Jo Malone Games, TikTok Chases Wallets

Welcome to The Uncertain Times.

There’s something inherently youthful about this week’s stories. Jo Malone shows up inside Fortnite, Clarks plays with 90s nostalgia and TikTok proves it’s nowhere near finished exploring what a social platform can be, as the app looks into letting users send and receive money between each other. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola urges us to ‘Taste Every Second’ of the upcoming Premier League.

This edition:

Two big brands get playful to appeal to younger audiences: Jo Malone surprises by showing up on Fortnite, Central Cee and Coca-Cola turn Premier League fandom into a soundtrack
YouTube starts tracking views from the moment they start
TikTok explores a ‘peer-to-peer’ payment feature in its US app, letting users send and receive money through DMs
Clarks’ Back-to-School campaign is bottled 90s joy

What does it take to appeal to younger audiences these days? Ask Jo Malone and Coca-Cola.

Two very different brands shared one instinct: if you want Gen Z’s attention, show up inside the culture they’re already in.

Jo Malone London X Fortnite

Jo Malone London took the more surprising route. The 127-year-old fragrance house partnered with creator platform Chartis for its first-ever gaming activation, building a custom Fortnite Creative island to launch its new Sea Salt & Bergamot cologne, a coastal-themed world players can explore, running through 24 August.

The question for many was could luxury and Fortnite coexist?

It was a step into unfamiliar territory: Fortnite’s audience is roughly 73% Gen Z, and brand president Jo Dancey was blunt about the commercial logic behind the move.

“Gaming is a major cultural space for younger generations – a place to connect, create and discover. Gaming platforms also help us connect with consumers who may not encounter the brand through traditional social media channels, making this both a creative first and an important part of our strategy to reach new audiences where they are.”

The campaign was backed by livestreams and social content on TikTok and Instagram to further capture Gen Z and male shoppers.

Jo Malone x Fortnite

Final sales figures to date are not yet available for Jo Malone’s £125 per bottle Sea Salt & Bergamot cologne. But what’s undeniable is that the luxury fragrance became an unexpected viral talking point in the beauty and gaming industries.

Coca-Cola X Central Cee

Coca-Cola Zero Sugar took a different way in. Its new ’Taste Every Second’ campaign paired rapper Central Cee with an original track, ‘The Team’, built to mirror the emotional arc of a full Premier League season, released under Central Cee’s own label alongside Coca-Cola’s in-house Real Thing Records.

The pairing works because Central Cee already sits at the intersection Coca-Cola wants to occupy: music, fashion and football. These aren’t separate interests for younger fans, they’re one feed.

A two-minute season-arc film and QR-coded retail packs extend the campaign into something fans can collect and replay.

Coca-Cola X Central Cee

The StrategiQ takeaway: neither brand is trying to look youthful by shouting louder. They’re borrowing credibility from spaces Gen Z already trusts – a game world, a song, a creator’s own label – rather than building a campaign and hoping the right audience finds it.

YouTube’s views just got a lot bigger, and a lot less meaningful

From 24 August 2026, YouTube will count a view from the moment a video starts playing, from the very first frame, with no minimum watch time, across long-form videos, Shorts, podcasts and livestreams. It brings the whole platform in line with the standard YouTube already applied to Shorts back in 2025, and with how TikTok and Instagram have always counted views.

YouTube’s own framing is that creators want “to eliminate this metric confusion and accurately understand their true exposure.”

In practice, someone who clicks a video and leaves half a second later now counts exactly the same as someone who watches the whole thing. The old, stricter standard doesn’t disappear, it just moves to a separate metric called ‘Engaged views’.

The timing isn’t a coincidence. Days before the change was announced, Bloomberg reported that YouTube is offering some of its top creators multi-million-dollar deals to keep their content exclusive to the platform, directly countering Netflix’s growing push to sign away YouTube talent like Alan Chikin Chow and Nick DiGiovanni.

Creators who take Netflix deals risk losing marketing support and brand-deal access from YouTube in return. Inflating the headline view number, right as YouTube is trying to make its own platform look as valuable as possible to the creators it’s fighting to keep, gives every channel a bigger number to point to in exactly the moment YouTube needs creators feeling like staying is the better deal.

The StrategiQ takeaway: we’re going to treat public view counts as a reach metric from here on – and keep an eye on Engaged views more closely. We’d also suggest marking 24th August as a break in any trend line you’re tracking. A bigger number on 25th August doesn’t necessarily mean anything changed about how well a video performed.

TikTok’s play for wallets

TikTok appears to be building a feature to let users send each other money in direct messages, running on TikTok Pay (Bloomberg reports that hidden code exists in TikTok’s US iOS app).

TikTok already operates the payment system in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand for TikTok Shop purchases, so it’s not an implausible roll-out, despite TikTok saying the feature is not being tested and may never ship.

The code suggests a ‘tap to accept’ mechanic with an expiry window, push notifications on payment status and the option to attach a message to a transfer, essentially recreating the Venmo experience without leaving the app.

It’s not an isolated experiment either. TikTok has already applied to Brazil’s central bank for two financial licences, one to hold and move user funds directly, another to lend or connect borrowers with lenders, alongside a growing TikTok Shop and hotel booking features. And X launched its own X Money feature to Premium subscribers in July 2026, after four years securing the money-transmitter licences required to operate in the US. TikTok would need to go through the same regulatory process.

What makes TikTok’s version potentially different is context: it already knows the video that started the conversation, the creator who inspired a purchase and the people involved in sharing it. That’s context no dedicated payment app has.

The StrategiQ takeaway: platforms keep finding new ways to close the gap between ‘seeing something’ and ‘acting on it’, and payments are the most direct version of that yet. If this launches, brands gain another storefront, on TikTok, that comes with an entirely new data source to inform strategy.

Clarks bets on nostalgia while parents hold out for deals

It’s happening against a backdrop of shoppers pressing pause. Price is the deciding factor for most back-to-school shoppers this year – 74% cite it as a top factor in their purchase decisions, and 64% are waiting specifically for sales or discounts (YouGov). NRF data backs it up: shoppers in early August had completed just 44% of their shopping list on average, holding out patiently for the right deal rather than buying on sight.

Clarks’ answer was ‘Jump into Clarks’, a campaign built around a reworked version of Kris Kross’s 90s hit ‘Jump’, running across TV, social, owned digital channels and in-store, and starring young actors cast from Somerset, Clarks’ home county, for another year running.

Underneath the nostalgia sits a sharp value play: school shoes from £25, and a three-pairs-for-the-price-of-two promotion.

For UK and EU president Joe Ulloa, the timing isn’t incidental. “It’s a season with huge heritage and nostalgia, as generations of families continue the tradition of buying school shoes from us,” he said, while positioning this year’s push as Clarks’ “strongest-ever value proposition.”

Ulloa was equally candid about what success looks like for the campaign. “One of the most important measures is how many families we support during the Back to School period and whether we’re helping parents feel confident they’ve found the right shoes for their children,” he said.

Clarks’ ‘Jump into Clarks’ campaign

The StrategiQ takeaway: in a season where parents are holding off, waiting for the right deal before committing, nostalgia alone won’t close the sale, but paired with a sharp offer, it gives a hesitant shopper more reason to buy.

The StrategiQ takeaway

there’s always room for play, as Jo Malone and Fortnite show, aka the activation no one saw coming. And there’s always room for evolution, as TikTok’s step towards transactions shows. But your brand doesn’t have to evolve to win. Sometimes the smartest move is doing exactly what you’ve always done, only better, as Clarks proves by leaning harder into 200 years of heritage.

Evolve if it serves your brand. Stay the course if that’s what serves it more. Either way, it has to be a choice, not a reflex.

IT’S ALWAYS STRATEGY.

Sources

Jo Malone Goes Gaming, Clarks ‘Jumps’ Into 90s Nostalgia