In this week’s Our Take: fake sites aren’t even pretending anymore, activists poison AI, the armpits with the most views in the world, and Reddit loves you.
FAKE MY LIFE
South Korea has a new digital phenomenon. “Dopamine sites” simulate real-life experiences without any of the reality attached.
The first is FoodNeverComes. You browse until you find what you want to eat, you add to cart, you hit “buy now,” and you’re told your meal is on its way. It isn’t. No money is transferred. No food is cooked. The only hunger satisfied is the urge to splurge.
Online Damta (Korean slang for ‘smoking break’) fakes a – you guessed it – smoking break. But this site wasn’t intended as a dopamine fix. It was designed to resolve arguments between smokers and their non-smoking colleagues who resented both the time they spent away from their desks and the surreptitious networking that went on behind a smokescreen. It went viral because it allows remote workers and non-smokers to experience what might be smoking’s one redeeming feature – the few minutes a worker gets to spend outside, chatting with colleagues or strangers from an office ten floors up. But without the health risks.
The Metaverse might not be happening, but it turns out there’s a real desire for fake experiences online. Who knew?
POISON AI
The internet has found a new hobby: poisoning AI.
Communities like r/PoisonAI are deliberately filling the internet with fake information in the hope that AI models scrape it and repeat it as fact. It sounds niche, but it recently fooled DuckDuckGo’s AI into claiming US Vice President JD Vance had died of rabies.
It might sound like harmless internet fun, but it’s actually a glimpse into the next battleground online. We spent years learning how to game search engines and social media algorithms. Now people are learning how to game AI.
For brands, that’s worth paying attention to, as more people turn to AI instead of Google (hell, even Google has given up on Googling things and gone full AI). If AI really is learning from us, we should probably stop teaching it nonsense. Then again… where’s the fun in that?
THIS CAMPAIGN IS THE PITS
An armpit probably isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a World Cup sponsorship, but for Australian deodorant brand Rexona, it makes perfect sense.
For a few seconds every match, the fourth official becomes the centre of attention. Fans hold their breath waiting to see how much added time is on the board, while players hope their number doesn’t appear. Amid all that tension, the fourth official stays cool, calm and collected.
That’s exactly why this activation works.
Rather than forcing a football connection, Rexona has identified one of the game’s most pressure-filled moments and found a role that naturally brings its “It Won’t Let You Down” platform to life. Better still, the branding appears exactly where everyone’s eyes are already fixed as the board goes up. Fair play to them. We’d be breaking into a sweat before the board even left the ground.
REDDIT THINKS YOU’RE THE BEST
Reddit has launched its latest brand campaign, People Are The Best, positioning itself by taking pride as one of the few places on the internet still powered by genuine human conversation. At a time when AI-generated content, polished influencer content and sponsored recommendations are everywhere, Reddit is doubling down on what has always made it unique – real people sharing real opinions.
Brands have spent years chasing polished content, but audiences are increasingly looking for something that feels a little less perfect and a lot more real.
The irony? While AI is making content easier than ever to produce, it’s also making genuinely human voices even more valuable. And in 2026, that authenticity might be one of the strongest brand positions a company can own.