The benchmark only evaluates responses once the community has identified the font.

E.g. https://www.dafont.com/forum/read/569491/taylor-swift-font-p...

That isn't the font, you can look at it yourself, it doesn't match.

To me it looks like the same font, but with letter spacing reduced so the letters don't flow into each other nicely but overlap a bit.

Edit: here's the same effect made on inkscape: https://i.postimg.cc/TYV6K6bt/taylorswift.png

And no matter what, when preparing for print you're going to mess with all of the kerning until everything looks right or to get effects that you want. You don't just accept the kerning of any font. The only reason to buy expensive fonts is that you have to touch the kerning less often.

I would say there’s a good chance they could be one-offs created by whoever was doing the ad. If you’re paying an artist, having them do the lettering could certainly be cheaper than licensing a font for the purpose (or developing a font that’ll never be used outside of one, or a series, of ads).

My fellow designer friends would often do this. But they would start from actual fonts and do slight (or more than slight) adjustments to them to match what they wanted as an outcome.

Yes but if you mess with fonts too much, then this can happen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snjCj0ntG8E