- Leading Ideas at Culture Pilot
- Posts
- INSIGHTS: 🔎 Atlas, ChatGPT Shopping, Sweet & Sour Candy, and the First Nudge
INSIGHTS: 🔎 Atlas, ChatGPT Shopping, Sweet & Sour Candy, and the First Nudge
From human to AI and the threads between, glimpse into brand strategy, tech, and opportunity in the marketing scene. This is your window seat from 30,000 feet.
culture pilot
October 22, 2025
CHA-
CHING
GPT
Let’s go shopping.
BRAND SIGNAL
OpenAI released their new web browser yesterday – Chat GPT Atlas – which runs on Google’s chromium and aims to streamline the AI web browsing experience. Mac users can download right away, and a windows version is projected shortly to follow. By today’s standards, it’s nothing groundbreaking (yet).
The browser features a built-in five-tab interface of ChatGPT, Search, Images, Video and News, plus a cursor feature that adds GPT functions when highlighting any text. Its obvious Open AI is continuing to take more eyes away from google as the first place we go to search.
But the bigger announcement in our eyes came just weeks earlier – a new feature that lets users of any borwser purchase products directly through ChatGPT, starting with Etsy and Shopify stores on the initial release.
You can now chat your way from “tell me about that thing I heard about” to “shut up and take my money” without ever visiting a website.
Now What?
Discovery, brand awareness, and final transactions are becoming increasingly intertwined. Even though we’ve been emphasizing the importance of content marketing for AI search over the past year, it’s becoming evident very quickly how critical this new funnel will be for every direct-to-consumer brand selling online.
Our content (read: consumer trust) is being filtered outside of the traditional website checkout more than ever before. As conversions begin shifting off-site more frequently, the websites, landing pages, and checkout funnels that we spend hundreds of hours on are showing their importance more than ever before.
Your goal: get ChatGPT to prioritize your content / products / services as the choice they deem most relevant. We’re past the point of paying attention. Now it’s time to play catch-up.
FROM THE FIELD
This past month, we launched the long-awaited SweetAndSourCandy.com website alongside our wildly talented partners at CMA Design, who led the branding and packaging design.
As the original producer of sour belt candy, the Sweet & Sour Candy brand is already in over 3000 stores nationwide, and they’re also responsible for the B2B2C production of other major sour belt candy brands through their white label program.
Culture Pilot launches sweetandsourcandy.com
Another well-deserved shout-out to Bear Hands Media for their film production work and lifestyle shots that made the whole thing pop.
That’s one more collaboration for 2025, helping Texas-born products reach more customers, on shelves and online.
GO TIME
First Nudge
If a problem or an idea crosses your mind twice, act on it once.
1. Ask why it’s in mind and what you can do about it.
2. Give it a name and write it down, along with the first one or two steps to make it real.
3. Decide is it time to schedule the first step now, is there anything in the way of starting, or should we wait until it crosses the mind twice again?
Then keep the cycle going.
Reply