Justin Bieber wants more ways to get in your ears
Welcome to Wednesday, futurists.
New York City has been buzzing for weeks. Maybe it’s summer’s effect, maybe it’s the Knicks making the NBA Playoffs. But there’s a special type of energy that comes during NY Tech Week, when the finance, tech, commerce, and advertising worlds take over the city to connect, learn, pitch, and show how they’re driving the future of our industry. And this year, we got to be a part of it.
We kicked off the week at the PayPal offices, where Phillip sat down with Dr. Mark Grether, SVP and GM of PayPal Ads. The conversation set the interpretive frame for everything that followed, and tackled a growing tension in commerce’s great AI debate. Mark noted:
“The storefront itself is no longer sitting on the merchant website — it is actually moving to the LLMs.”
Our own data shows that 77% of consumers still want to click through to the brand site to complete a purchase. They want to immerse themselves in a branded environment so they can explore and validate on their own terms. Grether didn't flinch: “Look at what happened with publishers,” he said. “They were a few years ahead of the curve, in unfortunate terms.”
PayPal Ads has a distinct point of view on this shift because of its transaction graph, a composite picture of consumer behavior built across 30M merchants, 400M consumers, Venmo's social layer, and Honey's browse data. The main difference from other ad platforms is that PayPal sees actual purchases, not just signals. And from that map, PayPal Ads can model what your shoppers will buy next, making ad placements and even creative far more impactful.
A Spoken Moment
The conversation with Grether speaks to a much larger reality, in which every brand interaction is contextual for the consumer, and “every opportunity…becomes a purchasable experience.”
But is there a world where an AI-powered, conversational service enters the branded eCommerce environment? We got to see the concept in context at the ElevenLabs pop-up in SoHo.
When we entered the futuristic merch store, we were greeted by a barista bot who dominated the entryway and brewed lattes based on shoppers’ verbal cues. One wall featured a line of digital screens, which we used to “chat” to an AI service agent who helped us sort through inventory, verify sizes, add items to our carts, and complete our purchases for in-store pick-up. (We even got to haggle with her, though she got a little sassy when we tried to pay $5 for an $80 crewneck.) We even used a secret code to get free tote bags.
The ElevenLabs store was a conceptual model in context. A proof of concept letting everyday consumers test, tinker, and play. It was an actualization of ‘Back to the Future 2,’ when video streams of Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan spoke the menu from TV screens to diners. The tech is very real, but the fluidity of the tech’s conversations with consumers is very much a work in progress.
Later in the week, we visited two Nike stores a mile apart to see the brand’s World Cup strategy up close and personal, and we immediately felt the difference. The House of Innovation on Fifth Avenue is built for the world, tourists who flock to the store to see how the global brand shows up in the city that never sleeps. The SoHo store is built for the neighborhood. Featuring tighter curation, deeper cultural fluency, and different levers for product customization, it’s the spot that’s purely New York, for New Yorkers. Nike has been doing this type of audience segmentation in physical space for years, and its people are what make the creative vision and the local connection feel real.
The storefront isn't going away, but it is proliferating into every surface that has an audience, whether it’s an LLM, a social feed, or a local flagship. PayPal built the measurement layer, ElevenLabs built the interface, and Nike built the culture-led spaces.
Commerce is always culture, but culture isn’t confined to the URL.
Justin Bieber is teasing a new lineup of speakers and over-ear headphones on his Instagram. They’re the newest addition to his SKYLRK brand ecosystem, which currently includes the viral slides, phone case, and athleisure. The alien-adjacent auditory collection is still a big secret. No specs, prices, or release dates were shared. But with the smallest speaker models featuring a built-in lanyard loop for carrying, it’s clear that SKYLRK is embracing sound as a form of visual expression. As our friend Nick Susi says, “music hardware is a fashion accessory.”
Heartbreak Feels Good in a Place Like This.
And it’s feeling oh-so good for all the cinema CEOs. Domestic box office sales surpassed $1B in May, an achievement not reached since 2019. (It’s also the first time it has ever been done without a Marvel title in the mix.) AMC reported that it had its best-attended May globally, while Cinemark said it was its most successful month domestically. Theaters have been jammed with a diverse roster of hits, from ‘Mandalorian & Grogu,’ to ‘Michael,’ ‘Devil Wears Prada 2,’ and ‘Backrooms.’
The momentum may very well continue as the summer season hype cycle continues, thanks to ‘Toy Story 5,’ ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey,’ and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day.”
A Meta Brick-and-Mortar Moment.
Best Buy is bringing Meta Lab @ Best Buy, a new store-in-store experience featuring Meta AI Glasses, to 50 locations this summer. The 900-square-foot experiential spaces will allow customers to test the full Meta product lineup through interactive demos and displays, smart mirrors, personalized fittings, and in-depth service moments with dedicated sales specialists. Meta has been investing in its own brick-and-mortar fleet, including a new flagship in Manhattan, but this partnership will undoubtedly get the company’s hardware in front of a more diverse clientele, especially since Best Buy shared that half of its shoppers want to see the glasses in person before making a purchase.
Pound the Pavement.
Japanese sportswear company Asics is spinning off its Onitsuka Tiger brand into a wholly owned subsidiary, OT Group, effective January 1. The move was made to help streamline decision-making for the fast-growing label, which has driven four consecutive years of record profits for Asics thanks to its retro-inspired sneaks. In 2025, Onitsuka Tiger sales surged 43%, and the brand plans to expand into new flagship stores across Los Angeles, Tokyo, Shanghai, Milan, and Seoul over the next year.
Culinary Citizenship.
Europeans are venturing to the US for the World Cup, and they’re getting the full experience. One area where we’re apparently winning? Food. Instagram and X are flooded with real-time documentation of foreigners’ culinary escapades synonymous with the American experience, from Ding Dongs to ranch dressing and late-night hash browns from Waffle House (which we can confirm is a revelation). This is the cultural indoctrination of American citizenship that no one talks about, but everyone enjoys.
Quench Your Nuts.
MVP Tom Brady is joining the bev game with a new organic canned coconut water. Good Nut is the byproduct of Brady’s partnership with Gopuff, which will also help get the cans of original, chocolate, and sparkling coconut water to doors. Gopuff has been the launchpad for several celebrity CPG launches, including Brady’s GOAT Gummies and Selena Gomez’s co-branded Serendipity ice cream bars. Good Nut came to fruition after the platform saw coconut water sales surge 115% year over year.
Whose Land Is It Anyway?
After seeing mounting pushback from citizens, ‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary is paring back on his 40,000-acre data center project in Utah. Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams stated that the revised proposal for the 9 GW data center will undergo full permitting and an environmental review process, particularly to alleviate residents’ concerns about land, water, and air quality. O’Leary claimed that the concerns were “exaggerated” and is now latching onto the narrative that China is behind the negative sentiment geared towards similar projects. But folks must be on to something because Google plans to invest in local water infrastructure and replenish more water than it uses by 2030.
Big Bot Glow Up.
Novi analyzed 10.7M AI citations and found that only five sources drove about a third of beauty recommendations. Reddit (no surprise), Who What Wear, Wikipedia, Sephora, and Allure are the top sources ChatGPT references most frequently when answering beauty product recommendation prompts. But the top-five ranking varies slightly by category. For example, Ulta was cited more often for skincare inquiries, while Fragrantica was cited more often for fragrance inquiries. When we surveyed 1,000 US consumers about when and how they used AI to shop during the holiday season, beauty and personal care ranked among the top three categories for LLM consultation.
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