Boys aren’t radical, girls are; people are scared of being conned by AI; and 00’s story-based community gaming is back.
From the observation deck - your weekly dose of three things that matter in marketing and advertising - welcome to 2026.
Welcome to the observation deck, a short piece that picks three trends and observations and shows you why you should care about them, and why they’ll be interesting in the marcomms world.
And we are back baby! After three long weeks away from the laptop, two of those spent up in Scandinavia, and in the arctic circle (yes, I saw the Northern lights!), it’s nice to have some semblance of daylight. It’s amazing how much simply having more than 4 hours of actual sunlight can brighten your mood. So with a target to up my lighting game in my flat and a lot of substacks to catch up on… seriously, you saddos who post during the gooch season… here are three things I’ve found interesting in the last week, that aren’t Trump trying to set off WW3.
Gamers are going retro for connection and community
BBC
After nearly 25 years since its launch, the legendary RuneScape has hit its highest concurrent logged-in users at 240,000 - only 3 other games have more concurrent players at the time of writing.
What has helped this game see success again? A focus on community and relationships, with microtransactions being removed after a public vote. Engagement was prioritised over profit. A win against the attention-hogging games that seem so prevalent atm. But it’s also how the original (not the more modern form of the game) has retained its sense of humour - uniquely British humour that brought users back in an increasingly sterilised online world. It’s an environment that has helped foster and create relationships. As the developer says, there’s a phrase at RuneScape: you never quit, you just take a break. The game will always be there for you, your character will always be there for you.
Why is this important?
With so many games working to maximise your attention, rather than provide you with a rewarding experience, users are fighting back - this points to a larger movement in culture, one where people are sick of being seen as eyeballs and want to be properly rewarded / compensated for their purchase or time. I expect to see far more of a movement back to retro experiences as people realise they can vote with their feet/eyes.
People are banding together to root out AI
The subreddit ‘is this AI?’ has seen over 300% monthly growth, with subs now totalling over 115,000 people. The purpose: to root out when AI is being used dishonestly and to help users who might not have the skills to recognise when they are being conned or tricked. It’s becoming more of a problem, and may have risen in popularity over the Christmas break as younger people returned home to see their parents absorbed in AI slop. Hence the growth kicking off on 23 December. No one wants to proudly share something to have a Gen Z slam them down with ‘HA that’s just AI ya Boomer’.
Why this matters
As AI use and slop fills up our screens, and AI gets better, it’s getting harder to discern the truth. But naturally people want the truth and don’t want to be misled. The instances where people have been duped can create a real sense of mistrust that can’t be resolved. As we move into more use of AI, discussions around proper AI use need to be had - what is ethical, what is not, when you can use photorealistic AI, and when it should be acknowledged. In adverts we have to state when actors are paid to give a testimony, or recreate a situation… these types of guardrails should naturally be applied to AI use too.
Young men aren't actually radical… young women are!
New Statesman
While everyone is worrying about young men sliding to the right (when in reality they are the least ‘right’ out of all ages of men) the interesting thing we are seeing is educated younger women in greater numbers shifting their political values further to the left than ever before.
It’s a movement that further widens the gap between young men and women. In previous decades women were more likely to vote conservative than men, but this trend started reversing in 2015, primarily driven by the younger end of the electorate. Strikingly, the majority of young people do not identify as either right- or left-wing. Instead, young women see their politics as flowing from their deeply held progressive personal values, which they increasingly think are at odds with the country they see around them, and which disproportionately affect them - trad wives and abortion laws changing, etc. So young women feel far less connected to their country than young men, and are far more pessimistic about it and the economy than any other group.
A possible link to this is that more younger women feel lonely than younger men (in contradiction, again, to the news we hear about the male loneliness epidemic), possibly driven by the far greater time they spend on Tiktok (85% of young women say they use it regularly compared to 67% of young men) and their higher education levels meaning they can see the frickin icebergs ahead.
The worst part of this is it apparently doesn’t seem to matter too much to the media.
But it does matter
More young women being educated, earning more and having more of a voice means that progressive policies will start being favoured by their cohort. The growth of such parties as the Greens and Lib Dems in London shows how more social-first policies are valued by younger groups. It matters in comms because despite a loud minority advocating for more traditional roles, our youth still want progressive values from brands, regardless of what well-funded groups on the right want people to think. Brands that advocate and help young people - especially young women - will succeed, because the numbers are there.
I’ve spent more than 15 years helping some of the worlds biggest and exciting companies understand their business, marketing and creating standout brand identities and communications
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