To find a stage that could host a mixed martial arts bout without obstructing the view of the “People’s House,” ESPN reports that the government turned to a design called “The Claw.” Created by the Belgium-based event-staging company Stageco, the tent that’s being used made its debut at the 2017 Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands.

It is made of two criss-crossing arches but was adapted slightly for the South Lawn, heightened by 20 feet and widened by 50 feet to sit over the octagonal ring. The structure was chosen because it provides an unobstructed view of the White House and Washington Monument, depending on which direction you’re seated. It also holds the temporary venue’s heavy lighting and speakers.

Stageco shipped the set from Europe in pieces, and it was assembled first in Pennsylvania as a test-build by the live events production company Tait, which is working with the UFC for the Freedom 250 event. The stage was then driven in four pieces to the White House. Matting was placed on the lawn to protect the grass before crews started setting up the stage.

The site on the South Lawn is one of three the UFC has prepared for the fights. Press conferences will be held at the Lincoln Memorial, and the weigh-ins will take place on the Ellipse. It’s an expansive production, especially considering the mixed martial arts league typically holds all those activities in a single location.

Pro sports comes to the White House

The White House has hosted an ice skating rink with the NHL when former President Joe Biden was in office and tee ball games when former President George W. Bush was in office. Sunday’s fight night is unprecedented, though. It’s the first professional sports event to be held on the White House grounds.

As such, the event has brought pro-sports-level commercial advertising. The logos of corporate sponsors like Polymarket—the prediction market that named the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser last year—are stamped across the venue. All told, it will cost at least $60 million to put on the fights.

On Saturday, June 6, the Public Integrity Project, an investigative advocacy and litigation group based in Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit to stop the spectacle, accusing the Trump administration of corruption, failing to obtain congressional approval, and violating federal law by hosting a private sporting event on public land. But a federal judge ruled on Friday that the show will go on.

Trump has compared the structure on the White House South Lawn to the Eiffel Tower, and even suggested that he might leave it up after the bouts are over. Despite those comments, the Claw will not remain at the White House for very long.

Stageco U.S. operations manager Nick Rivas told ESPN that it will be disassembled over the course of seven to 10 days after the MMA matches end. The temporary stage will head back to Pennsylvania for packing and shipment to Europe, where it’s needed in August for the Lowlands Festival.

“There’s an energy that we wanted to capture and I think it’s matching New York as of right now in a way that feels really nice,” she says.

Since running for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has become a design icon for breaking the rules of political aesthetics, from his campaign poster and branding inspired by Bollywood posters and MetroCards to his charming and affable videos. Now that he’s in office, he’s applying his refreshing approach to visual communication on an even grander scale. The World Cup campaign is his biggest yet. What’s notable about the strategy is how it applies all the feel-good parts of sports fandom to New York itself. 

While mega-events like the Olympics and the World Cup are touted as major economic drivers for host cities, the reality is usually more modest. Instead of benefiting FIFA or being in service of this summer’s tournament, the campaign—and the initiatives related to it, like free public watch parties, partnerships with family-owned restaurants, and public space improvements— advances the administration’s desire to make New York more inclusive and serves as a model for how other cities might conceive of mega-event branding. 

“The World Cup is one of those rare moments when a city gets to see itself differently,” Raziuddin says. “Millions of people will be looking at New York, but New Yorkers will also be looking at New York. It’s a chance to celebrate the city and the communities that make it what it is.”

In April, the Mayor’s Office hired Raziuddin—who is best known for masterminding the cover of Salman Rushdie’s 2019 book The Knife and her editorial design work at The Atlantic, The New York Times, and literary journal Acacia—to develop a visual identity for the campaign. It builds off a slogan of “Where the World Comes to Play,” which NYC Tourism + Conventions launched last fall. 

“It was two months of just insane effort,” Raziuddin says of the project. “I had to use all the juice I had to figure out the most ‘Mayor Mamdani New York’ collab I could think of.” Importantly, she adds, it speaks about the city rather than to the city. We talked to Raziuddin about how she did it. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tell us about how you began to conceive of the visual identity. The administration has a particular look and feel.

Mayor Mamdani is a part of this legacy of people who care about how design plays a role in New York. It is a great feeling as an artist, as a designer, to be around leadership that cares about communication design. It’s often overlooked, and it really can help set up a city in a way that feels enlightening and inspirational. 

The brilliance of this administration in City Hall is that they don’t overdesign. They make things clear, readable, and legible. There is something unique about the energy of City Hall and of the Mayor of New York right now. 

I balanced my style of being very scrappy, cutout, photography, collage with the look of the Mayor’s Office that is very vector forward.

What message needed to be clear through the campaign? 

We wanted it to speak to everyone. We wanted a child to understand what it was. We wanted an elder to understand what it was. We wanted to see community and for people to focus on New York. 

I’m trying to capture that energy and playfulness and community centricity without bringing in cliches of, like, everyone holding hands. That sensibility can be communicated through the language, color, texture, and composition. 

One of the campaign’s signatures is an apple whose skin looks like a soccer ball. How did that come about?

It was clear from the beginning that we needed a symbol. I went back to what my mentor, Peter Mendelsund, taught me: How do you put the thing in the thing? 

In my process, I make a lot of lists. So what are the New York symbols and what is prominent about a soccer ball? So a soccer ball is black and white, it is circular, it has hexagons on it. And then I’m making a list of taxis, pigeons, apples, bridges, and trying to just literally create connections. I played off the idea of the world. We tried to use the Unisphere, in Queens. I tried a globe and the circles on the Subway map. I didn’t want to force an idea so it just became the apple. 

Someone who might not be from New York knows the Big Apple. It’s an immediately recognizable symbol. The Apple has been done a million times, but how do you make that apple belong to this event?

What did research for the project look like?

Design is iterative. You make something off of fragments of information you have in your brain. It is difficult to be in a very over-stimulated digital world where you’re constantly taking in imagery that is made by someone else. When you’re seeing so much, it’s hard to have a focus and clarity of what you should be doing. What has really helped me is taking in different forms of art. I get inspired by reading about something or by going to the ballet or by going to the Met and seeing paintings by Old Masters.

For this, I went to the New York Public Library Picture Collection. There was an entire row of folders of New York City streets and signage. So I looked at sports, signage, magazine covers. I looked at food. I looked at different illustrations of apples. I looked at soccer, specifically, and World Cup and World’s Fair, but a lot of it came down to signage and just getting the nostalgic feel of New York streets. I also looked at Push Pin Studios and how graphic New York design is, like the heart in I ❤ NY. 

I try to avoid mood boarding as much as I can in my own work because I think it can get distracting. When I do mood boards, I try not to only put graphic design on it. I’ll put a rug or a piece of textile or a sound bite that inspires me in some way.

Did you have a soundbite in mind when designing the campaign?

No, but I can imagine a sound coming off it. It’s like a cheery, “whistling down the street in New York” feeling. 

How did the scale of the campaign affect the way you designed the identity? 

The challenge was designing something that could live anywhere. On a banner, a jersey, a subway platform, a pin, a tote bag, a community event, or a giant piece of city infrastructure. The beauty of this campaign is that it will be on your screens. It’ll be when you walk down the street, it’ll be on your body. It feels like it’s part of the fabric of the city. The point of us doing this for the World Cup is to make people feel involved and a part of something bigger than themselves. 

I knew that this was going to have to be all over the city in ways I wasn’t sure of, so I wanted to create a system. I worked closely with Aneesh Bhoopathy [who designed Zohran’s campaign branding and is now a senior designer in the Mayor’s Office] to create brand guidelines. 

We broke down the assets in ways that were easy for people to pick up quickly and use. So I knew that nailing one symbol that could appear on everything would be the main focus. The color palette is based on stuff that you walk past on your commute every day: subway green, the red “Thank You for Shopping Here” bags, and yellow taxis. One or two typefaces max was important for me. We used Dunbar Tall from Adobe Type Kit and the cursive font is Excelsior Script, but modified and redrawn a bit. 

Design is a sum of all its parts, right? All together it’s this really wonderful, joyful campaign.

The campaign references all five boroughs. Tell us about integrating the whole of the city into the supporting graphics.

It was important to make sure everyone is included and it’s not just Manhattan. I noticed, actually on the ferry dock outside of Gracie Mansion, there’s a flag waving and it’s a Manhattan borough flag. I realized that every borough has a flag and they’re all quite intricate. It was too much to use the full flag on everything, but what I decided to do was pull out elements that were graphic and sweet from each one. I went through tons of iterations and pared down and pared down and pared down to just one symbol from each flag. Putting them in an oval frame came from the shape of a sticker on an apple. I wanted it to feel like old sports memorabilia, city signage, and a sticker collection all at once.

You also designed jerseys for the campaign, which are made in Brooklyn and feature those borough symbols on the sleeve, plus a drawing of a pigeon, apple soccer ball symbol, and the phrase “New York City” on the chest. How did you arrive at this?

We wanted to go retro, old-school, basic—like the jerseys you would buy from street vendors. It’s back to that place again of nostalgia. I made options that were quite sexy hypebeast vibes, but it wasn’t the right tone. We didn’t want them to feel untouchable or something that someone who maybe isn’t so fashionable would feel uncomfortable wearing. We wanted it to just feel natural to everyone. 

Why was nostalgia something you wanted to lean into? 

I think there’s something nostalgic about the World Cup. We feel nostalgic for major events that repeatedly happen. They bring back memories. When I think about the World Cup, I think about watching it with my dad and my brother when we all still lived in the same house. You think about the food you eat and the places you go. And now as an adult in New York, I’m building my own kind of memories.

Did the mayor give any feedback that was especially useful? 

On the jerseys, the pigeon was his idea. I was adamantly, like, “I don’t think we should do a pigeon.” And then the pigeon just worked in the end. I initially designed “Where the World Comes to Play” in three colors and he asked to make it just one because it was too much. I did not want to change it. But now looking at it, I’m like, “Damn, he was right.” 

The relationship between the United States and the World Cup has been uneasy, especially in regard to immigration policy and safety fears. Did that affect the way you thought of presenting New York in the campaign?

How I will answer this is: I believe in the Mayor’s approach to the world and to people. He approaches everyone with the same decency as the next person. He is inclusive and has high morals and wants the people of New York to feel like they belong to the city. That’s what guided us. Not everything is in our hands, but we really approached it with that idea of community inclusivity. There is a new energy in New York that is undeniable and I think it is incredible what the Mayor has done for the city. 

How does it feel to see the campaign out in the wild?

I was really touched to hear how many people said they smiled when they saw it. Close friends texted me, “Oh my God, I want to take that poster when this is over from the bus stop,” and “I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a poster for my room.”

So will people be able to get posters without resorting to vandalism?

Don’t resort to vandalism! I do not condone that. I would just keep watching the @NYCMayor Instagram handle and things will drop eventually. But today, first things first, the jerseys are out and it’s an in-person purchase [from the City Store].

Leidy is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia. He has written for The Washington Post, Fast Company, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, and has published work in top journals such as Nature and Science.

What’s the big idea?

Our physical surroundings deeply shape our psychological well-being, identity, relationships, and memories. Intentionally designing and engaging with our spaces can help us live better lives.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Leidy himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

1. Practice space before screen.

Too often, we move through the world without noticing our physical surroundings. Our phones and other screens only exacerbate this problem.

Instead of fighting this reality, however, we can work with it. When you find yourself looking at your phone, take it as a cue. One of my friends told me that, since reading my book, she has started noticing that in the morning, when she wakes up and immediately goes to her phone to check email, she pauses and thinks, “Wait, I haven’t even taken in the space that I’m in.”

So instead of being a distraction, let the screen become a reminder to check in with your environment. From there, all the other benefits can follow.

2. Seek adjacent freedom when you feel constrained.

One of the most important things our surroundings give us is a sense of agency—the feeling that we can effect change in the world.

For example, in my office, there is a window that used to open but no longer does because of the air-conditioning system. That’s frustrating, especially on a nice spring day when I’d like fresh air. But situations like this are inevitable. There are always aspects of our environment we can’t control.

“Our surroundings give us a sense of agency.”

When that happens, we can take it as a cue to exercise control somewhere else. In my office, I can rearrange the furniture, decorate the walls, or choose where I sit. The point is, when you feel constrained in one area, look for another where you can act, and do it.

3. Practice setting boundaries by claiming space.

Our relationship with our surroundings helps us grow as individuals.

One of my favorite stories from the book involves my daughter, who had just started preschool. She learned that in a crowded space, you can say “space,” and people are supposed to give you a little more room.

One day, I was walking through the house to do laundry, and she said, “Space.” It was not crowded; it was just the two of us, but she insisted that I stay outside her circle. When I asked if I could move past her, she said yes, but that I could not look at her.

It was funny but also revealing. We often think of boundaries in terms of relationships with others or ourselves, but here she was learning about identity and personal limits through physical space.

“Our relationship with our surroundings helps us grow as individuals.”

That continues as we grow. A house is a boundary. A teenager’s bedroom becomes a space for independence. Claiming space is one way we define who we are.

4. Build campfires to encourage connection.

When we’re in neutral spaces and want to connect, we should think about creating environments that function like campfires.

An event planning company I interviewed organized a conference in the Superdome in New Orleans. Alongside the main presentation area, there was a large open space where they wanted people to connect. To encourage this, they placed glowing orbs with seating arranged in circles around them. Each orb had a different color to signal different types of conversations.

We don’t need to go that far, but the campfire concept is powerful. Around a campfire, no one owns the space. People bring their own chairs. Everyone is equal. There’s no head of the table, and there’s a shared focal point.

“We should think about creating environments that function like campfires.”

For example, as an introvert at a conference, it can be difficult to approach people. But sitting at a small table with a few open chairs, without spreading your belongings everywhere, signals that others are welcome. That simple setup can create the right conditions for connection.

5. Cultivate nostalgia in your spaces.

Our environments are powerful memory containers. They help us store and recall meaningful moments.

A big example is my family’s vacation house, which has been passed down for generations. My dad went there as a child, and now he brings his kids and grandkids. The space holds layers of shared history.

But it can be much simpler than that. Even marking a child’s height on a wall creates a timeline of memories. I have only lived in my house for eight years, but those markings tell a story. You can look back and remember exactly what life felt like at those moments.

In this way, our spaces become portals into our past. And we can be intentional about designing them to help us remember what matters.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea app.

Over the next several weeks for the World Cup, though, brands with naming rights to any of the 10 U.S. stadiums in the tournament have had to scrub their names from their big investments. In essence, they’ve had to de-brand.

MetLife, the insurance and annuities company that usually has its name in big letters on the side of a stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, has been covered in a sign that says, in part, “World Cup 2026.” Earlier this month, workers were spotted stretching a tarp to hide the letters of the name of a multinational telecommunications holding company (AT&T) on the roof of a stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Instead of their usual monikers, host stadiums have adopted new place-based names for the duration of the World Cup (MetLife Stadium is now New York New Jersey Stadium, and it even shows up that way on Google). That’s because FIFA, the soccer tournament’s governing body, gets the right to rename host stadiums to “any non-commercial name that it deems appropriate, without any reference to the naming rights sponsor, owner or user of the Stadium,” according to a stadium agreement obtained by a newspaper owned by a certain online marketplace founder.

Debranding means FIFA controls all the advertising. You want your brand in the World Cup? You better pay up. There are no free rides for big, global sporting events.

For marketers, there are few things more frustrating than being forced to rebrand. Like a snowplow driver in June or a journalist on a slow news day, they’re benched. Suddenly, millions of dollars worth of earned media value evaporates, just as the biggest sporting event on Earth comes to town.

But brand presence isn’t so easily erased.

Ryan Asdourian, Lumen’s EVP and Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, says the company’s branding has been stripped from every surface of the venue it paid nearly $163 million for in 2017 for 15 years of naming rights. The venue is now called Seattle Stadium.

“One of the things I’m most proud of is that we’ve got our branding everywhere,” he says. “I mean, it’s big top, it’s roof, it’s the Jumbotron, it’s the seats, it’s every garbage can,” he says. “It’s a lot.”

When asked how he’s thinking about branding during the World Cup, since it’s not going to be on the stadium, he says, “Well, we don’t, and that’s part of the agreement.”

To get a few last-minute brand mentions and some earned media in, though, the company released a promotional video joking about taking the logo down, though the CMO admits an outside company really plans and executes on the actual physical de-branding.

U.S. stadiums used to have mostly generic names, but beginning in the 1990s, corporate sponsorship became more common, and the trend has continued to grow. Today, nearly three-fourths of venues used by the big four men’s professional sports leagues are named for a corporate sponsor in banking or financial services, food and beverage, air travel, communications, insurance, technology, retail, automotive, or energy.

The rise of stadium naming rights has necessitated the need for contract clauses about de-branding for big outside events that don’t want it. In Atlanta, the luxury automaker that sponsors the stadium there found a loophole. Crews can’t get rid of one logo on the roof since it’s literally built into the retractable surface and removing it would damage the structure.

The temporary place names for the stadiums could be helpful for foreign fans visiting the U.S. who might not immediately know where venues named for razor blades or blue jeans are located, but could point generally on a map to Boston and the Bay Area. That benefit is likely secondary to the financial incentives for organizers.

For the rest of us, the non-commercial stadium names may feel nostalgic, a reminder of a time before everything was an ad.

Brands frustrated that their expensive naming rights are superseded can take heart that the temporary invisibility won’t last forever. Naming rights are a long-term investment measured in decades, not weeks, and everything that’s been debranded will one day soon be rebranded again.

Titled The Art of the Game, the exhibition consists of sculptures by 23 internationally renowned artists like Futura 2000, Hank Willis Thomas, and Taína H. Cruz. Each figure is adorned with a steel soccer ball sculpture measuring six feet in diameter in their signature style. It’s a collaboration between ARTS 14C, a Jersey-based nonprofit devoted to lowering barriers in the arts, and the New York New Jersey Host Committee of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The pieces are installed across the five boroughs and northern New Jersey and will be on view through Labor Day.

New Jersey and New York are among the 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada that are hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It’s not just national soccer teams who are competing in the tournament; cities are engaged in a friendly contest on who can become the most welcoming host to the thousands of people attending the matches. Public art is one of their secret weapons—and is spiritually aligned with the cultural exchange the games represent.

“The joy art and sports bring is hard to quantify, but they make life worth living,” says Robinson Holloway, founder and CEO of ARTS 14C. “The World Cup is a brief break for a lot of people. It’s a chance to celebrate the best of humanity and the best of community, just like public art.”

Beyond being a temporary exhibit with roots in the World Cup, The Art of the Game also reimagines what ripple effects of a large sporting event can look like. Big tournaments like the World Cup or the Olympics are notoriously a financial and infrastructure burden to host cities, often leaving behind neglected infrastructure—known as the White Elephant effect—and debt for residents to deal with.

The artists, both local and international, were sourced via an open call or nominated by leaders in some of the area’s most important art institutions including the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Brooklyn Museum, David Zwirner Gallery, and Pace. Agnes Gund, the arts philanthropist, helped fund the project. It was one of her last collaborations before her death in 2025.

“The World Cup is going to put an enormous global spotlight on our region, and we saw this as a chance to bring together artists whose work can reflect the scale, energy, and diversity of this moment,” Alex Lasry, CEO of the New York New Jersey Host Committee, said in a press statement.

The exhibition was inspired in part by the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt, a charity fundraiser. While the team wanted to create 104 balls, one per match played in the tournament, they eventually narrowed the number down to 23 in celebration of the 23rd edition of the World Cup. Each sculpture is made from aluminum panels and was fabricated and assembled between Powerhouse Arts, in Brooklyn, and Mana Contemporary, in Jersey City. Some artists, like Katherine Bernhardt, opted to adorn the pieces with paint, while others, like Tomokazu Matsuyama, used UV printing to embellish them with high resolution graphics.

After the games are over, the exhibition organizers plan to donate or sell the sculptures and would like to see at least 12 of them installed permanently on public sites, allowing residents to continue interacting with the pieces even after all is said and done.

Lasry added, “We also want this initiative to leave something behind after the final match is played—creating pieces and experiences that continue to live in neighborhoods and public spaces as part of the tournament’s lasting cultural legacy in New York and New Jersey.”

Naturally, the center is on the New Jersey shore near his hometown. It is located in West Long Branch on the campus of Monmouth University, where Springsteen played many of his earliest shows. It also sits just four blocks from where The Boss wrote his 1975 masterpiece “Born to Run.”

As the center’s name suggests, it’s not a museum solely about Bruce Springsteen—a distinction made at the behest of the ever-humble musician himself. The idea for the center came from Bob Santelli, a longtime Rolling Stone journalist who was among the founding curators of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which opened in 1995, and several other music-related museums in the three decades since. In Springsteen’s music he saw an opportunity to explore a deep connection between the art and the place it’s from.

More than a tribute to a superstar

Santelli, who has been writing about Springsteen since 1973, reached out to him to ask if he’d be interested in creating a museum. “This was an opportunity to make sure that Bruce’s legacy is preserved and celebrated in the state that he’s synonymous with,” Santelli says. Springsteen was not keen on the idea of making a museum all about himself. “He said, my feeling is that I’m a part of the American music story. I’m a chapter of it.” So Santelli reworked the concept, and broadened it to place Springsteen within the longer arc of American music.

The architecture firm CookFox won an invited 2018 competition to design the center. Its cofounder, Rick Cook, says that although he first saw Springsteen in concert back in 1977, he was not exactly an enthusiast. “The truth was I wasn’t a Bruce fan because I’m not a music fan specifically,” he says.

But then Cook read Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, and soon after went to see Springsteen on Broadway. He became a convert. “Bruce has his own magic act, and its foundation is storytelling,” he says. “So I started to view the project through that lens.”

A tribute to place

Cook’s team drew on the working-class themes of Springsteen’s music and persona to develop the center’s design concept. “We wanted it to speak about the kind of postindustrial America that Bruce writes about, the beauty and nobility of these places,” he says.

Santelli says the idea was a good fit from the start. “There wasn’t a whole lot to change, to be quite honest,” he says. “We were really, really pleased with the simplicity, but the elegance also . . . it captured the industrial workmanlike environment that Bruce wrote his songs in and writes songs about.”

The building is a relatively simple rectangular form with its two stories clad in rusted, weathering steel. Surrounded by a meadow of grasses and flowers, it appears to float on a coastal dune. And the main entry to the museum is approached by a boardwalk, another Jersey shore reference. “The idea wasn’t so much that it was the literal representation of a boardwalk,” Cook says, “but that everybody crosses that threshold together.”

Inside its doors, the center opens up into a double-height space framed with huge pieces of rough timber. “The big wood columns and big wood beams hold the floors up. So there’s a directness to the storytelling and the architecture that we believed was consistent with the honesty and the directness of American music and Bruce’s music specifically,” Cook says.

The ground floor features a 240-seat auditorium where visitors watch a 25-minute introductory overview of the center, narrated by Springsteen himself. Designed to concert-grade technical and acoustical standards, it will also be used for live performances. The rest of the floor is less Springsteen specific, with a large permanent gallery tracking the evolution of American music from Indigenous songs to contemporary recordings, a temporary gallery space with an inaugural show about protest songs, and a few smaller galleries on the history of the electric guitar, and Springsteen’s connection to Monmouth University.

Upstairs is all Springsteen, with several galleries documenting his story, his various bands, and is long career leading the E Street Band. Interactive features include a music studio where visitors can remix “Born to Run” and a space where people can get a virtual drumming lesson from the E Street Band drummer, Max Weinberg. Much of the 4,200-square-foot floor is used to house Springsteen’s 48,000-item archive of handwwritten lyrics, concert posters, magazine clippings, and paraphernalia from tours around the world.

“It is not a biographical series of exhibitions,” says Santelli. “Rather, it is primarily a story about the creative process, about how he created the music, and what his music means to New Jersey and America in general.”

Fan service

Santelli comes to his role as executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music after 16 years leading the Grammy Museum, and creating music museums like the Woody Guthrie Center, in Tulsa. “I’ve seen my share of egos,” he says. But the experience working with Springsteen was unlike many of the interactions he’s had with famous musicians. “We found Bruce almost too humble,” he says.

However, as a New Jersey native and a graduate of Monmouth University, Santelli knew the project would have high standards to meet. “There’s a lot of pressure when you’re dealing with someone like Bruce Springsteen in the state of New Jersey to make sure that you’ve done the legacy right, you’ve told the right story, and you’ve made it educationally relevant, which was the point,” he says.

Springsteen was mostly hands off during the design process, and only made his first visit to the space with its exhibitions installed in early June, less than two weeks before its public opening. “He gave us a double thumbs-up,” Santelli says. “Of course, I was very relieved.”

There will certainly be some scrutiny, though, especially among Springsteen’s large fan base. A fan group called the Spring-Nuts recently got a sneak peek at the center, and many more longtime fans are sure to visit. Santelli’s confident they’ll get the experience they expect. And it’s sure to win over new fans, too. After eight years working on the project, Cook, who didn’t follow music beforehand, is now a devotee to the artist. “I’m one of those Springsteen fans who knows every word,” he says.

Look closer, though, and you start to notice something strange about this already supremely strange scene. The video, posted last October, came from a group of pranking young dudes who call themselves the Arby’s Boys. The account has posted hundreds absurdist videos—a car filled with Arby’s curly fries (caption: “Idk what to do”); an Arby’s cashier taking an order while playing with a finger skateboard (33,000 likes)—all designed to look like user generated content from 20-something guys with an unusual sense of humor.

In reality, Arby’s Boys is the work of Cousin Labs, an agency hired by the restaurant to create a social feed that effectively works like a slot machine for viral Arby’s content. According to Cousin Labs, the account has accumulated more than 100 million unpaid views in six months, despite only having around 45,000 followers. 

The realization that brands no longer need to build a loyal following to attract eyeballs has been a steroid needle in the buttock of marketers who are churning out social content. This turn towards “interest-based” algorithms (as opposed to follower-based) has created a social ecosystem of easily manufactured virality. It’s gotten to the point where nobody believes anything anymore. And they probably shouldn’t!

In today’s social world, brands like Arby’s are encouraged to sidestep the main feed and mimic the user-generated content that tends to go viral. The result is short-term boosts in social content success, but this disingenuous virality has its long-term drawbacks. In an age of increasing AI slop and media manipulation, the waves of brand BS have created a suspicion economy, where no one really thinks anything is sincere. 

Now every time something cool happens in culture or a band becomes popular or a giant metallic monolith mysteriously appears in the desert—one of the first comments is inevitably, “I hope this isn’t a marketing stunt.”

Nothing is real. Everything is advertising. 

But there’s a bifurcation taking place in the brand world, with some brands aiming to create more earnest content and experiences to rebuild trust, while others utilize the newest tools at their disposal to prioritize attention, even if it further erodes our collective trust and their ability to break through in future efforts. 

It’s a fight that will redefine how we build, play, and interact online, and determine the trajectory of our deteriorating relationship with truth and pop culture.  

In this Fast Company premium subscriber exclusive, read on to learn:  

• How the erosion of audience trust by some brands has created a golden opportunity for others 
• Why Cousin Labs’ Arby’s Boys strategy isn’t as diabolical as it seems
• What brands can do to build trust AND massive fan audiences

No Surprise

In the early 2000s, brands took pride in their ability to hack culture, convince people something was real, then pull the mask off Scooby-Doo style and say, “Surprise! It’s advertising!” And oh how the people laughed. 

In 2008, to prove its new line of pastas were legit, Pizza Hut created a fake Italian restaurant called Toscani’s and asked people for their reviews before revealing that it was really Pizza Hut pasta. That stunt, and subsequent copycats, inspired SNL’s hilarious 2018 Burger King coffee sketch starring Adam Driver. 

When a 310-foot-diameter crop circle appeared in a farmer’s barley field in Chualar, California, in late 2013, the internet was buzzing with theories of who made it, and what it meant. A few weeks later, it was revealed as a marketing stunt for Nvidia. 

At first, brands took advantage of easily distributed content by creating marketing stunts that were effectively entertainment (remember Devil Baby??). In the early days of social marketing there was less psychological manipulation at play, and people got a kick out of the playful tones and back-and-forth banter with brands like Wendy’s and Steak-Umm. The downside to that? It set the stage for this new breed of social stunt that feels a lot ickier.

University of Michigan marketing professor Marcus Collins says that our lack of trust in brands has been brewing for decades. Think lead paint in children’s toys or knowingly marketing addictive cigarettes to kids. 

“The biggest Scooby-Doo reveal is that we find that marketing underwrites almost everything,” says Collins, author of the best-selling book, For The Culture. “So there’s almost no surprise to us that almost everything is an ad. Oh, what’s this orange blip that’s in the sky? What’s going on? Oh, it’s an ad for Marty Supreme. Got it. There are those who just accept that fact, but for others, they feel deceived. But both have a very hard scar tissue that fuels their skepticism.”

However, the shift from a follower-based algorithm to interest-based, has only accelerated and deepened our skepticism. In a follower-based algorithm, you needed to follow an individual, group or brand in order to see the content they created. As a distribution channel, this controlled how much content any given feed was churning out—too much is annoying, too little is anonymous—and put the onus of finding an audience on the creators. With an interest-based algorithm, which TikTok pioneered with its For You feeds, users just get a steady stream of content curated by the algo based on what they like or spend the most time watching. No following necessary.

The Suspicion Economy isn’t restricted to just brands, though brands have been its primary proponent. A recent story in Vulture (“The Feed Is Fake”) chronicled a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients, posting 50,000 videos daily across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to look like the unscripted output of ordinary users.

Social media marketing consultant, and author of the popular Link in Bio newsletter, Rachel Karten says when the algo was more follower based, brands had to be more careful in terms of just how much they would post to their feeds in order not to annoy their followers. 

“But in these new-ish algorithms, there are some brands that will take more of that volume approach and treat the algorithms like a slot machine and pull the lever as many times as they want,” says Karten. 

That changes not only the frequency volume, but the type of content brands are posting—including content made to look like fan or user-generated content. The FTC instructs brands and influencers to make clear, prominent disclosures that are hard to miss, and verbally on video. Karten says that marketers used to more closely follow FTC guidelines when it comes to clearly labeling advertising, but that vigilance has significantly waned as enforcement has also dropped. 

“More so than ever, it’s on marketers to decide where that line is right now because the FTC is not paying attention to what’s happening,” she says. “It feels like a free for all and it’s on marketing teams to decide where they find their line, which is not a good thing.”

Around the algo

Before co-founding Cousin Labs in 2024, Paul Marvucic spent a decade managing creator marketing at platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Patreon. He saw an opportunity for marketers to better exploit the differences between the content strategies of creators and brands. While creators were successfully building businesses around the algorithm, many brands were still treating social media as a mere distribution channel, often copy-and-pasting traditional TV commercials to their feeds.

“That paradigm continues today where most brands still are thinking about organic (unpaid) social as a distribution channel,” says Marvucic. “Leading brands are inviting social into the room and building social-first campaigns, and the ones on the cutting edge are saying, ‘Hey, let’s build entertainment IP around our brand and let’s put it in the hands of creators who have cracked this and who have built their businesses around the algorithm.’”

Marvucic doesn’t see content like Arby’s Boys as misleading; instead he says it’s authentic in its ability to entertain the audience. “If it feels like a brand understands culture, they’re showing up in the right way, and they’re providing value in the form of entertainment or education and are playing fair, I think trust goes up,” he says.

The authenticity of the Arby’s Boys account is something of an open question. Its Instagram page is labeled as the “largest Arby’s fanpage,” and touts that Arby’s started following it in November. Which, even though each post has the hashtag “#arbyspartner”, sounds a lot like a feed trying to convince you it’s a fan page created by, you know, fans. 

When I press Marvucic about it, he insists their work is clearly brand related. “Everything we do is with disclosure, we have all the right tags and we play by the book, not everybody plays by the book,” he says.

Where Marvucic and I do find common ground is on the idea that social feeds should be audience-focused and brands should treat them as content R&D. There’s often a giant chasm between what the audience cares about, and what the brand wants to say. Fan content is the best, or at least most common, way for a brand to resonate in a real way. 

“Often, you’ll find that the best brand content is often not even coming from the brands themselves,” says Marvucic. “So there is this enormous opportunity for brands to show up to different audience playgrounds and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to have fun, we’re here to exist inside your world.’”

Back to reality

In February, I wrote about how Burger King created a customer hotline  that went directly to brand president Tom Curtis. Curtis committed to spending at least four hours a day over two weeks—including nights and weekends—taking unfiltered calls and texts from customers, hoping to hear their input about all things Burger King. 

Speaking to BarkleyOKRP, the agency behind it, it was clear this was a direct attempt to counter our inherent cynicism towards any piece of brand work. At first, I thought this was just another stunt meant to gain earned media love. But after talking to Curtis and the agency about the extent of the ongoing efforts beyond the initial campaign, it looked like the flame-grilled real deal. In fact, I first heard the term “suspicion economy” from BarkleyOKRP executive creative director Matt McNulty, who lamented the lack of sincerity in most brand work. 

BarkleyOKRP executive vice-president of strategy, Kevin Lilly, tells me that as brands have optimized and gamed the original promise of the internet—more transparency, through more access—our expectations have changed. The early internet first delivered information largely unfiltered by ad feeds and adaptive algorithms, which made consumers feel empowered, and brands became a bit more available, responsive, and transparent. You could tweet about a missed flight or a broken watch, and they’d respond! It was a new kind of connection with brands. 

But over time, Lilly says, brands and platforms figured out how to leverage that feeling of control. What started as empowerment became more engineered. Reviews and ratings made us feel like we could see the “truth” about brands, but those signals didn’t stay neutral for long, and brands started optimizing them, turning them into marketing channels. 

“As people got more savvy to this shift, trust became more conditional, and a mindset of ‘prove it’ became prevalent, making the gap between marketing claims and real experiences easier to expose,” says Lilly. “Today, we’ve moved beyond questioning claims to questioning intent. Interactions with brands and platforms are often assumed to be adversarial by default.  The realization that ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’ is mainstream.”

The effect has created a seismic shift in where people get their information. If people feel like their entire online existence is manufactured by brands, where do they go? They go inwards, to trusted sources that are not mediated by brands and selling. 

James Kirkham, founder and CEO of brand consultancy Iconic, says that trust hasn’t disappeared from culture completely, but has migrated mainly to dark social, group chats, trusted newsletters, the friend who sends you the link, or the small podcast with the core audience you chat to in the comments. 

“Private is real to most people, but big public is now seen by so many as performative, and therefore something to doubt,” says Kirkham. “The classic social feed has become both the place where brands buy the most coverage and so a place where audiences apply the most skepticism.”

This is why more brands are investing in experiences, where people can touch, feel, and be surrounded by something real. A recent report from PQ Media found that experiential marketing spending grew 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025 and is on pace to grow by 10.3% this year.

In fact, attention is no longer the most valuable metric. It’s connection. As 72andSunny international CEO Chris Kay wrote in Fast Company earlier this year, for Gen Z, “the linear marketing funnel is now obsolete, and that a real-life connection to a brand is the key weapon of choice for modern marketers.”

What is the value of a view? As anyone who’s lost hours thumbing through their feeds knows, views can range from engaged passion to borderline white noise hypnosis. Increasingly for brands, the question isn’t whether the audience sees something, it’s whether they care. 

Collins says that the continued erosion of trust presents an opportunity for smart marketers who know that connection is more powerful than attention, especially in establishing and growing trust, particularly in the long-term. “Likes, attention, buzz, these things are fleeting,” says Collins. “If I were a CMO, I’m asking how do we connect with audiences based on the way that we see the world?”with audiences based on the way that we see the world?”

Now, design can be found in the C-suite. The U.S. government even has its own chief design officer now—Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia.

What does it mean to hold the CDO title today? At By Design, we wanted to know, so we had Mauro Porcini, Samsung’s chief design officer, come on the show. 

Porcini was among the first chief design officers ever, taking on the role first at 3M and later at PepsiCo. He now holds the same title at Samsung, where he brings a big vision and unique philosophy to the tech company. 

Below are a few excerpts from the podcast, which have been edited for length and clarity. Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

You pioneered the role of chief design officer. How is this position different from, say, a creative director? 

First of all, a chief design officer, to me, is a business leader.

Many years ago, in my previous company, one of the executives of the company told me, “Mauro, you need to stop always thinking like a design leader. You are an executive of this company, and you need to really think like an executive of the company.”

And it was an aha moment because there is a difference between always advocating for design  versus elevating yourself to be bigger than that, and really trying to understand how to impact the company—with their goals and their difficulties and complexities—through design.

Half of the job is being a business leader. The other half is being a design leader. You need to be able to combine the two, and be a business leader that understands deeply the world of design, but also understands other dimensions of the business, and leverage design, creativity, human centricity—this humanistic approach to innovation—to drive business growth.

Does that mean that sometimes you have to swallow your passions as a design leader or creative to be practical when it comes to what this means for the business in a way that maybe some designers at the company wouldn’t? 

It depends on what your passion is. If my passion is to grow the business, to succeed long term, to really have an impact on the business, then you’re not swallowing your passion. You’re managing everything you do—your approach, your resources—to achieve that goal. But it means that sometimes maybe the perfect design that you can think of as a traditional design leader is not the right answer in the moment. You need to do something different to achieve that goal. 

Now, I also want to give the other answer, though, because it’s fundamental for me. Look, being a chief design officer, especially of a big company, means that you are at the top of the company, and so you have access to billions of people, as well as financial resources. And then you can influence so many different people as well. So that’s an opportunity and also a responsibility.

How would you like to see people think about Samsung design differently in the next few years? What will surprise us the most? 

I want the company to be a leader in a humanistic approach to innovation. I want the company to drive a change and evolution in the tech world where we open up to diversity of products, diversity of languages, a diversity that reflects the diversity of people and humanity. 

With the leadership position of Samsung in so many product categories, there is a probability that if we change something in a category, competition will follow. And so this will have a chain effect, and the industry will change. There is some fatigue in this industry. People are looking for newness. They want to go back to a store and get excited. They want to discover new things. I think they’re ready. The world is ready. We need to lead that change.

What I don’t know is how fast we’re going to move. Not as a company, but when you start to change a few things, the users, the consumers, need to follow you. So we need to understand how fast they will react. And second, when they start to follow, you’re going to do more of this, and then competition will start to follow. So the speed will be decided by the market. The speed will be decided by how fast consumers embrace it. 

But I do believe that in 10 years’ time, this industry will be completely different. I have no doubt about this. We can’t go on in this kind of uniformity of language in the industry.

A new design by one of the world’s most famous architects could help the project take shape, and accelerate the large-scale transformation happening across Bentonville. Initial renderings have just been released for the STEM university and a related master plan by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and they show a three-building campus spanning two city blocks and clad in rusty reds and copper.

Featuring an academic building, a student residence, and a makerspace looking out on a public plaza, the buildings cover more than 420,000 square feet but keep a relatively low profile of about five stories in a part of town just outside the main core of downtown development. BIG founder Bjarke Ingels says the campus keeps open edges and attempts to blend into its neighborhood surroundings.

“Architecturally and urbanistically, the goals have been to tear down the barrier between the campus and the community, and to reconsider the STEM campus as an integrated neighborhood in Bentonville where you have academic buildings but you also have shops and cafes, workforce housing for residents and housing for students,” Ingels says.

Slated to open in 2029, the project would be another major development in Bentonville, which has undergone a rapid and extraordinary transformation at the hands of the Walton family, starting with Alice Walton’s creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011 and recently expanded.

Bentonville 2.0

On a recent visit to Bentonville, I sat down with Tom to talk about how such a university would fit into this small town, and how it could help improve education in the region. He sees the university as a tool for accelerating the adoption of new technology in the age of artificial intelligence, but also for changing perceptions among people who remember the region before Crystal Bridges kicked off the rapid evolution now underway.

“Growing up here, we always had a chip on our shoulder about how people thought about Arkansas,” says Walton. He and his brother, along with support from others in the Walton family and the Alice L. Walton Foundation, are hoping to bring a more flexible approach to higher education into a town that has found itself transitioning from company town to regional growth engine.

The project would be a dramatic difference from the corporate landscape that had been there for decades. Walmart’s former Home Office is sprawling, parking-wrapped, largely windowless, and arguably soulless. The blocks adjacent to it that are now actively being demolished were mostly warehouses and utility spaces. All largely empty since Walmart opened its new 350-acre Home Office campus a mile to the east, the old buildings already being torn down and those to follow will hardly be missed.

The head of the area’s chamber of commerce recently joked on a podcast about handing out jars of Home Office demolition debris to longtime Walmart employees as a celebration of the building’s demise.

Just past the edge of the city’s center of gravity, the site has slowly seen the town grow up around it. Modern infill housing is under construction on nearly every block in this part of Bentonville, and the former Home Office site is within a few blocks of the award-winning architecture of the Thaden School and the cultural hub the Momentary. Walton sees this part of the town building up a critical mass of activity and amenities, which the university would only cement.

“Unlike a traditional university campus that’s siloed and out there on its own, we felt like there’s an opportunity to bring industry in, bring the community in, and create a mixed-use development around a university setting so that you have different types of like collisions and impacts occurring,” Walton says. “The master plan’s much more urban in terms of how it will feel, and it’ll be seamlessly integrated into the downtown fabric.”

It would be far from the only large architecturally significant project in this small town. Within about a mile radius it would join Moshe Safdie’s Crystal Bridges of American Art, the bikeable Ledger building, Marlon Blackwell Architects’ Heartland Whole Health Institute, Polk Stanley Wilcox’s Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, and forthcoming developments designed by Herzog & de Meuron and CannonDesign.

Ozark rustic

BIG’s design takes cues from the material and landscape of the region to create what he calls “Ozark rustic”—a stone-and-brick palette for a “quotidian” architecture familiar to the region.

The buildings have undoubtedly modern forms, and make no mistake about being thematically connected to each other. One is a maker-centric building filled with labs and workshops, and BIG has translated that startup spirit into a stack of oxidized steel boxes with tilt-up sunshades recalling garage doors. Large walls of windows border the public plaza on the campus, turning the workshops into visually accessible spaces and the building itself into a kind of vitrine.

Next door, the academic building will be programmed with classrooms, offices, and large informal student study and community spaces woven through each floor. The building itself has a vaguely accordion form, with large perforations on its sides for the common areas of the building to look out on its surroundings. Clad in standing seam copper, a material more commonly found on roofs, it’s a throwback to an older era of manufacturing and 20th-century technology.

The third building is a student residence that Ingels says is like “a European courtyard building that has been tied into a knot.” Made of precast concrete in a brick-like red, it pinches in at its center to create an arrival plaza, and uses its unique form to hold raised courtyards and roof terraces.

Walton says the design builds on the university’s mission of broadening access to technology education, and making it possible for people to tap into new knowledge as it emerges.

“Because of technology, you’re going to have to upskill and reskill multiple times in your life, every decade potentially,” Walton says. “I think work’s going to be there, but I think we’re going to have to retool how we as a society engage around education. So hopefully this can be a model for how to do that.”

Long before teams had even qualified to play in this year’s tournament, FIFA hired two teams of researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Tennessee (UT) to develop the turf grass that would serve as the playing field for its most unconventional World Cup to date. Set in three different countries, 16 different cities, 10 different climatic zones, and both indoors and outdoors, the games of the 2026 tournament will be the most diverse in the Cup’s history. FIFA wanted these very diverse games to have playing fields that were as similar as possible.

It’s a task the researchers took on as a design challenge. To solve it, they started mixing seeds.

Over the course of nearly three years, the researchers tested different combinations of grass types that could grow into a dense sod that would be strong enough to withstand top-level soccer play in up to nine games over the 39-day tournament, all while persevering through the wildly different climates of the 16 host cities, which range from Toronto to Seattle to Dallas to Miami to Mexico City to Guadalajara.

The project was led by John “Trey” Rogers III, a professor in MSU’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and his former PhD student, John Sorochan, now a distinguished professor in turfgrass science at UT’s Department of Plant Sciences. Rogers says the final grass combination they developed ended up being a very precise mix of 84% Kentucky bluegrass seed and 16% perennial ryegrass seed.

“You get way into the weeds and turfgrass 101 with this stuff,” Rogers says. “We studied a lot of different ratios here to try to find out how fast we could get something ready to be harvested, and at the same time maximizing the strength without compromising the maturity.”

This mix is what will make up the playing field of 10 of the 16 fields in the tournament, with better adaptability to the relatively cooler temperatures of northern cities like New York and Boston and the climate control of indoor stadiums like Atlanta’s and Houston’s. The other six, in warmer climates like Miami, will use high Bermuda grass.

Growing World Cup Grass

For the first time in a World Cup, all the grass has been grown on what Rogers compares to wide, tray-like flower pots made of plastic. Filled with an inch-and-a-half of sand, the grass seeds are planted and grown over the course of several weeks, getting all the regular watering and mowing of a backyard lawn.

But because the roots of the grasses can only grow down the inch-and-a-half distance to the plastic tray, once there they spread laterally, interweaving with each other and forming a dense network that helps the grass put up with the runs, pivots, and slides that occur in a typical soccer game. These plastic trays can then be rolled, shipped, and installed in the stadiums.

This approach is becoming the new standard for growing grass playing fields. “You haven’t seen a Super Bowl in the last 15 years, if it’s on grass, that wasn’t set on plastic,” says Rogers. “This has been around a while. It’s just new to FIFA.”

During the years-long development process, the grass has also been subjected to a variety of strength and use tests, including a specially designed “sod pull” that uses a machine to pull both ends of a strip of mature grass to see how much force it takes to pull apart.

Ahead of this year’s World Cup, Sorochan and his team at UT also developed a machine called fLEX, which simulates an athlete’s foot striking the ground, using a 3D-printed foot wearing a real soccer cleat. The device measures what an athlete feels when running on turf, and the researchers have used it to measure the playability of soccer and football fields around the world.

It’s one of the reasons FIFA felt comfortable diverging from its typical field profile using 12 inches of sand beneath the playing field. Through testing with fLEX, the researchers were able to show that the field feel of the shallow profile sod being grown in those plastic trays would be comparable to a conventional pitch. The device is also expected to be used throughout the tournament to record field conditions and inform groundskeeping.

Rogers expects the grass to perform as expected during this year’s World Cup. And though he says this shallow approach is technically new to the World Cup, it won’t be the first time World Cup grass has been grown in flower pot-like devices. The first time was during the preparations for the last U.S.-hosted World Cup, in 1994, and Rogers himself was the one who grew it.

Using six-inch deep hexagonal planters, Rogers and his team grew the playing grass in a quonset hut on the MSU campus and then transported it to the domed stadium ahead of its run hosting four games during the World Cup. The grass worked so well, the local organizing committee decided it should live on. After the last match was played in Michigan, the sod was rolled up and moved to Belle Isle Park in Detroit, where it has spent the last three decades. A sign can still be found on the edge of that field, reading “World Cup 1994 Soccer Field.”

“Unless it’s been totally killed off, I would almost guarantee you there are still plants in there that are surviving from the Silverdome days,” Rogers says.

He’s hoping something similar happens this time around, with 16 fields worth of grass that is arguably even more special.

Good online ticketing UX prioritizes transparency and ease of use, but for the World Cup, users have complained the system is designed to maximize profit instead of serving fans. Here’s how.

1. The queue and long wait times

To buy a World Cup ticket on Fifa’s website, fans first have to choose between three buttons on its home page, which read “last-minute sales,” “marketplace,” and “hospitality.” If you click on “last minute,” you’re taken to a page to complete a captcha, and then a waiting room where a clock counts down until you can enter the sales portal. On Wednesday it started at 23 minutes, though the time remaining sometimes changed. There’s only a five-minute window to enter, and if you miss it, you’ll have to get back into the queue.

The friction doesn’t stop there. Once you make it through the queue, a user has the option to click linked text at the top of a pop-up window for hospitality packages (which are different than last-minute tickets, and also accessible via a button on the World Cup home page), or to click an “enter here” button at the bottom, which sends the user to a log-in page before providing access to last-minute tickets.

Fans reported hours-long wait times, and tough luck to anyone who got engrossed in another tab while waiting without setting a timer. The friction adds a time cost in addition to the monetary cost of buying a ticket.

After sitting through the countdown, fans might find themselves confused by multiple buttons to click, including a top link to hospitality packages, but clicking enter takes you to a sign-in page, adding more steps to the process.

2. Glitches and error messages

The ticketing system was designed to block bots and dissuade scalpers, according to the Athletic, but by slowing down automated attempts to buy tickets through additional steps and friction, it ultimately led some fans to experience a buggy user journey that left them without any tickets at all.

One error message some fans got when they finally reached the front of the queue said, “You have sent too many requests in a short period of time. Please wait a moment and try again.” And Fifa admitted earlier this month that 60 fans inadvertently got the chance to purchase tickets for free. They were later given the chance to purchase those tickets for full price.

3. Blind ticketing

Unlike reserving a ticket for a seat at a concert and movie, FIFA uses blind ticketing, in which you buy don’t buy a specific seat, but instead select the color-coded section of the stadium where you’ll be assigned a seat later.

That meant when pre-sales opened last October, fans only knew what section they were buying into generally, and after seats were assigned in April, many found they’d be given sub-optimal seats—or moved into a different section entirely because section maps changed, according to the Athletic.

The seat map doesn’t appear until later in the user journey. Even then, it doesn’t follow information design best practice, since it doesn’t clearly communicate exactly what the user is buying. The map doesn’t show how many seats are left or where exactly you’ll sit within a section, nor does it indicate that certain rows are already reserved for premium seats, or that the designated sections can shift.

The high-end hospitality seating packages, which for some matches is the only seating still available, is similarly vague about what you’re buying and how many seats are still left. Ultimately, the user journey is more of an opaque gamble.

“Some consumers have reported feeling deceived because the seats they were ultimately assigned belonged to a lower-tiered category based on the seating map available to them at the time of purchase,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a letter to FIFA.

4. Not designed for companion seating

Disabled fans found wheelchair and accessible seating was priced higher than other seating and it was also difficult to purchase companion seating, which wasn’t available until the fourth phase of ticket sales, according to the Guardian.

Fifa’s ticketing policy doesn’t guarantee that group tickets will be seated together, and its “Sit Together” functionality, which appeared as an entry field to enter a ticket purchase number and a “sit together” button to click, ended in February.

Fans on Reddit have complained that their groups have been split up despite buying the seats in the same order, and it could mean that like in 2020, families could find they’re not even seated together.

5. Dynamic pricing

FIFA used dynamic or surge pricing for this year’s World Cup, which meant prices can and have gone up due to demand. Instead of a fixed price, an algorithm takes demand into account for how much charge, squeezing as much money as possible from fans.

Already this year, dynamic pricing has come under fire. U.S. lawmakers criticized Ticketmaster for pushing artists to aggressively expand dynamic pricing, and dynamic pricing led to higher ticket prices, according to a March report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Of course, maybe they should’ve just sponsored Freddy the viral Germany fan traveling the country and discovering all of America’s specific delights like Waffle House, Big Gulps, and more. 

The criteria for a great World Cup ad is very similar to that other football advertising extravaganza, the Super Bowl. It’s a creative arms race to craft ideas that are not only entertaining and spark excitement for the games, but are indistinguishable from the brand making it. If you can swap in someone else’s logo and the ad still makes sense, then don’t count on the audience remembering who the ad is for. 

Bring on the opening whistle, here are my Top 5 World Cup ads (so far).

Adidas “Backyard Legends”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since I’ve already called it Adidas’ best World Cup ad in 20 years. As I wrote when it originally dropped, the magic trick here is how it manages to take a less than unique story device (famous players, unexpected game, etc.), and give it a new spin in a way that lives up to both the hype and the occasion of the world’s biggest sporting event. 

The world-building and lore that Adidas manages to craft in these five minutes is impressive, as is how genuinely fun it feels for everyone involved, not just the viewers. But perhaps its best move of all is that it ends before the supposed epic game even starts. We never see this mysterious streetball squad in action. The brand thankfully leaves it up to our imagination. 

Nike “Rip the Script”

Here we have a chaotic, meta whirlwind through a Hollywood set of a World Cup commercial shoot. 

One of the reasons I loved this isn’t just the flawless execution, but the idea of the brand creating its own universe in which that story could exist. And between all the stars, big names, sets, and set-ups, it serves up an almost endlessly clippable piece of brand work that will extend its audience and the hype around it. 

And for the real ad nerds, it’s also a perfect mash-up of its 1998 World Cup ad and 2015’s “Short a Guy.” The 1998 spot had the Brazilian national team stuck in an airport, waiting to go to the World Cup in France… and they just start playing in the airport. Meanwhile, “Short A Guy” features a similar frenetic energy and chaos, moving from one set to another, combined with many different stars. 

“Rip the Script” isn’t a copycat of previous creative strategies like these, but a culmination. 

Uber Eats “Who Could Cook At A Time Like This?”

When it comes to big budget sports advertising, Uber Eats doesn’t skimp. The brand has had a few huge Super Bowl moments, from the Beckhams drafting off the success of a Netflix doc series in 2024 to Matthew McConaughey spreading theories about Big Food’s role in creating football for the last two years. 

Here we get famed chef and aggro-reality star Gordon Ramsay, actually yelling at people to not cook in favor of watching the games. This counterintuitive message from Ramsay fits the moment, is hilariously executed, and works perfectly for the brand. 

My only nitpick is that one could argue that this could be a DoorDash spot, given it’s just about food delivery. But Uber Eats has worked to establish a pretty unique brand voice through its use of celebrity—remember this great 2023 De Niro spot?—that we’ll give it a pass. 

Brahma “Let Yourself Believe”

Since the dawn of time, or at least the World Cup, Brazil has always been considered a favorite to win. So it’s hard to see the Carnarinho (Little Canaries) as an underdog, but this spot by AB InBev-owned Brahma beer has fun with the country’s anxiety around once again proving its beautiful game bonafides. 

On the surface, it looks and feels a little like any other big budget sports spot—the everyday people playing the game, the big name cameos (Ronaldo!), and gratuitous product shots. But not only is this spot rooted in research showing 76% of Brazilians don’t believe their team will win, it also uses fun – of historical moments in Brazilian football lore to try and build back that belief. 

Coors Light “Taller Boy”

OK, at first I thought this really was a giant can. It’s not. But it’s pretty damn close. Here, Coors Light continues its long run of fun and funny merch gags with a double-walled stainless steel canister that functions like an XXL can holder, fitting up to three 12-ounce beer cans.

By now, Coors Light has been known for its merch game—the mosquito trap, the flashlight, the bear-themed golf club cover—for years. Now, I know this isn’t technically an ad, but every time someone walks into a watch party wielding one of these Taller Boy canisters, all the conversation and LOLs around it will undoubtedly be a walking, talking, IRL Coors Light ad. 

The team’s away jersey, designed in partnership with Adidas, is a blue and pink pattern based on the works of the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967), whose mind-bending paintings helped define the surrealist movement. Authentic versions of the jerseys are on sale at Adidas for $150.

This is the fourth time that Belgium has opted to honor some element of the country’s heritage through its away jersey design. At the 2016 UEFA European Championship, the athletes donned a jersey inspired by Belgium’s cycling culture; at the 2022 World Cup, they sported a design created in collaboration with the Belgian music festival Tomorrowland; and for the 2024 Euros, they pulled inspiration from Tintin, the iconic cartoon by the Belgian artist Hergé. In 2026, the team is putting its most high-design spin on the concept yet.

‘This is not a jersey’

When you think of Magritte, you likely picture a green apple, a bowler hat, and a pipe.

While Magritte dabbled in cubism during the early years of his career, his most famous works—most of which were produced between the late 1920s and early ‘60s—blended realistic scenes with unexpected twists. Objects often appear where they shouldn’t be, as in the green apple superimposed atop the face of a well-dressed man in The Son of Man; or physics are abandoned, like the floating pedestrians in Golconda.

The jersey directly calls out one famous work, The Treachery of Images, which shows a pipe captioned with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). On the neck of the jersey, a subtle script reads, “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” (“This is not a jersey”).

Several common motifs emerge from Magritte’s portfolio and are taken up by the Belgium away jersey. His fixation on the afternoon and evening sky lends a blue hue to many of his works, which is reflected in the robin’s egg base color of the jersey. Dozens of his pieces explore mirrored or repeated shapes—especially round ones like the apple, moon, or sun—which, in the jersey design, is reimagined as a series of pink and blue soccer balls.

According to a description from the Royal Belgian Football Association, the small horizontal lines throughout the pattern reflect the bounds of a soccer pitch.

While most countries tend to return to simple, color-blocked reinterpretations of their national colors for World Cup jerseys, it’s not unheard of for teams to take a more outside-the-box approach. This year, for example, Ghana’s home jersey takes inspiration from kente, a traditional hand-woven textile, and France’s away jersey is inspired by the color of the Statue of Liberty. Other teams have pulled pointers from jerseys of World Cups past, including Uruguay with its 1930s-inspired away jersey and the U.S. with its home “stripes” kit, inspired by a 2012 look that was likened to the book series Where’s Waldo?

Compared with these designs, many of which still rely on a color palette pulled from national flags, Belgium’s look is fairly daring. Instead of directly duping Magritte’s work, Adidas’s reimagining tastefully remixes it into a modern, bright print—and it’s seeming likely that the Red Devils will be one of the best-dressed teams on the field.

Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is an incumbent Republican who’s served in the U.S. Senate since 2015, while Dan J. Sullivan is a last-minute candidate who’s also running as a Republican. He entered the race just days before Alaska’s filing deadline.

Sen. Sullivan’s logo, which he’s used for 11 years, features his last name in a white serif font above a right-justified, all-caps sans-serif subhead reading “U.S. Senate” in gold. As in the Alaska flag, a series of gold stars is arranged in the formation of the Big Dipper constellation. Polaris, the North Star, cleverly replaces the tittle above the “i.”

Meanwhile, Dan J. Sullivan’s logo and color palette are nearly identical, but they invert the white and gold lettering and feature just one star instead of several.

There are nine Dan Sullivans registered to vote in Alaska, per the Anchorage Daily News. If you’re not befuddled already, there was also a Dan A. Sullivan who ran for and held office before in the state. (His campaign logo for lieutenant governor was blue and green.) But the sitting Sullivan senator doesn’t think the new candidate’s entry to the race is simply serendipitous, and he considers the logo a rip-off.

“He stole it,” Sen. Sullivan told CNN about the logo similarities, calling it “about 98% similar.” He suspects political chicanery, accusing Democrats of entering a candidate with his name to draw away votes and help Democrat and former Rep. Mary Peltola, who’s also running for the seat in Alaska’s top-four open primary in August.

“Mary Peltola and D.C. Democrats know they can’t win this race on the issues, so they’ve resorted to dirty, dishonest tactics—recruiting a sham candidate with the sole purpose of deceiving voters and manipulating Alaska’s election system,” Sen. Sullivan’s campaign spokesperson Nate Adams tells Fast Company in a statement. “This blatant attempt to confuse and disenfranchise Alaskans undermines confidence in our elections, and if allowed to stand, will deny voters the honest choice they deserve.”

A brief history of political logo copycatting

Candidates with the same or similar names are more common than you might think, like in New York, where contenders named José E. Serrano and Jose Serrano, and Vito Lopez and Victor Lopez, have faced off in races against each other. During the 2022 midterms, 13 states and territories had at least one race between candidates who share the same last name, according to Ballotpedia.

Political professionals in many of these cases assume the similarly named challengers are dummy decoy campaigns to draw away votes. In Alaska, the Peltola campaign has denied involvement.

Consumer brands can protect their intellectual property if campaigns borrow their branding, like when the New York Knicks and Campbell’s Soup sent cease-and-desist letters to politicians who mimicked their logos. But candidates have little recourse if one of their actual competitors really shares their name.

In Alaska, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) told the Associated Press that it’s considering legal action, and on Monday, the Alaska lieutenant governor’s office announced it was launching an investigation to determine the validity of the new Sullivan’s candidacy.

“Serious allegations have been raised concerning this filing in the race for U.S. Senate, and the people of Alaska deserve a thorough and transparent investigation to ensure that the election is carried out properly and without deception,” Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom said in a statement.

Logo rip-offs happen. Are they fair game?

Simply adding your name to a ballot is unlikely to meet the legal definition of commercial use or trademark infringement, says Alexandra J. Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University School of Law. But using a similar logo and using either the name or logo in connection with goods you sell or tickets you sell for an event could be more actionable. In order to bring a claim for infringement, a plaintiff has to be the owner of a valid trademark used in connection with the sale of goods or services.

The newest Sullivan in the race doesn’t currently have an online campaign shop linked to his campaign website. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“Outside of trademark law, I imagine there could be some kind of fraud or election interference claim to be made, especially if this person is not a bona fide candidate but only one who joined the race to gum up the works and undermine Sullivan by confusing voters,” Roberts says.

Will the real Dan Sullivan please stand up? With no more than a middle name or initial to distinguish them, voters could struggle at the ballot box.

When she started her business, wholesale was key, Scott explained during the Inc. Small Business Week Series. “I didn’t have money for advertising and marketing,” she said. “But Nordstrom, they’re a huge megaphone for my brand. I was in their books or their catalogs. They were doing the marketing for me. And that was driving my direct-to-consumer business or e-commerce business.”

Scott described the ideal retail structure as a pyramid with three sections: a strong wholesale presence at the base, a specialty or experiential retail store in the middle, and e-commerce at the top. “Those three elements together have to work and harmonize together to have a successful business and brand,” she said.

Sharing advice with other entrepreneurs

It’s advice that Scott has passed along to other founders, including Kelly McGee and Cristina Ashbaugh, the co-founders of Yardsale—a ski gear brand specializing in magnetic ski poles that Scott backed as a guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank. “Wholesale gives them this opportunity to really learn a lot about their customer and their product experience,” she said. “And, like I said, it’s the foundation for building a really successful brand.”

As a skier, Scott took interest in the brand and closed the deal at $250,000 for 10 percent equity, with a $5 royalty on each sale until she recovers $300,000. “You skiers deserve each other,” Daymond John, a fellow Shark, commented at the time.

Scott’s advice has already started to pay off for McGee and Ashbaugh. “Thanks to Kendra’s guidance, we’ve secured an expansion into REI, marking a major milestone for us, and we’re very excited for the road ahead,” Ashbaugh said.

Turning her company into a $1 billion business

In 2008, Scott opened her first jewelry store in downtown Austin. Since then, she has grown the brand to more than 130 retail locations across the U.S. and over 2,500 employees. She credits her success to engaging with customers and building a company that treats them like family.

“It was this village—this community of love and support—that we started in those very early days of Kendra Scott that has just continued to grow,” she told Inc. in 2022.

Scott knows the middle part of the three-section pyramid well. Leaning into the experiential part of retail, her stores offer jewelry customizations and hat fittings. In March, she opened Beau’s Bar in Nashville. The space, which is Western-inspired, allows shoppers to enjoy cocktails while browsing jewelry, apparel, and boots.

“Retail today is all about experience. If you are a retailer and you are just opening a store and putting product on a shelf and hoping that’s going to build your brand, you are going to fail,” she said.

The four walls of a retail store have to mean something, Scott said. Customers need to feel like they’re stepping into a community that reflects a brand’s culture. The goal is to create an experience so compelling that customers think, “These are my people.”

“Kendra always told us that it’s so important to be experiential and not transactional. And I think that’s been something that’s been really core,” McGee said.

Before opening a permanent storefront in their hometown of San Francisco, McGee and Ashbaugh put Scott’s advice to the test by hosting a series of pop-up events. When it opens, their new space will bring together everything she recommended by operating as a coffee shop, a retail store, an office, a warehouse, and a design studio.

“We heard Kendra in the back of our heads say you cannot just make a store,” Ashbaugh said. It appears they took her words to heart.

—Amaya Nichole, News Writer

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

Teddy Roosevelt pioneered sports at the White House

Many early presidents were talented athletes before taking office. Abraham Lincoln and William Howard Taft were celebrated young wrestlers. John Quincy Adams was fit enough to take daily naked swims in the Potomac River while in office.

But Teddy Roosevelt was the first to make sports a large part of White House life, installing a tennis court on the lawn. His wife, Edith, was concerned about his workload, and the grass court outside his office was meant to force more relaxation.

Cullinane, who is the author of “Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet” and is a history professor at Dickinson State University, said Roosevelt loved tennis and, though he didn’t play well, he did so “long and vigorously.”

Roosevelt would take the court daily at 3 p.m., rain or shine, for seemingly endless six-game sets against top aides. He also boxed, holding bouts in the White House that were far more intimate affairs than Sunday’s UFC fight. While sparring with his military aide Col. Daniel T. Moore in 1905, Roosevelt detached the retina of his left eye.

During a recent New York Post interview, Trump was asked about Roosevelt and replied that he “had a lot of energy, loved the outdoors.” He indicated that he knew about Roosevelt’s having boxed at the White House but didn’t comment on how the UFC event might compare.

Other presidents brought more sports with them

Hoover used the lawn to play a combination of tennis and volleyball involving 6-pound (2.7-kilogram) medicine balls that White House physician Adm. Joel T. Boone was credited with inventing to improve his fitness. The game eventually became known as Hoover-ball.

His successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had an indoor pool built for polio therapy. Harry S. Truman ordered an old horseshoe pit removed from the White House grounds, but the first President Bush reinstalled it in 1989.

His son hosted T-ball on the South Lawn beginning in 2001 and presided over 20 games, with his last featuring Little Leaguers who were the children of active-duty military personnel.

Eisenhower used the putting green outside the Oval Office frequently enough to leave golf-spike marks on the floors inside. Barack Obama had White House tennis facilities repainted as a basketball court, though they were converted back as part of a pavilion improvement project overseen by first lady Melania Trump during her husband’s opening term.

Presidents often mixed sports and politics

Playing, or at least being avid fans of, sports has long given presidents ways to connect to everyday voters while also projecting vitality.

John F. Kennedy largely hid his skill as a golfer because he was afraid of bad political optics. But he promoted footage of himself and his family playing touch football and frolicking in the surf, seeking to convey his youth and energy.

Nixon had a single-lane bowling alley built in the White House yet spoke much more frequently in public about his love of football, trying to appeal to sports fans in ways that his advisers initially feared might alienate some. Obama made an event of filling out NCAA brackets with his predicted tournament winner each year.

Trump has attended a series of major sporting events, including Monday’s trip to the NBA finals in New York. The UFC coming to him, however, is unlike anything the presidency has seen.

“There’s definitely precedence for athletic events, but this is a combination of athletic event and a celebrity event,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and senior fellow at the Reagan Institute.

Troy noted that, as the bevy of musical acts pulling out of the Trump-led celebration to mark America’s 250th birthday illustrates, “The entertainment world is just hostile to Republicans and Trump. So he goes to find his celebrities where he can.”

Trump has been a UFC fan for decades. His 2024 presidential campaign showcased his friendship with the league’s chief, Dana White, and Trump also attended bouts around the country, hoping to energize voters not usually interested in politics.

UFC’s cage matches mirror Trump’s bare-knuckled approach to politics and sometimes can overlap with his policy initiatives. In making the case for his immigration crackdown, Trump once told White to consider setting up a league in which migrants could fight one another — with the winner then squaring off against the UFC champion. He suggested the “migrant guy might win.”

Cullinane noted that the “UFC is dominated by men and this idea of masculinity,” which means “whenever you aim for a certain demographic, you are almost naturally politicizing the sport.”

‘Maybe we’ll never take it down’

The South Lawn’s octagon was built in a matter of weeks and designed to be temporary, unlikely to survive prolonged exposure to the elements. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from musing about leaving it up permanently.

The president has likened his birthday party to an international celebration of yore and The Claw to an architectural marvel in France. He noted on TikTok that Paris’ Eiffel Tower was built to be a temporary structure for the 1889 World’s Fair but then, “They said, ‘You know we sort of like it,'” and eventually, “They never took it down.”

“You know, we’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said before adding, “And I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.”

Troy said that, 20 years from now, the spectacle that is the UFC on the White House lawn may feel normal as accepted traditions on celebrity and sports shift. If so, Trump’s tradition-busting will have played a role.

“Trump, I think, is more willing than other presidents to be asked that question: ‘Why aren’t you doing it the way the previous presidents did?'” Troy said. “Breaking the precedent doesn’t bother him.”

Associated Press writer Darelene Superville contributed to this report.

—Will Weissert, Associated Press

But for many sellers, there’s one thing they hold back—a pair of Manolo Blahniks, a Louis Vuitton purse—because it’s special and they don’t want to let it go for less than it’s worth. So they might opt to sell it on TheRealReal or Poshmark, where they have more control.

Starting today, they no longer need to. ThredUp is launching Direct Listings, an open-beta peer-to-peer marketplace that lets sellers post individual items at their own price, right next to the Clean Out bags that drove ThredUp’s business. For the first time, sellers can hand over items they don’t care about and personally list the ones they do within the same app.

Resale is on track to be a nearly $80 billion U.S. market by 2030, and after years of explosive growth, ThredUp’s founder and CEO, James Reinhart, sees a new phase looming. “What you’ll see over the next couple of years is consolidation,” he says. To win that phase, though, ThredUp has to serve a wide range of customer needs.

The resale market is sorted into two camps. There is the do-it-yourself, peer-to-peer platforms—eBay, mobile-first Poshmark, Gen-Z oriented Depop, plus luxury players like Vestiaire Collective. On the other side are managed marketplaces, where the company does the heavy lifting. This includes The RealReal, which caters to luxury sellers, and ThredUp itself, which sells more mass market brands.

ThredUp was always built for the seller who didn’t want to do too much work. But in focus groups with sellers, many were asking for more control over a handful of items—and the peer-to-peer model isn’t really built for them. “The casual seller who doesn’t want to spend every day managing their listings and responding to comments and price-optimizing gets crowded out of those marketplaces,” Reinhart says.

ThredUp evolves

From the start, ThredUp pitched itself as the easiest way to sell secondhand clothing. The company manages the entire selling process, using data to identify how much customers are most likely to pay for it. Many sellers want to be hands off, but ThredUp has been experimenting with new features that give sellers some control over the pricing of their items.

In 2025, it launched Premium Clean Out kits, where ThredUp set the price of the items but the seller could go in and manually change them if they wanted. The growth of these kits was exponential, Reinhart says. This gave the company the confidence to launch Direct Listings, a tool for selling a few prized pieces one at a time.

Crucially, it’s still aimed at the casual seller, not the professional reseller. The goal was “a lean-back type of product experience,” Reinhart says—list a few special items, while continuing to let ThredUp manage the majority of other items you want to sell.

In early tests, Direct Listings posted an average selling price of $60—more than double ThredUp’s managed-marketplace average. Sellers don’t pay a fee, versus the 10%–20% standard elsewhere. Nearly 18% of listings are priced above $100, with a 12% sell-through rate on those premium items. And the highest-spending cohort was Gen Z, at a $72 average, who have a few designer pieces to sell. “These tend to be younger people who’ve got more time than money,” Reinhart says.

Reinhart believes that customers are not interested in managing several different resale apps. So to survive in the crowded resale market, ThredUp must offer a wide range of options, from donation kits of low-priced items to single-item listings. “People are going to be looking for a one-stop shop, because people are generally lazy,” he says. “We want to be that one super app for selling.”

Ultimately, he believes this will drive ThredUp’s momentum. The company posted $81.7 million in first-quarter revenue, up nearly 15% year over year, with active buyers up 25%. It’s still running at a loss—$6.5 million for the quarter—as it invests in automated distribution centers, but management has guided to full-year revenue of roughly $351 million–$356 million. Reinhart believes that resale will only continue to grow.

“Every successive generation of young people is adopting resale at higher rates,” he says. “Once people start shopping secondhand, they don’t stop.”

The overhauled packaging features a new color palette, simplified text, an entirely different wordmark, and a pirate who’s gotten a fairly significant facelift.

The work was spearheaded by the creative agency Pearlfisher, fresh off rebranding SkinnyPop—which, alongside Pirate’s Booty, is a subsidiary of The Hershey Co. The new branding started rolling out on store shelves earlier this month and will appear nationwide within the next week.

Inside the bag, the actual Pirate’s Booty recipe has been tweaked alongside the branding to include an extra dose of cheese. According to Eric Bowers, vice president of marketing for Hershey’s Salty Snacks division, these changes come as Pirate’s Booty is getting its first major marketing investment push from Hershey in several years—which means new partnerships, product innovations, and activations in real life and on social media. 

To introduce a new generation of Gen Alpha customers to the brand, Bowers worked with Pearlfisher to unshackle the pirate (Captain Bob) and his trusty parrot sidekick (Crunchy) from the constraints of the previous branding to serve as more flexible, socials-ready mascots for the snack.

The OG “healthy” snack

Pirate’s Booty initially hit the high seas in 1987, when entrepreneur Robert Ehrlich created it as a healthier alternative (made with real cheddar!) to the kids’ snacks on the market. The brand was acquired by Hershey in 2018, and although it’s a processed food, cheddar cheese is still the fourth ingredient on a relatively short nutrition label, which also includes no artificial flavors.

In today’s snacking climate, those two attributes are a built-in brand advantage. Driven by the rise in wellness culture and a federal push against artificial dyes, some of the world’s biggest brands—including PepsiCo, Welch’s, and Kraft Heinz—are racing to reformulate their popular snacks with fewer additives and invent entirely new health-conscious options.

Within just the past few months, both Lay’s and Tostitos have launched their own rebrands to emphasize real ingredients such as potatoes, corn, and lime on their packaging.

Given those macro trends, Bowers says now is the “most opportune time” for Pirate’s Booty to reassert itself as a better-for-you option in the chip aisle, and that meant catching both kids’ and parents’ eyes with an entirely new look. 

Inside Pirate’s Booty’s new look

For kids who grew up in the ’90s and early aughts, the most jarring change to the Pirate’s Booty packaging will undoubtedly be the new Captain Bob. 

Rather than sitting inside a roundel on the front of the pack, Captain Bob is now bursting out of it, rope in one hand and a corn puff brandished in the other. His facial features have been given a bit of a rogue-ish glow-up, including a bushier mustache and chiseled jaw. In all, he looks more like an animated hero than the scrappy hand-drawn Captain Bob on the old packaging. His sidekick, Crunch, has been given a similar treatment.

Matt Sia, executive creative director at Pearlfisher, says that all of these changes were intended to make Captain Bob and Crunch feel less like logos and more like living characters who, presumably, can appear in places like social media and IRL activations to build awareness of the brand among young customers. 

“Before, everything was a bit more contained, and there was a recognition around the round, blue central shape,” Sia says. “Now, Captain Bob is swinging into the environment, he’s interacting more with the actual product—there’s a sense of adventure and confidence, even in the styling of the illustration. With all the learning that we had, we wanted to make sure that we were optimizing him to feel like this larger-than-life character.”

Alongside Bob and Crunch, the Pirate’s Booty logo has also gotten an overhaul. Its former skinny serif font has been replaced with a custom font with ultra-chunky letterforms, flourishes on the “R” and “Y,” and a rough texture around the edges. “It feels a little bit more carved from wood, like something that you might find on the beach,” Sia says.

Other elements of the packaging have been optimized to stand out on store shelves and signal Pirate’s Booty as a better-for-you brand. The actual packaging material, for example, is matte instead of the usual shiny chip bag; the copy on the front of the pack has been reduced to boost clarity; and the color palette now centers around soft blues, tans, and yellows that are less common choices among its competitors.

As the new branding has quietly begun to roll out, the initial reaction—mainly from adult fans of the original—has been lackluster. One tweet about the new look reads: “Wild rebrand for pirates booty. LOL.” On Instagram, where the brand has deleted all of its old posts to usher in the new branding, one fan called the look “AI-generated.” (According to the design team, no AI-generated imagery was used to create the new pack.) And another wrote: “Please, for the love of everything, the rebrand art for the bag has brought me to my knees in anguish.”

“When you’re redesigning a brand like this, you’re not designing for a pack alone. You’re designing for the future of the brand,” Sia says. Any change, he adds, will inevitably garner a reaction. “Especially in the design world, a lot of people have opinions, and a lot of people have ideas of how they would have solved it differently. One of the things that we pay most of our attention to is: What’s really best for the consumers? What are people looking for?”

In this case, Sia and Bowers are confident that freeing Captain Bob and Crunch is the key to bringing a new generation of fans to the brand. Whether the masses will agree remains to be seen.

Lego has produced oversized sets before, many of them bloated monuments to their ambitions, but this one earns every single brick. Translating Antoni Gaudí’s century-spanning, organically erupting, mathematically impossible basilica into a display object you can fit on a bookshelf is not a flex. It is a massive design problem that Lego designers have solved masterfully. 

The set, measuring 24 by 18.5 by 15 inches, is truly the ultimate Lego Architecture masterpiece, a product line that translates most famous architectural marvels into bricks. It is a genuine attempt to bring one of the most visually complex buildings ever conceived—a cathedral that has been under continuous construction since 1882 and still isn’t finished—into a display object that captures its essence in an impressionistic way, but with apparent perfect precision.

The mission, as Lego designer Rok Žgalin Kobe frames it, was not to simplify Gaudí’s vision but to honor it. “We felt an immense responsibility to do justice to the Sagrada Família through this design,” Žgalin Kobe says. “Our goal was to honor Gaudí’s vision with the utmost respect, capturing the rhythm of the basilica’s construction, its extraordinary complexity and ambition, and translating that into an immersive building experience.” 

The key for Žgalin Kobe’s translation is not replication but psychological suggestion. The cluster of bricks that he uses to build the towers, for example, does not recreate the soaring stone nave brick by brick; it gives your brain just enough geometric information to recreate one in your mind. Lego works because the brain fills the blanks, and the better the designer, the less the brain has to work to complete the illusion. With the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s towers are encrusted with organic, nature-inspired ornamentation—stone that looks like it grew rather than was carved. 

Surreal masterpiece

The Sagrada Familia is one of the great unfinished stories of modern civilization. Construction began on March 19, 1882, commissioned by the devout Catalan bookseller and philanthropist Josep Maria Bocabella. The first architect, Francisco de Paula del Villar, abandoned the project in 1883 after disagreements with Bocabella’s architectural advisor, Joan Martorell, leaving little more than the crypt complete.

Antoni Gaudí, then 31 years old and already radically unconventional, took over that same year and threw out everything, reimagining the structure as a vertical forest of organic towers, parabolic arches, and stained glass designed to flood the interior with colored light. He knew he would never see it finished.

“My client is not in a hurry,” he reportedly said. On June 7, 1926, at age 73, he was struck by a tram on the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. He died three days later in a hospital, on June 10—this year marks the centennial of that death—with about 15% of the building complete.

The Spanish Civil War dealt a further blow in 1936, when anarchists broke into the site, destroyed Gaudí’s original plans and plaster models, and burned his studio, requiring 16 years of painstaking reconstruction from photographs and surviving fragments before building could properly resume.

On February 20, 2026, workers finally installed the upper arm of the cross atop the Tower of Jesus Christ, the central spire Gaudí always intended as the tallest, reaching 566 feet. The Sagrada Família is now officially the world’s tallest church, surpassing the Ulm Minster in Germany. Pope Leo XIV will bless it on June 10—144 years of construction and counting.

The Lego set mirrors this layered history in the most literal way possible. The build sequence follows the basilica’s actual historical construction order. You begin with the foundational apse and crypt—the oldest surviving section of the real building—move through the Nativity Façade and the dramatic Passion Façade, rise through the grand naves and the Western Sacristy, complete the six iconic towers, and finish with the Eastern Sacristy and the Glory Façade.

Building this set is, in a precise and intentional sense, a reenactment of 144 years of architectural history, compressed into the course of a weekend. As Žgalin Kobe puts it: “Balancing scale and precision, while remaining faithful to a living monument that has been evolving for more than a century, was a unique design challenge, and one we’re incredibly proud of.”

One detail captures Lego’s fidelity to the source material better than anything else: the stained-glass window effect, engineered to echo the way colored light moves through the real basilica’s interior. Gaudí designed the Sagrada Família’s windows with deliberate orientational logic, with warm ambers and reds on the west to capture the setting sun, cool blues and greens on the east for morning light, creating an atmosphere inside the building that shifts hour by hour.

The Lego version cannot move with the sun, obviously, but the designers have built the chromatic suggestion directly into the model’s structure, so that the completed set reads as luminous rather than merely decorative, engineered to be admired from every angle and its inside.

For many of the people in line, this would be their first piece of Knicks gear. Such is the effect of Knicksmania, an ecstatic response from a city that has not seen its pro basketball team reach the championship since 1999.  

But for those unwilling to brave the long lines, or spend at least $60 for an official Knicks shirt, an entire ecosystem is taking shape beyond the Garden.

Stepping out of the 34th Street station on a subway entrance painted blue and orange, a vendor draped the metal fences commonly used for street closures with $20 Gildan T-shirts printed with the Knicks logo and “NBA Finals.” 

A block over, outside the entrance of MSG, at least four different vendors had small black carts filled with at least 60 shirts each, all around the $20 mark. When asked about how they managed to secure a large number of championship-themed shirts, despite the Knicks reaching the finals less than a week ago, an anonymous vendor put it simply: Go online, find a design, and “print that shit on a T-shirt.”

The options ranged from bright orange shirts to white and black options, but a common thread among all of them was that they seemed to be AI-generated.

On social media, users noticed the phenomenon as well.

“I think … A.I. has zapped the power from bootlegs,” a user said on X about the shirts. While many seemed to be collages of stock photos of the Knicks logo with similar typeface, one particular design featured an image of the team resembling the hyper-saturated AI style, with a busy background featuring the Garden and Batman.

“It’s made them more efficient actually, and lets them have more designs now,” a user noted.

The AI merchandise has been spotted in Bed Stuy, Union Square, and even the West Village. While vendors agreed the technology was in part responsible for their quick response to Knicksmania, the use of AI is also becoming a differentiator between merchants in the bootleg economy.

“My cousin Lorenzo makes rad bootleg NY sports shirts, all human-designed, no AI. US Open, Liberty, Mets, Knicks, and World Cup designs,” a user advertised on X.

In Harlem, a separate artist has gained attention for his 2000s airbrushed designs, painting bootleg Knicks merch in real time.

Regardless of the origin of the designs, Knicks fans are fully embracing the offshoot product lines emerging throughout the city, seeing bootleg fashion as a physical representation of the city’s DNA, one in which anyone can hop on a trend and make it their own—as well as a quick buck along the way.

“NY is so back. $25 for Bootleg Knicks Finals shirts outside of MSG,” a user said on X. “NYC has never been more alive.”

Sold out

Down on Canal Street, a retail corridor usually filled with faux Goyard Saint Louis GM Bags and unofficial AirPod Maxes, sports jerseys draped the awnings of various gift stores. But no Knicks merch was to be found.

Speaking with five different vendors, it became clear that Knicksmania has already ravaged the area: Only five XL shirts were left on the entire street. Store workers, who wished to remain anonymous, told Fast Company that, because no one could have predicted the Knicks making it to the finals, they ordered their usual product amount, which quickly sold out as the team advanced. 

One store owner who has been on Canal Street for more than eight years said he typically sells at most one to two Knicks ball caps a week—with tourists usually opting for Yankees merch. But this season, his Knicks caps were gone within a week.

The same vendor estimated he has sold at least 200 jerseys in the $60 range within the last two weeks, and while he is trying to order more from what he claims is an official licensed supplier, that source is sold out as well.

Left hanging in all the stores instead are soccer jerseys, a nod to the upcoming FIFA World Cup, but vendors say they are simply not selling well.