And like any fine, upstanding cinephile, I checked out The Mandalorian & Grogu this past weekend at my local independent cinema (check out The Sun Theatre in Yarravile) and while I had a genuinely good time whiling away two hours of a cool autumn Saturday, I left thinking something I almost never think: that would have been better as a season of TV.

I don’t usually say that. I usually say the opposite.

Streaming has spent the better part of a decade taking what should be tight, propulsive hundred-minute films and stretching them into three-hundred-minute slogs, individual episodes existing only to service the next one, never bothering to arrive anywhere on their own terms. The bloat is real and it is boring and I am tired of it.

But The Mandalorian & Grogu pulled off the reverse. It’s essentially three episodes of television with twenty percent more budget and a theatrical release date. And sitting there in the dark watching it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Disney had made a deliberate choice to blur the line between platforms. And even if the Star Wars IP is powerful enough to survive it (Baby Yoda transcends format), most things don’t.

Platform Is Not Just Distribution

Here’s the counterpoint I kept returning to, driving home from the Sun Theatre with my popcorn regrets: The Pitt.

If you haven’t watched it, fix that immediately. It’s a medical drama set entirely across a single fifteen-hour emergency department shift, told in real time across fifteen episodes, with one hour of story per episode of television. It is one of the most formally precise pieces of storytelling in recent memory, and it works entirely because of the platform it lives on. The episodic structure isn’t a constraint. It’s the entire creative engine. Each hour ends with just enough resolution to feel earned and just enough tension to demand the next. The format and the story are inseparable.

Could it work as a film? Absolutely not. A two-hour cut would gut everything that makes it remarkable. A streaming dump of all fifteen episodes at once would destroy the rhythm that makes each hour land, not to mention the ability to discuss with friends and coworkers about that one scene (you know the one.). The Pitt is what it is because television, real episodic television with the breathing room to develop character across time, is exactly the right home for it.

This is what respecting your platform looks like. And it is increasingly rare.

TV and film exist as distinct formats for a reason. Hitchcock more or less invented the concept of scheduled showtimes with Psycho because movies demand your full attention from the first frame. They represent a complete contract with the audience, beginning to end, no exits. Television was built on the opposite premise. Episodic, accessible, something you could drop into at any point and broadly follow. They are different creative relationships with the audience, built on different expectations, different commitments, different rewards.

Hollywood spent decades understanding that distinction. Streaming spent a decade dismantling it. And The Mandalorian & Grogu, for all its charm, is a symptom of an industry that has stopped asking what a story needs and started asking what the release calendar demands.

Which got me thinking about brands. Because brands are making exactly the same mistake, with none of the safety net.

The Great Flattening

The dramatic rise of digital advertising over the past thirty years has produced what I’d call the great flattening of creative output. Integrated marketing communications, always a legitimate discipline, quietly became shorthand for the same creative rolling out across every touchpoint with almost no consideration for what actually made sense on each platform.

Banner ads crammed with oddly cropped imagery. TV spots repurposed wholesale for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok without anyone stopping to ask whether the format, the audience, or the context made any sense. The cheapest possible pathway, dressed up as efficiency.

Nobody really noticed because reach numbers stayed up and the deck still looked fine. But something was quietly being lost. The same thing The Mandalorian lost when it traded its natural home for a cinema screen: the sense that this thing belongs here, was made for here, understands where it is.

The Channel Is the Creative Brief

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the difference between platforms isn’t a production constraint to be minimised. It’s a creative opportunity being left on the table every single time someone exports the same thirty-second cut across six different channels and calls it a campaign.

TikTok is not Instagram. Instagram is not LinkedIn. A pre-roll on YouTube is not a television commercial. These platforms have distinct audiences, distinct behaviours, distinct relationships between the viewer and the content. The brands that understand this aren’t just performing better on individual channels, they’re building something the flattened approach can never buy. Genuine relevance. The sense that this brand actually belongs here, in this space, speaking to me specifically.

The Pitt understood this instinctively. Every creative decision, from the real-time structure, episode length, and the deliberate absence of a binge option at launch, was made in service of what television uniquely allows. The result is something that couldn’t exist anywhere else, which is exactly why it cuts through everything else.

The Mandalorian & Grogu will do fine at the box office. Star Wars has enough accumulated cultural capital to absorb a format identity crisis. But the film is a lesser thing for it, diminished by the blurring of what it is and where it belongs. You can feel it watching it. Something slightly off, like a song played in the wrong key.

Brands don’t have that accumulated capital to spend. They don’t have Baby Yoda. Every flattened campaign, every repurposed asset, every one-size-fits-all creative decision is a small withdrawal from an account that may be thinner than they think.

The Pitt couldn’t be a movie. The Mandalorian & Grogu shouldn’t have been one. And your brand campaign that started life as a TV spot has no business on TikTok without a complete rethink.

The channel is the creative brief. This is the way. Start treating it like one.

The post My Hobby is Watching 450+ Movies A Year. All I’ve Learnt Is How To Stop Worrying And Love The Channel Differences appeared first on The Faith Agency | Full Service Marketing Agency in Melbourne.

I guess that’s why I connect with Angine De Poitrine so much. Their music sounds like my brain feels.

That’s maybe not fair to the microtonal math party rockers, whose songs are in fact stunningly complex and well crafted, not random and scatterbrained as my thoughts are. But ever since their KEXP set launched them into a level of virality not seen since, I’d wager, OK GO, they’ve proven to be one of the strongest rebukes to generative AI imaginable. Two French Canadian dudes in papier-mâché heads, body paint and polka dotted jumpsuits, while guitarist Khn picks up his custom made dual necked guitar-bass and lays down track after looping track of the most intricate riffing you’ve ever heard, all while drummer Klek navigates time signatures between 7/8, 10/4 and good old 4/4.

There is simply no way AI could come up with anything even remotely close to this. The weirdness is too earned, too specific, too deeply human. And yet. That’s precisely where it gets interesting.

Enthusiasm or Outrage… The Algorithm Doesn’t Care.

Many in the r/indieheads community have voiced growing frustration at how relentlessly they’ve had the band pushed at them. Not just the KEXP set on repeat, but vinyl releases, obscure French TV interviews, a recent profile in The Guardian. Some have gone as far as labelling it an astroturfing campaign.

Here’s the thing though: it almost doesn’t matter whether it is.

Whether this is a deliberate manipulation campaign or simply the algorithm doing what algorithms do, the effect on the consumer is identical. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t seek it out. It arrived anyway, again and again, until your resistance either broke into curiosity or hardened into resentment. The same algorithm (whether it’s Meta, Google or Reddit) pushes content designed for engagement, and engagement doesn’t discriminate between enthusiasm and outrage. It just wants you to keep scrolling.

I would argue that a platform like TikTok changed things permanently. Search engines, where you retained at least the illusion of agency, have given way to recommendation engines, where the content finds you. You are no longer the navigator. You are the destination.

And the nefarious gooey middle of all of this? You have far less control over what you engage with than you think you do.

There’s something else being lost here too, and it’s subtler but just as important. The joy of discovery.

Finding a band used to feel like an act of personal archaeology. You dug, you found, you evangelised. It was yours. That feeling of ownership, of having genuinely stumbled onto something, was a core part of what made music fandom meaningful. You didn’t just like the band. You found them. And that distinction mattered enormously when you were the one pressing play on a burned CD for a friend at 11pm on a Tuesday.

Now when something lands in your feed and you love it, there’s a nagging voice underneath the enthusiasm. Did I find this, or was I pointed here? Did Angine De Poitrine choose me, or did someone pay for that introduction? Even if the music is genuinely extraordinary, even if your emotional response is completely real, the provenance of the discovery feels compromised. And that erodes something that can’t easily be rebuilt.

For brands, this matters more than almost anything else. Word of mouth, the holy grail of marketing, is built entirely on that feeling of personal discovery and the very human desire to share it. If consumers can no longer fully trust that feeling, if every recommendation arrives with an asterisk, the entire referral economy gets murkier. The most powerful marketing tool ever invented quietly starts to rust.

The Cost of Doing Rock and Roll

Take Geese, the indie darlings of 2025, and another buzzy zeitgeist act that makes this millennial hipster very happy. Their music is genuinely extraordinary. And yet they found themselves at the centre of a significant controversy when a digital marketing firm called Chaotic Good was caught bragging to Billboard about flooding social media with bot accounts, artificial comments and manufactured engagement on behalf of their clients (with Geese listed prominently among them). The band hasn’t confirmed or denied it. Chaotic Good quietly scrubbed their website. And the internet, predictably, lost its mind.

But here’s what struck me most about the whole episode: the fans were angrier at the journalists who reported it than at the firm that did it. Because the music was real. The emotional connection was real. And no amount of bot traffic could fully account for that.

Which is exactly the point. Sit with that for a moment. Because if the artists you admire, the ones making genuinely original, emotionally resonant work, can have their rise entangled with artificial digital voices without anyone being entirely sure what was real and what wasn’t, what does that tell you about every other voice in your feed? The ones selling you insurance, athleisure, mortgage refinancing, energy drinks?

The manipulation isn’t coming. It’s already here. It’s already worked on you. Multiple times today, probably.

Reality Can Hijack the Algorithm

Businesses need to understand this. The old rulebook, the one built on brand principles, consistent messaging, integrated marketing comms pushed through established channels, isn’t wrong exactly. But it’s increasingly insufficient.

Consumers aren’t just divided in their attention. They’re divided in their trust. An increasingly dubious audience is filtering harder than ever for content that feels real, that speaks to something true, that doesn’t smell like it was optimised in a boardroom. Angine De Poitrine feels real. So too Geese. The art is genuine even when the distribution isn’t.

And that’s the insight brands need to sit with: reality can hijack the algorithm. A genuinely interesting, genuinely human piece of content (a story, a product, a goddamn point of view) can expand the aperture of your reach far beyond any traditional media plan, precisely because it gives the recommendation engine something worth recommending.

But you can’t fake the thing that makes it work. The algorithm harvests authenticity. It doesn’t manufacture it.

So find the real. Present the real. Build something worth pointing at.

Maybe just without the papier-mâché and the chest pains (go and Google what “Angine De Poitrine” actually translates to…).

The post Algorithmic De Poitrine. And Why Brands Are Next. appeared first on The Faith Agency | Full Service Marketing Agency in Melbourne.

It’s been genuinely revolutionary. Which is exactly why what I’m about to say stings a little. Because alongside the weight loss, I’ve had a front-row seat to watching Claude get measurably dumber in real time.

From First Date to Long-Term Relationship

Claude has been my primary AI since early 2025. Before that, sure, I’d dabbled. Nervous first dates with various platforms that never quite gave me what I was looking for. Smart enough, sure. But not connected. Not the kind of tool that makes you feel like you’re working with something rather than just querying a more expensive search engine.

Claude was different. Funny, sharp, proactive. It asked the right follow-up questions. It pushed back when I was wrong. It held context in a way that made complex, ongoing projects feel genuinely manageable. We’ve been together this whole time, with very little straying, outside of the occasional need for visual creative work (and I say this with affection: Claude, you’re just not a visual guy).

In that time, I’ve watched it grow too. New models dropped at an impressive rate. Claude Code arrived and genuinely changed how I approach technical problem-solving. So too Cowork, and Claude Design’s already added another dimension. The trajectory felt like exactly what you want from a platform you’ve committed to: continuous, meaningful improvement.

And then, somewhere along the way, something shifted.

The Regression Is Real

It started subtly. Responses that felt a touch more generic. A little less initiative. And then it became harder to ignore.

The output limits hit differently when you’re mid-flow. I’m sitting down for lunch, trying to log macros on the fly, and I’m suddenly staring at a rate limit message. Fine in theory. Deeply annoying in practice when food decisions don’t pause for API windows.

But the output throttling I can live with. What I find harder to accept is the attitude. Ask Claude to go do the research on a technical problem, the kind of task where you need genuine initiative, not a polished summary of your own prompt, and increasingly, you get the AI equivalent of a shrug. A framework. A suggestion that you might want to look into some things. Or just blatant lies. It has started feeling like the AI equivalent of a junior employee who’s clocked on but checked out.

Of course though, this isn’t an accident.

The Pattern Is Familiar

There’s a term for what’s happening, coined by writer Cory Doctorow: enshittification. The mechanism is depressingly consistent across 21st century tech. A platform arrives. It’s genuinely good, not just in a functionality way but a changing the way things are done way. It earns your trust, your habit, your data and your dependency. And then, once the moat is dug deep enough, the slow decline begins.

Netflix is the textbook case. The early product was a revelation: unlimited content, no ads, one flat fee. Then came password sharing crackdowns, ad-supported tiers, price hikes and a content library that increasingly feels like it’s optimised for the algorithm rather than the audience. Uber spent years subsidising rides below cost to establish dominance, then steadily raised prices once the taxi industry had been hollowed out. Facebook went from a clean social tool to an engagement-maximising attention machine wrapped in privacy scandals (very happy to have dropped my personal dependence on that one).

The pattern is always the same: subsidise adoption, establish dependency, then extract value.

 AI is not immune to this logic. In fact, given the extraordinary infrastructure costs involved in running these models, it is especially susceptible to it.

What’s Actually Happening

The cost of serving large language models at scale is enormous. The compute, the energy, the infrastructure, none of it scales linearly with users, and the economics of the current pricing models were always, at some level, introductory. The goal was adoption. Dependency. Making Claude (or ChatGPT, or Gemini) as indispensable to your workflow as your email client.

That phase is largely complete. So now comes the squeeze. 

The squeeze doesn’t have to look like a price increase… not yet, anyway. It can look like output limits. It can look like slightly less initiative baked into the model’s default behaviour. It can look like responses that are technically correct but conspicuously light on the kind of proactive thinking that made the tool feel genuinely intelligent in the first place. Death by a thousand small regressions, none of which individually justifies cancelling your subscription.

And this is where businesses who’ve made significant bets on AI need to pay attention.

The Big End of Town Has More to Lose

For personal users or small businesses (basically, me), the stakes are annoying but manageable. I adapt my prompting, I work around the limits, and my macros get logged eventually.

For organisations that have restructured workflows, reduced headcount, or built entire product lines around AI capabilities, the calculus is very different. The efficiency gains were real, but so is the growing realisation that you don’t own any of it. You’ve built on someone else’s infrastructure, priced at someone else’s discretion, with capabilities that can shift between model updates without notice or explanation.

The long-term reality of AI, I suspect, is not the wholesale replacement of human departments but something more nuanced: AI as a powerful force multiplier for human work, with costs that will eventually reflect its actual value rather than its introductory pricing. The question for any business that’s leaned into AI is whether they’ve built genuine resilience into that dependency, or whether they’ve just handed a new vendor enormous leverage.

Act Accordingly

None of this means Claude isn’t still remarkable. It is. The good days still remind me why I made it my primary tool in the first place. And honestly, 16 kilograms down and a complete rethink of how I manage complex projects, this isn’t us breaking up, I’m just talking about how things have changed.

But Claude is on notice. I’m watching the trajectory. I’m noting the regressions. I’m getting better at prompting not because the tool has improved, but because I’m compensating for where it’s gotten worse.

That’s the tell. When you start working harder to get the same output, enshittification has already begun.

The question is what you do about it. For mine, it’s the three Ds:

•     Diversify your platform knowledge, because you need to know who’s got their heads above the pack
•     Document what the good version of the tool looked like, so you notice when it quietly becomes something else.
•     Discuss with others what their experiences are, as you never know where the next best thing might come from.

And maybe, just maybe, keep counting your own calories. Some things are better off staying in your own hands.

The post The Enshittification of AI Has Begun. Act Accordingly. appeared first on The Faith Agency | Full Service Marketing Agency in Melbourne.