Happy new year. I hope you had a great winter break.
This issue of Brands & Humour is looking deep into 2026 and indeed beyond: there’ll be a few changes in what the newsletter is about and also, for me, a new brand for my consultancy, here.
But first, here’s a picture of David Bowie:
‘I don’t know where I’m going from here. But I promise it won’t be boring.’
— David Bowie
I thought about Bowie’s wise words a lot over the past few months. Truth is, as 2025 wore on, I wanted to make this newsletter and my consultancy, HumourScope®, more relevant. I felt they had become a bit, well… vanilla.
…And it just wouldn’t do.
So what did I do?
I had a lot of chats: chats on the phone, chats on Zoom, chats on Teams, chats in person. I wanted to know about marketing in 2026. I wanted to know what was eating people up. I wanted to listen.
Simultaneously, I wanted to get away from the constant chatter about AI — and even worse the AI gurus who knew nothing about AI until, er, late 2024 (or who were into NFTs in 2022, or the metaverse in 2020…). Not because AI isn’t relevant — it is, bigtime, the genie’s out of the bottle — but it was just so… everywhere…
What I discovered was I needed to rejuvenate things.
In this newsletter, I’d made a habit of dismantling BIG ADS for BIG BUDGETS for BIG COMPANIES. Ads like this one:
Fine if you have $1 million for production and $7-8 million for a 30 second airtime during the Super Bowl. And that’s just one showing of one ad, while all the quarterbacks and tight ends1 sip on their energy drinks while their coaches yell at them to try harder.
And yet, in these straitened times, not many businesses have $10 million in loose change down the back of the sofa.
Or even in their bank accounts, for that matter.
I spoke to a 24-year-old designer, Arturo, about this. He said:
Take Barclays. They [might] say I’m gonna spend 100k on the best videographer, the best editor, the best scriptwriter. And somehow, a 17-year-old makes a video with his iPhone and is getting millions of views, you know? Because that 17 was like more human, connecting more, you know? He made a little mistake. It’s not perfect. But it’s charming, you know?
I spoke to another marketer, Adam, in his forties, who was promoting a white paper for his fintech.
I don’t want to do something that was just a boring white paper, given that we’re all targeted by millions of white papers every week. And so we were looking for ways to cut through [that] would be more interesting.
These are just two quotes from two interviewees: I spoke to many, many more. What I got the sense of was a changing landscape in which brands were struggling to cut through on vastly smaller budgets and grappling — sometimes successfully, sometimes less so — with tech innovations.
I needed — and need — to be relevant again.
So, what are the changes?
Admittedly, a brand talking about their rebrand can be the epitome of navel-gazing but please indulge me: this isn’t a surface spit-and-polish. This goes down to the roots.
My consultancy is now very much in the training space — previously it was in the strategy space.
My positioning is that brands need to cut through but are prevented from doing so by the tsunami of slop hitting our inboxes, feeds and attention 24/7. Humour helps achieve cut-through.
Allied to this new positioning is the new brand look and feel:
New colours:
And a mascot, Max:
Check out the site, if you fancy, and tell me what you think (I’ve enabled the comments on this newsletter and will do so moving forwards).
As for this newsletter, I’m going to explore some of the by-ways of humour in creator marketing or on social far, far more. I’m going to share practical tools more. So it’s less “isn’t this good?” but also, “here’s how it can help you.”
This doesn’t mean I won’t sometimes geek out on the latest McDonald’s ad or other BIG STUFF. After all, brand communications are about fame.
But it means I’m going to be more curious about the smaller things going on — stuff we can learn from, stuff we can riff off, and stuff that’s wrongly ignored. Philip Larkin, one of the greatest English poets, once wrote: ‘sun destroys the interest of what happens in the shade.’ He was right.
Thank you for flying B&H airlines today.
And thank you David Bowie for being, y’know, David Bowie.
Paddy
pg@humourscope.com
+44 7866 538 233
I’m no American. Perhaps you can tell. But I would like to thank my good Canadian friend, Tim Kist, for his tutorials in this sport.