The new launch blueprint, fakeout marketing, Andromeda, and the active wars
You're telling me a creative made this strategy?
Welcome back to another week of Hyper. This week, we’re talking about launch blueprints, modern film premieres, fakeout marketing, and the changing nature of ads, imagery, and, well… everything.
Let’s get started.
Level up your creative strategy
If you’re trying to figure out what the next phase of creative strategy looks like for your marketing team, agency, or brand, you need to attend the Creative Strategy Summit put together by our friends at Motion!
We all know that consumers are scrolling faster and algorithms are constantly shifting, but the only consistent theme is that you need to adapt 24/7.
And Motion is helping solve this by curating the brightest minds in eComm, social, and creator marketing for a virtual summit where you’ll get:
Deep-dive sessions on creative strategy, growth, and retention
A creative playbook you can use throughout the year
Practical tactics you can plug into your brand right away
Frameworks to help you build your internal strategy for 2026
Community, networking, and fresh energy to keep you moving forward
If you’re building a DTC, Amazon, or eComm brand, this is something you and your colleagues need to show up for.
The most insane part about this is that you attend for free!
Use the link below to register; you won't want to miss out on this offer.
Mark your calendar. October 9th, 12-6pm ET.
The new launch blueprint 🗺️
If you're thinking about creating a new brand or product in 2026, here are a few key factors to consider (based on our observations and conversations).
We saw several years of “aesthetic” and “positioning” innovation being a big driver for new brands. Exciting packaging, counter-culture look… but now ChatGPT and Claude recommendations are driving recommendations more than ever.
Seeding to influencers, TikTok Shop, and its related Amazon lift are becoming the major sales drivers.
And in each of those categories, what drives performance are things like product innovation and unique selling points that are dialed in.
What can an LLM use to recommend a product? What can an influencer easily say in two phrases to explain why a seeded product is better than another?
David’s unbeatable macro-ingredient stats. A direct pricing proposition versus a popular luxury product. A specific tech breakthrough, guarantee, or construction.
Here’s how the formula looks…
CORE:
Product innovation or dialed USPs
ADDITIONS:
+ campaign creative theme
+ related unboxing experience
The last two are items that increase the success of the promotion below
MULTIPLIERS:
x creative volume of launch
x group reach of team and influencers at launch
The core product and additions start the train, but the full total available market of an initial release is unlocked by the amount of assets you put into organic and paid content, as well as the extent to which your team’s social presence and influencer social presence amplify it.
The more you execute on these, the greater the chance it has to gain a cultural multiplier, where organic conversation begins to drive the creative and influencer return to be greater than the sum of its parts, thanks to natural conversation.
Why tho?
We are in the era of fakeout marketing… at the audience’s expense
LeBron announced “the Decision 2” in an ill-advised attempt to garner attention around his retirement, or moving teams, and it ended up just being an… ad for alcohol.
Erewhon teased their new DTC smoothie launch by sliding in a carousel of cities, leading fans to expect new locations of the luxury grocer. However, it was actually just the locations where they would shortly be shipping to.
What these do well: get attention, which is increasingly hard to get, so a positive thing they were able to accomplish that on a serious scale.
What this sets up: an era where attention comes at the expense of the audience. The first few of these, like above, are fine, it might leave a light bad taste in the mouth, but doesn't really matter, but this will get repeated by dozens of companies, and it is going to lead to swift negative brand association.
Tread carefully.
Traditional entertainment is adapting
I attended the Tron: Ares premiere on Monday (big thank you to Meta and Disney Studios!), and a few things were interesting about this versus other film premieres I’ve been to.
Big influencer presence - dwarfing traditional media, a who's who of LA TikTok and IG personalities
The photo setup: you could pose with realistic vehicles, robots, get transformed photos, or even set up in front of a theatre and stage on a red pedestal. Everything was designed for content.
Social network integrations: I attended an event with Meta, where Grok was powering an activation with x AI robots, positioning itself with science fiction.
Cultural tie-in: the artists from the score performed (NIN)
A good blueprint for maximum exposure for a premiere, instead of the same invite list and event blueprint every time. We’ll see more of this.
Field Notes
It’s already here. Most creatives pride themselves on being able to distinguish between AI and reality. The reality is that they can only identify the obvious ones. Content like the one below still has a few telltale signs, but is increasingly excellent.
I've been looking into this more deeply (preparing a new venture), and what I’ve found is enlightening.
Movie trailers, TV show opening sequences, big-budget ads, e-commerce photos of major brands no one’s talking about… they’re already 10-20% AI, and it simply exists unacknowledged, undiscussed, and in plain sight.
In time, the outrage we’re all hearing in the creative world is simply going to be… an uneasy silence.
The active wars are in action. Garmin made a major move, requiring Strava to display the Garmin logo on any products that utilize its data. Strava has an emperor-with-no-clothes moment as it becomes very clear without Garmin that they really don’t have much data.
All the while… Aura has begun providing customers with the experience the new generation actually wants. A space to watch.
Andromeda is here, and if you are running Meta ads, you need to read this. And if you’re working with a performance agency that hasn't explained this and adjusted its strategy accordingly yet, you should consider letting them go.
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Damn the erewhon carousel totally got me !