Strands of Genius: The Real Award Show Problem, The Golden Line, Bathroom Media

Plus: Cannes rumination, Tiny Awards

and

Jul 01, 2025

:: THE UPDATE ::

Two more sleeps here in the UK before we’re headed back to Tennessee! It’s been a shorter European summer than usual for us, but now that we have a house of our own, we want to spend more time there! We will miss the Leffe blonde beer and our Euro Crew, but we cannot wait for air conditioning and our own bed :)

:: A HOT TAKE ON CANNES ::

Well well well, the Yakobs have their first Cannes under their belt. And to be honest, we’re still processing our time there. Like any professional event, there were some highs, and there were some lows. We left with some feelings of excitement and felt some feelings of existential dread.

The highs:

Global friend binge. Getting to see friends, colleagues, and clients from across the US (California, Washington, New York, Atlanta), France, Buenos Aires, New Zealand, Canada, Australia. (Cannes: where it’s easier to see your NYC friends than in NYC.) We especially loved the community, company (and let’s be real: the a/c as well!) over at the Ladies Who Strategize apartment.
Getting Rick Rolled. Or rather Rick Astley rick rolling the whole crowd at YouTube’s 20th birthday party. His voice? Flawless. His Botox? Even tighter. Never gonna give that dermatologist a bad review.
Scratch off business cards. These were such a hit — a great conversation starter, a fun lil activity, and included prizes ranging from a voice note pep talk from me + Faris, my recipe for biscuits and gravy, 3 provocations on a topic of your choice, a free 30 minute strategy session, a copy of Paid Attention, and more.

The lows:

Capitalism, but make it tasteless. The overwhelming amount of capitalism and wealth on display. I (Rosie) kept saying that I could tell brands and media companies have money, but they don’t seem to have great taste or much strategy. So many brands spending so much money… to say so little. Rich, except in the ideas department.
Silence on global conflict. The only conversations we had about what was happening in the real world (ya know, a war between Russia and Ukraine, a genocide of Palestinians, the US bombing Iran) were the ones that we initiated. Our industry exists within culture, not in a vacuum absent of culture. A safe choice that serves few.
Hot yoga torture chamber. The lack of air conditioning!! It was about 90F *inside* the apartment where we stayed, with no a/c or fans. (We spent 100 euros on fans bc it truly felt like a sleep deprivation torture within a hot yoga studio. If you are in the CIA and devising new forms of torture, this works exceptionally well.)

Some of the other themes we noticed:

Everyone is a media company now. I mean it was crazy to see just how many companies are selling media. Door Dash, a company that doesn’t even operate in France? Media company. Chase Bank? Media company. United Airlines? Same. These companies, that we know for providing services, are leaning into selling media space. If you’ve got screens, you’ve got ad space. Next thing you know your fridge will be brokering programmatic deals for you.
Big titles, small ideas. People with big titles using are still using their stage time for bland corporate comms approved talks, with “wisdom” like ‘The big companies are screwed because it’s hard to turn big ships. The small companies can be bold and provocative.’ (I mean, true, but I don’t need a dude standing on stage telling me that.)
Activations for the ‘Gram, not for humans. Too many activations were made for photos and write ups more than for participation. Take Pinterest Beach for example. From afar, it looked like millennial sort of heaven with plenty of abstract shapes in bright colors. The activities available were, in theory, cool: You could get a custom dessert made for you, you could make your own risograph poster, you could even get a tattoo. BUT. To get your dessert, you needed to read through 5-7 different wheels that have choices on them. The next person didn’t get to go until the first person was all the way through. The queue was more than 30 minutes long and in direct sunlight. The poster table also had a queue longer than 30 minutes in the direct sunlight, and again, while the idea is cool in theory… there were six seats where you could make a poster, and people were taking their time. Why not have one activity and make it something that more people could participate in? Why not have shade?
Everyone hates the billable hour, no one’s killing it. The big agencies that are selling time are likely fucked, if not in the near future, then in the mid-to-slightly-further-off future. We heard a lot of “the model’s broken.” What we didn’t hear was, “Here’s what we’re doing instead.” Indie shops are trying stuff. Big shops are just watching. Quietly sweating.
Every AI is better when powered by humans. Look, we’re big believers in this anyway. It’s why we invested in Springboards.ai. But it was interesting to see just how many AI companies presented themselves as ‘partners’ and ‘powered by.’ Every AI company everywhere realizes that people might be frightened and they’ve all decided that the way to make people less frightened is by saying ‘hey, our technology isn’t here to replace you but to help you, and by the way we need you, and you are awesome.’

TL;DR

Cannes is a paradox. It’s creative people chasing clicks. It’s trying-to-be-bougie tech parties in 95°F heat with no shade. It’s brands screaming for relevance while ignoring reality. It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. It’s… capitalism in a crop top. (We asked ChatGPT for a Cannes joke and crop top capitalism it gave us 😅)

And we’ll probably be back next year. In an apartment with a/c.

:: THE LINKS ::

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH AWARDS

As usual there has been some kerfuffle over not very true case study (some made with AI) footage in various Cannes entries. Whilst the AI aspect might be new, the pearl clutching that followed seems increasingly hollow since this has been a problem for a long time - and it’s not a problem with the awards. Faris wrote this a decade ago, little has changed.
“The incentives are great and the award shows are a system. And as the financial sector has aptly demonstrated, when these two conditions are met, there will be people who hack the system for personal gain. Award shows have no way of checking everything entered actually ran so they rely on an honour system. This is similar to the way the Libor was monitored. Inevitably, someone will work out that it’s profitable to lie. Once someone does, it becomes a competitive disadvantage to only tell the truth..” [Strategy Magazine]

THE GOLDEN LINE

We were big fans of Jonathon Harris’ incredible work fusing data, the web and creativity when we lived in NYC. We even took part in a small way in one project, where he spent the night at our apartment. His new work is about finding flow. “What’s the plan? Here’s the plan! Strategic plan! Master plan! Backup plan! 10-year plan! Fail to plan, plan to fail! Our modern world is built on plans, and conventional wisdom tells us we’d be fools to try to do just about anything without them. But what gets lost when we become overly attached to our plans? What happens when life inserts itself with something unexpected? Do sacred messages come to us not only through beauty but also through barriers? As the old saying goes: Man plans, God laughs. The Golden Line offers a playful alternative to our modern obsession with planning.” (Sunlight.US)

BATHROOM MEDIA

An MIT dive on how media become ensconced in our most private of rooms. “Over time, bathroom culture expanded well beyond basic hygiene.

“As Alexander Kira notes in his classic study on bathroom design, activities including “smoking, eating, drinking, reading, watching television, listening to the radio, telephoning, playing, masturbating, and so forth” were treated as increasingly acceptable and normalized.”

”To a large extent, media technology use in bathrooms had long represented a luxury or privilege not afforded to many lower- or middle-class folks. But this wasn’t a sheer affordability matter; as with telephones in the early 1900s, people commonly rejected such devices even when they were available because they treated bathing as a sacred practice separate from everyday life’s hustle and bustle.”

:: THE TINY AWARDS ARE HERE ::

Some friends of Strands are trying to celebrate the bits of the web that *aren't* dead or dying - via The Tiny Awards now in their third year, which exist to celebrate the best of the small internet - non-commercial, frivolous, poetic, silly, anti-algorithmic and, basically, just fun and interesting. Here’s what they have to say:

We hope that they celebrate the wonderful, brilliant, human creativity which still sits at the heart of the best of the web, regardless of the rise of AI slop and the dominance of 3-4 social platforms. The Tiny Awards are designed to celebrate the creative, independent and homemade web, the stuff that people make because they just love making stuff, and that feels like quite a 2025 aspiration.

Nominations for the Awards opened last week and will run for a month; they will then be judged by a panel of online creatives and digital culture experts before being opened up to a public vote, with the winner set to be announced in early September.

This week, we’re writing to you from London, UK. We’re especially thankful for:

Leffe blonde, fans, whiskey with Rebecca & Matt, hummus and a catch up with another Matt, smashing geodes, splatter painting with our niblings, Clayverse studios who are letting me rent their kiln, and YOU!

If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know. You can hit reply to this email if you’ve got anything to say, and we’ll endeavor to get back to you promptly!

rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @farisyakob.com is on Bluesky sometimes while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

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Strands of Genius