At one point, “selling out” was the worst thing an alternative musician could do. But in 2025, brand collaborations are all the rage with the hipster aristocracy, with both Aphex Twin and Bon Iver teaming up on product ranges. How long until Perfume Genius releases his own fragrance, or Car Seat Headrest start promoting car seat headrests?
Scroll down to read about free speech, Slop Sans, and a different way Starbucks is dishing out caffeine.
Stats to power your week
📣 One thing often missed with the ongoing debate around free speech is how gender shapes people’s views on it. Men (66%) are much more likely to say it’s important on social media, compared to 56% of women. GWI Zeitgeist
🛃 Not for the first time, we’ve found immigration to be a uniquely polarizing issue in Germany. Matching previous results, our latest poll found it’s the only country where concern about immigration (50%) is as high as concern about the economy (49%). Little wonder that the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party is leading opinion polls for the first time. GWI Zeitgeist
🍁 With economic tensions and stories of hostile encounters at the border, appetite for international travel to the US is waning (though California is trying to win it back). We’re seeing signs of it in our own research, with the share of Canadians considering the States as their next holiday destination down 26%. GWI Travel
🔌 In response to Trump’s new trade tariffs, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has relaxed production targets on electric vehicles. It’s a move that’s also responding to consumer demand, as EV adoption is slower than you might think - British car buyers are just as likely to pick up a diesel car (21%) as an electric one (20%) for their next vehicle. GWI Core
🎙️ Podcasts have taken the world by storm, but it can hardly be considered an audio medium anymore. Podcast listeners are twice as likely to prefer video podcasts to audio ones. Preference for an audio-only format goes up with hours listened though, as heavy users may not have time to watch a video. GWI Zeitgeist
What’s on our radar
When analyzing the growth of generative AI, it’s easy to focus on cultural dimensions, like its environmental impact, or the legalities of its training. But in sizing up the trend, it’s often more fruitful to find indicators of how much of a better job it does than other currently available options - as both L'Oréal and James Cameron have talked about recently.
That said, generative AI is unusual - it creates certain aesthetic features that become oversaturated very quickly. More people are picking up on the “AI hyphen” and the familiar font of ChatGPT’s new image generator, though, AI-generated banner ads seem to do just as well as human-made ones.
In an effort to promote transparency for consumers, the UK passed a law that penalizes businesses that don’t remove fake reviews.
It’s easy to wonder what the downstream effect of increased concern about immigration and tighter policies might mean - but we saw a good example last week, as the CEO of Constellation Brands highlighted a drop in beer sales among Latino consumers in response to the Trump administration’s policies.
Clearly taking note of one of our highlighted trends for this year, Starbucks has followed the buzz and released a new range of energy drinks.
Chart of the week
Close your eyes and imagine a doctor, a lawyer, or a journalist. Do you picture a man or a woman? Traditionally they’ve been male-dominated jobs, but in all those careers women are becoming the majority, or close to it. In the UK, lawyers and doctors are more likely to be female, though women remain less represented in more senior positions.
But more to the point, our research suggests women will continue to overtake men in those professions as the next generation comes through, with more girls than boys expressing an interest in all of them. In teaching, which has been female-dominated for a couple of decades, more people are asking if that comes with tradeoffs for boys’ education. It’ll be interesting to see if similar questions arise in law, media, and medicine.
Local lowdown
Serbian, not stirred
James Bond might be one of the UK’s most recognizable cultural creations, but one of the markets where he’s most popular, Serbia, can make a claim to be his spiritual home. You could actually make a case that James Bond is originallySerbian. Stick with us.
It goes back to World War 2, and a double agent named Dusko Popov, who MI6 used to feed misinformation to the Germans. Ian Fleming met Popov in a Portuguese casino, and it’s said his bold gambling style inspired him to write his first Bond novel, “Casino Royale”. Popov also shared something of Bond’s penchant for womanizing, though he was careful to mention he’d never drink as much on the job. Hold the martinis.
