Niu Lai has been called bad at basically everything a film can be bad at. After a disastrous opening, ridicule has turned the Chinese animation into a meme, and now a hit. A cheering reminder for mediocre products everywhere: it’s better to be remarkably bad than forgettably average.
Scroll down to read about the Women’s World Cup, Woke 2.0, and the nostalgia divide.
Stats to power your week
⚽With the FIFA Women’s World Cup happening next year, we have a chance to understand how engagement with the tournament differs from the men’s competition. 41% of men’s World Cup viewers watch at a friend’s house, versus 26% for the women’s tournament. The next step may be turning viewing the women’s game into a social ritual. GWI Pulse
🚩By contrast, the women’s tournament is doing well at prompting emotional attachment. 44% say they get patriotic following their country in the men’s tournament, with the women’s competition just behind at 40%. GWI Pulse
🥬Having already seen off a British Prime Minister, lettuce’s latest trick is harbouring cyclospora stateside - a parasite with some unfortunately “explosive” side effects. The fallout goes beyond just the recalled products, with 41% avoiding ingredients associated with outbreaks, such as leafy greens. Mind you, maybe it doesn’t take much persuasion to skip the greens. GWI Pulse
🪧AOC says “Woke 1” was crazy. But what was it? And are we entering Woke 2.0? The defining trait of “Woke 1” was concern about racism, the third-biggest concern among Americans in 2020. Today it doesn’t make the top 10, showing how dramatically issue salience can move. GWI USA
Meet the audience: EPL fans in the US
Without GWI data
With GWI data
The EPL campaign kicks off soon, with some clubs holding pre-season tours in the USA, a growing soccer market that might get another burst following the World Cup.
These kinds of geographically dislocated sports audiences are fascinating because timezones change their characteristics as well as cultural differences. As you can see, GWI data helps establish that soccer viewing is often a breakfast activity in the US. In addition, the data says most of these fans are married or partnered, often with kids at home, watching football as a normal part of domestic life rather than an event they've dressed up for.
They're not exclusively loyal either: 55% also follow the Champions League and 73% follow MLS, more than five and three times as likely as the average sports fan respectively, suggesting these fans see themselves as sports omnivores rather than single-league obsessives. And we should clarify one thing: we at no point specified that either fan needed to support Arsenal.
Chart of the week
Nostalgia is the trend that never goes away, and this week’s chart highlights several interesting, sometimes counterintuitive aspects of it.
For one, younger consumers’ nostalgia is more cultural, whereas older consumers’ nostalgia is more autobiographical. Younger folks trigger nostalgic feelings through things they’ve watched, whereas with enough life behind you, it becomes more about things you’ve done.
This feeds into the next point: younger consumers are already modelling nostalgia as a kind of consumption. We might occasionally gripe at the number of reruns, reboots, and retro merch, but you can see the size of the audience that exists for it.
And a final thought to ponder: might digital photography make us less nostalgic? Maybe looking at old photos isn’t actually a byproduct of aging, but a ritual based on a physical object now less common.
More from GWI
Believe it or not, but some people are already thinking about Halloween. Here’s our guide on those pumpkin-craving “Summerweeners”.
And we have more tips on how to recognize and target overlooked audiences here.
