Hey Cowboys,

Happy Tuesday! Hope you had a great weekend. We’re breaking down some hot news today.

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LIVE NOW — come hang out on X or YouTube.

Today’s lineup 👇 and stories.

TJ Bongiorno is guest hosting the day's stories. Oren John on which ad formats are actually pulling attention right now, and which ones quietly stopped working. Conor Begley takes the interview seat on why he left clean-beauty data for organic lagers, after exits at Tribe Dynamics and Nest Fragrances.

Sydney Sweeney’s nearly nude “Just Sports” campaign for prediction-market app Novig, where she’s an equity holder and strategic partner, set off a fresh backlash from women’s athletes who say the ad sexualizes women in sport. Balls, a hockey stick, and a hoop do the PG-13 work. The internet did the rest.

The spot ran on TV and social last week. Sweeney pitches Novig as sports-only betting/trading, framed against platforms that also run contracts on politics, wars, and death. Barstool blasted the cut as “Just sports”; the post cleared millions of views.

Female athletes answered with their own highlight reels. Gymnast Gracie Kramer’s Instagram, “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like”, crossed a million likes. Olympians including Ariarne Titmus, Felicity Palmateer, and sprinter Amy Hunt called it a kick in the face / Carl’s Jr.–era objectification. Boxer Skye Nicolson and others piled on with training clips tagged as real sport.

Sweeney hasn’t done a formal apology. She posted ESPN Body Issue covers of naked athletes to Stories, and said on Novig’s site the idea was fun, confident, and about cutting noise to put focus on sports.

It’s her second hated ad cycle in a year after the American Eagle denim blowup.

A betting app bought maximum attention with maximum skin. Athletes bought the reply: if this is “just sports,” they’re posting what sports actually looks like, and the controversy is doing as much distribution as the media buy.

Mixue: How a 45-Cent Ice Cream Cone Built the World's Biggest Fast-Food Chain

Forty-five cents buys a soft-serve cone at Mixue, and 47,000 locations later that cone has passed McDonald's and Starbucks on store count. The Wall Street Journal compares the playbook to Dollar General: tiny, cheap, franchised stores flooding lower-income areas, roughly 90% of them in China.

Anthropic Tells Investors It's Profitable, With One Big Asterisk

Anthropic told select investors its adjusted operating income will be positive for a second straight quarter, per the FT, a claim no frontier lab has made. The asterisk: AOI strips out model development, and on net income the company is still billions down.

Teens Now Trust AI Shopping Recommendations Over Friends and Parents

Nearly a third of teens trust an AI product recommendation over a friend's, and 23% would take it over their parents', per a Mastercard survey of 26,000 parents and teens out Tuesday. Mastercard's forecast is one in ten people routinely shopping and paying through an agent by 2030.

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Ecomm Cowboy is the go-to live show for ecommerce operators, breaking down the latest DTC, retail, and AI news while interviewing the founders and executives building today's fastest-growing brands.

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Ecomm Cowboy Team