Happy Wednesday, y’all 👋. I hope you’re settling in for the long holiday weekend and enjoying the quiet before tomorrow’s festivities.

The focus of today’s deep dive is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a ritualized broadcast moment that has become one of the last reliable engines of mass attention. With new brands and global IP entering the lineup, the parade is stepping into a different role in a fragmented media landscape.

It’s a story about scale, cultural consistency, and why a century-old tradition now matters more than ever for brands navigating the modern attention economy.

Driving the news: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade returns tomorrow with a surge of new brand entrants and global IP, from Netflix to Lindt to Pop Mart’s Labubu, all preparing to compete for presence in one of the few cultural moments that still delivers sustained national attention. What began in 1924 as a Macy’s marketing event has grown into a national ritual that blends entertainment, commerce, and cultural signaling. The expansion continues this year as brands look for reliable visibility in a fractured media environment, a trend detailed by Kathryn Lundstrom for Adweek as marketers turn to the parade for guaranteed reach at a time when digital platforms can no longer promise it. Link

The stakes: The parade now operates as one of the last mass-attention engines in American culture. Its century-long history gives it a structural advantage: it is a ritualized, time-anchored broadcast moment that still draws multigenerational households into a single viewing experience. In an era defined by fragmented feeds and compressed attention spans, brands are gravitating toward events that can still deliver coherence. The parade offers exactly that.

Fast Company positions the parade as an event engineered for the modern attention economy. Its movement, novelty, and visual cadence mirror contemporary consumption patterns, giving it unusual staying power. For brands navigating rising acquisition costs and diminishing returns from digital advertising, the parade represents a rare combination of cultural weight and predictable scale.

The friction: As the parade becomes a more attractive platform for IP, execution grows more consequential. A balloon is no longer just a balloon. It is a stress test for whether an IP can translate into a national moment with emotional resonance rather than surface-level visibility. The stakes are higher because the surrounding culture has splintered; the parade’s coherence now carries more value than ever, which raises expectations for how characters show up.

Labubu illustrates this shift. For Pop Mart, tomorrow is a wager on its ability to graduate a global fandom into American mass culture. For Netflix, the parade offers a chance to extend its cultural footprint into a format it hasn’t historically occupied, using familiar characters to translate streaming-era IP into a shared national moment.

What this unlocks: The parade’s renewed relevance signals a wider move back toward event-driven storytelling. Brands are recalibrating around moments that create shared cultural context as digital platforms lose their ability to deliver it. Expect more companies to invest in large-scale activations that blend physical presence with digital amplification, using the parade as a reference point for converting IRL attention into durable cultural relevance.

The bigger picture: The parade has not fundamentally changed. The media environment around it has. As streaming, social platforms, and fragmented entertainment habits dilute shared experience, a century-old broadcast ritual gains new strategic value. Its consistency is the asset.

Bottom line: The Macy’s Parade has become a proving ground for modern IP and a refuge for brands seeking reliable cultural attention.

For everything else, see below 👇:

Entertainment

1. Can Disney Animation Reclaim Its Magic? — (Brooks Barnes for NYT) — Link

2. Grok and Company Write the Next Sopranos: A Story of WALL-Es in the Writers Room — (Rosecrans Baldwin for Vanity Fair) — Link

3. Why Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery Sale Is Growing More Complicated — (Eriq Gardner for Puck) — Link

Consumers

4. Retail Earnings Show Shoppers’ Resilience, but Some Stores Struggle — (Emmet Linder for NYT) — Link

5. Abercrombie & Fitch's shares are up 37% thanks to Hollister's success — (Sarah Fielding for Fast Company) — Link

AI

6. It Really Is Possible to Spend Too Much on AI — (Asa Fitch for Wall Street Journal) — Link

7. Welcome to the Slopverse — (Ian Bogost for The Atlantic) — Link

Culture

8. Brainrot is officially a scientific phenomenon — (Sam Gutelle for Tubefilter) — Link

9. Miu Miu Literary Club Heads to Shanghai—and Offers a Deeper Take on Fashion’s Book Obsession — (Liam Hess for Vogue) — Link

Media

10. Why Are So Many Celebrities Joining Substack? — (Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay for Slate Magazine) — Link

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