AI-powered brand mascots, Elf Beauty's coup and more Nike news

Weekly Exhale

Sam Altman timed the release of Jony Ive and OpenAI perfectly. The move came during a big week for technology. The reaction was huge. It drowned out everything else.

Over at Google’s I/O conference, a series of new products were announced to little fanfare, including Flow, an AI filmmaking tool powered by Veo 3. They weren’t alone. That same week, Microsoft ran its Build summit with its own parade of launches. Oh, and Anthropic quietly dropped two new super-powered models and expanded its API functionality.

We’ve stopped noticing, not out of apathy, but saturation. Our crocodile brains have developed filters to the relentless tide of version updates that promise to “change everything, forever.”

Still, we were wrong to miss Flow.

It turns out Flow is different. Not novelty-good. Usable-good.

Joanna Stern, a Wall Street Journal reporter, gave the world a demo. She made a short film called Robot & Me. Entirely generated. Just prompts and a whole lot of patience. The result is a silly, satirical vignette starring Stern and a humanoid valet, the Optimax 5000. Optimax quickly micro-manages all the joy out of her life in the name of better sleep, productivity, and health. Eventually, she takes a power drill to its chest. Settings now “manually adjusted,” the final scene shows Optimax blasting country music and cooking up a stack of syrup-drenched pancakes.

It’s a throwaway video that actually changes everything.

Let’s be clear: Robot & Me is nowhere near human-level filmwork. And by Stern’s own admission, the process is awful even if the tools are magic. It took more than 1,000 generated shots to produce a few usable minutes. The hallucinations—sorry, outtakes—are the best part. In one locked-off scene, Stern hides on a bathroom toilet while her AI twin inexplicably emerges from the shower.

But there’s no getting around it: The render quality is now professionally deployable. It fulfils a wide range of creative needs. Conscientious objectors to Flow aren’t protecting the craft. They’re protecting themselves. For $299 a month, anyone with a half-decent idea and some narrative instinct can shoot film without ever touching a camera.

For brands, the opportunity is immediate.

Flow’s standout feature? Character consistency. And the film proves it—Optimax 5000 holds visual form across each of the different scenes. For marketers, that’s gold. Mascots are back. This year’s Super Bowl brought out Mr. Clean, Chester Cheetah, and the Kool-Aid Man. Flow is a billion-dollar mascot-maker. A way for brands to build repeatable storytelling and visual equity. With low budgets, from day one. And with more consistency than most CMOs have ever managed.

Given Jony is now at OpenAI, expect a wave of vague language about human creators as the last tastemakers. They’re not wrong. But how long before “have taste” becomes just another line in the prompt?

I got home late last night. Barely through the door when—SMACK!—a pink narwhal teddy came flying off the upstairs landing and hit me square in the face.

My son ambushed me. Again.

He treats my return home like a movie fight scene. Less Robot & Me, more Cato in The Pink Panther. He hides. He strikes. We wrestle until one of us gets hurt or calls for mercy.

It’s silly. It’s physical. And it happens every day.

In Neanderthal times, this would have been training for survival. For defending the cave. For hunting. Now? We order in. The driver hands us food. We eat. It’s clear my son's biology hasn’t caught up with Deliveroo and takeout from Uncle Roger's.

I’m not alone in wondering where we are on the evolutionary scale, compared to the pace of our technologies. Some books—okay, a TikTok or two—suggest Homo sapiens aren’t evolving much at all. That we’ve plateaued. We still conquer, consume, and comfort ourselves. And technology simply repackages these urges into faster, more excessive forms. We work the same hours as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we just do it on Zoom. We don’t gather around fires, we gather around feeds.

Netflix gave us Blockbuster without the drive. TikTok gave us dopamine without the plotline. And now Flow gives us cinema without a camera.

At least, we still crave each other. That’s our one evolutionary constant. Collaboration. Connection. Even as markets keep obliterating the old and ushering in the new, we remain biologically inert. We still want to play. To touch. To laugh. To sit in a dimly lit restaurant and marvel at the beauty of the person you're with.

Maybe one day, our cells will catch up to the chips. Maybe our ability to control AI, like Stern taking down Optimax, still hangs in the balance. Until then, I'm siding with biology.

A soft toy to the face. Laughing about nothing.

And truthfully, I'm not sure I have a choice. My species is stuck. In the face of relentless progress, we remain exactly as we are.

This weekend, my son and I are flying out on a trip. He’s already measured the hotel room to make sure there’s enough space for combat. I’ve got my eye on the large Egyptian cotton pillows.

One in each hand should do the trick.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Bank of England downplays inflation risk, calls for rate cuts | Financial Times

US economy shrinks for first time in three years amid tariffs | MSN

Memorial Day hits send AMC, Cinemark and Marcus stocks soaring | Fast Company

Brand Beat

Veo 3: The tools are magic, the process madness | Wall Street Journal

Nespresso taps The Weeknd to woo younger audiences | Brand Innovators

Walmart unveils AI-driven platform to promote healthy eating | Fierce Healthcare

Ben & Jerry’s calls Gaza conflict genocide, Unilever under scrutiny | The Wall Street Journal

Gap shares tumble as tariffs may cost $100–$150 million | CNBC

Nike, Lego unveil playful kids’ sneaker collaboration | Fast Company

Nike's return to Amazon signals shift for direct-to-consumer purists | The Drum

Walmart moves to capture business abandoned by rivals | The Street

Perplexity’s six-month ad run prompts marketers to demand scale | Digiday

TikTok trend spawns new Sprite+Tea fusion drink | Brand Innovators

Poppi taps gaming market to boost prebiotic soda buzz | Marketing Dive

Kellanova CMO Julie Bowerman future-proofs Pop-Parts and Pringles | Adweek

Tesla continues teetering on the brink of collapse | The Verge

KFC plans £15bn investment in UK and Ireland, creating thousands of jobs | The Guardian

OnlyFans founder shifts focus from sex work to influencers | Wired

Calm Q2 market fails to boost CMO confidence | Digiday

Why is food everywhere in fashion advertising | Business of Fashion

Roblox farm game fuels underground digital fruit market | Bloomberg

Gen Z feels school-backed pressure to become social media creators | Fast Company

GLP-1 use surges 600% as 2% of Americans take weight-loss drugs | Slashdot

Starting Up

Elf Beauty to buy Rhode for $1 billion | Vogue Business

Protein bar maker David’s valuation climbs to $725 million | The Information

Inside the murky market for startup secondary shares | YouTube

An in-depth interview with Loveable’s Anton Osika | Sifted

Black Mirror–style dating app sweeps California college campuses | SFGate

BGF pledges £3bn for UK growth, £300m for female-led firms | BM Magazine

Big Tech bets on these nuclear fission startups | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Two divergent paths for the future of artificial intelligence | The New Yorker

Elon Musk allegedly used ketamine and other drugs while advising Trump | The Guardian

Nvidia’s business booms despite China sales ban | The Wall Street Journal

Tim Cook’s rough year worsens with fresh Apple setbacks | The Wall Street Journal

Watching Google Veo 3 videos is genuinely terrifying | Creative Bloq

Anthropic names Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to board | Bloomberg

Venture Vibes

London listing advisers unfazed by Shein IPO snub | Reuters

Grammarly lands $1B in nondilutive funding from General Catalyst | TechCrunch

Every VC-backed IPO in the past year was a down round | The Information

Best friends become private equity’s rising young stars | The Wall Street Journal

Klarna’s losses swell as consumer loan defaults rise | Financial Times

Elon Musk’s Neuralink lands $600M funding at $9B valuation | TechCrunch

Forbes unveils 2025 Midas list of top global venture capitalists | Forbes

Design Driven

Nike's innovation and design chief John Hoke to retire | Business of Fashion

Improve your brainstorms—or know when to ditch them | Design Week

Prompt code: why I stopped Figma prototyping and what Majorel means | LinkedIn

Kyrgyz café fuses Soviet brutalism and Manhattan loft design | Wallpaper

Happiness

TikTok and AI are the junk food of the internet | The Times

Why your workplace will thrive with gracious professionalism | Fast Company

Why Esther Perel bets on saving the American workforce in the AI era | Fortune

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