Hi there,

Welcome back to another week of Brand Matters. Hope you had an amazing Thanksgiving yesterday - whether you were with family or taking the excuse for a cheeky long weekend.

This week, we're examining why iShowSpeed—a 20-year-old chaos streamer with 45M subscribers is the ultimate stress test for modern branding, and why the death of the "Polish Premium" might be the best thing that ever happened to us.

In today's issue:

• How Speed's unfiltered approach proves the golden era of content creation is here

• Why brands are shifting from renting attention to building shows

• What the death of polish means for your 2026 content strategy

• Ad of the Week: Uber's emotional holiday campaign that stays out of its own way

• Brand Watch: NKORA's rebrand proves slowness can be a competitive advantage

Let's get started.

How iShowSpeed Rewrote The Rules

A kid backflips off a cheap gaming chair. He barks at the camera. Pikachu fireworks nearly set his bedroom ablaze.

I don't know how iShowSpeed landed on my algorithm, but there he was—and my first instinct was to scroll past. To a strategist trained in the precise art of brand equity, his content feels like an affront: chaotic "brain rot" for a generation that can't focus longer than six seconds. I dismissed it as noise.

But dismissing things because they don't fit your definition of quality is dangerous. When I finally stopped rolling my eyes, the numbers hit me. Darren Watkins Jr. isn't just some kid getting lucky with the algorithm. He's a walking stress test for the traditional media model.

The maths is brutal. Speed generates more engagement per dollar spent than virtually any traditional media property, and he does it by breaking every rule we've spent decades perfecting. That efficiency doesn't just challenge the old model—it exposes how much of our "best practices" are actually just expensive security theater.

Here are some interesting data from his Twitch and Youtube Channels about his global tours from 2022 to 2025.

• 46.1 million YouTube subscribers

• Over 5 billion hours watched

• Record of over 1,000,000 viewers on a live stream

His 2024 World Cup content outperformed entire network sports packages. If you haven't heard of him, you're not alone—most executives I talk to draw a blank. Meanwhile, their kids' entire friend group can quote his latest stream.

While we sit in boardrooms obsessing over brand safety and the perfect shade of blue for a call-to-action button, Speed has built an empire on the one thing most corporate brands are terrified of: uninsurable reality.

Authenticity You Can't Edit

The real weapon isn't the chaos—it's that the chaos is uneditable.

In a world drowning in deepfakes and AI slop, livestreaming offers the last remaining proof of authenticity: you can't fake live. When Speed screams at a horror game or melts down over a FIFA loss, that's not "content"—it's evidence that a real human is actually experiencing something in real time.

He didn't earn mainstream credibility by cleaning up his act. He forced the mainstream to meet him where he was. Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't sit down with internet clowns—except Speed got the meeting. Prime Hydration doesn't hand out signature flavors to nobodies—except Speed got his own SKU on shelves. When he raced Noah Lyles, the "joke" evaporated the second he ran a 4.49-second 40-yard dash. Performance doesn't care about your production budget.

Speed didn't bridge the gap between "digital creator" and "mainstream star." He proved the gap was always imaginary—a construct we invented to protect the old gatekeepers.

The Death of the "Polish Premium"

The fundamental disconnect comes down to control. Corporate content gets manufactured through rounds of approval, legal checks, and sanitation until it's perfectly polished. And usually, perfectly dead.

Speed figured out early that in a digital ecosystem drowning in competence, "professionalism" is actually a liability. When everyone else uses 4K cameras to sell a curated lifestyle, high-definition starts to look like a lie. Grainy footage of a kid melting down over a video game feels undeniably real.

He wins because he offers what Netflix, NBC, and Nike often forget: The audience doesn't care about the container; they care about the contents.

@kickclipper_

IShowSpeed reacts to Cristiano Ronaldo Bicycle Kick goal in 2025 👀🔥 #ishowspeed #fyp

The Universal Language of Chaos

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of Speed's rise is his ability to bypass language barriers entirely. Traditional media spends millions on localization—dubbing, subtitling, cultural consulting—to export content. Speed just shows up.

He has inadvertently revived the logic of the silent film era: Physical comedy requires no translation.

A backflip is a backflip in Ohio and in Oslo. A scream of terror at a horror game hits the same in Mumbai as it does in Manchester. By relying on high-octane physicality—barking, dancing, falling, screaming—he creates a product that's instantly exportable. His viral hits, like the song "Shake" or his World Cup anthem, didn't climb the charts because of lyrical complexity. They worked because they were carriers for his infectious, high-energy persona.

When he travels, he doesn't engage in "tourism"; he engages in radical cultural immersion. He doesn't observe culture through a bus window. He wears the local jersey, tries to speak the language (often failing hilariously), and throws himself into the local mosh pit.

In doing so, he solves the "Global Reach" problem that plagues major networks. He makes the audience feel seen not by pandering to them, but by letting them roast him. Whether he's in Brazil, Portugal, or Japan, the dynamic stays the same: he's the chaotic vessel, and the culture itself becomes the co-star.

The Immersion Strategy: No VIP Section

This global strategy is deliberate and dangerous. Speed doesn't do press tours or controlled meet-and-greets. He lands in a city, turns on his camera, and walks straight into the crowd.

In India, thousands swarmed him in the streets. In Southeast Asia, police had to intervene as mobs shut down entire blocks. He treats every international trip like a controlled detonation—he knows the chaos is coming, and he walks directly into it because the chaos is the content.

That Athens moment with Giannis Antetokounmpo crystallizes everything. Here's an NBA champion, in his home country, sitting next to a teenager whose job description is "professional screamer"—and the crowd chose Speed. Not because he's more talented, but because he's built a parasocial bond so intense that fans across the globe feel like they're in on the joke. He doesn't need a translator; he creates a shared reality that transcends words.

@clipternet__

The moment Giannis realized Speed is more famous that him 😳🚨 #ishowspeed #giannis #clips #twitch #viral #streamer #giannisantetokounmpo #fyp #trending

The Clip Industrial Complex

Speed doesn't distribute content—he fragments it.

He engineers his streams for moments, not consistency. When he screams at a jump scare or breaks his setup, that's the product. Within minutes, those 15-second fragments are clipped, captioned, and distributed across TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts by thousands of fans functioning as an unpaid marketing army.

Most brands spend millions trying to engineer virality; Speed generates it as a byproduct of being himself. He's created a content model where the audience does the distribution work for free because the clips themselves are shareable currency.

The Liberation: Why Imperfect Content Is Your Competitive Advantage

For fifty years, the barrier to entry was "Polish."

To compete, you needed the sharpest image, the cleanest edit, the most controlled message. The "Polish Premium" was a tax every brand paid just to play the game.

iShowSpeed proves that tax has been abolished.

This isn't a diagnosis of doom for brands—it's the ultimate permission slip. Speed's success proves we're living in a Golden Era for content. Audiences have stopped judging you on your lighting rig, color grading, or budget. They're judging you solely on your ability to be interesting.

This is a liberation. We can stop obsessing over pixel-perfect aesthetics that kill speed and drain budgets. The "formats" available to us are infinite. You don't need a TV spot; you need a moment. You don't need a studio; you need a point of view.

The 'Polish Premium' is dead, and that's the best thing that could have happened to us. Speed's competitive advantage isn't his budget or his team—it's his willingness to look stupid, fail publicly, and trust that audiences crave reality over perfection. The only thing stopping you from reaching the world isn't your budget anymore. It's your willingness to let go of control.

Stop polishing. Start playing.

Ad of the Week: Uber’s Tear Jerker

I'm an absolute sucker for a tear-jerker. The longer the form, the better. Give me two minutes to ugly-cry over a beautifully shot montage and I'm yours.

Uber's first-ever global Christmas campaign, "Close," is exactly that—and it works because the brand stays out of its own way.

A young woman takes an Uber to see her father after a strained previous encounter. As familiar streets roll by, the emotional weight of the trip becomes clear—turning a routine airport pickup into a quiet journey toward repair. James Blake's haunting cover of Landslide does the heavy lifting. The car is just the vessel.

Most brands over-explain. Uber does the opposite. The ride isn't the solution—it's just there, doing its job so quietly that the real story can happen. Two minutes of a daughter working up the nerve to knock on a door. No app demo. No pricing. Just emotion.

That restraint is what gets you.

Brand Watch: NKORA

When Nancy and Emile Mehmet opened NKORA in London in 2015, they created a neighborhood coffee shop unlike anything they'd seen before. Ten years later, seven locations in, the identity needed a refresh.

Monopo could have gone slick and minimal. Instead, they built the entire thing around slowing down.

The rebrand repositions takeaway coffee not as a rushed pit stop but as part of a daily walk—a quiet ritual that helps people notice more. The execution matches: Miles, a hand-carved linocut mascot taking a walk with coffee in hand. Each frame carved on lino sheets, printed, digitized, animated.

Each location got its own lino-printed illustration, abstracting a real walking route from the area—nearby parks, markets, rivers. The brand didn't scale by getting generic. It scaled by getting specific.

In a category obsessed with speed, NKORA bet on slowness. The imperfections are the point.

Lento Vibes

A bit of random inspo from around the grounds:

• The New Speed of Marketing: Adweek explores how brands are collapsing timelines—running real-time creative cycles and treating marketing as a living, breathing system. 👉 Read the feature

• Media Trends, AI, and the Grateful Vodcast Era: A new Adweek deep dive on how AI tools, vodcast creators, and platforms like OnBackground are redefining modern media storytelling. 👉 See the trends

• Black Friday Gets a Gen Z Boost: Discount-hungry shoppers are turning to AI for deal discovery, while Gen Z bucks the trend—flocking back to stores for the IRL experience. 👉 Read the breakdown

• ESPN Bets on Alt-Casts: ESPN expands its NBA and NFL “alt-cast” lineup, blending live commentary, creator energy, and fan-first experiences to reimagine sports viewing. 👉 See the play

• Twitch Streams Through Recovery: Arizona State RB Cam Skattebo streams his rehab journey on Twitch, turning recovery into community with daily check-ins and fan engagement. 👉 Watch the stream