Going Off-Label Is a Brand Strategy, Not an Accident
From KitKat crackers to Gandhi cigarettes, brands are being used in ways their owners never intended. That's not a legal problem to fix—it's a cultural signal worth reading.
Takes on branding, packaging, advertising, consumer trends, tech, and India.
Short editorial pieces from the NOW Media studio. Weekly.
Political Campaigns Are India's Real Ad Lab
Bengal's 13% rise in digital ad volumes and Tamil Nadu's Formula V playbook show that Indian elections are now the fastest testing ground for new media strategy—and brand marketers are watching.
Offline Is Back, and Brands Should Pay Attention
India's next brand wars will be fought in physical retail, not feed algorithms. The question isn't whether to show up offline—it's whether brands have surrendered that ground too cheaply to platforms.
The Handmade Signal Is Getting Louder, Not Quieter
Postcards, textile art, hardware-as-high-art, a restomod stitched by hand. Across categories, the premium move is now conspicuous craft — proof that a human made deliberate decisions about the thing you're buying.
Brands Are Building Rooms, Not Running Ads
Miu Miu opened a jazz club in Tokyo. Wallpaper* threw a party at Public Records. Margaret Howell printed 130 years of Architectural Review covers. The smartest consumer brands are engineering physical experience as their primary media.
Legacy Brands Are Buying Back Their Own Mythology
Fender turns 75, Swatch remixes the Royal Oak, and Chanel commissions a chess set. Luxury is less interested in the future right now than in re-narrating its own past — and consumers are paying full price for it.
Cannes Lions Is Rebuilding Itself. Again.
Seven new things at Cannes Lions 2026 sounds like housekeeping, but the festival keeps reinventing its format because the industry it mirrors keeps reinventing itself — and neither can afford to look irrelevant.
Fixed Fees Are Agencies Betting on Themselves
A quarter of North American agencies have moved to fixed-fee pricing. That shift has nothing to do with client convenience — it's about protecting margin in a world where hourly billing punishes efficiency.
Publicis Buys LiveRamp. Data Is the New Media.
Publicis's $2.2B LiveRamp acquisition isn't a holding-company flex — it's a structural bet that whoever owns identity infrastructure owns the next decade of ad spend.
The $175 Banana Is the Only Honest Sustainability Story Right Now
The Ordinary priced a banana at $175.90 to make a point about true-cost accounting. Meanwhile, iF Design gave out 10 sustainable packaging awards. One of these conversations is more honest than the other.
Cute Packaging Is Back, and It Means Business
Sooki Sesame Oil and Bad Hambres both went warm, illustrated, and character-driven. Neither is being naive about it—this is a deliberate move toward approachability as a competitive edge in crowded pantry categories.
Tinned Fish Has Become a Full Creative Brief
Three separate tinned-fish projects landed in the same news cycle. That's not coincidence—it's a category rewriting its own visual language, and the studios getting hired are treating the tin as a canvas, not a container.
Quiet Environments Are Outperforming Loud Brand Statements
Galerie de Nuage's soft abstraction and the Salte Library's fragrance-first logic point to the same shift: the most effective branded spaces right now are doing less, not more—and landing harder for it.
Collecting the Past Is a Brand Strategy Now
Audi resurrects a 1935 race car. New Zealand turns museum-held birds into portraits of ecological loss. Kirigami sculptures become collectibles. The artifact is back—and brands that manufacture meaning through objects are winning attention that content can't buy.
Place Is the Brief Now, Not the Backdrop
From a Seoul library built around scent to a Polish house that follows mountain contours, the most interesting design work right now treats site as authorship. Brands should be paying attention.
Gen Z Is Burning Down Brand Loyalty in India
Indian Gen Z doesn't do lifetime value. They do right-now value. Brands still running CRM playbooks built for their parents are losing the plot — and the wallet share.
India's Category Wars Are Moving to Summer Attention
Ice cream brands are fighting for the same scorching-weather moment. When every player in a category shows up at the same seasonal trigger, the creative brief becomes the only differentiator.
Rewarding Work in an AI Age Needs a Harder Question
Industry awards in India are quietly facing an existential audit. If AI can produce the output, what exactly are we honouring — the idea, the execution, or the outcome?
Local-First and Transparent AI Are Designing Against the Default
Smashing Magazine ran deep pieces on local-first web architecture and AI transparency patterns in the same cycle. Both are design philosophies that require deliberate effort to choose — the defaults push the other way.
Agents Need Platforms. Platforms Are Being Built Now.
Two case studies — Superset building an IDE for AI agents, General Intelligence building an agent platform with agents — show that the meta-layer of AI tooling is itself being assembled using AI. That loop is tightening.
Infrastructure Is Eating the AI Product Layer
Vercel shipped a firewall you configure in plain English, an AI Gateway with fast-mode model access, and a security harness for codebases. The infra layer is moving faster than most product teams can keep up with.
Destination Is the Product Now, Not the Amenity
From Bruges to Melbourne to Hackney, the most interesting openings of 2026 aren't selling rooms or meals—they're selling a specific sense of place that couldn't exist anywhere else.
Craft Is Winning Against the Algorithm-Optimised Product
Letterpress workshops, the Loewe Craft Prize, handmade e-bikes, and Afro-Brazilian art at 1-54 all point the same direction: consumers are paying a premium for evidence of deliberate human effort.
Heritage Is the New Launch Strategy for Luxury
Brands are mining existing cultural icons—Hendrix, Rolls-Royce, Winnie-the-Pooh, Hôtel Belle Rives—rather than inventing new ones. The asset was always there. The bet is on curation, not creation.
Google Reclaims the Top—and It Deserves Scrutiny
Google knocking Apple off Kantar's most valuable brands list matters beyond the ranking. It signals where brand value is migrating—toward AI infrastructure, away from hardware aspiration.
ROI Talk Is Back Because Nobody Trusted the Old Metrics
CMOs are being told to rethink ROI just as AI reshapes ecommerce ad measurement. The real issue isn't methodology—it's that the last decade's attribution models were never honest to begin with.
Platforms Want to Be the Whole Thing Now
YouTube is pitching itself as TV. Netflix is running AI agents to sell ads. Amazon's Alexa is becoming a shopping layer. The platform-as-destination play is the dominant ad story of this moment.
Constraint Is the Brief Now
An ink shortage from the Iran war strips color from Calbee's packaging. Sustainable design wins awards without asking for credit. Constraint—forced or chosen—is becoming the most honest brief in packaging.
Italian Identity as Packaging System, Not Cliché
Two Italian food brands use cultural identity as a design system—not a shortcut. The result is packaging that earns its references instead of coasting on them.
Shame Is Leaving the Packaging Brief
A foot fungus treatment and a $175.90 banana walk into a brief. The punchline: brands are designing packaging that refuses to apologize for what it is—or how much it costs.
Healing and Gathering Spaces Are Teaching Brands Something
A light-filled hospital, a Japanese-inspired public installation, and a courtyard home in Madrid all prioritize how people *feel* inside a space. Brands building digital or physical experiences should be taking notes.
Color and Form as Territory, Not Decoration
From Albania's twin residential chimneys to the LEGO-homage Apple workstation, designers are using radical form and saturated color to stake out unmistakable visual territory — a move brands should be watching closely.
Permanence Is the New Brand Flex
Brands chasing trend cycles are losing ground to those that build for the long game. Geberit's anti-trend bathroom play and Audemars Piguet's pocket watch revival signal that durability — not novelty — is the credibility move right now.
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Short, opinionated takes on branding, packaging, and India. Daily or weekly, your call.