1.  GAP Leans Into Retro Comfort – The “​GAP Hoodie House​” at Coachella allowed people to design their own products, profess their love of the simple hoodie and offered a comfortable counterpoint to all the quirky (and often uncomfortable) fashion on display in Coachella fashion. It was a perfect reminder of everything people love about their GAP hoodies and was perfectly on brand.
   
   
2.   Dove Solves a Sweaty Problem – Last year a ​viral tweet​ from an influencer suggested that the heat of the desert venue made Coachella the ideal festival for a deodorant sponsor. This year, ​Dove answered the call​. Focused on offering free deodorant and solving a very real problem for concertgoers stood out and captured lots of attention and goodwill. Along with their inventive use of ​vending machines to expose “flattening beauty standards,”​ it was yet another win for a brand that has continually helped rethink beauty standards.
   
   
3.  Public Art Company (PAC) Brings the Spectacle – Even in a digital world, sometimes there is no replacement for creating a beautiful spectacle for people to experience in person. As the official art provider for the festival, PAC built ​several immersive installations​ around the Indio festival grounds to allow people to think about space, interaction and feeling: “each piece is designed to be entered, sat beneath, wandered through, and genuinely felt. We’re curating for the body as much as the eye.”
   
   
4. The Coachella Billboard Phenomenon – This may be hard to believe, but one of the most talked about elements of people trekking to the desert for Coachella this year were ​the billboards they encountered along the way​. In a moment of captivity driving to the festival, Gen Z audiences are paying attention to out-of-home (OOH) marketing and (​according to some surveys​), even trust it significantly more than social media. Most interestingly, apparently every year during Coachella “over one-third of TikTok virality trends have started from or included OOH displays.”

By the way, even if you can’t make it to Indio this year, you haven’t missed all the fun. Check out the YouTube livestreaming schedule for all the events you can still ​watch this coming weekend  and let me know what other marketing initiatives stood out for you.

The Free File program, which dates back to 2002, allows the industry to claim that it’s possible to file taxes free while working to ensure that most people keep on paying. The bottom 70 percent of taxpayers ranked by income are eligible to use the Free File program. That’s about 100 million households. Only about three million use it each year. Instead, every year, millions of people eligible for Free File pay to use virtually the same software from the same companies.​

Intuit’s behavior has been particularly egregious. ProPublica reported in 2019 that the company had concealed the landing page for the Free File version of its product so that it was invisible to Google and other search engines. It also created a stalking horse called TurboTax: Free Edition, which pushed users to pay for add-ons. After it got caught, the company abandoned the Free File program.

Despite its success, the potential growth of a free government system allowing people to pay their taxes quickly online threatened the livelihood of the $17B tax filing software industry. So the lobbyists went to work and the extremely promising IRS system that would have saved Americans an estimated 13 hours and $290 in fees met its untimely end.

So what’s the solution here? There’s a silver lining that may point to the answer. Apparently, in 2025 before abandoning the Free File program, “the federal government published most of the program’s source code on GitHub.” Now all we need is an entrepreneur with a similar sort of vision to what drove Mark Cuban to build CostPlus Drugs as a way to cut the middlemen out of pharmacy sales. If you know one, please forward this email on to them.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Based on tracking animal movements, not only can the country’s eco-tourism board identify where animals are going but they can also redirect tourists to other locations when a certain spot becomes overcrowded and human presence might adversely affect the animals. The entire campaign is designed to attract a growing number of travelers interested in sustainable travel and deeper experiences with local wildlife. For your viewing pleasure, a link to the full video is included above from this campaign that ​earned a Cannes Lion award for advertising​ at last year’s Cannes Festival.

Here are three questions that local news helps to answer and why it should matter to you:

1. What’s happening in your area? Your local publications are the ones that are often most in tune to local events, places to go and also local legislation that’s likely to affect your life but that’s mostly ignored by other news media. ​
2. What does the news mean for you? Whether it’s local or state level legislation or the local impact of federal announcements, or just giving you the weather, local news breaks down what the big picture means for your life.
3. Who are the winners and losers? Like most good journalism, local news can help you understand both sides of an issue by focusing on the all-important question behind a story … who’s winning and who’s losing?

Even though Local News Day is today, there’s still time to sign up as a sponsor or an individual supporter. Better yet, use the map to find and support the local news sources near you (if you’re based in the US).

It’s a different experience of watching a game and for years that was pretty much the only other option. Watch the neutral national television broadcast or listen to the game with your people. Now on broadcast TV, one of the hottest trends taking off is so-called “alterna-casts” where they are taking a similar idea even further. This week ​ESPN launched “Courtside”​ in time for the Women’s College Basketball Final Four tournament. This will include four hosts sitting courtside offering a more “immersive” experience for fans.

Perhaps the most popular example of this model is an alterna-cast launched back in 2021 featuring the former NFL quarterback Manning brothers (Peyton and Eli) offering a ​remix of their own coverage​ for Monday Night Football games that was described as a cross between a zoom call and hanging out with buddies watching the game at a bar:

Despite all the attention, the brothers don’t go in for anything fancy, in either setup or presentation. They talk over each other. They barely acknowledge when the show must stop for a commercial break. Guests like Dwayne Johnson get to talk about their love of football, tequila investments and upcoming movie projects — and even a T-Rex skull replica on display in the background — without the slightest pressure to dig deeper. When the Mannings signed off after a Wild Card game not too long ago, they did so without the faintest whiff of TV-hosting skills. “Bye!” yelled Peyton. Neither of them told viewers to stay tuned to watch late-night ESPN mainstay Scott Van Pelt on “SportsCenter.”

This is the golden age for a new idea that is increasingly being applied and commercialized by network TV for all sorts of live programs perhaps beyond sports too. Insiders believe the future of the Oscars, Grammys, World Cup and many other events could include this same alterna-casting idea to broaden the fan appeal for events and offer a more personalized experience. What we all give up is the same thing that has disappeared thanks to streaming media — a shared entertainment experience. As this continues to happen, I wonder if we are losing something here, or is it just a better experience for everyone? Let me know what you think.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

According to NPR, the ​proposal appears unlikely to pass​ and perhaps the best way to understand the difficulties here is to consider some of the thoughtful questions that Supreme Court Justices have been asking about the proposed policy:

• How would you know who the father is, or the mother? What if they’re unmarried? Whose house do they live in?
• How would you adjudicate these cases? You’re not going to know at the time of birth whether they have the intent to stay or not, including U.S. citizens by the way.
• So [are] we bringing pregnant women in for depositions? What are we doing to figure this out?

This is the part I find most interesting about the story. Too often, there seems to be little to no discussion or thought about the realities of HOW things will actually work once rules are made or changed. Case in point – the recent moves by US Department of Energy to reduce safety regulations at nuclear power plants which are ​highly likely to literally kill power plant workers in the long term​ .

So when the questions get real and are asked by people other than deeply invested journalists, it’s worth paying attention. We need more people in positions of authority to ask these kinds of questions about proposed policies instead of choosing blind loyalty and quiet obedience.

“Utopias was actually born from another Samuel Adams creation — 1992’s Triple Bock, the beer industry’s first barrel aged beer, which sold for the then-unheard-of price of $100 per case. In 1999, the beer evolved into “Millennium,” and in 2002 it adopted the name Utopias.”

Jim Koch, founder and brewer of Samuel Adams, calls the beer a labor of love since it’s not a huge money maker for the brand. Its existence does something interesting for the rest of the beer maker’s products too … underscoring the attention to detail and craftmanship that presumably goes into their other products too. This is the sort of old-school marketing idea that is becoming rarer and rarer to see.

A unique product, promoted through an interesting story and something that feels distinctive and new … even though in theory any beer maker could have done it. There was a time when I would see a lot of ideas like this coming from marketers in all industries. It feels like a while since I’ve both seen and written about an idea like this which has little to do with technology or AI. Sometimes a good idea stands out simply because it would have worked at any moment in time. That’s still worth raising a glass to celebrate.

The modern casting director of business is the HR director, talent manager or hiring expert. As automation changes the structure of teams, this role should be increasing in importance. You would therefore expect to see lots of conversation online about the future of recruiting. Inspired by reading about that award for casting, I started to dig into this topic and found that this conversation is strangely missing … apart from AI vendors selling tools to do it for you. Where are the experts imagining the future of recruitment and talent acquisition?

Without this, the danger is that more companies turn to AI tools and platforms as a default and the human side of recruiting is lost. So, I’m curious about your experience, whether you have (or are currently) in the job search market or have been recently. Are you seeing any equivalents of casting directors in business imagining the future? If so, I’d love to know and spotlight their work.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

“United Airlines today announced the United Relax Row: a set of United Economy seats that can transform into a couch, creating a more comfortable option for customers traveling in the United Economy cabin on long-haul flights. United is the first North American airline to offer this kind of seating option and holds North American exclusivity on the design. This new, dedicated row of three seats is outfitted with individually adjustable leg rests that fold up at a 90-degree angle to create more room to sleep, stretch out or watch a movie.”

Predictably, the announcement is getting rave reviews and lots of excitement from consumers even though it doesn’t officially come out until next year. Aside from being a great idea, it does also point to the sad reality of just how desperate economy class travelers have become for any sort of effort from an airline to make their increasingly pitiful journey with shrinking seats just a little better. Yes, this is also a revenue generating idea from United since these seats will likely be sold at a premium … but if other airlines are paying attention, it may finally spark some innovation for the other 90% of travelers who aren’t sitting in those lie-flat business class seats.

• An advance preview of the full book before it comes out
• A chance to contribute words (and get featured in the book!)
• More special, secret, non-obvious swag and cool stuff that I haven’t come up with yet but will definitely be worth it! 🙂

Regarding the book itself, the vision is to create a compendium of words that will exist in the future but don’t yet, to describe scenarios, people, situations and emotions that we are currently living with, but that language has not yet been named. What kind of words?

Since I know you’re wondering – here are a few words that I shared from the stage that we will probably include in the book:

• Angorithm – A system designed to use rage as a reliable method to incite engagement and capture attention.
• Credentropy – The gradual erosion of trust in institutions, experts and credentials until no one believes anything anymore.
• Riftmonger – One who deliberately sows division and manufactures chaos among others for personal gain.​
• Sloptimism – The genuine inability to tell when the output from AI is noticeably terrible. Most often practiced by sloptimists.
• Shallowing – The active process of becoming less thoughtful and more coddled as a result of overly helpful technology.