Shades of weird: From Coca-Cola's corner shops to Ive and Altman's $6.5bn moonshot

Weekly Exhale

Today, when people talk about brands, they talk about speed. Reaction time. Quick upticks. The dopamine hit of winning the internet for a few hours. But that’s just day-trading brand value in the attention economy. If you want to build something that delivers century-long returns on the public markets, the work is slower. Duller. More like banking. You’re compounding trust. Steady signals, consistently repeated, over decades.

So when I first saw Coca-Cola’s grassroots repair program in Mexico—replacing shopfronts, refreshing awnings—I liked it. A clean exchange: Coca-Cola will fix your signs, as long as they’re Coca-Cola red and carry the logo. Something a little New York Giuliani-era about it. Fix what’s broken on the street, lift the mood. Commercial advertising with a hint of civic pride.

Tug at the red thread in Mexico, and the story goes deeper. Coca-Cola arrived in 1926 and embedded itself so fully into Mexican life that today it contributes around 2% of the country’s GDP. In Chiapas, Mexicans consume up to 800 litres per person per year, eight times the amount Americans drink. Vicente Fox started out as a Coke truck driver in 1964, became CEO by 1975, and eventually President of Mexico in 2000, ending the incumbent party’s 71-year political reign at the time.

In Chiapas, some families drink more Coke than water. They don't always have a choice. In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Coca-Cola extracts so much groundwater, locals struggle to fill a bucket. So they drink Coke instead. Babies are fed Coca-Cola. In the highlands, it’s even used in religious ceremonies. Congregants believe the burping up of Coca-Cola bubbles expels evil spirits from the body.

A brand isn’t a vibe or a viral moment. It’s a chequebook. A licence. To extract nature's resources from the ground, sweeten it, carbonate it, bottle it and sell it back to the people it once belonged to. As a treat. As sustenance. As a sacrament.

Not once, but again and again and again. Coca-Cola’s compound annual growth rate sits at 13%. A $10,000 investment in 2020? Worth over $18,000 today. The product? Delicious. Everywhere. I drink Diet Cokes on repeat. And in Mexico, it's more than a drink. It's a job. It's the water supply. The political party of choice.

The ad promoting the repair program is called Shades of Red. It looks like a Cannes entry. Because it is. Coca-Cola is shortly defending its 2024 crown as Creative Brand of the Year.

“He was my closest and most loyal friend.” That’s what Jony Ive said when Steve Jobs died. A decade later, he described the day Steve passed as brutal and random. He still thinks of him every day. He remains close to Steve’s widow, Laurene. Two families, knit over three decades.

Steve’s last words to Jony were: I’ll miss talking with you. Jony was on the floor next to the bed. When it was over, he stepped into the garden. He remembers the sound the wooden latch made as he pulled it closed.

In his eulogy, Jony’s voice broke when he recalled the simplest things. Like Steve calling at midnight to discuss something tiny. The sound of a gate hinge.

Friendships, like brands, take time. Thousands of conversations and quiet moments. Until one day, the person on the other end of the call isn’t just a friend. They’re the ones you laugh hardest with. The keeper of your dumbest stories. Your darkest secrets. The late-night therapist. The person who knew you before your success or title. Your sounding board. Your soft landing. The one you message first when it all goes wrong, or beautifully right.

With Steve and Jony, we're talking about a creative bond like no other. It was a dialogue across decades. Sometimes bold, sometimes subtle. Always profoundly human.

So when the (AI) image dropped of Jony Ive, hand on Sam Altman’s shoulder, part of a $6.5 billion bet, it was hard to know what to feel. At first, I was electrified. Then…not so much.

The video is pure theatre. Altman walks through San Francisco’s financial district in LEGO x Adidas UltraBoosts. Jony, cloaked in camel, moves east on Columbus, then, mysteriously, north, magically flanked by the same extras, teleported across shots to make the city look fuller.

They meet at Café Zoetrope, which is wood-panelled, candle-lit, cinematic. The lighting’s warm. The espresso is performatively pulled. They talk of friendship. Of family ties. Maybe that part’s real. Or just self-aggrandising. What's said is perfectly fine. But the feeling is synthetic. A hard sell to investors on a future brought forward. A Jony Ive-flavoured arbitrage.

I wondered what Laurene Jobs makes of it. What she and Jony would say to each other about it. For when Steve spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something finished. Something real. Something breakthrough.

Altman’s pockets, for now, are empty.

What aches a little is this: Jony knows better. He knows that what goes into a thing—its spirit, its care—is what’s felt on the other side. A designer's civic duty. But here, Jony reads from the gospel according to tech-promises: Bezos’s drones. Musk’s robo-taxis. Zuckerberg’s metaverse.

If there’s still fire in Jony’s creative spirit, I hope Altman gets his first real creative review—and it rattles him. That moment where a Creative Director stares you down and says, No. This isn’t it. Let’s start again.

Because I want this partnership to yield brilliance. I want AI to find its soul. That can only happen if both of them stop pretending it already has.

You can’t skip to the end. Not in friendship. Not in creativity. Not in AI. Not in anything that matters. You show up. Again, and again, until that gate hinge sounds right.

I count my blessings that I’ve had friends show up for me like that. Some I’ve seen often, others less. Some for a season, most for decades. I’m not sure there’s a “me” without them. More like a chorus. A constellation. A better version of myself, spread out across the people who’ve held me up, called me out, and made me giggle so hard.

I’m thinking of them now, their minds, their hearts, their absolute refusal to let me drift too far from who I am. And for the one or two we’ve lost along the way. I miss the conversations we never finished. In the same way, Jony describes missing Steve. The same way anyone who’s ever loved someone brilliant does.

There’s no getting around it. Friends, the real ones, make the time we’re given worthwhile.

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

UK inflation jumps | Financial Times

Latest tariff plans could trigger global economic shock | BBC

U.K. consumer sentiment edges up as tariff turmoil eases | The Wall Street Journal

Brand Beat

Coca-Cola’s ‘Shades of Red’ campaign supports Mexican small businesses | The Drum

UK creative economy needs a bold champion now | Financial Times

How Lego built a marketing strategy that fuels global growth | McKinsey

Amazon’s Grubhub deal yields major business gains | Fast Company

Terence Reilly named Crocs Inc. chief brand officer | Women's Wear Daily

Danone adopts pharma-style marketing as GLP-1 reshapes American appetites | Digiday

Tinder CEO steps down amid latest Match Group shakeup | Bloomberg

Nike to hike prices and resume Amazon sales next week | Business of Fashion

How L’Oréal Paris uses ambassadors to power its brand | Vogue Business

Ministers delay UK junk food ad ban until next year | Financial Times

Amazon CEO: Tariffs haven’t dented consumer spending | CNBC

Acne brands target Gen Alpha at their favourite hangout | Fast Company

Apple remains Kantar’s top brand for the fourth consecutive year | Marketing Brew

How FinTok influencers are reshaping financial services marketing | Sprout Social

TRESemmé’s Paige DeSorbo collab launches Unilever’s influencer strategy | Adweek

Duolingo deletes TikTok videos after AI backlash, returns with odd message | Fast Company

Netflix to stream Sesame Street episodes later this year | CNBC

Heineken’s Rebecca Haigh explains why brands need reality checks | The Drum

LVMH falls out of Europe’s top five largest stocks | Business of Fashion

Levi’s sells Dockers brand to Authentic Brands Group for $311 million | Retail Dive

Creative industries challenge doomsday narrative at D&AD festival | The Drum

Starting Up

The true cost of being a female entrepreneur | Startup Magazine

Female-founded Atomik AM raises €713k to scale advanced manufacturing | EU Startups

Gut health AI toilet startup Throne raises $4M from Moxxie | TechCrunch

Balancing founder interests with audiences in brand building | Self Projecting Projections

Tech Tidbits

Microsoft-backed Builder.ai collapses over suspect sales claims | Financial Times

Google passes ‘Will Smith eating spaghetti’ recognition test | Forbes

Musk’s DOGE uses Meta’s Llama 2, not Grok, for gov’t slashing | Ars Technica

Zoom CEO uses AI avatar on quarterly earnings call | TechCrunch

Nvidia RTX 5060 review fiasco warns gamers and reviewers | The Verge

Jony Ive joins OpenAI in $6.5B AI devices startup deal | New York Post

Google launches Gen-AI video tool offering control, sound, consistency | IndieWire

How Kara Swisher reached new heights as a tech powerhouse | The New York Times

Venture Vibes

Klarna CEO, Sutter Hill celebrate Jony Ive OpenAI deal | TechCrunch

OnlyFans in talks to sell at $8 billion valuation | Bloomberg

Breaking into venture capital has never been tougher | Bloomberg

Keen Venture Partners lands €40m EIF backing for defence tech fund | EU Startups

Revolut CEO secures $250M for AI-powered VC firm QuantumLight | Forbes

Startup employee stock sales to surge amid IPO slump | The Information

Design Driven

Marimekko-print Crocs are the perfect statement shoes | Design Milk

Designers grapple with burnout from endless upskilling demands | It's Nice That

Heatherwick revamps Longchamp flagship in New York after 20 years | Wallpaper

Happiness

You don’t have a business if you can’t take breaks. | Inc.

Teen wellness influencers turn to Kennedy-style scepticism | The New York Times

Almost half of UK youth prefer life without internet | The Guardian

This Week's Meditation

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