no. 38: how do you deliver brand trust?

sea moss, pinterest, and sleep tape.

happy thursday! in your inbox ahead of a birthday weekend, so that’s extra exciting. let me know what caught your attention this week. cheers!

mini news round-up 🗞️

• openai just announced shopping inside chatgpt - “we’re looking to bring a new kind of conversational shopping experience into chatgpt,” says matt weaver, head of solutions engineering for the emea region at openai.

• coach heat drives tapestry q3 revenues up 8% - i have been bullish on tapestry for about three years now. thank you, coach!

• sleep tape is in these days and a great analysis of trend cycles here -

  “i’ve found that it’s easy to think you’re too late to something and this is often a mistake” brilliantly from

  Joe Hovde

• everyone is freaking out about the west village girl article - this was a concerningly long read. felt more like a dissertation.

• safari searches dropped for the first time last month, likely thanks to increased ai use - it’s an exciting time to be working in ai search and sorry that i keep showing you articles on it.

• bumble reported a 7.7% year-over-year revenue drop in the first quarter of 2025 - tough news but i don’t know any of my friends who met on bumble. i’ve been seeing their ads and it made me wonder how they were doing these days:

brand-storming 🧃

• sea moss - it’s come to my attention that people are buying and consuming sea moss. this is probably part of the coconut cult epidemic.¹

  

  i always find it interesting what’s in the related queries section for a new trend. #4 and #5 tells me what I need to know on who’s most likely buying sea moss.

trends to watch 👀

it’s not new news that whenever we see something that’s ai-generated or modified, we get upset that we didn’t know about it. this year alone, the film industry felt the weight of that reaction: background actors replicated with ai, scripts punched up by machine, voices duped, the list goes on. the collective response is not one of surprise, but often almost anger and distrust. i think this is due to, in part, our desire not to let our intellect deceive us.

this reaction isn’t unique to hollywood. (see the brutalist’s ai controversy, explained). it’s happening in all cultural spheres: marketing campaigns, product photography, journalism, music, all of it. consumers don’t just want to know what they’re consuming — they want to know every single thing. ai isn’t inherently the villain here, but how do you begin to ensure your customer isn’t upset with you?

via a24

you tell them. pinterest just rolled out labels for image pins that are generated or modified using genai. they're also testing tools to give users more control over how they interact with genai content:

via pinterest

the pinterest cto stated: “this is a direct response to what we’re hearing loud and clear from our users: they want to be able to make more informed choices about the content they see. when people come to pinterest, we want them to encounter quality content that makes their unique journey of personalized visual discovery better – and we believe that genai, when thoughtfully implemented, can contribute to more creativity, inspiration, and action for our users.”

labeling ai doesn’t take away from the art but rather provides an information layer of context. we’ve all accepted photoshop as part of the visual lexicon, and “ai-edited” will eventually just be another part of our accepted creative language. i found this to be particularly compelling from the brutalist controversy:

“it is controversial in the industry to talk about ai, but it shouldn’t be,” jancsó said in the interview. “we should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. there’s nothing in the film using ai that hasn’t been done before. it just makes the process a lot faster. we use ai to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”

and in the spirit of transparency, this was spellchecked by ai.

see you next week! as always let me know what you want to see more of on here and what you want to see less of!

1. coconut cult refers to the recent surge in popularity of coconut cult yogurt on social media, particularly on tiktok, where users claim it improves gut health, skin clarity, and overall well-being.