Anthony Gordon took an arrow for a stranger at Agincourt.
Somebody posted that on X about a 600-year-old debt of gratitude paid out in real time. Thousands of people went yeah, felt that.
That’s the power of the World Cup. And characters like Anthony Gordon. They do look like they would take an arrow for you at Agincourt.
There is no agency on earth that pitches “past-life medieval war guilt, but make it Newcastle’s left winger.” It only exists because one weird person felt one weird feeling and hit send. That’s a beautiful game.
Hold that thought. Because while the internet was busy reincarnating Anthony Gordon, every brand in America climbed the Empire State Building to fight about what you are allowed to post.
THE FLAGS DIDN’T KILL ANYONE. THE DISCOURSE DID.
If you skipped social media for the holidays, people in black masks scaled the Empire State Building as a stunt. Then the brands started to run with it.
Now there are dozens of them. Loverboy put its logo on a flag. Spritz asked “when are you restocking skinny spritz.” Caraway: “your cookware shouldn’t have PFAS in it.” Fashion Nova went absolutely elementary school dork: “made you look. shop Fashion Nova.” Petco. Bulletproof. A soda brand. A marketing services company, which is the point at which the bit ate itself and started digesting. Or as Anonymous Crab tells it, “contemporary capitalism has become exceptionally good at absorbing the language of resistance and flattening it into a meme template”
Matthew Kobach posted the grid. “Brands move fast these days. And there’s hundreds more.” And the timeline lost its mind.
Jack Appleby: “This is so, so embarrassing.” Adam Faze: “a beautiful example of why chasing trends is the worst imaginable way of building a long lasting brand.” Cory Dobbin: “I want to throw up.” Somebody named sandra: “low signal af.” Somebody named Joana: “extremely tacky.”
And here’s where I get off the bus.
EVERYONE DUNKING ON THE FLAGS IS DOING THE FLAGS.
The flag trend lasted about four days if we’re being kind. The trend of being disgusted by the flag trend is going to last three weeks and get ten times the engagement.
I don’t disagree with the hypothesis put forward by Silence, Brand!, “Increasingly, brands are joining moments because visibility has become a race against the algorithm, not because the moment aligns with their values. Viral moments are treated like a rapidly depreciating asset needing to be harvested before attention expires.”
They are going to say that consumers recognize all this. I’m just not so sure that the vast majority of people care as much as we think they do.
I’ve watched this cycle for over twenty years and it never changes. A thing happens. Brands pile on. Then a second, more sophisticated crowd piles on the pile-on, and they get to feel like the smart ones when their marketing outrage does numbers.
The dirty little secret is that the algorithm pays everybody the same either way. Chasing the trend and chasing the backlash to the trend or even the backlash to the backlash are the exact same move.
Nobody’s being poisoned here. A flag is not a crisis. A brand is not going to fold because it hung a bedsheet with AI with a stupid little headline. In a month you will not remember a single one of these posts, including the ones that made you type “I want to throw up,” which, respectfully, is a lot of feeling for a Loverboy logo banner. I mean how could they do that to my boy Kyle Cooke.
The problem was never that brands did a trend. Brands have always done the trend. The problem is that most of them have nothing to say at the best of times, so they said their tagline, loudly, up high, where you couldn’t ignore it. That’s not trend-chasing. That’s just moving quickly and trying post something.
Should you do one? Sure, why not. But it’s always better if you are going to be the Anthony Gordon at Agincourt. Weird, specific, a little unhinged, clearly made by a human who felt something. Anything. You can’t fake that with a flag. You definitely can’t fake it with a flag that says “logo.”
Which brings us to the one brand this week that actually understood the assignment.
DOMINO’S SOLD PEOPLE AN IMAGINARY PIZZA AND IT WAS THE FUNNIEST THING ONLINE.
This week Sony told PlayStation customers in the UK that 551 movies they’d paid for were about to vanish. StudioCanal titles like Paddington, Terminator 2 and Pan’s Labyrinth were all pulled from people’s libraries as of September 1, “due to our content licensing agreements.”
Guess what? You bought Paddington. You did not own Paddington. You owned permission to watch Paddington and your permission got revoked.
The reminder nobody wanted: digital purchases aren’t purchases. They’re kind of long-term rentals.
Domino’s UK understood the assignment before Sony even handed it out. An “OFFICIAL STATEMENT,” corporate blue, deadpan as a hostage note: as of April 1 2027 it will cease production of physical pizzas and go digital only. Download the codes. Enjoy them “using the power of the imagination, in an entirely virtual sense.”
16.5 million views. On a joke about owning nothing — which is the exact thing Sony just did to 551 movies, except Domino’s did it on purpose and it was funny.
That’s the whole lesson sitting right next to the flags, and it’s free: commit to the bit and aim it at something real. Domino’s didn’t write its tagline on a bedsheet and haul it up a pole.
It built a joke, kept a straight face, pointed it at the emptiest promise in tech — you bought this, you own this — and let you do the rest of the work. Reactive, sure. Trend-chasing, technically. But it had a point of view and it landed, which is the only test that’s ever mattered.
The flag brands chased a moment. Domino’s made one out of thin air. Sounds like what Sony’s been selling.
MEANWHILE FIVE BRANDS SHARED A COAT SIX WEEKS TOO LATE.
While American brands were dogpiling on flag trends, five Canadian ones stitched themselves onto one jacket. Molson Canadian, Canadian Tire, RBC, Sleep Country and Manchu Wok put their logos on a single faux-fur coat, dropped in a music video back in May, have now created The Great Canadian Giveaway for real.
Enter to win the coat, plus a Molson mini fridge, a Blackstone griddle and a Manchu Wok fortune cookie plush. Over $5,000 in prizes.
It’s ridiculous. No more so than the flag stuff and endless “buy Canadian” moment for clout. But the coat dropped in mid-May. The giveaway landed July 1. By the time it arrived, the moment it was chasing had already moved on at least twice.
Also: who needs a fur coat in July.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE ORANGE CRUSH
This week, we’re drinking an Orange Crush.
Here’s the thing I love about it, and why it belongs in an issue about manufactured trends: nobody marketed this drink to you. It’s credited to The Starboard, a beach bar in Dewey Beach, Delaware, back in 1995. It spread the slow way — one sunburned Marylander at a time.
It got big because it’s good. Took thirty years. That’s the opposite of a trend. That’s a classic. No wonder it’s the official State Cocktail of Delaware.
I saw a great version this week from @spooonfullofsyd that runs it with orange Poppi instead of the usual lemon-lime soda — very 2026, and honestly it works. So that’s how we’re building it.
Orange Crush
2 oz vodka
1 oz Cointreau (or any orange liqueur)
3 oz fresh squeezed orange juice — about two oranges, and it has to be fresh, this is the whole drink
Splash of orange Poppi (or any bubbly orange soda)
Orange wheel
Build over crushed ice in a pint glass and stir. Top with the Poppi. Orange wheel on the rim. No Cointreau? Triple sec’s fine.
The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Domino’s can do no wrong in my eyes.