Charlotte Mair

Founder and Managing Director

Charlotte is the Founder and Managing Director of The Fitting Room, an award-winning, independent global cultural brand marketing and communications house.

The Fitting Room creates hype, demand + legacy® by tapping into the power of subcultures—those underground movements that shape mainstream culture and influence behavior.

For us, culture comes first. It’s at the core of everything we do.

Over the years, The Fitting Room has partnered with a diverse range of clients across industries, mastering the art of cultivating hype and demand to successfully launch, position, and transform brands.

Enquiries: chloe@tfr.agency 


We won Wendy's UK. 🥳

After a competitive 4-way pitch, The Fitting Room has been appointed lead strategic and creative partner. Actually mad. As Wendy’s continues its UK expansion, we’ll be leading:

👉🏾 Brand strategy and creative direction
👉🏾 National campaigns and PR
👉🏾 Influencer and creator storytelling
👉🏾 Hyper-local marketing for franchise partners

All built to drive awareness, footfall and full-blown fandom.

Danielle Every  and I travelled to Ohio Columbus in January to experience full immersion with the international team, and spent time across all elements of the business and it was just exceptional.

It was also -20, I bought Snow Boots, obvs.

We’ve kicked off a few campaigns already.

Wendy’s at London Fashion Week was a MOMENT. And we’ve started launching new restaurants.

Hold tight. So much coming!!! 

Thank you so much to Evie at PRWeek UK for covering the news.

Founder and Managing Director, The Fitting Room | Creating Hype, Demand and Legacy | Ad Age Leading Women in Marketing, Advertising and Media

Just a girl with a TikTok, a dream, and now a bloody TV series.

Last week, I started filming a new TV series, which still feels absolutely mad to say.

Here’s a little BTS from the prep. Yep, still need to learn to smile. Lols.

More updates to come. 👀 

What an absolutely bonkers start to 2026.

The McDonald's CEO taste-test took over the internet.

Burger King responded. Wendy's responded. So naturally our social team got our client GDK (German Doner Kebab) involved too.

(Yes, I know. Who needs to see another CEO in a suit trying a product on camera. 🙄)

But Simon Wallis’ video was funny as hell. Zero enthusiasm, minimal smiling, told to take a small bite of the OG Kebab, and took the biggest bite you've ever seen. 

And it called out the disconnected CEO trope in the best possible way. Pure bants.

3 days in on TikTok:

👉🏾 255,000 views 
👉🏾 14,600 likes
👉🏾 279 comments
👉🏾 1,204 saves

Our Social, Content and Creator team brought it home with this one.

And Simon, you're an absolute legend. 🫡

The lovely folks at YouTube invited me to The Brit Awards in Manchester on Saturday.

OMFG!!!

For a decade I’ve worked Brits night, running client after parties, managing activations and being on call for the team and production. But I hadn’t actually attended the awards since 2015.

So this invite left me SCREAMIN’ when it hit my inbox. Absolutely no bloody chill, even after all the wild things my career has allowed me to do.

Arrived to the Lounge that they had decked out, and then onto YouTube First Class Carriages, with a DJ, merch and absolute vibes.

When I arrived at the YouTube suite at the awards, they asked me to interview Lisa Nandy the MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Just a girl 😅.

What an absolute TIME!!!

Also… Olivia Dean. WOW!

Full vlog coming to YouTube this week (because I do that now. Lols).

Thank you so much for having me Jo Ogunleye 🏆.

Your brand will spend £50,000 on market research. Yet completely ignore people telling you exactly what they think for free in the comments. 

2 months ago, I posted a TikTok exploring Monster Energy's branding for their latest US product launch, FLRT Energy.

To date, on my TikTok alone, that video generated:

👉🏾 1.2 million views 
👉🏾 116,000 likes
👉🏾 765 comments
👉🏾 4,608 saves
👉🏾 5,144 shares

But the most interesting part for me will always be be the comments section.

Surveys are expensive. And mostly bullsh*t.

When people fill them in, they show up as their best selves. They don't tell you the truth. But the comments section, no profile picture required. No judgement. Just saying the quiet part out loud.

And most brands go to the comments section to respond. Not to listen. It's all about who's got the fastest wit to sass somebody back rather than actually learning something.

From that one video, 765 people told me:

👉🏾 Which energy drinks they drink, and why
👉🏾 Why women were pissed off - pastel colours, pink tax, patronising positioning
👉🏾 Which flavours they actually liked - often the existing the white and pink Monsters
👉🏾 I was introduced to the product Alani
👉🏾 New start up energy drink brands were showing up
👉🏾 That they didn't feel the need for a sub-brand at all

765 people handed energy drinks brands a product brief. 

Your comment section is the most honest focus group you'll ever have.

It's soft data, my favourite. It’s often that and gut that drives our audience-first campaigns.

We’re pulling back the curtain on the creator economy. 

Invisible Ceilings: Power, Labour & Influence in Influencer Marketing is coming, and I could not be more excited about this panel.

It’ll be an honest, no-filter conversation about how power really operates in the creator economy.

Thank you to the lovely folks at Influencity - Influencer Marketing Platform for having me. The lineup for this one is stacked.

Ashley Rudd Jennifer Delgado Leanne Villiers Zoe Connell, moderated by the brilliant Cam Khaski Graglia, PhD.

Link in comments to register. We’ll be live on LinkedIn, come through.

Next week I’ll be sitting down at Advertising Week Europe on the Innovation Stage to interview our client Michael C., the Managing Director of The Wendy's Company UK. 

Wendy's has always understood the power of distinctive brand assets, from its square burgers to its legendary Frosty® and fries.

But in a market where attention is fragmented and brand loyalty is harder to earn than ever, how do you translate its iconic American DNA into a competitive and culturally relevant UK market?

That's exactly what we're getting into.

We'll be unpacking:

👉🏾 How to translate global brand heritage into local relevance
👉🏾 How to balance performance marketing with long term brand building
👉🏾 How to create marketing that travels beyond paid media into culture and conversation
👉🏾 How Wendy's UK is building demand through brand personality, audience first marketing and operational excellence, whilst staying true to the product that made it famous

It'll be a candid discussion on leadership, growth and what it really takes to build a brand that people don't just buy from, but talk about.

Thank you to the team at Advertising Week Europe for having me back for the second year.

See you on the Innovation Stage!!! 👏🏾

From widow at 27 to building one of the most iconic champagne brands in the world. Barbe-Nicole Clicquot is an absolute legend.

At 21, she married François Clicquot, heir to a failing champagne company. Then, at just 27, her husband died suddenly, leaving her grieving with a failing wine business on her hands.

This was a time when women were legally the responsibility of their fathers until marriage, and then their husbands. Society fully expected her to sell everything and remarry.

Instead, she convinced her father-in-law to give her a chance to run the company.

And she didn't just save it. She made it massive.

👉🏾 She renamed it after herself. Veuve means widow. Iconic.

👉🏾 She created the first ever branding on a champagne bottle, that distinctive gold yellow label still used today.

👉🏾 She refused to place ads in newspapers. Instead, she made sure reporters wrote about Veuve Clicquot being served at the official dinners of kings and lords. She understood PR before PR existed.

👉🏾 She invented the riddling table, revolutionising the champagne-making process entirely.

👉🏾 She smuggled bottles through Napoleon's blockade to reach Russian markets when nobody else could.

She built Veuve Clicquot into the second-highest selling champagne brand in the world, all while society actively tried to push her aside.

No one decides where you belong but you.

What an icon. 🥂

Are girl bands a recession indicator?

After 10+ years in branding and marketing, I’m watching something that looks less like a cultural moment… and more like a business cycle playing out in real time.

Right now, the algorithm is flooded with girl groups. FLO. XO. GIRLSET. BLACKPINK. KATSEYE. And it’s not a coincidence.

Think back to when the Spice Girls launched in 1996, just as the UK was coming out of a brutal early-90s recession. Why then? Because girl groups are easier to merchandise, easier to market across demographics and perfectly engineered for a public craving for escapism.

Now isn’t that different. We’re in a period of economic uncertainty, political exhaustion and record-breaking loneliness. And the music industry, as it often does, is reaching for the format that has worked before.

But here’s the question I keep coming back to: If girl groups are making a comeback… has the industry actually changed?

Because what bands wear, who stands in the centre, who is featured in campaign imagery and who leads the single rollout are boardroom decisions. And those decisions don’t just shape how an artist is perceived. They shape how fans compare, rank and sometimes target members within the group.

We’ve seen how this dynamic played out with The Supremes, Destiny’s Child, Little Mix and Fifth Harmony. And some people are now questioning whether history is repeating itself with Manon from KATSEYE taking a hiatus.

I wrote about all of it on my Substack, The Digress: recession economics, the nostalgia play, Gen Z loneliness as a market, whether labels are already building for Gen Alpha, and the question the industry still hasn’t answered properly.

📨 The Digress drops every Sunday at 9.30am.

Spent last Thursday co-chairing a judging day for some of the best experiential work in the industry. Casual.

Had the best day as Co-Chair judge for the Campaign UK Experience Awards, alongside the brilliant Michael Brown from Asociat.

We were surrounded by the best of live events and brand marketing, reviewing some of the most creative ideas, beautifully executed campaigns and brand experiences that drove incredible results.

Safe to say the bar was very high.

VERY excited for the winners to be announced next month.

Big up this year's judges - a wonderful bunch 👏🏾

The women who shape our lives rarely get the credit they deserve.

We recently started working with Borough Yards, kicking off strategy and cultural programming for 2026.

And today we launch our first moment in the space for International Women’s Day.

From 5–8 March we’ve installed “The Women That Made Us” - a public mirror wall where people can leave a message to a woman who shaped their life. A mum. A mentor. A teacher. A friend. Someone who changed your trajectory.

Because most of us didn’t get here alone. It takes a village.

The first 50 people will also get complimentary treats from After School Cookie Club and Santa Nata - because reflection is always better with a cookie.

📍 Borough Yards, London Bridge
⏰ 10am–8pm

Come down, leave a message, and help build a living mural of the women who made us. 💛

On Thursday, I joined my first 2026 IWD panel to talk all things AI.

I sat alongside senior comms leaders Amy Dowling from TUI and Charlotte Sjoberg from  Virgin to celebrate Kat Thomas’s new book, “Weapons of Mass Confidence,” and we didn't hold back.

Research shows women use AI to polish. Men use it for power. Surprised, I wasn’t.

But here's what I really want you to sit with:

👉🏾 AI is built by billionaires, on old data, full of real-world bias. It's the new propaganda machine for the patriarchy.

👉🏾 Convenience always has a cost. AI's is environmental, and it's falling hardest on the poorest communities.

👉🏾 Calling AI a confidence tool is a privileged conversation. It's making people feel smart, not be smart.

👉🏾 Power never hands tax-paying people free tools to outthink it. Critical thinking is under threat, and that should be a key influence as to how we adapt these tools.

I'm not anti-AI. I'm anti the romanticised narrative that erases its consequences.

Thoughts?

The Khia Asylum is where culturally irrelevant pop stars go to disappear.

Yet some of the world's biggest brands are already inside. And their escape plan is rage-baiting you.

Some brands have millions of followers, polished campaigns and massive budgets. Yet their posts never start a group chat debate or show up in a screenshot captioned "have you SEEN this."

So what do brands do when they're stuck in cultural obscurity? Some have turned to rage bait.

Oxford named it Word of the Year in 2025. Usage tripled in a single year. American Eagle Outfitters Inc. E.L.F. BEAUTY. Duolingo. Sabrina Carpenter.

Rage bait is a hack for an economic problem. But free attention can cost you something far more valuable than ad spend.

In this week's newsletter I go deep on:

👉🏾 Why organic reach is functionally dying
👉🏾 The political playbook brands borrowed (and why it usually backfires)
👉🏾 What Duolingo got right that most brands miss
👉🏾 How to escape the Brand Khia Asylum without burning everything down
Link in the comments.

📨 The Digress drops every Sunday at 9.30am.

I spent three hours on Reddit last week, starting in Super Bowl threads and somehow ending up in a chat where everyone, not marketers, just regular people, was dissecting brand memes, marketing moves and the state of social media right now.

One scroll, you’re at a wedding celebration. Next scroll, rage bait about politics. Then a TikTok trend gone wild. The internet right now is chaotic… and it’s a perfect window into how polarised attention has become.

Nothing captured it better than Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Sugar cane on stage, a real wedding, a message about Puerto Rico’s power grid crisis… and the country went wild. 

Fans were celebrating, politicians were outraged and conservative groups staged their own ‘’alternative’’ halftime show.

But zoom out for a second and this stops being about Bad Bunny. 

The performance wasn’t the story, the reaction was and what it revealed is that every cultural stage is now a political one, whether you intended it to be or not.

Brands take note, if a 13-minute show can split a country in two, neutrality is no longer an option. From Nike and Kaepernick to DoorDash and 50 Cent, culture, attention, and controversy are driving real-world business outcomes.

This week on The Digress, I unpack all of this and more:

👉🏾 Brands speaking like humans yet staying silent during crises

👉🏾 Podcasts winning Golden Globes

👉🏾 YouTube quietly dominating everything (hello BBC)

👉🏾 My 2026 marketing, culture and branding predictions 

Some of it’s fun, some chaotic…

📧 The Digress drops every Sunday at 9.30am, link to this article in my comments. Link to article in comments.

The “honest review” trend isn’t protecting consumers anymore.

It’s producing content at someone else’s expense. Content creators have started a new genre on TikTok: "testing" service providers. 

They book beauty appointments, hair sessions, or pamper treatments. Not because they need them, but to secretly review the provider on camera. Everything from cleanliness, skill, and time management.

It started in a place that made sense. People were fed up with overpriced, overhyped service providers charging a fortune and delivering far less than promised. The question was fair: how can you charge this much and give so little?

But like most things on social media, it didn't stay there.

Now it's not just the overpriced providers being filmed. It's aunties doing hair from their kitchens, students offering lashes from their uni flats, and small business owners who never asked for visibility but were quietly building something through word of mouth.

One viral review and suddenly their livelihood is on trial.

We've built a culture where:

👉🏾 A single mistake can undo years of trust
👉🏾 "Honest reviews" are also engagement strategies
👉🏾 Small businesses carry the same scrutiny as corporations but with none of the infrastructure to manage it
👉🏾 The margin for error is essentially zero and even thinner if you're from a marginalised background

The internet gave consumers a voice and that matters. But there's a difference between sharing your experience and turning someone's livelihood into a content series.

I unpacked this fully in my latest Substack. The psychology behind why this trend is happening now, what it means for small businesses, why we're witnessing the death of second chances, and how to navigate it.

Link in the comments.

📨 The Digress drops every Sunday at 9.30am.

Last week, a 70-year-old content creator went viral.

She's never taken a single breath. She was entirely AI-generated. And the comment that stopped me in my tracks wasn't outrage. 

It was: "In this economy, is that necessarily a bad thing?" I've been sitting with that question all week.

+ The creator economy is worth $250 billion (Goldman Sachs) and projected to nearly double to $480 billion by 2027. 

+ There are over 207 million creators worldwide. 84% are already using AI in some form. 

+ The virtual influencer market alone is on track to hit $46 billion by 2030.

So here's the question nobody's asking loudly enough.

If authenticity is becoming rarer, does that make it more valuable? Could avoiding AI be the thing that separates luxury brands from everyone else?

I went to the people actually living this, creators who've spent years building real audiences and now have to reckon with the fact that a well-prompted chatbot could theoretically do their job by Thursday afternoon.

This week on The Digress I go deep on all of it:

👉🏾 Why ‘authentic’ content is quietly becoming the new luxury

👉🏾 Where real creators are actually drawing the line and why it matters

👉🏾 The identity questions AI is forcing creators to answer about their own work

👉🏾 What the hesitation from major brands is really telling us about the future of trust

👉🏾 And whether standing out in an AI-saturated world is still possible, or just something we tell ourselves to feel better

If you're in brand, marketing, media or the creator space, this one's for you. And honestly, even if you're not, I think you'll find something in it worth sitting with.

📨 The Digress drops every Sunday at 9.30am. Link to article in comments. 👇🏾

Co-founder of Agentic - AI media and research - Founder of Publishing Strategy - media consulting. Follow for a balanced take on AI

I work at the intersection of content, technology and analytics. Agentic is a consultancy that runs AI projects for its own content assets and uses these workings in client services. We provide marketing services to content focused companies, generative AI advisory and process automation.

I was formerly the MD of History Hit, an innovative specialist broadcaster that became a major player on SVOD, podcasts and YouTube. I previously worked for established media brands such as The Telegraph and Bauer Media. I've got a lot of experience building monetizable audiences. 

If you would like to discuss content strategy and AI for your business, get in touch.

James Carson

Enshittification summed up brilliantly by this Norwegian Consumer Council ad.

An apparently boring national body has really caught the spirit of the times. 

This is the fable of OpenAI:

Basically you make something good, like ChatGPT. You get lots of users. 

Then you enshittify it with ads.

Next you soil your reputation by working with the Pentagon just after your rival got unfairly labelled a supply chain risk by clowns dressed as politicians.

Meanwhile your CEO goes onstage and whines about people saying it takes too much energy to train AI models, saying it takes a lot of energy to train a human.  

That's enshittification, and it's happened in the last few weeks. 

This ad is much, much, better than it could ever be in an English accent.

Helping media companies with AI agents and content workflows. Media analyst and twice weekly YouTuber.

We released our biggest video yet last night.  It's all about the societal risks of AI. 

I've been thinking about technology's insidious effects for years. A consequence of working so closely with it.

I wrote a book about social media going wrong in 2017. Got an agent, it didn't get published. 

In 2023 I read Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave and thought, with AI, we could be on the the same path.

I don't know how many words I wrote for the script but it was over 12,000. Five drafts I got it down to something manageable to make a video. It ended up being 42 minutes. 

The premise is that AI risk thinking is either job decimation or Terminator. But it's way more complex than that. 

I'm a big believer that if we get AI 'right' then the upside will be huge. I think its impact on business will be massive in the long run. 

But right now, we're in an uncertain quandary. Are we going too fast? I believe so. 

I came across a 2024 paper by Atoosa Kasirzadeh and what's called the Accumulative AI X Risk Hypothesis. 

Her premise is that a more plausible approach to AI risks are its accumulative effects: Manipulation, Insecurity, Surveillance, Trust Erosion, Economic Destabilisation and Rights Infringement. 

The kind of thing we've seen with social media on steroids. 

It was a hard video to make. It took many long nights and weekends of applying current affairs to future forecasts... but I took it as far as I could. 

Check it out on the YT - channel Absolutely Agentic. 

This is the intro.

Dario Amodei is a hero. 

The Trump Administration's actions against Anthropic over the last fortnight are incredibly disturbing. 

Last week, the Pentagon gave Anthropic an ultimatum: remove all restrictions on how Claude could be used by the military, or lose a $200 million classified systems contract.

Anthropic's red lines were really quite narrow and obvious: 
No mass surveillance of US citizens. 
No fully autonomous weapons without a human in the loop.

The Pentagon said it had no intention of doing either of those things. But when Anthropic asked for that commitment in writing, the contract language would have allowed those safeguards to be overridden at will.

When Anthropic refused, Trump ordered every federal agency to cease using Anthropic's technology. 

Defence Secretary Hegseth designated the company a "supply chain risk" - a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries. 

This is so obviously untrue it's like a parallel universe. 

If the state genuinely didn't want these capabilities, it wouldn't need to crush the company refusing to provide them.

Anthropic is the AI company that has most visibly built its identity around safety and responsible deployment. 

Punishing them for holding that line sends a clear message to every other AI company: comply or be made an example of.

It's also a completely over zealous assault on the private sector, which would have been better off at this point not to involve itself with the government at all. 

Bizarrely OpenAI are possibly going to fill the gap, with similar (yet acceptable) redlines. 

But Amodei has his principles and Anthropic will see the government in court. I hope they win. The whole thing is chilling.

taplio

The Battle

Charlotte Mair

James Carson

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The Battle

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James Carson

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Charlotte Mair's LinkedIn Performance

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