The first five days focus inward. They help you listen more carefully, notice how your thinking organizes itself, recognize blind spots, and develop steadiness during uncertainty. Each day introduces a way of seeing before asking you to do anything with it.

Day 6 is where that way of seeing turns outward.

The Narrative Capture marks the moment when the inward work of clarity turns outward. After several days of reflection and perceptual alignment, this entry invites you to notice how meaning is shaped around you in real time.

Using a familiar holiday campaign as a case study, it explores how stories frame attention, normalize ideas, and quietly influence what feels acceptable or inevitable.

Once you see how narrative capture works, it becomes much harder to unsee.

Stories guide our attention, framing what feels normal, inevitable, or harmless. During emotionally charged seasons like the holidays, that framing often goes unquestioned.

In this holiday bonus episode of Case & Point, host Asa-Mari Z. investigates the backlash surrounding McDonald’s Netherlands’ AI-generated Christmas ad and what it reveals about storytelling, power, and responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

What happens when a global brand uses generative AI to tell a holiday story centered on chaos and cynicism, aimed at an audience of working people already carrying real economic and emotional strain? And why did this ad land so differently from McDonald’s far more successful Grinch Meal holiday campaign?

The Case & Point holiday edition episode serves as a live case study of this phenomenon, applying the lens you’ve been developing throughout the week to a familiar cultural moment, and showing how narrative power operates quietly, through framing rather than force.