Can Do It!” posters were everywhere. Women built planes, ran factories and held economies together.

Then the war ended, men came home and the message flipped.

The same governments that had celebrated women workers pivoted to…you’re destroying society if you don’t go home and make dinner.

The propaganda was relentless:

• Magazine ads showed women beaming at vacuum cleaners like they’d won the lottery

• TV shows like Father Knows Best sold suburban domesticity as moral obligation

• Experts (mostly men) published studies claiming working mothers psychologically damaged their children

And it worked because data shows that marriage rates hit all-time highs and the baby Boom happened. Fertility in places like England and Wales reached nearly three children per woman in the early 1960s

Women didn’t leave the workforce because ambition vanished. They were pushed out by design no childcare infrastructure, mortgages built for single-income households and a culture that insisted mothers belonged at home. The system was engineered for domestic stability enforced through policy, economics and expectation.

1970s–80s: The Backlash Gets Political

As second-wave feminism gained ground, the pushback got even tougher. Remember the Equal Rights Amendment in the US? It basically said: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Sounds reasonable, right? IT FAILED because conservative movements ran campaigns claiming it would:

• Destroy families

• Force mothers into factories

• Make women use men’s bathrooms

• End alimony and child support

Phyllis Schlafly built an entire career telling women equality would ruin their lives. The irony? She used the very freedoms feminism fought for, education, professional credibility and a public platform, to argue against expanding them further.

When women gain agency, systems adapt. Sometimes so do individuals in ways that preserve old hierarchies.

Brands realised they couldn’t openly oppose feminism, so they pivoted.

Enter: Superwoman.

She had a high-powered career, a perfect body, a spotless home, emotionally fulfilled children and endless sexual availability. She could “have it all.”

Keep every traditional expectation just add a full-time job.

When women burned out, the conclusion wasn’t that the system was broken. It was that women couldn’t handle freedom.

• TV shows like Murphy Brown (1988–1998): Career-focused women were shown juggling demanding jobs and personal/family expectations, often with commentary on their “ability to have it all.”

• Movies like Working Girl (1988) and 9 to 5 (1980): Showed ambitious women navigating office life while maintaining societal expectations of femininity and domesticity.

• Magazines: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Good Housekeeping frequently ran features on women managing career, romance, and domestic perfection at the same time.

“See? You can’t handle it. Maybe you should just stay home.”

2010s–Now: The Algorithm Will Tradwife You

Which brings us to now.

It’s easy to think propaganda doesn’t exist anymore. It does but it’s just quieter.

As a marketer, certain patterns are impossible to ignore: nationalist family policies in Hungary and Japan, fertility incentives in South Korea, targeted political messaging around marriage and childbirth, and corporate campaigns that normalise delayed motherhood while monetising reproductive technology.

And then there’s the tradwife influencer.

If someone genuinely wants that life, that’s their choice. But algorithms reward this content disproportionately and systems that profit from unpaid domestic labour often amplify it far more than feminist messaging ever gets.

The irony is interesting…Women are building careers and personal brands promoting a lifestyle that tells other women not to work.

It’s giving Serena Joy from The Handmaid’s Tale, a whole career devoted to reinforcing traditional roles, only for the system to exploit and monetise it..

Why is all of this important to brands?

The woman who opted out of marriage and kids isn’t sitting in an empty room eating beans from a tin. She’s:

• Buying property (solo or with friends)

• Traveling more frequently and internationally

• Investing in experiences, education and wellness

• Building diversified portfolios earlier

• Spending on pets, hobbies, home design

• Purchasing premium services (meal kits, cleaning, convenience)

If you want to dig deeper into how women are reclaiming autonomy and reshaping pretty much…EVERYTHING, check out my other pieces:

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep evolving.

And make sure you digress often. Curiosity is key to winning in this game.

Charlotte

HubSpot’s leadership team is actively building followings on LinkedIn with hundreds of thousands of followers and that young woman who tagged Dr Pepper in a less than 60-second video with a song idea? She’s now everywhere.

Everyone, it seems, is building a personal or employee brand and those who have one appear to be winning all the opportunities, which brings me to a question someone asked me last month:

“Is having a personal brand now an insurance policy for your career?”

They felt comfortable asking because outside of running my agency, I’ve somehow become a ‘creator’ with almost 300K followers across platforms. My personal brand has brought in speaking gigs, partnerships, inbound clients and media features.

But here’s what I told them and what I’m telling you now: the answer is more complicated than anyone wants to admit.

As CEO, I spend my time on growth strategy, client relationships, team dynamics and yes, hiring and firing. Companies like mine are actively hiring and growing and I’m grateful for that but it’s not the reality for most people right now.

AI automation, budget cuts, economic uncertainty and the rollback of DEI initiatives have led to mass layoffs across every industry. Some people landed on their feet. Others were forced into freelancing, pressured to start businesses or found themselves restructuring their entire careers in their 40s and 50s. Having or building a personal brand was literally a lifeline.

Harriet Fisher was fired from her job on a Friday. By Monday, she’d gone viral on TikTok.

Within weeks, she’d landed talent management with Encanta, built a following of over 51,000 and turned her personality into her career. Her content resonated because it was authentic, relatable, and perfectly timed, someone turning a devastating moment into opportunity.

Nicole Ramirez was laid off from her marketing director position at Forbes in July 2024.

She felt blindsided because he’d spent years building her identity around that prestigious title and suddenly it was gone.

Rather than spiral, she turned to LinkedIn and systematically built her personal brand. She went from 2,400 followers to over 23,000 in six months. The work brought her new clients, brand partnerships, speaking opportunities and multiple job offers. She’s now a growth marketing consultant running her own practice.

This all shows what can be possible but they make it look like the formula is simple: get fired, go online, get famous, get opportunities.

But for every Harriet who gets fired on Friday and is represented by Monday, there are hundreds who start posting and hear crickets.

The survivor bias is real, we seem to celebrate the wins because they make good stories. We don’t talk about:

• The 6–12 month lag before most people see traction

• The emotional and mental toll of performing your life for algorithm approval

• The privilege required to have runway while you “build”

• The fact that viral moments rarely translate into sustainable income

• The hidden practices most gurus don’t admit: engagement pods, course sales, and more

So why is everyone suddenly asking if they need a personal brand? To understand that, we need to understand how we got here.

A Brief History of Career Security

1950s-1990s: The loyal company man era

Work 25 years at one company, climb the ladder, retire with a gold watch and financial security, your employer WAS your brand. This was the era when a single income could support a family, buy a house and fund retirement. Personal visibility outside your company wasn’t just unnecessary, it was almost suspicious. “Why would you need it if you were loyal?” was the sentiment.

2000-2007: The credentials era

Prestigious degrees + big company names = career insurance. You differentiated yourself through institutional prestige think McKinsey, Goldman, Google on your CV opened doors. Your credentials signaled competence without you needing to prove it publicly.

People were creating content in this era from blogs (Blogger launched 1999, WordPress 2003), early forums and listservs and personal websites but this content lived outside professional evaluation and employers didn’t reward it. One could argue a A McKinsey or Goldman CV outweighed a blog every time no matter how many followers you had.

2008: The breaking point

Boomers saw their retirement accounts dwindle, Gen X faced layoffs in their 30s and 40s, prime earning years, with mortgages and kids. Millennials learned before their careers even began that there is no security.

This was the moment an entire generation’s relationship with work changed. The promise that “education + hard work = stable career” had started to shatter.

Even then, 2008 marked a mindset shift, not a behaviour shift, people knew the rules had changed but most were still playing by the old ones.

2010-2014: Other options

Twitter and Instagram existed, but they were personal. YouTube was for entertainment, and even though LinkedIn began experimenting with content features, adoption was slow.

People weren’t “building personal brands” yet, they were experimenting, side-projecting and sharing expertise publicly without calling it that.

Entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, and Seth Godin were ahead of their time. They showed that you could build an entire ecosystem around yourself rather than a single company, turning ideas, audience and trust into leverage.

Even so, this model still felt niche and entrepreneurial. It required a level of risk tolerance, personality and autonomy that most corporate workers didn’t have and didn’t need.

2021-2022: The Great Resignation

Between 2015 and 2020, the creator economy grew quietly. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube and later TikTok offered real ways to monetise attention but most of this still felt optional.

Then 2020 happened: the pandemic. Remote work became the default, offices closed and people spent more time online than ever. Networking, learning and even entertainment migrated to screens. Suddenly, ordinary employees could reach massive audiences from their bedrooms.

The first wave of “ordinary people going viral for work-related content” hit and people began realising just how hard they were working for less.

In this environment, “quiet quitting” emerged (really just doing your job without going above and beyond). People openly discussed that work wasn’t their identity. In China, “lying flat” became a cultural phenomenon, as young people explicitly rejected hustle culture.

2024-2026: The New Reality

Personal branding has shifted from “nice to have” to “must have.” Prestigious credentials still matter for breaking in, early-career professionals still need degrees and name-brand companies to get initial opportunities, but they no longer protect you mid-career the way they once did.

Everyone’s been laid off from somewhere impressive by now, so a LinkedIn logo won’t save you when your entire department gets cut.

Having an audience, whether 500 people who trust your expertise or 50,000 followers, increasingly equals leverage. Not because you’re more skilled but because you’re less dependent on any single employer if you play it right.

Yet there’s a deep contradiction: a lot of people reject hustle culture and insist “work is not my identity,” while simultaneously being told to build personal brands, create content constantly and monetise their personalities to stay competitive. This leads to the pressure to be always-on, always visible, and always producing is unsustainable.

So, Is Personal Brand Career Insurance?

It’s not universal, a personal brand can be a hedge but not everyone needs one. In stable, regulated industries like medicine, law, or academia, credentials and expertise can protect you longer.

In more volatile sectors, tech, media, marketing, creative fields, professional visibility now matters in a way it didn’t before. The market rewards proof over promise…. You don’t have to like it, I’m not sure I do, but ignoring it doesn’t help anyone.

Career insurance used to come from your company. Now, you have to build it yourself, often at enormous personal cost.

My Story: 10 Years Without It, Then 3 Years With It

Personal branding started as a rational response to institutional failure: build your own leverage when companies won’t give you any, document your expertise so opportunity can find you, and make yourself visible so you’re not just a line item in a spreadsheet. But you have to remember, it’s a tool, and like any tool, it works best when applied to specific goals.

For me, building a personal brand was about:

• Having a voice in industry conversations

• Connecting with other founders and leaders

• Creating optionality beyond my business

• Being known for my thinking, not just my company’s output

Here’s what I’ve learned along the way:

1. It’s a choice, not an obligation. Your goals might not require visibility and that’s okay.

2. Business success ≠ personal brand. My agency thrived before I had one. Now my personal brand opens doors the business alone wouldn’t, but the business would survive without it.

3. Benefits exist, so do costs. It’s not “just posting” or “being authentic.” It’s work, performance and energy spent managing perception. Count the cost before you start.

4. You can stop. Many people use visibility strategically, achieve their goals, then step back. Personal branding is a tool, not your identity.

Before you start, ask yourself:

• What are you actually trying to achieve? Career security, industry recognition, optionality, professional satisfaction?

• What are you willing to trade? 10–15 hours a week, privacy, mental energy, the pressure to stay relevant.

• What’s your real risk if you don’t do it? For some, invisibility is costly. For others, your work speaks for itself.

Be honest about which category you’re in and make a choice that serves you, not the algorithm.

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