Happy Tuesday.

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Polymarket: Deceptive Advertising - A Wall Street Journal investigation found Polymarket, the UFC's official prediction-market partner, paid mostly college-age creators to film bogus winning bets on look-alike copies of its site, then had a clipper network blast the clips at U.S. users it's been banned from serving since 2022. The numbers expose the con: across the flagged videos, creators celebrated roughly $900K in "winnings" on positions that would have actually lost more than $166K, all while hiding the paid relationship that disclosure rules require.

Instagram TV - Instagram is pushing its TV app onto Samsung sets in the US (joining Fire TV and Google TV to cover most connected TVs) and layering on co-watching features like interest-based channels, casting Reels from your phone, and Stories on the big screen. The quieter shift worth watching: it's testing a dedicated spot for horizontal video, a notable reversal for a platform that trained everyone to shoot vertical, and a new lean-back surface for creators and brands to reach audiences.

Kevin Durant is CeraVe's New "Face of Legs" - CeraVe built a three-week, social-first campaign around a years-old viral jab at Kevin Durant's dry legs, crowning him the "new face of legs" with a hero video, OOH, and point-of-sale tie-ins. The payoff is the part worth noting: a 43% sales lift alongside 4.1 billion PR impressions and 83 million organic views, proof that comedy-led, native-seeming content can drive revenue (not just reach) when the brand leans into the joke instead of sanitizing it.

By Colin Dougherty

Most agencies are drowning in fifteen-minute calls, and the creative work is quietly dying in the gaps between them.

Jamil Bhuya (Co-founder & Head of Growth, Otherhalf Studio) runs his design agency on a rule that sounds insane until you hear him out: after onboarding, they don’t take client calls at all. No status meetings, no live feedback sessions, no project managers. Everything runs asynchronously.

Presentations go out as a thirty- to sixty-minute Loom. Feedback gets left as comments directly in the Figma file. One Slack channel holds it together.

The reason is creative physics. As Jamil puts it, “You can only be creative so many hours a day.” Nothing burns those hours faster than context-switching across ten projects and sitting on calls. Getting cut off mid-presentation and debating a color in real time is how you wreck a designer’s flow. Async protects the one thing the agency actually sells.

The product isn’t a product, he says, it’s the delivery, and if he burns out his designers, he doesn’t have an agency.

Jamil also argues it’s a sharper business model.

Most agencies spend 30 to 40% of their hourly rate on project management and internal comms. Strip the calls and that time goes back into the work: tighter timelines, and a client team that can rewatch the Loom across time zones before sending one consolidated round of notes.

The pitch is blunt. You’re paying for delivery, not for project management.
Look at your own calendar: is it a wall of fifteen-minute blocks keeping you from the work?

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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team