🛸 The Orbit Dispatch: Issue #15
Awkward CEO Taste Tests, Kitty’s 46-Year Goodbye, The AI Empathy War + TV Static Archeology
Hello!
We’re back with your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities and internet curiosities. Grab a coffee, or whatever fuels your creative weirdness and dive in!
What we’re obsessing over this month:
The AI Ad Wars: Google’s emotional utility vs. Anthropic’s “privacy as a product.”
NYFW’s Identity Crisis: Why Rachel Scott is the busiest woman in fashion right now.
The Hug vs. The Shield: Google’s play for "emotional utility" vs. Anthropic’s play for "privacy as a product".
Digital Archeology: Exploring the maps of our ancestors and the static of retro TV.’
Executive Performance Art: The accidental comedy of McDonald’s "casual" CEO taste tests.
🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes
Super Bowl hit Levi’s Stadium on February 8, 2026—and as usual, it doubled as the world’s most expensive marketing thermometer. With 30-second ads costing somewhere between $8–10 million, brands weren’t just buying airtime. They were buying a cultural moment. A Super Bowl spot is no longer “run ad, hope for laughs.” It’s launch the teaser, drop the extended cut, activate the TikTok, pray for memes.
Google Gemini quietly won the night with its “New Home” spot, directed by Daniel Mercadante. Instead of flexing futuristic tech jargon, the ad showed something simple: a mom using AI image tools to help her son picture their new house—fresh paint on the walls, a redesigned bedroom, small changes that suddenly make a place feel like home.
Anthropic took the opposite route with its campaign, “Ads Are Coming to AI.” Created with Mother, the ad leaned into discomfort—showing AI chatbots as pushy personal trainers and invasive therapists. The message was clear: this is what happens when AI gets monetized.By promising to stay ad-free, Anthropic turned its business model into a moral stance. Not just better tech—better boundaries.
Autumn/Winter 2026—across New York, London, and Milan—felt split between two moods: viral spectacle and quiet archival obsession. NYFW opened with Rachel Scott at Diotima and closed with Rachel Scott again—this time in her role at Proenza Schouler. Same designer, two lanes. One week, bookended by the same creative mind, juggling personal vision and big-house expectations.
The Djungelskog Effect: IKEA’s Accidental Marketing Mircale
When an abandoned baby macaque at a Japanese zoo went viral for clinging on to an IKEA orangutan plush toy for comfort, the internet collectively melted. IKEA played it perfectly, quietly donating backup plushies to the zoo instead of turning it into a loud brand stunt. A beautiful reminder that in an era of hyper-engineered (AI) campaigns, the most powerful force online is still just pure, unscripted empathy.a
Source: Ikea Asda's "Analog Tinder" Stunt We’ve officially hit peak dating-app fatigue, and the UK supermarket chain Asda just capitalized on it beautifully with their "Love in the Aisles" Valentine's activation. The premise was simple: single shoppers could grab a red shopping basket instead of the standard green one to signal they were open to being approached. The stunt went massively viral on social media because it tapped directly into a cultural desperation for low-tech serendipity.
🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations
My Retro TVs — Flip Through the Static
Forget the "Infinite Scroll." Sometimes you just want to sit on the floor and flip through channels in 1994. This site simulates vintage television sets from the 50s to the 00s, letting you watch exactly what was onscreen during those decades.
myretrotvs.comWplace — The World is Your Canvas A collaborative, real-time canvas layered directly over a world map. Find your hometown, find an empty space, and paint something. It’s chaotic, ephemeral, and a beautiful reminder that the internet can still be a shared sandbox.
wplace.liveThe Anti-Bland Alphabet
A curated middle finger to the "safe," soul-sucking sans-serifs currently homogenizing the internet. This is a tactical archive of high-quality, expressive typefaces that are entirely free to use.
Logos From Memory — The Branding Reality Check
This interactive site asks you to sketch famous corporate logos entirely from memory. It’s a quiet, humbling reality check proving that multi-billion-dollar branding rarely sticks in our brains exactly the way agencies intended.Stickers Gallery — Archiving the Laptop Lid
Before algorithms curated our interests, die-cut vinyl on a laptop lid did the job. This site is a high-res, meticulously categorized archive of physical stickers from the early tech and indie web worlds—a digital museum of tactile internet culture.
📸 Visual Inspiration
The Kawaii "Reset": Yuko Yamaguchi’s Final Bow
The design world just witnessed a generational shift. The flamboyant designer behind Hello Kitty is stepping down after more than four decades in charge of her look - and yes, we are officially old now.
Born on a 1980 coin purse, Hello Kitty has morphed into a global marketing titan. From Balenciaga runways and Nintendo consoles to her own custom Airbus and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, she’s proof that a character without a mouth can effectively dominate every corner of the cultural economy.
Yuko Yamaguchi has been responsible since 1980 for the design of Kitty and famously maintained the brand’s most controversial lore: that Kitty is officially not a cat, but a little girl from London. Under her leadership, this “little girl” rose to become the global epitome of Japanese soft power, proving that a character without a mouth could speak to almost every demographic on earth.
🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month
McDonald’s CEO vs. The Big Arch™
In a recent attempt to humanize, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski sat down for a “casual” taste test of the new Big Arch™. It was intended to be a relatable content, but it quickly turned into a masterclass in executive-level awkwardness. Social media users and online comedians have mocked his awkward taste test, citing it as evidence that he did not enjoy his own company’s burger.
The video feels less like a lunch break and more like a mandatory orientation film, especially when Kempczinski refers to his own burger as "product". The word "product" effectively strips away the joy of eating, replacing it with the cold, hard logic of a quarterly earnings report.
It’s a linguistic slip that instantly dissolves the “relatable” facade, reminding everyone that they aren’t watching a man enjoy a sandwich, but a leader inspecting a unit of global inventory.
🤔 Poll of the Month
📣 What’s New:
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Thanks for reading!
Forward this newsletter to your favorite design-nerd friends, internet nostalgics, and lovers of all things odd. See you next month—stay curious!
🛸 – The Orbit Team
