There’s a song going viral on TikTok right now about Puerto Rico. The kind of thing that gets lodged in your head on a Tuesday morning and refuses to leave. Thousands of creators have stitched it (on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, a Stitch is a collaborative feature that lets you clip up to five seconds of another user’s video and integrate it directly into your own) shared it, danced to it. Luke Combs posted it (don’t know who that is? Neither did I. He’s playing Wembley Stadium!). Jennifer Love Hewitt (I know what you did last summer etc) posted it.

 

Nobody made it, a prompt did.

 

The creator, @saxboybilly18, is transparent about it, it’s right there in his bio, but who’s checking bios? They’re just listening, sharing, feeling something. Which is the part that should make us stop and think. Not the deception (there isn’t any), but the implication. AI has now been trained well enough that the average listener genuinely cannot tell the difference between a human-made track and a generated one. And if that’s true today, what does the music landscape look like in three years? In five? When the cost of creating a decent song collapses to thirty seconds and a text prompt, what happens then?

 

On this, a dear friend recently sent me an AI re-edit of a song I wrote. I’m still so confused by it. My words, my chords, my melody, all being re-played. Arguably, it’s ‘better’ in an impressive playing (?!) way. But man, what would Neil Young say? It’s incredible to be able to do this but leaves me so underwhelmed. It’s almost like something new in terms of emotion. Actually, I think it’s similar to a fast-food type of satisfaction; instantly a ‘hit’ leading to regret soon after.

 

The Pub You Couldn’t Get Into (Yet)

At the time of writing, it appears the UK are going to put bans in place for social media use for under 16s. As a father of three boys (only one now affected) I vacillate in my opinions on this strategy; yes it’s good to be off screens vs. surely this regulation pushes the problem underground and the underground is murky, especially online (so I’m led to believe).

 

Assuming Sir Keir gets this through, then there is a generation about to grow up without algorithmic culture as their primary social infrastructure in their early formative years. No TikTok. No Instagram. No feed telling them what to like, who to follow, what sounds like music this week — and increasingly, no way of knowing whether what they’re hearing was made by a person or generated by a model. And if you think that means they’ll just sit quietly in their bedrooms, I’d gently suggest you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be fifteen and told you can’t go somewhere.

 

For my generation, the pub wasn’t just a place to drink. It was the place you couldn’t get into yet — which made it the most interesting place in the world. The Half Moon in Herne Hill. The Camden Falcon. The Windmill in Clapham. The Railway in Clapham. The Venue in New Cross. Sticky floors, questionable sound systems, and bands you’d never heard of who were either brilliant or absolutely terrible but either way you were there, in a room, with people, and something was happening. And you weren’t meant to be allowed.

 

The restriction created the desire. The exclusion created a culture. Now apply that to a generation being told the algorithm isn’t for them yet — and growing up in a world where AI is quietly hollowing out the authenticity of everything on those platforms anyway. Where do they go? The pubs are now probably student housing!

 

Do they go somewhere physical? Somewhere real? Somewhere that feels like it belongs to them rather than to a platform’s engagement metrics or a model’s training data? And when they get there, will they find each other? Isn’t this the way every genuinely new cultural movement has ever started?

 

When Making Things Becomes the Radical Act

When did you last feel genuinely excited about a piece of technology you bought? The way you felt the first time you held an iPod and understood immediately that everything had changed. Or the first time Spotify worked and your entire record collection was just… there.

 

We’re not in that moment anymore, the technology has plateaued into utility. Phones are incrementally better, streaming services are incrementally broader, apps are incrementally smarter. None of it feels like the future arriving.

 

And then there’s AI — which does feel like a leap, genuinely, but a deeply unsettling one. When a prompt can write your copy, generate your music, design your visuals, and script your video in the time it takes to make a coffee, the act of craft starts to feel either redundant or more precious than it has ever been.

 

More people are playing guitar than at any point in decades. Vinyl has and continues to have a revival. Independent record shops are reopening. People are making things with their hands again, not because it’s more efficient (it absolutely isn’t) but because it’s more real. Because the app that teaches you guitar via gamified micro-lessons is clever, but it’s not the same as actually playing in a room with other people. And because in a world where AI can generate a Puerto Rico song in seconds, a human playing something imperfectly and beautifully in front of you is just about the most radical thing imaginable.

 

The maker economy in music isn’t a niche trend. It’s a counter-disruption. And it has implications that reach well beyond music; indeed, see the huge and growing chunk of young adults who are now with binoculars as they scrutinise all things with wings.

 

What This Means If You’re a Brand

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone in media and planning. Because if the next disruption is physical, generational, and human, if culture starts being made in rooms again rather than on feeds, then the map for reaching young audiences needs tearing up.

 

The brands that will get this wrong are the ones that keep optimising for the platforms that are about to lose their grip on a generation. The ones that are so dazzled by what AI can do — the personalisation, the scale, the speed — that they forget to ask what it can’t do. The ones that let an algorithm, or a model, tell them where the audience is, rather than having someone in the room with enough experience and genuine cultural knowledge to say — actually, I think something is shifting here.

 

And that’s the thing about disruption that the technology industry consistently underestimates. It isn’t just a media problem or a music problem; it’s a judgement problem. Every major disruption I’ve watched from inside this industry — and there have been a few — has created winners and losers not based on who had the best tools, but on who had the people with the wisdom to know how to use them. AI doesn’t change that equation. If anything, it makes human judgement more valuable, not less, because when everyone has access to the same models and the same outputs, the differentiator is the person deciding what to do with them.

 

The AI song going viral on TikTok is a perfect example. It isn’t a story about technology getting clever. It’s a story about what happens when the tools outpace the understanding. When nobody in the room asks; but what does this do to the culture we’re trying to be part of?Meanwhile, the TV still beams (Plus ca change). The radio wasn’t killed by the video, in fact it has new tools too (DAX, podcasts etc) and out of home is still utterly relevant (especially in the gym).

 

The Disruption Nobody’s Planning For

AI is the disruption everyone’s talking about. The think pieces, the conference panels, the pitch decks, all of it centres on what the models can do and how fast they’re moving. But the disruption nobody’s planning for is the human reaction to AI. And if history tells us anything, that reaction will be bigger, stranger, and ultimately more important than the thing that triggered it.

 

It’s going to look, in many ways, like the past. The grotty venue. The band nobody’s heard of yet. But it won’t be the past, it’ll be something new built on the same human instinct that’s driven every genuine cultural movement, the need to be in a room with other people and feel something real.

 

For brands, for agencies, for anyone whose job is to connect a message with an audience, the question isn’t whether this shift is coming. It’s whether you have the people around you who can see it, navigate it, and make sure your brand is part of what emerges — rather than optimised perfectly for a world that’s already changing.

 

Credit: Alex Pilkington, Director of Growth

This week see’s the launch of field doctor. on TV. It’s always an exciting time when we bring a new advertiser to the big screen and we are positive the results will be fantastic, aided by the fabulous creative produced by our friends and partners Fable Studios.

 

In a cluttered world of home delivery preprepared meals and food boxes (some healthy and some not so) its brilliant to have been working with a team that truly differentiates, with purpose at the heart of the offering.

 

Dietitian-designed frozen ready meals focused on functional nutrition and specific health needs. Offering over 60 meals targeted at specific health goals, including gut health, Coeliac-safe Gluten-Free, Low FODMAP, Heart Health, Menopause, Diabetes support, and Weight Management this is definitely not another copy cat product. Oh and they taste great!

 

Huge thanks to Marion Queffurus Alex Brooks Martin Dewey for trusting us with your money.

 

Well done James Budden Rob Holder Yas Haghighat for getting this one up and running.

 

Credit: Stu Smith, MD

We’re really proud to see Mostly Media feature in Campaign UK‘s Best Places to Work 2026.  This is an independent survey carried out across both adland and marketing departments, and making the list means a lot to us all.

 

Now I’m obviously biased, but we have a fabulous team, who make coming to work each day a pleasure (think youth club, and yes there are Flumps and Jelly Snakes aplenty).

 

The work the team deliver for our clients never fails to impress me (and hopefully them) which must mean we are getting something right.

 

Thanks to all at Mostly and so happy you like what we are building together.

 

Stu Smith, MD

We’re very proud to present the first ever TV ad from our client, The Independent Pharmacy.

 

It’s a great day when you see your client’s ad, bucking the trend of the usual corporate messaging, come to life.  This one is really worth a watch.

 

Kudos to our production partners at JonesMillbank for creating such a superb commercial.

 

Well done James Thompson & James Budden for taking this one from ‘can we?’ to getting it in front of millions of eyeballs.

 

Most importantly thanks to Abby Carter, Scott McDougall & Andy Boysan for trusting us with your money, we can’t wait to see the results.

 

Enjoy folks – its really very good! The Independent Pharmacy TV ad

 

Huge congratulations to our very own Jonny who ran the recent Bath Half Marathon raising funds for South West Children’s Hospice.  He not only finished in 2:08 but also achieved a 19-minute PB!

 

If you’d still like to contribute, you can do here

 

There’s also a great video from the charity that shows exactly where the support goes here

 

Well done Jonny!

With the imminent appointment of former Google President for Europe, Matt Brittin as Director-General of the BBC, it poses the question of whether the broadcaster is no longer automatically the natural heir to the broadcaster’s throne and a change of direction for Auntie.

 

Auntie Beeb used to be the slightly disapproving relative telling you to sit up straight, watch the news, read a book and eat your greens; now she’s turned up knowing Google, talking about platforms, data and discoverability!

 

In fact, I guess the question is, after giving the top seats to people fluent in platform power (also see the hire of Rak Patel at Channel 4, having come from Spotify) can these huge tech businessmen still persuade the public that “TV for all” means something more than scaled content and efficient delivery?

 

The irony is that after all this talk of transformation, the answer may still be painfully old-fashioned! MAKE BETTER STUFF. Not more stuff, not thinner stuff, not algorithmic content engineered into relevance, but work with enough originality, authority and cultural force to cut through whatever device it lands on.

 

Great content will always trump streamlining processes.

 

Link to the BBC article here

 

Credit: Alex Pilkington, Director of Growth