London Calling At The Top Of The Dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile? London calling... I never felt so much alike alike alike alike... - The Clash
Hello friends. It’s Post Big Game Monday. Did you call out sick from too much guac? Did your team win?
Yeah, this last week - in the words of Inigo Montoya - “let me explain.. No too much… Let me sum up.”
Sooo….Anthropic spent the week openly needling OpenAI over its ad-curious moves. The message was refreshingly, uh… human. Un-sanitized. For the first time, an AI company wasn’t wrapping its world-domination plans in the usual “benefit to humanity” abstraction. The pointy end of the stick was finally facing outward, and it felt… honest.
Meanwhile, investors had a toxic freakout over “agentic AI,” sending SaaS stocks into a full-blown panic spiral. The subtext wasn’t really about robots replacing us; it was the terrifying realization that half the software we pay for is just a “friendly” Javascript user interface draped over a very lonely database.
Then there were the “layoffs” (in rock and roll quotes). Companies have apparently discovered that “AI” is a remarkably convenient scent to spray over crappy quarterly results. Just slap a “future-forward” label on the press release, issue a calm statement, and hope no one notices the smell. It’s corporate Febreze - spray in the offending direction.
And then, of course, came the Olympics. NBC appeared to quietly trim the boos aimed at JD Vance (because of course they did), producing that unmistakable “uncanny valley” feeling that mainstream media has now perfected.
Compare that to Lindsey Vonn going down hard on the slopes. Pain, risk, and courage were fully visible. There was nothing to “manage.” The raw feed did all the work. Nobody needed a talking head to explain the incredible courage, and competitiveness in Vonn’s situation.
And, yeah, even the Super Bowl got pulled into the gravity well. One thing that’s clear is that the genius of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl wasn’t the performance; it was the audacity to be completely unbothered. Wholesome. He didn’t try to assimilate. He didn’t apologize. He just existed joyfully on the biggest stage in America. The loudest people hating on Bad Bunny’s halftime show are the same ones who thought jazz was the devil, water fountains were special, and hip-hop was a fad.
History is literally repeating itself, but this time it’s wearing Gucci and speaking Spanish. Cope harder.
For the last decade, marketing and communication strategies have been built around protecting people from reality. Smoothing it. Softening it. Making it “safe” to sit on without actually touching.
But, here’s the thing, reality not only doesn’t need a wrapper anymore, the wrapper, as it turns out, has become the most suspicious thing in the room.
So, yeah. Let’s throw that wrapper away and roll on.
Zoom Lens: Throw Away The Wrapper
You want to know if someone grew up in the 70s or 80s? Ask them about the ‘Good Living Room.’ You know, the one where your grandparent’s furniture was entombed in three-millimeter-thick industrial plastic. If you sat down wearing shorts, you were effectively vacuum-sealed to the sofa until your grandmother peeled you off like a post-it note.
In marketing and communications the last 20 years have been the Era of the Wrapper.
Tech startups shoved two boring words together and made it one “innovative” shell. Then, they took a boring database, gave it a rounded font and a ‘friendly’ UI, and called it a revolution. If you were a Cable TV network, you took a chaotic live event and duct-taped a ‘narrative’ onto it, complete with teeth-whitened talking heads to tell you exactly how to feel about the mess you just saw, and called it “content”.
And if you were a global brand? You blended every beautiful, specific culture into a ‘General Market’ smoothie - a beige liquid designed not to offend anyone from the inner city to the suburbs, or, frankly, interest them either.
The Wrapper isn’t just the packaging; it’s the product. It’s the corporate equivalent of Auto-Tune - polishing the flat notes and sandblasting the grit until every brand sounds like a distinctively average Katy Perry song: safe, sterile, and scientifically engineered to be perfect for muzak in an elevator.
But this last week, the music has… well…. pointed to something different coming.
“Polish” Is Now A Tell
Here is where we’re at in 2026: AI and real-time access to publishing and media distribution has made “professional polish” the cheapest commodity on earth.
Infinite “fine” is now free. You can generate a reasonable press release, a “professional” email, a sanitized logo, or a completely false but realistic looking meme in four seconds. And in economics, when something becomes free, it stops being a signal of quality. It becomes a “tell.”
We’ve reached a tipping point where ‘too polished’ no longer means ‘high quality.’ It means ‘I’m being lied to by a localized server in Virginia.’
You know the feeling. You’re scrolling LinkedIn and see that beat poetry post that looks professional and articulate. But three sentences in, your internal ‘plastic on the furniture’ alarm goes off. And weirdly, it makes it worse than bad. Bad is at least human; this is just... hollow. Neutral.
The safe middle isn’t just boring anymore; it’s suspicious.
Sooooo, if the Wrapper is dead, what’s left?
The New Rules: Friction is a Feature
When the cost of perfection hits zero, the value of Friction skyrockets. I believe we are moving from an economy of Presentation to an economy of Proof. I feels like as marketers and communicators we basically have two lanes left:
Lane 1: Radical Utility (The Agent - and no not that kind)
Stop describing what you do. Just fucking do it. If your marketing is just a series of adjectives describing how “empowering” your tool is, you’re finished. If your marketing is something that solves a real problem in 30 seconds, you win. The lesson: Don’t wrap the utility. Expose the utility.
Lane 2: Radical Humanity (The Hero)
If you can’t be a robot, you better be a human. And humans are messy. We don’t want the sanitized translation; we want the specific, jagged reality. We don’t want the press release; we want the unedited video. The lesson: Don’t edit out the boos. Don’t smooth out the accent. Don’t hide the sweat. Our imperfections are the only receipt we have that we actually exist.
I have more thinking on this exact topic coming - because I know that’s an uncomfortable shift. It is for me too.
The Bottom Line
For a long time, our job as communicators was to be the buffer. We were the “smooth new age music” playing in the elevator to keep everyone calm. But the elevator is broken, and people are sick of the new age tunes.
We have to stop trying to be “Professional.” Professional is now something a standard LLM can mimic in 4 seconds.
We need to be pointy. Difficult. Specific.
Because in a world of infinite synthetic perfection, the only thing that carries a premium is the truth.
WIDE ANGLE LENS
Let’s Zoom out and check out what interesting things are catching my eye in marketing and advertising.
The Superb Owl Ads Went Somewhere (Finally)
The best Super Bowl ads this year shared a quiet heresy: they weren’t necessarily trying to be “for everyone”. According to Ad Age’s creative roundups, the standout work leaned weird, absurd, and unmistakably pointy - Coinbase, Squarespace, Anthropic, and Levi’s (returning to the Super Bowl after 23 years) all chose to go somewhere, even if not everyone followed. (A Shout out to Levis for calling their Ad “Backstory”).
In a year where “brand safe” has become indistinguishable from “AI-generated,” the winning signal was friction.
The First Social Media Trial Is About to Strip the Wrapper Off
This week, the first major U.S. trial examining social media’s impact on children’s mental health begins - and it won’t be the last.
The case matters less for its immediate outcome than for what it will force into daylight: internal documents, product decisions, incentive structures, and the gap between public messaging and private knowledge.
For years, platforms have wrapped themselves in language about “connection,” “community,” and “user choice.”
For marketers and creators, this is the real signal: the era of narrative insulation is ending. “Saying the right things” will no longer be enough if the underlying mechanics tell a different story.
LENS FLARE
What I’m reading right now
Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies — W. Joseph Campbell
This is a useful reminder that media panics tend to misdiagnose the problem. W. Joseph Campbell’s (it’s a different Campbell than most of us are used to) history makes the case that “yellow journalism” wasn’t just about sensationalism - it was about a crisis of trust triggered by new distribution power. Faster presses, wider reach, weaker norms. Sound familiar?
What’s striking, in hindsight, is how often reform efforts focused on tone rather than structure. Clean up the headlines. Sound more serious. Wrap the news in credibility.
It worked - briefly. Until the next technological shift broke the wrapper again.
Scott Brinker on SaaS moats (and why marketers should be nervous too)
In a recent post, Scott Brinker argues that traditional SaaS moats are eroding - not because software is dying, but because UI and feature aggregation are no longer defensible advantages. What stands out isn’t the tech forecast; it’s the structural analogy.
Which should make marketers uncomfortable for a different reason: many blogs, content hubs, and “resource centers” are just beautiful wrappers around things everyone already knows.
If your value is organization, presentation, or friendliness, AI will outcompete you by lunchtime. If your value is lived experience, judgment, synthesis, or conviction - you still have a job.
🍷 Finishing Notes…
So, what did we learn this week?
For decades, the job of communications was to keep everyone comfortable. We softened the edges, smoothed the feed, and made reality safe to sit on without actually touching it.
That made sense when authority was a one-way street. The wrapper wasn’t just protective; it was a signal that someone was in charge. But the signal has changed.
This isn’t about being messy for the sake of it. It’s about relocating our craft from the presentation to the proof. It’s moving from “smoothing things over” to “standing behind something specific.”
In a world flooded with perfect, sterile surfaces, people aren’t looking for comfort anymore. They’re looking for contact. They don’t want the vacuum-sealed version; they want the thing itself - sweat, accents, gravity and all.
So, as you head into the week, ask yourself the quiet question that should keep CMOs awake at night: If the plastic disappeared tomorrow, would anyone actually want to sit on your furniture?
It’s Your Story… Take off the Plastic… And Tell It Well…
