Welcome To Friday Fives, Vol. 290
This week, we’re polishing up on a cleaning trend, whispering about the color purple, swinging in hot with a new golf brand, generating ideas about generative AI video, and swapping out dupes for the real deal.
Plus, we’re swooning over our shoutout in Adweek about our Valentine’s Day care packages to announce a new passion project that’s expanding on the already-sweet Cherries: a candy store! It doesn’t get sweeter than this.
The Cleaner That’s Tickled Us Pink
Cleaning grime from those stubborn bathroom tiles has never looked so pretty. The once-underdog bubblegum-pink cleaning product The Pink Stuff went viral solely through word of mouth fromvigorous cleaner of IG fame, Sophie Hinchcliffe. From there, it took off. No advertising campaign needed. The Pink Stuff sales have quadrupled since 2018. But the fear with viral-based sales is a lack of control and fleeting trendiness. A brand’s storytelling is in the hands of influencers. Is The Pink Stuff a miracle-working solvent? Good but overhyped? Not actually good at all? It doesn’t seem to matter. People see #cleanfluencers offering #cleanspo on #cleantok with a “#pinkstuff” in the caption and they run to the product.
Since the dawn of the pandemic, YouTube watchers and IG-reel scrollers have flocked to the hypnotic quiet talk and roleplay scenarios of ASMR to offer them an escape. Slowly, like the whispers of ASMRtists themselves, purple started to appear more and more in this content. From periwinkle backdrops to neon violet lights, the color became a mainstay of the soft-murmur media, denoting spirituality, relaxation, and imagination and attempting to further the sound-induced tingles the genre spurs. Creators latched onto this palette as a way to monetize their whisper through a trending color, with purple even spotlighted as Pantone’s 2022 Color of the Year, Very Peri. But that was two years ago. Has the color run its course? What we really want to know: Is pinkthe new purple in the world of ASMR?
It’s the breakup of the century. After a near three-decade long partnership, Tiger Woods and Nike have gone their separate ways–but from what we hear, the split was amicable. The fate of the iconic TW logo? That’s owned and trademarked by Nike, but Woods doesn’t mind. He’s happy to leave it behind and chart a new logo course that is equally representative of himself. The launch of his upcoming apparel and lifestyle brand Sun Day Red comes complete with a new logo: a tiger with 15 stripes to represent 15 titles won. The products are said to be made with the same dedication Woods puts into his own career. And to no one’s surprise, Woods clarified that he has, in fact, worn red on Sundays (in pretty much every major tournament ever).
OpenAI’s Sora is a research project available to a select few that are vetting it for its safety vulnerabilities. What differentiates Sora from other text-to-video AI bots, like Google and Runaway? Its photorealism and up-to-a-minute length of clips. A scene of Tokyo with snowflakes falling was created in no time and was highly detailed, though still slightly off in some regards. Another creation? A short fluffy monster beside a red candle–Pixar-esque vibes included. It’s powered by a diffusion model used by the Dalle-3 image generator, but all that techy stuff only furthers the true talent of Sora: its remarkable cinematic grammar. Move over Nolan, there’s a new auteur of film.
Premium brands are saying “faux-get about it” when it comes to copycats. While consumers are starting to wonder if cheaper versions of premium brand products, or “dupes,” can do the job just as well and for less, those premium brands aren’t going down without a fight. Brands like Lululemon and Jolie are popularizing “dupe swaps,” the act of trading in your faux or competing brand product for the real deal (often worth upwards of $100). This quality-based “taste test” has become a way for premium brands to strut their stuff and dissuade consumers from being influenced by the lackluster qualitiesof dupes. Is there a future in dupe swapping? We don’t know, but at least we can get a free pair of leggings out of it.
