Lollipops & The End Of The World
Chupa Chups & liking blunders
Why are some brands happy to mess up? And others gleefully own their fails?
Suck on a lollipop and lets have a look.
Then, there’s a new docu on the end of the world (maybe), a handy AI roundup, Meta India rapping in Tamil and more.
This is The Colour Bar- a collision of brands, creativity and media.
Open Up!: Chupa Chups, and liking blunders
AI Watch: · a new docu · Sora’s flop · Bollywood FaceSwap ·
▶️ Curated/Cuts: Aston Martin powered by AI · Meta Raps in Tamil ·
AI watch: Sora’s flop, Sony’s AI spy, Eros swaps faces, Linkedin’s promise.
➕ another Netflix music thing · studios for creators · Indonesia’s Tiktok blow ·
☝🏽Busy? Lazy? Multitasky? Click play above and let me read this to you!
1. Open Up!
aka Chupa Chups are annoying.
If you are young enough, or have young kids, or have had young kids, you will know well the weird, inexplicable, head-shaking infuriation of…
… opening lollipop wrappers.
In particular, Chupa Chups. Seriously popular, seriously annoying. The kind that make you go “humans have reached the moon but can’t make a lollipop wrapper that peels off easy?”
But wait. A step back.
There is a psychological phenomenon where highly competent people become more likeable after committing a minor blunder. This ‘Pratfall effect’ was coined by American psychologist Elliot Aronson in the 1960s. The idea is that perfection can be intimidating, suppress warmth. But minor imperfections can humanise excellence, restore warmth without destroying status.
“Competence makes people appear worthy of respect, and making a mistake makes them relatable.” ^
Brands have leveraged this as an approach- to humanise, be more relatable or just add some self-deprecating humour and endear themselves to consumers.
So. I don’t know if it’s a stretch, but you could say Chupa Chups heard all the whining about their wrappers, and asked someone to hold their beer. Then… it made wrappers that are not difficult, but IMPOSSIBLE to open.
This most unopenable lollipop ever is a ‘limited-edition product’, available to influencers (of course), who will validate this over-engineered piece of candy clothing.
But surely that’s not all?
Yes- Chupa Chups has, actually, made wrappers that are easier to open. Finally! Hallelujah! Except they have, in this stunt, wrapped those in ridiculous weapons-grade covering. But that’s all this is, a stunt. Which means we can all hope to find slightly less annoying lollipops in the market soon.
“This is one of those stupidly brilliant ideas, where doing the complete opposite to what you should do is the obvious answer,” _Felipe Serradourada Guimaraães, ECD at BBH.
The Pratfall effect has a good history of brand usage, so I couldn’t resist giving a quick look at some others.
Domino’s famously showed radical transparency when it publicly acknowledged customer complaints that their pizza tasted “like cardboard”, and promptly relaunched the recipe.
Guinness cleverly made the slow pour into a virtue. It might take a while to pour a pint, but hey, “good things come to those who wait.”
Duolingo of course, embraces it’s own annoying owl, believing they can convert well-known irritation into shared humour.
Ikea has leaned into the jokes about its self-assembled pieces.
Way back, Listerine’s original mouthwash (medicinally unpleasant, to put it mildly) accepted its fault and simply sold on the idea that “anything that tastes that bad has got to work.”
Anyway, let’s all patiently wait for our neighbourhood mini mart to get that great invention of humankind: a lollipop that can be unwrapped easily.
2. AI Watch
First off, a documentary that seems all too timely.
Here we have the utility-meets-cheeky title ‘The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist’.
From what I can tell, it looks to address the difficult balance many are trying to find between robots ending our world, or at least LLMs crushing our cognition, with the hype around AI and how our lives are going to be enriched in ways we can’t comprehend.
“Collapse of humanity,” “abrupt experimentation,” “is now a good time to have a kid?” “there’s so much potential… for things to go wrong”, “the most extraordinary time ever.”
With bites like these and interviews with leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and more, there’s likely something for everyone here. Though hopefully, the result is not a vanilla soup of ‘everyone has a valid POV’.
Somehow, I don’t think so.
It does come from some serious pedigree- the Oscar-winning filmmakers behind Navalny and Everything Everywhere All At Once produce-direct a film with the log line:
“A father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with all this AI insanity. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a hand-made, eye-opening documentary about the most powerful technology humanity has ever created... and what’s at stake if we get it wrong.”
They thoughtfully have the definition of apocaloptimist readily available too. This is helpful, considering its a made up term.
a·poc·a·lop·ti·mist(noun) : a person who believes that even though we are currently racing towards the worst possible outcome, there’s still a chance we can get our sh*t together.
It also comes with two entirely different looking posters, if that sort of thing pleases you.
In theatres soon, which means most of the world that does watch, will watch it on Netflix.
More AI nuggets.
Recently, I touched briefly on how Sora2’s user-focussed app was becoming a bit of a damp squib. Patrick Wilkens breaks down how it has been an utter flop- $15 million a day in costs, $367K a month in revenue. His post also has this nugget, which is absolutely spot-on, “AI video generation is not a consumer social product. It’s a B2B production tool.“ (service, I say)
Google has acquired Producer AI, a generative AI music platform that will join Google Labs. Using-amongst others- Google’s Lyria3 model to generate music, it will continue Google Labs’ focus on “enhancing human artistry, enabling exploration and expression.” Or as James Pero over at Gizmodo says, to enable us all to “lob prompts at the chatbot like, “make a lofi beat,” and watch as it snatches the joy of creation straight from your misguided hands.”
Still on music: Sony has made an AI music detection tool. It can identify the underlying tunes used in tracks generated by AI, paving a potential path for writers, composers to claim compensation. It’s unclear how (or why) AI services would integrate this, seeing as they are (largely) built on legally questioned modes of training and data.
Linkedin is promising to keep our comments sections authentic. With the deluge of bots and LLM generated comments, this is a very welcome promise.
Lets hope its effective.The Eros Universe has been launched, as the Indian production, distribution, technology company looks to provide a “rights-led creator economy platform”. Eros has a huge film library (~12000 titles) and with ‘clearance’ for gen-AI use, this could provide a lot of scope for creators. What exactly they can/will do with it, remains to be seen. The company itself shared this, erm, Face Swap feature, as a teaser of what a game changing ‘AI powered cultural ecosystem” could look like.
3. Curated/Cuts
· No Roads
Amidst all the generative AI grandstanding from fly by night users, its always refreshing to look at how elements of the technology are actually being integrated into production workflows. I have written before about Marey by Moonvalley / Asteria, the model being built by/for filmmakers and VFX artists, founded on cleanly sourced data.
Paul Trillo and the Asteria team worked with the Aston Martin FI team for this spot at the end of the last season, where the brief apparently was, “to go places where there are no roads.” It’s a cool spot, but arguably the workings are more fascinating - bringing together miniatures, 3D modeling, VFX and generative rendering.
The breakdown is here ; they could control every single frame on the timeline married to the AI workflow. No ‘prompt and hope’ stuff here.
You might recall- I had shared ‘Cuco’ sometime last year. Also by Trillo, that piece used generative AI to give life to hand drawn artwork, bringing together artist and musician.
As Trillo says, “where is the fun in prompting your way through this?”
· Believers Succeed: Meta India
Meta for Business has this short to targeted at small businesses. Hyper local, made in Tamil, and tapping into many nuggets that will appeal directly to the target audience. No translations, dubbing or ‘vubbing’. Nice storytelling, and hey- star power helps!
They say it was “built to celebrate every SMB owner who chose belief over doubt’, because Nambuvar Vellvaar (Believers Succeed) 🤞.
➕Quick Hits
Youtube is TV. But this has also meant that creators are now studios- at least the successful ones who have made sustainable businesses of it. Here is another step in bringing the TV world and Youtube world together, in the US the Whalar Group has launched Lighthouse Studios to “build a TV-like schedule of creator content.”
Indonesia’s social media ban for Under-16s begins on March 28th, making it the “first non-Western country” to do so. Jim Louderback is calling it ‘the ban that breaks Tiktok’, because it is TikTok’s No.1 global market (also Facebook’s second biggest after India, and is in the the Top 5 for YouTube & Instagram). Crucially he says, TikTok Shop generated $13.1 billion in Indonesia in 2025. I knew Indo was a big market, but that’s one whopper of a number.
More music to Netflix: the streamer will air Harry Styles: One Night in Manchester, the day after he performs his new album to a sold-out crowd.
“help us make sense of what's happening right now
and the ways we can shape what comes next.”
_The Center for Humane Tech on The AI Doc.