Motorsport fandom is strange. Back when I was a child motorsport fandom was a bunch of anoraks – literally. There was a category of clothing that you could buy from mail order catalogues and retailers like Demon Tweeks called a rally jacket. This was a coat good enough to deal with some cold wet weather branded by a car company or a tobacco brand.
Motorsport fandom, in particular single-seater race series are starting to see very different types of fans who learned their supporting ideas from the K-pop armies which are a symbiot of the artist promotion machine. While both promotion machine and fans are separate with very different tactics, they were united by a common goal to a point.
This isn’t the first time that media has brought in new fans, gaming created fans in the past. But the current motorsport fandom is interesting because of the cultural friction that it brings for drivers and legacy fans. From hate campaigns and death threats against drivers to ‘idol’ style objectification – women are demonstrating traits that would define toxic masculinity. All wrapped up in pastel tinted social media posts and Etsy products – so that makes it all fine, doesn’t it?
- The K-popification of F1: How a New Generation Is Rewriting the Rules of Motorsport Fandom | Teen Vogue
- F1 new wave fandom | VML Intelligence
- How Gen Z women are powering the next wave of F1 fandom
- New F1 fans don’t understand motorsport culture – Sports Mole
- Why F1 NEEDS Women! – Kym Illman
- Fandom Is the Fuel – by Steve Price
Beauty
Business
China
Thinking Through Protracted War with China: Nine Scenarios | RAND and Trump is enabling Chinese power – by Noah Smith
Consumer behaviour
More than “I do”: Legal status and cultural distance shape marriages and separations | CEPR
The evolution of stupid | FT – this reminded me of the debate about calculators in maths and physics exams when I was at school
Design
Why carmakers need to bring back buttons
How Renault is speeding up car development to match Chinese rivals | FT
‘When was the last time I saw one of those?’ Car magazine – on the consumer’s obsession with screens over driving experience
FMCG
Japan’s mayo king calls time on baby food as inflation bites and births fall | FT
Health
A Close Look at Auxiliary Prescription Labels | Inconspicious Consumption – interesting intersection of regulation, consumer experience and design
Japan
Alimentation Couche-Tard drops its $46bn pursuit of 7-Eleven owner | FT
Luxury
LVMH’s Loro Piana placed under court administration over worker exploitation | FT – it seems to be a feature of the LVMH management ‘system’ rather than a bug
TikTok won’t grow your luxury brand in the long term | The Drum
China could give luxury titans a run for their money | FT – this was only a matter of time. See also Swatch activist ups pressure as profits plunge over China weakness | FT
Marketing
WPP has its next CEO – but what do clients make of heir apparent? – It’s not indifference. It’s pragmatism. Marketers like this don’t want to buy into the idea that a leadership change signals sweeping transformation. After all, Rose doesn’t start until September. Until then, they’d rather stay focused on the present, not the promise.
Ryan Kangisser, a bellwether for client perspective thanks to his proximity to them as the chief strategy officer at MediaSense, expanded on the point: “I do think that often the industry cares more about these sorts of appointments than clients do. Especially if clients have got a really solid client lead, or business lead, then they’re the people who they feel are the ones driving their business.”
Cindy Rose is the right choice for a CEO (but maybe not at WPP) – The Media Leader
WPP turns to Microsoft executive as AI threatens ‘Kodak moment’ | FT
Cindy Rose WPP: Why Cindy Rose will lead WPP to recovery, ET BrandEquity
Is Accenture interested in all or some of WPP? – More About Advertising – it would make sense for Accenture to do their due diligence at the very least
Why Nike Quietly Launched on Substack
Media
Apple TV+ Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix | Spyglass
Amazon Breaks Up Wondery Podcast Studio, CEO Jen Sargent Departs | Hollywood Reporter – issues with the business model for audio offerings, curious to know if Vox will follow suit? The shows that moved to SiriusXM are interesting, SiriusXM is a subscription-based satellite and internet radio service
Online
Google, Microsoft and Amazon face pressure over data sovereignty – Rest of World
Shitposting as a National Asset – DARC
Is Everything a ‘Humiliation Ritual’? | GQ and Humiliation Rituals | Protein – on the nature of social media rewards, but could as easily apply to many unscripted TV formats.
Reddit at 20: A Look Beyond the Upvotes – 3 Quarks Daily
Chinese police crack down on young women writing homoerotic fiction | Le Monde – this is interesting because its been an area of Chinese online culture which has escaped censure so far despite the government’s concern about traditional family values under the Xi administration
Disinformation warriors are ‘grooming’ chatbots | FT
Retailing
China falls for American-style bulk buying at Sam’s Club despite US trade tensions | Ft
Security
Data Warfare – DARC – interesting theory.
Axios Future of Cybersecurity: 1 big thing: A tale of two generative AI futures – differing opinions from Defcon in Vegas on the impact of AI on hacking and cyberdefence
Building Trust in Military AI Starts with Opening the Black Box – War on the Rocks
Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Iran From Within — ProPublica
Software
Nikkei Asia podcast on how the Korean media industry and gaming developers are using AI – South Korea pushes limits of AI in gaming and entertainment – YouTube
Axios AI+ 1 Big Thing: AI’s elusive coding speedup – small sample but interesting study. Part of the problem might be the corpus that would underpin coding for open source projects.
Five things I believe about actually-existing AI today | Dave Karpf
Technology
An OpenAI Acquisition Turns Into a Google ‘Hackqusition’ | Spyglass – hackquisition is the new acqu-hire