Media expert Antony Young rounds up media news from beyond Aotearoa in a regular column for StopPress.
This week:
- Brands are realising the power of employee generated content.
- BMW owners are fuming over in-car ads.
- UK ASA bans Jaded ad for cigarette use.
- Reality TV becomes a favoured format for brands.
- UK and US adults use nearly 11 hours of media a day.
- LinkedIn is now targeting the slop its own AI helped create.
Your staff are your next content influencers
Five years ago, Sherwin-Williams fired Tony Piloseno for the paint-mixing TikToks he filmed at work, citing “gross misconduct”, including “wasting properties.” He’d pitched the company on using TikTok to reach younger buyers first. They fired him anyway.
Now, Gap Inc. is opening its creator programme to employees across its brands that include Old Navy, Gap and Banana Republic, letting staff earn commission on affiliate links they share on social. Gap’s move is a loose, bolt-on version; Starbucks’ Green Apron Creators is the formalised one.
“The attitude has completely flipped,” says influencer marketing agency Linqia chief strategy officer Keith Bendes. Sprout Social’s June report found 40% of consumers frequently discover products through employee-generated content, 61% among Gen Z.
Brands are taking notice and have started monetising them. The poster child is Kaeden “Oblivion” Rowland, whose ASMR-style videos filmed at Staples pulled nearly 600,000 followers and 17.6 million likes. She still works there. Staples CMO Bob Sherwin says employee generated content is “authentic, not a manufactured brand moment.” This is the whole point, and also what makes it affordable.
BMW is running in-car ads and owners are fuming
As a media buyer I love this. However, BMW owners are furious, with some having paid up to $160,000 for the car only to have their ultimate driving experience turn into a not so welcome viewing experience.
In December 2023, BMW’s Stephan Durach called the car “your last private space” and said he couldn’t see selling the screen to play a commercial. That apparently didn’t stop BMW pushing a Spider-Man ad to its infotainment screens in around 70 markets. The banner greets you at ignition “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW!” and tapping it triggers a full-screen animation across the centre display while the ambient lighting blinks and changes colour in sync.
The tie-up with Sony-Marvel sees the iX3 and 5 Series appear in the film, so the ad promotes a movie that promotes the cars. Clever, except the backlash is drowning the cleverness. It closes on Spidey dragging the BMW logo into an end card for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
Ad banned due to displaying cigarette
The object at the centre of the ban is barely there, a slim cigarette, visible ash at the tip, held by a model in fashionable clothing standing by a scooter and a body of water. The UK ASA said that this portrayed smoking as appealing and irresponsibly glamorised it, a breach of the CAP Code’s social responsibility rule.
The ad which ran in Jaded London’s email newsletter was called out and banned. Jaded is a brand worn by Beyoncé and Kylie Jenner, is stocked in Selfridges and Urban Outfitters, and targets young buyers.
Jaded argued it wasn’t even clear the object was a cigarette and not the focus versus the clothing. The ASA wasn’t moved. The ad landed as the UK phases in a smoking ban for anyone born after 2008.
Brands are the new reality TV
While unscripted TV premieres are down a third since 2022 and Queer Eye and Jersey Shore both got cancelled in 2026, the format isn’t dead, it appears to have migrated into the brand world.
In fact, it’s become a powerful strategy to grow brands. Sour Strips hit $24 million in annual revenue in five years, then sold to Hershey. The sour candy brand attributed its rise to its show. Founder Maxx Chewning filmed himself meeting food scientists, opening the first test bags, packing boxes, crowdsourcing flavours from his audience in real time. People followed to see what happened next.
Graza did it with olive oil, then parlayed the following into potato chips. Chamberlain Coffee and Feastables prove it scales past scrappy startups. The logic underneath: content is now infinite and AI makes it possible to produce it cheaply. What’s hard to fake is progress and vulnerability. Founder-led brands have the edge here; the protagonist is obvious and the risk is real. Business magazine Fast Company says the most valuable asset a brand can own is an unfolding story people choose to keep watching.
Media use fragments as UK and US adults approach 11 hours a day
People spend nearly 11 hours are day on media, according to a study of UK and US adults by data and analytics firm Ampere.
How is that possible? It counts the smartphone in your hand while the TV’s on. Consumers now touch an average of 11.5 media platforms a week. Streaming leads at 1 hour 57 minutes while social media runs 1 hour 46 minutes and YouTube pulls 1 hour 35 minutes.
The breakdown by age tells us what we instinctively know: Gen Alpha games most and hits 13.6 platforms a week, Gen Z lives on social and music, Gen X and boomers hold the line on streaming, linear TV and live sport. Some interesting breakdowns by device: 33% of YouTube users put it on as background, 28% of Netflix viewers watch on a phone.
Ampere’s Sam Nursall suggests understanding the moment now matters as much as understanding the audience, with the study concluding that streaming gets used for relaxation and immersion, social media used mostly to kill boredom, and YouTube used for discovery and mood-lifting.
Nursall says advertisers need to consider different frames of mind on different platforms such as, the value of a relaxed viewer at 9pm and a bored scroller at lunch.
LinkedIn’s AI wrote the slop it’s now fighting
LinkedIn spent two years pushing AI into the compose box, and is now walking it back because the feed filled with the output. The social media platform just added a “seems like AI slop” button so users can flag posts that read as machine-written which had in the past showcased its own “enhance your post” feature.
This follows a study released last month that reported 41% of LinkedIn’s longform content posted had used AI to write or edit, the highest of any other platform. Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan calls slop “a top priority,” which is corporate for “our engagement metrics are suffering.” The button isn’t just moderation, it’s data collection, feeding signal into new classifiers that will demote suspected slop in recommendations beyond your network.
LinkedIn says it’s already blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts daily. It’ll also privately warn posters when their content reads as inauthentic, a nudge to write more like themselves. The backdrop is an industry-wide correction: Substack now flags AI-written newsletters via Pangram, which just raised $9m to detect AI content, and Digg shut its Reddit rival in March after bots overran it. Cloudflare says bot traffic has now overtaken human traffic on the web.
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