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Nov 26, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Svilena Keane |Lydia Martin |Eaon Pritchard |Becks Collins
Shoe Tim. Tunnel mouth. The Nutter Butter man ‘whose intentions are unknown’. For the past year or so, cookie brand Nutter Butter has been serving surreal content with disturbing visuals and distorted sounds to its followers on TikTok. Other brands are increasingly embracing what has been labelled by industry commentators as ‘unhinged’ content, too.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Elizabeth Anyaegbuna |Natasha Randhawa |Kate Knowles |Becks Collins
Chinua Achebe once wrote that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. In today’s media landscape, this truth resonates deeply. Like our ancestors’ oral histories — reframed and rewritten through a Western lens — our contemporary stories face a particular paradox. We speak of ‘reclaiming narratives’ during Black History Month, yet how do you reclaim something that was never truly yours to begin with?
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Charlie Li |Ben Essen |Becks Collins |Paul Greenwood
As we find ourselves bombarded with a relentless stream of curated perfection and perpetual doom-laden news, it’s worth asking: when was the last time you felt truly present ‘in the moment’? When was the last time you took a photo without immediately thinking about how it would turn out on your social media? We live in a time where there is more content to consume, yet more people than ever before feel isolated, disengaged, and dissatisfied.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Eaon Pritchard |Becks Collins |Paul Greenwood |Mariana Silva
Marx and Engels argued that capitalism’s relentless drive for profit would ultimately lead to exploitation and overproduction, causing economic crises where supply outpaces demand, and an impoverished working class would eventually rise to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. It didn’t pan out like that. It turns out capitalism’s flexibility and adaptability have been pretty good at preventing the collapse Marx and Engels predicted.
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Aug 18, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Becks Collins |Al Mackie |Alistair Vince |Sean Hargrave
It Ends with Us is currently the second biggest movie in the US. The film is advertised with florals and a huge focus on the film’s star, Blake Lively, who promoted it in a now-controversial TikTok by telling women to ‘grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it’. The poster and seemingly loved-up promo images of Lively and actor-director Justin Baldoni frame the film as positively romantic, a rom-com. A fun film for a night out with the girls. This year’s Barbie.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Becks Collins |Alice Pukhova |Philip Koh |Rob Blake
Clowns, tigers, bunnies, Barbie… brandland is full of iconic mascots. When making lists, however, it’s usually the same 10 to 20 heritage brands that come to mind — those who represent nostalgia, childhood and pre-streaming TV. That’s because it’s hard to get a brand mascot to stick. Many try and fail to connect, or completely turn people off (e.g. Burger King’s mid-2000s creepy plastic-faced King). Relatively few stand the test of time.
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Harry Kinnear |Becks Collins |Chris Jefford |Jerome Hiquet
Worldwide digital advertising spend is increasing every year, but ad blocking is also on the rise. So with our July theme of ‘Fame and Attention’ we thought we’d ask our network, from a marketing and strategic point of view, how should brands best capture our attention. We see twice as many ads today than ten years ago. Whether this estimate is right doesn’t really matter. The reality is: we live in an intensely noisy world.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Becks Collins |Olaf van Gerwen |Olivia Atkins |Robert Volten
The greater the fame, the higher the fall. As a result, celebrities sometimes cycle through several iterations of their ‘identity’ to try to clamber back up to the heights of their former self or more accurately, former ‘status’. The result? Either their growth is inhibited before it even gets started or their image becomes detached from what actually made them famous in the first place.
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Svilena Keane |Mike Chivers |Becks Collins |Rob Blake
The summer of sports is upon us, and while this is certainly cause for excitement it’s also cause for concern. Considering the usual spike in hate speech around major sporting events, the world’s largest socially-led creative agency, We Are Social, have published their Braving the Backlash report, exploring how sports brands can best tackle rising online hate.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Alice Pukhova |Mike Chivers |Becks Collins |Matt Straker-Taylor
Pride month is a time for LGBTQI+ strategists to both celebrate their identities and, with a mix of cringe and schadenfreude, observe brands’ often failed attempts to engage in Pride — commonly known as rainbow-washing. This phenomenon is widely discussed in progressive creative circles, where the consensus is clear: to avoid rainbow-washing, brands must commit deeply to social causes and authentically represent LGBTQI+ stories.
