This week I celebrated my 14 year anniversary to my amazing wife, Tiffany Miller. Together we have built an incredible family and diverse community of people in Chicago who support us unequivocally. From my tolerance bubble I was saddened to see this week the results of an earlier Gallup poll that shows a continual decline in support for same-sex marriage from it’s high of 71% in 2023 to 65%. Forget about acceptance for changing genders. Republicans are largely responsible for the decline, For example, in 2021 and 2022, 55% of Republicans said they favored legal same-sex marriage, but today, the figure is 37%.
This is disheartening for several reasons, the least of which is that people are less accepting of my entire existence. But more importantly we’re a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and outside of the “religious morality” question which conveniently can't ever be settled, as a civic and policy issue there is no reason for the lack of support.
Here’s why - the American Sociological Association in 2014 reviewed 10 years’ of scientific literature on child well-being in same-sex parented families in the US covering 40 credible and methodologically sound studies many of which drew on nationally representative data.
The authors concluded there was clear consensus in scientific literature that children raised by same-sex couples fared as well as children raised by opposite-sex couples. This applied for a range of well-being measures, including: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
So now that we know it's not about the children, it can only be one thing: fear of difference.
Fear of difference isn't a policy position, it's a default setting, and defaults are exactly what brands cave to when the political wind shifts. I've watched companies pull back from commitments they made in 2020 over the past year and call it "listening to the market." It's not listening. It's caving, and audiences can tell the difference even when the brand can't.
Fourteen years in, my marriage isn't an abstraction I need a study to defend, though I'm glad the study exists. It's Tiffany, our family, and a Chicago community that never needed a poll to know how to treat us. That's the actual rebuttal here. Not a statistic. A life, built in full view, that any honest person looking at it would call ordinary. The people voting against it have simply decided not to look.
MKE QUIETLY SOLVED A PROBLEM EVERY OTHER FESTIVAL CITY IS STILL FIGHTING
Every major festival city fights the same losing battle every year: build a temporary city for three days, then spend the other 362 tearing it down, defending the noise complaints, and absorbing the environmental cost of a footprint that didn't exist eleven months ago and won't exist in one. Milwaukee sidestepped that fight almost sixty years ago, and I didn't fully appreciate it until I stood on the grounds myself last week.
I was there for RÜFÜS DU SOL, the Australian trio wrapping their North American tour, and their first Milwaukee show in nearly a decade. They killed it. Musically tight, high energy, visuals that actually matched the music instead of just distracting from it. It's the first show since I saw Kraftwerk at Tribal Gathering back in 1997 that made me think "I would fly somewhere just to see this again." RÜFÜS DU SOL is officially on the must-see-whenever-they-tour list.
But the bigger revelation was the venue itself. Henry Maier Festival Park is 75 acres of permanent infrastructure sitting directly on Lake Michigan, and it's not built for one festival, it's built for all of them. Summerfest runs three weekends and roughly 600 artists across 12 stages there every summer, and the same grounds also host PrideFest, Polish Fest, German Fest, Irish Fest, Mexican Fiesta, and Black Arts Fest across the rest of the year. Compare that to Coachella or Outside Lands, where organizers build a festival city from scratch and dismantle it days later, every single year, forever.
That permanence changes the economics for brands, not just the environmental math. Briggs & Stratton has sponsored a stage there for 27 years and just extended it again. American Family Insurance's name is on the amphitheater itself, not a banner that comes down in October. When your activation lives on a permanent structure instead of a rented cornfield or polo field, you're not buying three days of visibility, you're buying compounding brand equity that a pop-up festival can't offer at any price.
If I'm a brand thinking about where to put festival sponsorship dollars, a market that rebuilds its footprint from zero every year is a worse bet than one that's already amortized the infrastructure and just keeps handing you the same stage back. Milwaukee figured that out in 1968. Most festival cities still haven't caught up.
BRANDS ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE BY IGNORING THE BIGGEST PLATFORM IN KID'S GAMING
Toca Boca is one of the most valuable digital environments in the world, and almost nobody outside the toy aisle is paying attention to it. That's the actual story here, not just that I got my daughter's purchase history restored when we upgraded her iPad, though that alone felt like a real parenting win after two years of racking close to $100 in purchases.
For anyone without kids: Toca Boca is a life-simulation game with 60 million monthly active users and over $1 billion in lifetime player spending, currently pulling in roughly $8 to $9 million a month. Little girls flock to it because it offers total freedom, no levels, no achievements, no penalties, just endless customization, exploration, and decoration. Parents love it for the opposite reason: it's completely closed. No friends, no chat, no strangers.
That combination, fandom for kids and safety for parents, is exactly the environment brands spend enormous budgets trying to manufacture and usually fail to. A handful have figured it out. KATSEYE's collaboration last year turned the girl group into playable in-game characters with their own avatars, music, and a style pack, and it became one of Toca Boca's most successful tie-ins to date. Adidas just launched a digital-only collaboration this August, bringing branded sportswear and sport-themed locations into the game specifically to keep tween girls engaged with sports as they age out of it in real life.
Those two partnerships prove the model works. What's surprising is how few other brands have shown up to compete for it. This is a closed platform with tens of millions of engaged kids and parents who've already opted into paying for it, and most of the industry is still treating it like a niche app instead of the retail-adjacent media channel it's already becoming.
ESPN F**KS AROUND AND FINDS OUT, PABLO TAKE YOUR VICTORY LAP
Pablo Torre was right, and the network that let him walk still hasn't found the words to admit it.
A year ago, Torre reported on his podcast that the LA Clippers had paid Kawhi Leonard through a fake sponsorship deal with a company called Aspiration, $28 million for essentially no work, to get around the salary cap. The NBA just confirmed all of it: the Clippers lost five first-round picks, Ballmer was fined $30 million and suspended a full year, and Torre won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting for breaking it. That's the largest cap penalty in the history of any American pro sports league.
Here's the part that should bother you more than the scandal itself. Three weeks before that ruling, ESPN, the network with the actual NBA broadcast rights and reporting relationships, published its own story saying the league had found "no evidence" of wrongdoing. The NBA didn't quietly disagree. Its spokesperson put out a statement saying ESPN's article "contains numerous and significant inaccuracies." That's about as close as a sports league gets to calling its own media partner a liar in public. ESPN stood by the story anyway. Then the actual ruling landed, and ESPN was wrong about nearly everything that mattered.
The irony writes itself: Torre used to work at ESPN. He left in 2023 for "creative differences," reportedly because he wanted more resources for investigative journalism and didn't get them. So the network that couldn't make room for the kind of reporting that just won a Pulitzer spent this summer laying off veteran reporters with decades of institutional knowledge between them, while finalizing a five-year, $100 million deal for Stephen A. Smith and negotiating something in the $60 million range for Pat McAfee. Two hot-take hosts are now worth more to ESPN than an entire investigative bench.
This isn't just a sports media story. It's what happens when an institution optimizes for engagement and access over journalistic integrity: it loses the ability to tell you the truth even when the truth is sitting right in front of it, because the people who could have caught it are gone, and the people who are left have a financial incentive not to rock the boat with the leagues that pay for access. Torre didn't have that problem. He wasn't inside the tent, so he didn't need permission to report what he found.
If you're thinking about your own brand's relationship with the people who report on you, or the people you've chosen to keep versus the people you've let go, this is worth sitting with. The rule-breakers rarely get caught. When one finally does, pay attention to who did the catching, and who had every reason to look the other way.
See you next month!
Listen to the Spotify playlist inspired by this blog post!
Schedule a meeting with The Big Idea Catalyst!