We hope you’re recovering from the weekend, fam. The next time you’re flying back from your weekend getaway with your favorite canine friend, you can take Bark Air — an airline geared towards pampering your pooch with snacks, belly rubs, and a window seat. It’s, of course, absurdly expensive... but, hey, only the best for your fur baby, right?

In other news… brands could become movie studios, Spotify slows things down, and Nike taps AI as its newest designer.

We hope you enjoy this and all upcoming issues, but we have one request: please share your feedback. If you have any thoughts at all about our new look, format, and direction, please reply to this email. It’ll go straight to us. Do not hold back.

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe

The Future. Michael Sugar, the award-winning producer behind titles like Spotlight and The Knick, is creating an upfronts that, instead of pitching brands for advertising or product placement, is meant to help arrange financing for projects. While most brands will likely invest in individual projects, don’t be surprised if an enterprising brand uses future “upfronts” to launch a full-fledged studio arm and create a film slate.

Produced by Pringles?
“The Way Upfronts” is giving brands the opportunity to put their marketing dollars into something much more exciting than a 30-second TV ad spot.

Sugar23, which has helped brands like Anheuser-Busch InBev and Procter & Gamble make moves into entertainment, is trying to show brands that they don’t have to fully finance a movie to invest in Hollywood. Instead, they can fund a script’s development or put equity into a movie to get talent onboard, all with the goal of flipping it to, say, Netflix or Amazon.

All cheaper options than a traditional commercial but have the potential for far more upside… especially in an age when people pay to skip commercials.

63.4% of you voted No in Friday’s poll: Are you a sports fanatic?

“Used to really watch sports but with people changing teams 4 $$ and having to subscribe to cable... Younger days I’d pay attention to the Olympics, Daytona 500, Indy 500 but only so many hours in a week, and with working weekends, sheesh!”

“Enjoy playing them but watch minimally. Doesn’t entertain me as much as movies, TV, or music.” 

“My favorite type of stories are the ones that inherently come out of sporting events. The comeback, the hometown hero, etc. I get sucked in very easily.”

Meet Tiege Hanley. 

Tiege Hanley is an easy-to-use skincare system created with men (and those who identify as men) in mind. It comes with all the essentials, too:

You won’t be left to your own devices, either. They’ll tell you how to use everything. Yes, everything.

And right now, they’re offering an exclusive 30% off your first box, plus a gift.

The Future. Spotify is working on a remix tool that would let users change the speed and pitch of any song on the platform, while opening up a new revenue stream for rights holders. By giving users a new way to engage with their music, artists might soon find versions of songs they didn’t create becoming moneymaking, breakout hits.

Speed up, get paid
Spotify is taking cues from trends on TikTok for its newest feature.

Listenership for manipulated songs has exploded so much in recent years (38% of of songs on TikTok last year had their speeds or pitches changed), that artists are just doing it themselves. SZA’s “Saturn” and Dua Lipa’s “Illusion” were released in multiple versions simultaneously this year.

They wanted to make sure they got those royalties somehow.

We may have reached peak footwear…

Today we get into how every celebrity now has an alcohol brand, the downfall of Vice Media, and whether or not the DC Universe reboot is going to revitalize Warner Brothers Discovery.