The nights are drawing in, the air is crisp, the leaves are turning brown…spooky season is upon us at last. After a sweltering few months in many parts of the world, is the cool of autumn/fall now more anticipated than the heat of summer?
Scroll down to read about diamonds, protests, and how no-one talks about groceries anymore.
Stats to power your week
🥧Spooky season heralds the introduction of pumpkin spice lattes, and as a mark of how popular seasonal flavored drinks are: they’re almost as popular to buy out of home (27%) as flavored water (28%) and energy drinks (29%). GWI Pulse
🪧The French have taken to the streets in recent weeks, a common enough occurrence for some to describe it as “a national pastime”. Is this true, and is there anything about the national character that might explain it? A big question, but one thing we did learn in a 2024 survey: French consumers were 77% were more likely than the global average to describe themselves as activists. GWI Pulse
💎Diamonds: a girl’s best friend, one of a man’s biggest expenses. Diamonds are a curious market - the products are expensive, but the buyer and consumer are different people. Given the pressure, we thought we’d lend a hand by pointing out what women are most likely to look for in a diamond, compared to men:
setting design, cut, and ethical sourcing. In other words: (carat) size isn’t everything, guys. GWI Pulse
📃Reactions to a new Apple product will be unfolding this week (sorry) as the Cupertino firm releases its first ever foldable iPhone. 24% are very or extremely interested in making their new smartphone a foldable one, but intriguingly there’s no real difference by income - suggesting the foldability isn't a premium feature. GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: Horror gamers
Without GWI data
With GWI data
Zooming out for a moment, the emergence of “spooky season” reflects how horror and Halloween-adjacent material have gone from the cultural fringes to a more cosy mainstream. Horror films have moved from “video nasty” moral panics into comfort viewing, and horror games have also come online as entertainment for the long nights. But who actually plays them?
It’s tempting to make an association between horror games and the largely female, witchy aesthetic that’s taken over social media in the last few years, but this is still a gaming audience, and one focused on risk-taking at that, so it’s largely male. Self-identifying as confident and adventurous, they’re choosing the scares for fun.
But they’re not loners - half are married, over half have kids, and they’re more than twice as likely as average to play party games, MMOs and battle royales. Horror games can be as much about a shared thrill under a blanket as an introvert’s pastime.
Chart of the week
16 years after The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin’s followup film, The Social Reckoning, is now out in cinemas. It provides a good opportunity to ask: how exactly has the online world changed in that time? How are our conversations different?
If today’s discourse feels more contentious than it did 16 years ago, it may have something to do with politics and sport becoming such a big part of the online conversation.
We’re also talking more about food, which might have something to do with the internet being inherently more visual these days. But on the other hand, travel and fashion - topics closely associated with Instagram, which only launched in 2010 itself - have become relatively less talked about since it came out. Perhaps we’re happy to admire people’s vacation and wardrobe updates from a distance without being drawn into discussions about them?
And we shouldn’t overlook what hasn’t changed during that time - even as the music industry has changed enormously, music remains the foremost topic of conversation.
More from GWI
Watch our recent webinar with Chief Insight Officer Jason Mander explaining synthetic data…but done right.
Our latest Talk Data To Me podcast features the great minds at M&C Saatchi talking about how they quantify culture.
