OK COOL

What Arsenal's victory has taught me ab…… (I joke) 😈 I grew up in North West London and all my classmates were Arsenal. It would have been so much easier to defect, but that would be spineless. But how this club has been showing up on and off the pitch is undeniable. I regularly cover their marketing work, from the women's team to the NTS and Aries collabs. And at OK COOL we've got some of the most tapped in sports fanatics in the business. People who live for sport and London culture. So as you can imagine, we talk about it a lot. Everything about the club has been on point this season. The management, the football (men’s and women’s), the marketing. 🤌 I live near the stadium and last night North London was shut down until the very early hours of the morning. The energy was on another level. THOUSANDS packed out the Emirates. Right now North London is the centre of the world for football. Who was there....? 💚 ✌

J&TJ just dropped Tunacado and Power Shake charms with Gstaad Guy 😲 Built around the "à la poubelle" philosophy of Gstaad Guy's jewellery brand Poubel. Which is all about embracing individuality without taking yourself too seriously. A super cool way to connect food culture with personal style. And get new eyes on the brand through Gstaad Guy’s own cult following. He has one of the highest net worth followings in the world. A €75 charm on a €3000 designer bag is the Gen Z flex. IYKYK energy for the Tunacado lovers 🙌 👇 Charms are HUGE right now. → Pinterest searches for charms are up 700% year on year. Wild! → Coach's $95 cherry charm drove double-digit growth at Tapestry. → The market's gone 12x in 12 months. Gen-z’s obsession with charms is driving the whole category. 🫶

I had the privilege of sitting in the front row at a packed Vimeo soirée watching Annie House do Annie House on stage 🔥 You could've heard a pin drop. People furtively taking photos of the slides, scribbling notes and laughing at all her punchlines… So good… I wanted to share 3 slides from the prez. She broke down what culture actually IS. Community, virality, lore, underground, mass, commentary, obsessions, fandom, semiotics, taste, vibe, jokes, memes, rituals, movements. All of it. If you want to shape it and benefit from it, you have to participate meaningfully. She traced the shift too. Once upon a time you missed last night's Simpsons and you were sidelined from culture in real time. Then everything got flat, same and sanitised so presence was enough. Now there's a desperation for creative worthy of a conversation. The next (excellent) presenter referred to Annie no less than FIVE times. Moments like this are a reminder… everyone else is playing catch up with OK COOL. Inspired 💚 🤘

A Supreme logo just added over $1k to the price of an ounce of gold 😲 They released a real gold bar in collaboration with PAMP Suisse. The Swiss refiner that central banks and investment funds buy from. Back in 2019 they put gold bars on a $78 cotton tee.  Seven years later they stamped the Supreme logo onto bullion. In two versions and mintages. 💰 1oz bar at $5,998. Only 100 units worldwide. 💰 1g bar at $298. Only 1,000 units worldwide. Spot price for an ounce of gold was sitting around $4,724 in early May. So Supreme is charging about 27% premium for the logo stamp. And that's the whole Supreme game. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆’𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝟯𝟬 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆. Resale has always been their engine. People buy Supreme to flip Supreme. Now they've done it in the oldest resale market on earth. It sits alongside other collectable drops like the Everlast boxing ring, the leopard faux fur lined casket, and an ATM. Where the product IS the story. They drop gold bars and the entire internet writes the campaign for them. Complex, Hypebeast, Highsnobiety, GQ all covered the drop before it happened. Then it gets re-covered on drop day. Then again when resale prices appear. Then again when someone famous is seen with one. The drops earn more cultural conversation than most multi-million pound TV campaigns. The scarcity multiplies it. And PAMP now gets youth, cultural relevance, and entry into a conversation they'd otherwise never touch. Would you buy one? 👀🔥

France just announced their World Cup squad as a US sitcom 🔥 There's a window of attention around squad reveals. France just nailed it. The video is fully produced with American diners, barbecues, and convenience stores. A fun way to celebrate American culture without mocking it. The fictitious town it's set in is called "Clear Fountain." The literal English translation of Clairefontaine. France's national training centre. And the tagline. "Chacun a un rôle à jouer." Each one has a role to play. World Cup is getting absolutely hammered for ticket prices, but there's been some top-tier marketing in the lead up. Super cool 🔥

Brands are turning drones into flying billboards 👀 The sky is now prime advertising real estate. There's a load of unused space up there and brands are clocking it. Lego, GE, Netflix, Mercedes all dropping up to $1m on 1,000-drone fleets. But honestly the more interesting op is for smaller brands. The format's still unexpected enough that the audience does most of your distribution for you through organic social…. IF you get creative… boring advertising is still boring in the sky. And huge flexibility around how local you can get with it. What do we reckon... rate it as a format, or leave the sky alone?

An artist just hosted a floating banquet on the sea… insane 🤯 Set between two calanques at Les Goudes. This is Alix LaCloche. Franco-American chef and culinary scenographer in Paris. She's famous for bespoke culinary performances.  Think theatrical tables that look like paintings. Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Jacquemus have all come knocking.  Because nobody's doing this like she is. There's ridiculous amounts of inspo brands can take from artists like Alix LaCloche when it comes to pushing the boundaries of creativity in brand experience. I encourage everyone to go and find artists like this and look beyond their usual places for creative inspiration. There are some incredibly cool things happening in niche corners of the internet. And the bit that gets me… she spends her mornings cooking for the homeless in Paris. Walking the neighbourhood dropping meals off to people who need them. 👏 💚

Taste is the most valuable commodity in marketing. But you can't fu*king buy it. You have to find someone who has it and trust them completely. And that's genuinely terrifying for most brands, because taste means surrendering control. It usually means letting somebody make a call you don't fully understand yet. My best attempt at defining something almost impossible to define… Taste isn't knowing what's good. It's knowing why something everybody else thinks is good is actually not. It's that feeling when a campaign looks right but feels wrong. When a brand is ticking every box and you still wouldn't follow them. When something is technically perfect and yet completely forgettable. Virgil Abloh said something I think about all the time. "I'm only 3% different from what came before me, but that 3% is everything." That 3% is taste. AI can produce a million versions of anything faster than any human team. The one thing it genuinely cannot do is feel the difference between something that's almost right and something that's undeniably right. Most brands don't have anyone in the room who can actually tell the difference. 👀

This horror movie is texting people from billboards. Whether you respond or not... it gets worse 🫣 The new Blumhouse film 'Obsession' has put these up across LA and NYC. Day one. A wholesome billboard from a character called Nikki. A love note.  A phone number.  “Text me”. Then the billboards started reacting.  Each day Nikki got more unhinged. And anyone who DID text? Voicenotes of maniacal laughter. Texts like "I want to wear you like a sweater and keep you around with me all the time". The more you engage, the darker it gets. The internet is lapping it up. People sharing screenshots. Regretting it. Forwarding it to the group chat. 👇 There’s only a handful of these billboards in two cities. But the campaign is going viral in feeds worldwide. Every day Nikki gives people something new to post. The OOH acts as the content engine to seed a global social campaign. And for the people who engaged, they're already part of the film's world before they've even watched it... that's a pretty cool thing to do. (Images from @filmbuzzr IG)