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💨 Blue Ribbon, MJ & The Swoosh: The Nike Story. How Nike was founded, the battle it fought and how it got to where it is today.
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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

_{*Note: Political rant incoming, if you are a Trumper, you'd best look away now.}

As someone who thinks Trumpism is very dangerous for the world, it’s been fun watching him destroy the GOP's chances in the midterms, along with JD’s chances in 2028. A lot can change in the next 2.5 years, but I couldn’t think of a bigger voter betrayal than what we’ve seen in the first 15 months of his term. We’ve had economic destruction, backing out of free trade, a pedophile ring cover-up, and now a brand new unnecessary war. Poor old Sacks mustn’t know what to do with himself.

Trump has also been played by Putin like a fiddle and absolutely dogwalked by Netanyahu. It sucks that he has been so destructive both domestically and internationally. I do hope that at least we are cleansed of him and his ilk for good. We, as a global community, deserve much better than this.

BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

Eight Very Cool Marketing Things

My father has one of those garages that has a million and one little trinkets from all over. Shells from some faraway beach, old motorbike parts from a discontinued bike, posters and pin-ups from the 1983 AFL Grand Final (Aussie reference). Me, not so much. I’m not so much of a collector of things.

As an entrepreneur, marketer, and all-around growth hacker, though, I do collect ideas. My bookmark folders are overflowing, and my swipe files can take no more. All digital gold I have found across the World Wide Web, that I believe one day, will move me one step closer to complete, and utter global domination.

Today, I am going to share a few of these with you, with the hope that you, like me, may be able to find some inspiration; a small win that gets you to your next milestone. Precious nuggets of inspiration are all around us. Here are a few I find compelling. Enjoy!

1/ The creativity of this McDonald’s ad

First up, we have a wonderful advertising campaign by Mickey D’s. It’s usually Burger King that I sing the praises of in this newsletter for their incredibly precise global newsjacking tactics, but today it’s Ronald’s team. I am not going to talk too much about this ad. Just pause for a moment and look closely, and you’ll see the beauty for yourself.

2/ Using a media platform for lead gen

One of my goals for next year is to begin leveraging this newsletter more deeply for lead generation. My company, Athyna, launched our Intelligence product a few weeks ago and has been pulling out all of the stops to build a pipeline in the AI post-training space.

With that in mind, one of the things you’ll start to see over the next few months is more and more guests from our Dream 100 clients. If you’re not familiar with the Dream 100, it’s an exercise of writing down the 100 clients you want to work with and directing as many resources as possible towards them. In our case, we have 123 odd firms, and four or five contacts inside of each of them. You can see our full list here.

Our targets on the list range from developers and architects to CTOs. And as you well know, if you’ve ever done technology sales before, these are not the easiest people to get in front of, let alone be able to build rapport with. But if Dale Carnegie taught me anything, it’s that spending 30 minutes with someone and genuinely picking their brand usually leads to the beginnings of a good relationship. As an example, last week I interviewed Benny Chen from Fireworks AI. The piece will come out soon, but in the meantime, I sent him this message. Let’s see how it goes.

A note on the above

Something interesting for any reader connected in the AI space: we are offering equity for introductions to anyone in our Dream 100. $25k equity for anyone who can introduce us to the right contacts at companies like Anthropoc, OpenAI, Midjourney, etc.

3/ Small elements of brand affinity

Something else I’ve been loving lately is the idea of small brand touchpoints that add a little brand affinity. You would have seen brands that have built playlists—Tyler Denk from beehiiv, for example, has Big Desk Energy—or other small brand touchpoints for their community. Another thing that I love are deep work playlists.

A good, deep work playlist is one that just loops for hours on end, alongside you, while you waltz through a nice flow state. I usually use pixelated Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones versions myself, but I’ve been playing with the idea myself, and will soon be shipping Open Source versions. You can see below my Elon hurtling through space in his Roadster, and Bezos deadlift PR animations. All we need now is the track to put beside, and voila. Brand affinity touchpoint.

4/ Trevor from Torq

Another fun one I found recently was Trevor from Torq. Trevor claims to be a junior media intern at the Series D cybersecurity unicorn, but really, what Trevor is is an old-fashioned hype guy. You know the buddy you want around you at the party your crush is at because he’ll tell all the best stories on your behalf; that type of hype guy.

Funny thing about Trevor is, he’s actually a paid actor. He’s paid to make noise online, film content at conferences, and more or less just be a viral sensation for the brand. Everybody needs a hype guy. Every company needs a Trevor.

5/ Timely 1st party data journalism

One of my favorite brands on the planet for straight-down-the-middle, unbiased reporting on global news is Tangle. They are an audience of over 500,000 readers from fifty countries and rate incredibly highly on every media bias and factuality chart.

6/ Next level memetic warfare

What seemed like mere minutes after Trump and Hegseth started dropping bombs on Iranians, the internet, as it is wont to do, was ablaze with memes about the news, my favorite of which was a parody of Flock of Seagulls, "I Ran." Click the link, and you’ll see what I mean. My question is: How does one do this?

This level of memetic warfare on the battlefield of distribution is game, set, match level stuff. If we are all in a war of attention, the MTV music video parody meme wins.

7/ Polymarket’s interactive advertising

It pains me to say this—Polymarket and Kalshi, along with their shit-eating founders, are my most hated companies in tech—but the marketing team at Polymarket needs a raise. Not only for the run of back-to-back-to-back partnerships they launched recently and for their Mamdani-inspired free grocery store, but also for this cracking interactive ad they ran in the New York subways.

Will Marty Supreme win Best Picture? What price will Bitcoin hit in 2026? Who should win the next election? They are doing two things here: 1) aligning with the brand of making predictions, and 2) inviting graffiti, UGC, and even a viral moment. I despise this company. But game gotta recognoze game sometimes.

8/ “I can’t hire fast enough” messaging

Alex Liberman, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, seems like a good guy to me. One of those online personas that you cannot help but like. Alex is doing something online with his new Tenex Labs startup that fascinates me: he is bragging. Bigtime.

It is my sneaking suspicion that whether or not Alex is telling the truth about their hiring, this strategy, especially when you have a large audience, works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘We are crushing it, we cannot keep up with demand,’ etc., fills people with curiosity, and is a soft signal that this company is hot. A social proof self flex.

AI pulls two emotional triggers in people. The first being desire: the need to be adept and on the cutting edge of this new technology. But also the more powerful emotion of fear: the fear of being outcompeted to failure. I really do like this guy, and he’s probably telling the truth. I wish him all the best. What I do know is that come Monday, you’ll see a post from me talking about how we cannot possibly hire enough people to keep up with demand.’ Advantage me. Thank you, señor Liberman.

Adios

That’s all for today. I actually started the day with a post about how to train LLMs, but I’m tired, and my limited cerebral horsepower wasn’t up to it, so you got this fluffy little fun piece.

Signing off just before midnight Saturday night, my time, getting this scheduled so I can enjoy my Sunday, which also happens to be my five-year anniversary. As always, thanks for reading and lots of love!

Extra reading

• The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack - August, 2024

• Pattern Interrupt Marketing, What Is It? - October, 2025

• How To Read Like The Greats - December, 2025

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Tracksuit*—a modern brand-tracking platform that shows how your brand is growing, how people feel about it, and where you’re winning (or not) in the market.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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