06 March 2024

Hi folks,

You’ve got the album, now buy the inspiration. Singer Kacey Musgraves is promoting her latest record in a unique way, in the form of a shoppable Etsy moodboard. Does this mean the hottest music trend for 2024 is… affiliate marketing?

Scroll down to read about F1 fangirls, glass skin, and the spiritual home of the Tour de France (hint: It’s not France).

Stats to power your week

🏎️ The new F1 season began last week, allowing us to reflect again on the sport’s “fangirlification” in recent years. The data speaks to a change in the sport’s demographic – since 2020 the number of fashion-conscious consumers who follow it has increased by 33%, while the number of baby boomers who are fans has dropped 29%. GWI Sports

🏅It’s a good moment for women’s sports. In the US, we’re seeing strong year-on-year growth in viewership of the UEFA Women’s Champions League (+44%), the National Women’s Soccer League (+28%), and the WNBA (+31%). GWI Core

🧴 The quest for eternal youth is nothing new, but it’s really coming to the fore in the skincare world. On the back of trends like “glass skin” and “clean girl makeup”, we’re seeing a spike in usage of anti-aging creams/serums (+19% year-on-year). GWI Core

💔 Are people on a break from dating apps? The number who use them has dropped 24% since 2020. Bad news for anyone who likes a uniform: the number of law enforcement officers on dating apps has also decreased by 42% in that time. GWI Core

🍬 You really are what you eat, especially as far as candy is concerned. Amazingly, the most distinctive brand consumed by Americans who describe themselves as “intellectual” is (*drum roll*) Nerds. You couldn’t make that up. GWI USA

What’s on our radar

Anthropic has released Claude 3, the latest version of its chatbot which appears to match GPT-4 on a number of metrics. Early tests indicate it’s very good with domain-specific knowledge, beating postgrads in a number of areas. It also seems to know when you're testing it…

Apple has killed its long-running, secretive electric car project. Many of its staff will be put to work on (you guessed it) AI instead. In other AI developments, Adobe has announced a music generation tool, while Google has demoed Genie, which hints at possible game generators in the future. 

Courtesy of Alibaba and Pika, we now have two examples of tools that add lip sync capabilities to AI-generated videos – in other words, realistic audio to go with the visuals. 

Laurie Anderson, artist and widow of musician Lou Reed, might be the most high-profile person yet to reveal she talks to (and works with) a chatbot based on her late partner.  

We saw last week that Reddit is planning to sell its data to train AI models – and now Tumblr and WordPress are following suit. The quality of AI-generated fan fiction will go up massively if this happens. 

Ozempic continues to realign industries, with Oprah Winfrey (who revealed she was using weight-loss jabs last year) stepping down from the board of WeightWatchers, gyms focusing on muscle loss over weight loss, and opinions dividing in the influencer community. 

Following a similar ban in Italy, France has passed new laws restricting the terms that meat alternative brands can use to describe their products. It’ll be interesting to see how creative marketers tackle this new challenge.   

It might be a tough time for layoffs in the gaming industry, but the field is gaining more cultural recognition. The world’s first museum dedicated to video game art has opened in Japan. 

Chart of the week

There’s a well-established lifecycle for social media apps. They tend to start by making waves on college campuses, building an early user base of students and young professionals. Their friends and family join the platform, and the early users themselves get older. All in all, the age of the user base gradually goes up. You can see this trend across a host of social platforms widely recognized for their connection with today’s youth.

But Snapchat has proved to be an exception over the years. It seems to have perfected the art of capturing different generations of young people, likely helped by clever research and marketing that lets the company stay close to its users’ needs.

Local lowdown

Colombia: Putting the pedal to the medal

Think of Colombia and you might picture salsa dancing, coffee, or maybe Shakira. You probably don’t think of the Tour de France. But almost half of all Colombians follow the cycling contest. It’s a reflection of the country’s deep love of the sport, putting them miles ahead of any other country in the world (perhaps surprisingly, only a quarter in France follow it). 

Especially in the rural mountains, public transport can be poor and cars expensive, making the bike an essential way to get around. For their part, cities like Medellín and Bogotá have long pioneered car-free travel during certain periods of the week. 

What happens when lots of people go through what’s effectively altitude training on grueling roads in the Andes? You produce athletes, like the 2019 Tour de France winner Egan Bernal, whose success led to days of partying in his hometown of Zipaquirá. Salud! 🥂

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