SUNDAY SCARIES: Reasons to Believe!

Last Sunday’s edition was about the end of the world, so it’s only fair that this week is about evening the score and reminding ourselves of why we should be optimistic. In an old fashioned advertising brief, we would call them “reasons to believe”, or RTBs; the product truths or brand attributes that make it worthy of the advertising you’re making and the overly elaborate decoration the campaign will be.

This week the brief is optimism for creativity and humanity, and the RTBs wrote themselves.

1. This Weird Show

For the 6 people in America who haven’t seen it, Widow’s Bay is a hilarious horror comedy on Apple TV about a cursed island town off the coast of New England. Last week, it won fourteen Emmy awards, more than any first-season comedy in history, and it swept every comedy category.

Matthew Rhys managed to win two lead acting awards in one night, one for this and one for The Beast in Me, (something else that nobody had ever done). Hiro Murai became the first Asian director to win for a comedy. And Katie Dippold, who created it, walked up and said, “Thank you, Apple, for letting us take this crazy, creative swing. They truly just let us do this weird show.”

It’s a beautiful vindication for ideas that usually don’t see the light of day. But in this case, a company with the budget to literally make anything, in an industry that’s terrified to make anything without a superhero in it, bought the strange thing and then had the discipline to leave it alone.

(Earlier that weekend, for anybody keeping score, The Odyssey became the biggest movie in Universal’s 114 year history, three hours of R-rated Homer shot on IMAX cameras.)

Reason to believe: The company with the most money was still willing to take a risk on a weird idea.

(Sources: Apple Newsroom, September 14, 2026; ABC News, September 14, 2026; TheWrap, September 13, 2026)

2. Actively Declined

Nine days ago Campaign Magazine got hold of an internal document from WPP Production, the in-house production arm of the world’s largest holding company, telling staff to “actively convince” clients to route all their production through WPP and, if a client insisted on the traditional triple bid, to supply all three bids from inside the building. In the memo, the stated goal was “positioning WPP Production as the default, trusted partner,” which probably seemed like a benign sentence to whoever wrote it and a terrible one to have read back to them.

What happened next is the good part: trade bodies objected, as trade bodies do, but the independent production companies, ones WPP could buy with the change in its couch, started fighting back publicly, simply by saying what everyone who’s worked in advertising already knows. Kelly Bayett of Love Song said WPP was deceiving its clients. Piero Frescobaldi of Unit9 said that “when agencies trade on execution for profits, they trade away their client’s best interests.” Dan Veal of IMA said what anyone who has sat through a rigged triple bid already knows, that if you remove the competition “…the work becomes narrower and worse.”

On Thursday, nine days after the leak, WPP took the document down, while claiming that any suggestion WPP was attempting to undermine fair competition is fundamentally wrong. But when you’re busted for stacking the deck, it’s hard to claim innocence and expect the rest of the players to believe you.

Reason to believe: The little production shops and indies shamed the biggest holding company on earth into changing its tune.

(Sources: Campaign US, September 9, 11 and 18, 2026)

3. Just Women in Sports

Novig is a sports-only prediction market that launched last month, and clearly spent a large amount of its seed money by launching with a campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, herself a partner and equity holder, “wearing” a football and not much else, across every screen and billboard it could buy. The concept was “just sports” and, if there was a criminal court for lazy ideas, the hacks behind this one should be in prison.

Thirteen months ago, the last time Sweeney’s body was used to start conversations, the discourse was a series of 50-something men on CNBC, debating her body followed by a eugenics argument that made everybody involved dumber.

This time the reply came from women who actually play sports, and it came as powerfully as could be: with footage. Gracie Kramer, a gymnast, posted a video of herself competing with the caption “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing but this is what a woman in sports looks like.” Olympic sprinter Bree Masters posted her own: “Respectfully Sydney Sweeney… This is what women in sports really look like.” Ariarne Titmus called the ad “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft,” and a water polo player and two runners did the same thing the same way, and the whole takedown took about a day.

It was funny, it was fast, and the joke landed where it belonged, on the ad. To her credit, Sweeney was prepared for the backlash and answered with a run of Insta Stories with Serena, Rousey, Sue Bird and Rapinoe, all of whom have posed nude for ESPN Mag’s “Body Issue”. But still, the female athletes’ reply was the one that ultimately made for the better headlines.

Reason to believe: The smartest and sharpest response to the most misogynistic campaign this year came from five women with their own highlight reels.

(Sources: ESPN, September 14, 2026; Newsweek, September 16, 2026; NBC, September 16, 2026; Salon, September 16, 2026)

4. The Back to School Issue

September is traditionally when Vogue publishes the issue that weighs more than a carry-on suitcase and doubles as a doorstop for the winter. This year JCPenney published one too. “The Other September Issue” puts five public-school teachers from San Marcos, Texas on the cover, dressed and photographed like they belong there, because they do.

JCPenney’s sales are down, five percent last year and four more in the first quarter, and it would have been easy and forgivable to spend this money on an influencer roster and a media plan. It spent it on teachers and a magazine instead, and the magazine is good.

This all comes under the guidance of newish CMO Marisa Thalberg, and the work, made by Mischief, the most reliably brilliant strategic contrarians in the world, is much more than a stunt. Teachers are more than ten percent of JCPenney’s customers, so the store set the models aside and put those actual customers on the cover to make them into the stars they deserve to be. And yes, all eight looks are shoppable and all eight together cost less than $3,000.

Reason to believe: JCPenney had every excuse to play it safe but had enough faith in an idea to bet on their customers.

(Sources: Business Wire, September 16, 2026; Forbes, September 16, 2026; Adweek, September 18, 2026; Brand Innovators, September 2026)

This Week’s Red Thread: Our Right to Optimism

At The Nuance Collective, we operate on something I call audacious optimism, which is the belief that the best work is still ahead of us and that the only way to find out is to move forward and try to make it.

It’s not cheerfulness or a positive outlook.

It is the confident, working assumption that the most amazing experiences and achievements will come if we create the right conditions. To drive us, we look at these four events last week as reasons to believe; because we know that sometimes even the biggest companies will greenlight the weirdest idea or put a school teacher on a magazine cover.

Admittedly, that ethos has had a tough year, and the end of the world is only part of it.

The doom comes from every direction at once now: companies announcing the next fifteen thousand job cuts as if they’re mentioning changes to a holiday schedule, economists forecasting the recession that is always next quarter, feeds that decide what we look at before we’ve had our say, influencer bots who’ve rented out their voices, and a rising tide of AI slop that makes everything look like everything else.

All of that is supposed to provoke a type of defeatism, especially in creative people; if the ideas are going to be chosen for us now, by an algorithm or a spreadsheet or a model. So we should just shrug and admit there’s no point having taste, or taking the swing, or saying no, or showing up as yourself. It sounds like realism, but it’s just well-reasoned resignation, and it is a fallacy.

No one is going gently into any good nights. Every reason to believe above was somebody fighting for creativity, and fighting with it, against those things and winning.

Our ability to create, to express, and to be who we are is alive and well. And we have every right to remain as optimistic as we audaciously believe we should be.

— NB