06 September 2023

Hi folks,

After helping grow the wellness industry, and then embodying quiet luxury during her court case this summer, Gwyneth Paltrow’s chaotic TikTok promoting a probiotic might just be the next marketing breakthrough she spearheads. Expect the sound of steamed milk memes to carry us through to the end of 2023.

Scroll down to read more about seniors at Starbucks, the Exorswift, and the downfall of fun holidays.

Stats to power your week

🧵 Hype around Meta’s new app Threads has dropped off a bit after its explosive first week, but there’s still strong demand to use it in future – over half of its early users say it’s “very likely” they’ll use it on an ongoing basis. But this depends on nailing the use-case, and our research shows those early users are expecting more of an X/Twitter style “information network” than a social one.  GWI Zeitgeist / GWI Core

📉 A holiday is often the thing people will splash out on most in a given year, which makes vacation attitudes a great place to see cost-of-living concerns up close. Last year, fun mattered more than cost in deciding a holiday destination – in 2023, the reverse is true. GWI Travel

🪧 With the latest wave of our USA Plus dataset, we have even more insights at our fingertips about how America is changing during these turbulent times. One particular highlight – the number who have boycotted a brand or organization has grown 33% since Q1 2023. GWI USA Plus 

👟 Before Barbie, there was Air, the Ben Affleck-directed piece about the origins of the Air Jordan brand where product placement is the film. But do these movies actually impact sales? On current evidence, absolutely – ownership of Air Jordan products in the US is up 31% year-on-year, while the number who’ve bought one in the UK is up 77%. GWI USA / GWI Core

 🧓 We talk a lot about parenthood in the world of marketing, but what about grandparenthood? We had a theory that grandkids’ influence makes grandparents more interested in youth topics – but on testing, it turned out to not actually be true. It’s non-grandparents who are more likely than other Americans over 65 to be interested in virtual reality, go to Starbucks regularly, and listen to music from the 2010s. GWI USA

What’s on our radar

One of the big barriers to AI adoption until now has been concerns about data security, something OpenAI and Microsoft are expressly targeting with their new Enterprise tools. And OpenAI’s new guide on how teachers can use ChatGPT in the classroom gives some clues as to what schoolwork will look like this academic year. 

In the world of visual AI, startup Ideogram has gone viral for its impressive ability to handle text in an image. In our quick test, it managed to produce a sign saying the name of this newsletter 50% of the time, while another tool didn’t (though it did give us “The Of of Th”, “It the Off”, and “The Of On!”).

Barbenheimer (yes we’re still talking about it) has led to more attempts at a zeitgeisty portmanteau, with Saw Patrol (Saw + Paw Patrol) probably the best example. But as Taylor Swift’s concert film has forced the new Exorcist release to open a week earlier, “The Exorswift” is looking less likely. 

Wrestling is back – the recent All In event in London had the biggest attendance for any live pro wrestling show in Europe. And MMA has become the latest target in Saudi Arabia’s investment in sports. 

As Burna Boy becomes the first Afrobeats artist to have a UK #1 album, music companies are continuing to invest in new markets looking for the next local sound to go global. Virgin Music is heading for Nigeria and the Middle East, while Warner has signed “one of the biggest superstars” in China. 

Philips is branching out from smart lighting to smart surveillance – a timely move, because as we pointed out last week, home security is where we’re seeing some of the fastest growth in demand for tech.  

Will consumers accept and buy from artificial influencers? Very probably, according to recent research. Oh and if you go into the woods today, you’d better not make a deadly mistake with an AI-generated mushroom foraging book.

Chart of the week

If you come across a female electrician or a male makeup artist, you’ve encountered someone quite rare – these are the jobs most likely to be done by the other gender. 

A surprising footnote to this data comes from our GWI Kids dataset, which shows us that boys (38%) are much less likely than girls (52%) to think people of their gender can do any job they want to. 

As the writer Richard Reeves puts it, much time and effort has (rightly) been invested in connecting women to opportunities in STEM, but less attention has been paid getting men into jobs like nursing and primary education. And without some persuasion, it looks unlikely the next generation of young men will change that.

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