A lot has been said already about Saturday's demise of Spirit Airlines, taking a low-cost option off the table for consumers and reducing the price pressure on rival carriers.

But let’s also note the passing of a brand that’s been in service since 1992, when the charter operation named Spirit became a new commercial carrier. It became an ultra-low-cost airline in 2007 under then-CEO Ben Baldanza, who called the new model a “dollar store in the sky” flying “buses with wings.” The Spirit name steadily became both famous and infamous.

Travelers who wanted snacks included in their ticket price or reclining seats should adjust their expectations or fly another airline, Baldanza would say: “Don’t go to McDonald’s and get upset there’s no filet mignon.”

Its marketing was equally economical, relying on crass humor for impact instead of production values. Promotional rubrics included “M.I.L.F.” (“Many Islands, Low Fares”), an Arbor Day “treesome” and jokes about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Anthony Weiner scandal.

“Go South for VD,” one Valentine’s Day email urged.

Here’s Baldanza’s explanation to the Journal in 2012:

Spirit took a different approach with commercials in 2024 and 2025 that advertised new premium offerings. The ads tried to position the airline as “More Fly.”

But minimalist pricing and brutalist service remained the hard-won core of Spirit’s brand proposition. Passengers made their choices.

“Its policies were often punitive, with gate agents earning incentives for dinging overweight or oversize bags,” Wall Street Journal travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson noted in her nuanced remembrance. “Its signature onboard cocktail for years was a BuzzBallz.”

“The airline stranded thousands of passengers at airports with no employees manning any of the check-in desks,” Colin Jost said during a “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update report. “Spirit said they were proud they were still maintaining their normal level of service.”

Now Spirit’s bright yellow planes will likely be sold and repainted. And its name will go into storage next to other once well-known trademarks like Cingular, Borders and Pan Am.

That’s unless someone finds a way and a reason to revive it. Travelers can’t fly TWA anymore, but they can stay at the TWA Hotel at New York’s JFK. A company once called Dynamic International Airways now flies under the old Eastern Airlines name. There’s even an effort to bring back Pan Am.

You tell me: What defunct brand was the biggest loss of accrued marketing effort and consumer awareness? What former famous name deserves to come back? Hit reply with your thoughts and I may include your response in a future newsletter.

There goes another one: IAC on Friday shut down Ask.com, where web users had asked Jeeves for help for almost 30 years. [NYT]

The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Megan Graham and Katie Deighton report on a month-long pop-up by Amazon’s Audible:

We visited the Bowery in Manhattan last Thursday to take an early peek at Audible’s new, temporary approximation of a bookstore: a “listening lounge and community hub” designed to give visitors a tactile way to engage with digital audiobooks.

The effort might help close the gap between audio aficionados and partisans of physical editions who staunchly prefer touching paper and browsing traditional bookstores.

(Both of us, for the record, are longtime proselytizers for audiobook listening… A juicy memoir-on-tape makes boring chores in teeny New York City apartments a whole lot more palatable. But we love paper books too.)

Audible, whose press release also cited younger consumers’ desire for tangible experiences, may have nailed the assignment. The main floor of the huge space—which agency Civic designed and built—contains shelves full of “story tiles” that trigger playback at listening stations or through smartphones.

Visitors around us perused titles like “Heated Rivalry” or “The Devil Wears Prada” while others sipped on literary-themed cocktails, made magazine collages or had their auras read.

Throughout May, the house will host crafting workshops, trivia, book clubs, live music shows and even speed dating, its attempts to create the kind of “third space” that bookstores effortlessly provide. We’ll be curious to see how many visitors Audible considers converts when the effort concludes, and whether the format is one the brand considers investing in permanently.

The company already has a long-term physical presence in New York at
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, both a branding exercise and a source of new audio to stream.

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” opened to an estimated $233.6 million worldwide this weekend, driven largely by women eager to rejoin Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the world of fashion journalism 20 years after the original movie, Ben Fritz writes for The Journal.

The film from Disney’s 20th Century Studios is the latest in a string of box office hits powered by pop-culture nostalgia among millennial and Gen X audiences, after the Michael Jackson biopic “Michael” and “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” did huge business.

“Nostalgia is a critical driver for people right now in how they consume entertainment,” said Martha Morrison, head of marketing for Disney Entertainment Studios. “On ‘Prada,’ it is, certainly.”

Up next: The recent CinemaCon industry event, where studios showed off their coming releases to theater operators, was packed full of aging stars promoting sequels to films from the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s, including “Toy Story 5,” “Practical Magic 2,” “Focker-in-Law,” “Scary Movie 6” and “Spaceballs: The New One.”

GameStop Chief Executive Ryan Cohen made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for about $56 billion and said he saw a path to make the e-commerce company a much bigger competitor to Amazon. [WSJ] 

The Met Gala arrives tonight, shadowed by criticism of honorary chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. [The Guardian] 

How Jeff Bezos broke into fashion’s inner circle. [WSJ]

The union representing actors has reached a tentative multiyear deal with the major studios and streamers on a new contract. [WSJ] 

AI is quickly transforming China’s microdrama industry. [NYT] 

Apple raised the starting price of its Mac Mini computer, which has been flying off Apple’s shelves in recent months partly thanks to demand from AI power users running private, “always-on” agents. [WSJ] 

WeatherTech named the independent shop Cramer-Krasselt as its agency of record, replacing Pinnacle Advertising after 17 years. [Ad Age]

Charlotte Blank, the former Jaguar Land Rover CMO who just became North America brand director for Defender and Discovery in March, has left the company. [MediaPost]