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newsletter compiled by James Herring
The Laughing Cow just built a truck shaped like cheese
The dairy brand’s “Wedgemobile”, a full-size truck built and shaped like one of its signature cheese triangles, rolled through the Minneapolis Uptown Art Fair, handing out samples, recipe cards and prize-wheel spins to fairgoers who came for art and left talking about cheese.
This 1.9-square-metre home makes Sweden’s housing crisis painfully real
Swedish housing developer Riksbyggen and BBDO Nordics have turned the country’s housing affordability crisis into three micro homes translating a stark set of statistics into an experiential PR campaign people can physically step inside.
Desperados turns frozen beer into festival jacket air-con
Desperados has teamed up with designer Paolina Russo to create the Freeze-Fit, a limited-edition festival jacket powered by frozen beer. The wearable brand campaign combines thermochromic fabric, hidden fans and an integrated cooling system with Desperados Freeze, the beer brand’s new frozen slush serve.
Crocs hatches six-foot mascot Niles
Crocs has brought the crocodile hidden in its logo to life as Niles, a six-foot reptilian mascot designed to become a long-term character across social media, campaigns and live activations. Named after the Nile, Niles was teased through videos showing a giant egg and countdown clock before hatching onto Crocs’ social channels last week. His first assignment was suitably mundane: starting work at Crocs HQ.
Quote of the week
“I'm sad the world has gone from "is it cake?" to "is it AI?"
KFC and Oreo made a fried-chicken-flavoured cookie
Oreo China has swapped the usual sweet centre for a savoury cream mimicking KFC's 11-herbs-and-spices Original Recipe (herbs, spices and salt — no actual chicken), sandwiched in the classic chocolate wafers, with one wafer stamped with the KFC logo. It launched on 31 July as part of Oreo's "Playful Time Travel" range. No word on a Western release.
This satirical equal pay campaign sends women to prison
Belgian women’s rights organisation ZIJkant launched an Equal Pay Day campaign built around a bleakly comic discovery: prison is one of the few workplaces where men and women are guaranteed the same rate for doing the same job. The brand campaign turns that uncomfortable fact into a film in which women actively try to get themselves arrested.
Partner post | Tracksuit
Tracksuit Insight: British Airways climbs on preference
Insight: BA’s funnel is strong across the board in UK International Airlines, but preference is the metric that’s actually shifted.
Aug’25-Jul’26 » Preference up from 55% to 62% (+7pp)
Why it matters: BA’s marketing has done the heavy lifting, pushing “A British Original” further with Reflections, an out-of-home series turning aircraft window reflections into portraits, and An Original British Briefing, Uncommon’s film that reworks safety-briefing language into an escape fantasy. It then took the idea to the US with a British accent campaign, including a full BA takeover of New York’s S shuttle. Plus - refreshed lounges in Seattle and Miami and Dubai, Club Suite rolling out fleet-wide, and free Starlink Wi-Fi landing from March.
Brand Lore: BuzzBallz
In the mid-2000s, Merrilee Kick was a high-school business teacher in Plano, Texas, grading papers by her pool, when she fancied a drink but didn't want breakable glass near the water. The gap she spotted: a single-serve, ready-mixed cocktail you could grab and go, no bottle opener, no cup — became her MBA thesis. In 2009 she turned the thesis into a company, packaging full-strength cocktails in colourful, shatterproof plastic spheres and calling them BuzzBallz.
She never took a penny of investor money. She built her own Texas factory to make the balls, gave a quarter-stake each to her two sons, and grew it into the best-selling single-serve ready-to-drink cocktail in America: 50 states, dozens of countries. In 2024, spirits giant Sazerac bought the lot, in a deal reported at somewhere north of $500m.
partner post | EPICA Awards
The EPICA Awards 2026 are open for entries!
EPICA is the only global competition judged exclusively by journalists: More than 200 editors and senior reporters in over 60 countries. Why does this matter? It makes all the difference! The jury is composed of industry professionals without agency affiliation or agenda. Their focus is on ideas and their independence creates a rare kind of verdict, one that reflects the true quality of the work without compromise. Build fame for your work and submit your entries at www.epica-awards.com
partner post | words and pixels
Disruptor of the Week: The Forbidden Pharmacy
The insight: New Zealand is one of the developed countries that invests the least in publicly funded medicines. More than 600,000 New Zealanders don’t have access to 200+ proven medicines that are already funded elsewhere. With the 2026 election approaching, a coalition of 17 health charities saw an opportunity to make the access gap impossible to ignore.
The intervention: They built the Forbidden Pharmacy, stocking the medicines patients in New Zealand struggle to access through the public system. But every treatment was locked behind glass, with displays showing the private cost in New Zealand against the price paid overseas. Films shared the stories of real patients, while an open letter urged party leaders to make medicine access an election priority.
The impact: With over 1,500 visitors - including patients, healthcare professionals, New Zealand’s Health Minister and politicians from four major parties - the Forbidden Pharmacy turned a complex funding debate into a simple yet disruptive visualisation of the access gap, bringing the issue directly to those with the power to change it.
Got a problem in need of disruption? That’s our kind of brief www.wordsandpixels.co
🗞️ The Wire
⦿ Meta agrees to pay up to $18bn over child-safety claims. Meta will settle claims from 29 US states that Instagram and Facebook harmed children, in a 2023 case it has always denied. The BBC reports that the money can fund youth online-safety work, and Meta must add teen daily limits and night-time blocks. A catch: 30% is withheld unless YouTube and TikTok adopt similar measures. A judge is expected to approve it.
⦿ A website now ranks every IKEA product by how hard it is to build. The IKEA Complexity Index scores all 21,290 items on a simple formula: steps in the manual multiplied by number of parts. The hardest single piece is the HEMNES dresser — 74 steps, 290 parts, and a tip-prevention mechanism that defeats everyone — for a complexity rating of 21,460. The humble BILLY bookcase? A mere 624.
⦿ Football's gambling ads didn't vanish. They just moved down the shirt. From 2026/27, the Premier League has banned betting firms from the front of match shirts — eight clubs had to find new sponsors, with Fulham taking data firm ClickHouse, Everton signing CMC Markets and Brentford promoting Indeed. But the ban only covers shirt fronts: gambling brands are still permitted on sleeves, training kit and around stadiums, and several are simply spending there instead. A voluntary ban that relocates the logo rather than removes it.
⦿ Apple paid 40% of its global tax to Ireland — because a court made it. A new country-by-country filing shows Apple paid Ireland $17.1bn last year, around 40% of its $43.2bn worldwide tax bill. But that's not Ireland raking in ordinary tax: most of it is the €13bn (~$15bn) in back taxes the EU's top court ordered Apple to pay in 2024 — which Ireland spent eight years in court fighting not to collect.
⦿ This dentist's sugar poster calls out drinks brands. A UK dental practice's "Think Before You Drink" board — shared by Jeremy Garlick — bags up the actual sugar under each drink: per the board, 81.5g beneath a 900ml Lucozade Sport, 53g under a Coke, even 21g under "freshly squeezed" orange juice, more than a Red Bull. No budget, no app — just sugar you can hold, in the one room where you're already thinking about your teeth.
⦿ YouTube changes what counts as a "view". From 24 August, YouTube logs a view the instant a video starts playing — no minimum watch time — across long-form, Shorts and live, matching TikTok and Instagram. Long-form videos previously needed around 30 seconds. Public view counts will jump, but nobody's watching more: the old watch-based number survives in Studio as "engaged views," and it's still what pays.
⦿ Callaway pulls golf ad over a violence backlash. A 15-second spot for Callaway's new driver — made by YouTube golf channel Good Good — showed presenter Garrett Clark shoving colleague Alexis Miestowski to the ground for reaching into his bag, over the line "You have been warned." Both brands deleted it and apologised after accusations it made light of violence against women. The PGA Tour, which hosts Good Good's tournament in November, distanced itself too.
⦿ The EU is coming for fake urgency. False "only 2 left!" counters and countdown timers that reset on refresh are already illegal in the EU under existing consumer law — Amazon was fined €7.48m in Poland for exactly that. Now the Commission is drafting a Digital Fairness Act to close the gaps, targeting dark patterns, drip pricing and manipulative design. A proposal is expected late 2026.
⦿ The US Army is dangling GTA 6 to keep soldiers in. A battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division is offering a four-day pass, timed to GTA 6's 19 November launch, to any soldier who reenlists for two to six years before 14 November. The idea was to connect to what soldiers are interested in," a division spokesperson said.
⦿ A Vine revival is banning AI. Divine, a six-second looping-video app from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's nonprofit, opened to the public on 20 August with 2.5 million restored Vine classics and one firm rule: no AI-generated content. Uploads must be filmed in-app or pass a C2PA authenticity check, or they're blocked. It's hit ~100,000 users and landed a first brand deal with Taco Bell.
⦿ Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has now gifted over 332 million books. Following her death on 25 August, aged 80, tributes have centred as much on her philanthropy as her music. The Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 as a tribute to her father, who couldn't read, mails a free book every month to children from birth to age five. It now reaches five countries, sends out 3.5 million books a month, and enrolls one in six American under-fives.
Post Mortem: Boaty McBoatface
In March 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council decided to crowdsource the name of Britain’s new £200m polar research ship, inviting the public to suggest and vote. A former BBC radio presenter, James Hand, put forward “Boaty McBoatface” — and the internet did what the internet does. It won in a landslide: 124,109 votes, more than three times the nearest rival. Then NERC ignored it, naming the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough instead — a name that had finished fifth.
The science minister explained the vessel needed a name that would “last longer than a social-media news cycle.” Cue a fresh round of outrage about democracy being denied. As a face-saver, NERC handed “Boaty McBoatface” to a small yellow submarine aboard the ship, where it stuck. The template escaped into the wild — Trainy McTrainface, Horsey McHorseface — and lives on to this day.
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P.S
The humble shelf label is an underrated bit of media space in retail. Unloved, ignored, and right at the point of decision. Worth the effort when someone bothers.
Love the shelf label. Somehow online this seems to not work so well. Where people want facts instead of great fun writing. Suggestions?