Our guest writer for this week’s Growth Byte, , has been tracking this development closely and has broken down the three ways brands misread culture and what questions they should ask themselves before jumping on a trend.

Check out her Substack, In Interesting Times, for criticisms and observations on all things strategy, culture, and business.

“Sometimes it’s just one weirdo with a bad take – stop creating these artificial rounds of discourse.”

And yet: provided that the take is talkable enough, that one weirdo can go extremely viral.

TikTok creator SpecsStudios parodied this in late August with “Upside Down Pot Girl,” manufacturing a fake discourse from scratch. The joke worked because the format was instantly recognizable: once enough people respond seriously enough to an absurd controversy, it becomes a phenomenon in its own right (think: iced coffee at job interview conversation).

And there’s another complication: even real trends aren’t necessarily as universal as they look.

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick has been writing about this as the rise of multiple mainstreams: “a cultural multiverse where ‘the most popular thing’ isn’t actually “the most popular thing” but a victor of one of many culture streams.”

Basically, there are three easy ways to misread culture today:

• Sometimes one person looks like a whole trend (but isn’t)

• Sometimes a real trend looks universal (but isn’t)

• Sometimes a real trend looks smaller than it is (but it’s huge somewhere you’re not looking)

So how did we get here?

For a brief time, social media made culture unusually easy to interpret

Before social media, marketers relied on trend analysts to help them tap into audience behaviors, who in turn relied on specialist commissioned research.

From the late 2000s onward, marketers realized they had another source: millions of people voluntarily documenting ALL their behaviors and opinions in public, for free, on social media.

Brands jumped on opportunities to keep track: In 2010, Gatorade launched its “Mission Control” to monitor real-time online conversations; more brands (and dedicated social listening providers) followed suit.

For a while, this worked pretty well. In 2014, KFC Singapore brought back its Cheesy BBQ Meltz in response to social pleas, while the Tesco TikTok campaign Voice of the Checkout grew directly out of the online love for the brand’s phrase “Clubcard accepted.”

And brands didn’t just respond to online conversations about themselves: they also watched culture form to see where they could play a role. Think: Dove channeling the viral conversation around TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter into the campaign #TurnYourBack.

That’s increasingly hard to replicate.

As the internet got louder, people got quieter.

In the UK alone, the share of adult social-media users who publicly post and comment fell from 61% in 2024 to 49% in 2026. Instagram, meanwhile, said in late 2025 that most users are now sharing photos and videos by DM.

So who’s still posting publicly? Unscientifically, it looks like:

• Creators who understand engagement

• People who spend a lot of time online because they struggle to make IRL connections (often due to specific personality traits, as TikToker Alexia says)

• Brands

And WHAT they’re posting includes a lot of slop – not just AI, though a 2025 analysis of TikTok search results found synthetic AI imagery in a quarter of the top results.

Even comments aren’t a safe space: “culture lives in the comment section” still holds some truth, but comments are now mostly a place for social users (including ample brands) to farm engagement.

None of this makes social listening useless – but it does change how we should think about it.

The public internet still gives us an extraordinary view of culture, but it’s a skewed version of real life. And brands need to dig deeper before they turn the latest discourse into a cultural insight.

• Does the behavior appear independently across different communities?

• Does search or behavioral data support it?

• Are ordinary people discussing it, or are creators mostly responding to one another?

Basically: Is this actually a trend, or just one person’s extremely successful piece of engagement bait?

And even if it was just engagement bait, learn from it: why did it work, and what does that say about what resonates with us? Because trends come and go, but the underlying human emotions and drivers are evergreen.

If you’re reading this and are a Substack writer, strategist or journalist yourself, feel free to shoot us a message if you’re interested in guest writing a Growth Byte.

We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. YouTube lets viewers build their own feeds with a prompt.

At Made On 2026, YouTube expanded custom feeds, which let viewers type what they’re in the mood for, like “evening wind down with long documentaries,” and save the result as a separate feed. The feature has been in testing since May and is now rolling out more widely in the U.S. This highlights the algorithm fatigue many people are feeling and points to a shift toward discovery driven by viewers’ own words rather than guesses based on watch history. That makes clear titles, descriptions and topic signals matter more, much like AEO.

2. Meta gives its Muse agent a body with the Muse Charm

At Connect, Zuckerberg unveiled the Muse Charm, a keychain-sized gadget with an animated avatar that lets people talk to their Muse agent without unlocking a phone. It ships in December, but Meta hasn’t announced a price. Reactions have been mixed with many noting the dangling form factor is squarely on-trend, tapping into Gen Z’s post-Labubu love of bag charms and retro tech as fashion.

3. LinkedIn tests a “Network” feed of only your connections and follows

CPO Hari Srinivasan announced a trial Network tab that sits alongside the main feed. LinkedIn is positioning it as part of a push against engagement pods and AI-generated clutter.

4. Wendy’s drops a real emo album

The chain released a six-track album, “Songs to Listen to in the Wendy’s Parking Lot,” on all major streaming platforms, featuring vocalists from the emo scene. Wendy’s made a point of saying the tracks were made by real musicians rather than generated by AI, with Matt Squire producing and singers from Memphis May Fire, Silverstein, State Champs and others.

5. McDonald’s launches a media network, aiming for a $1B ad business

At its investor day, McDonald’s unveiled McDonald’s Media Network, which will sell ads in its app and on kiosks using its customer data. Global CMO Morgan Flatley set a $1 billion revenue goal.

6. moves its newsletter roots to Substack

Gwyneth Paltrow framed the launch as a return to the scrappy spirit of the original goop newsletter, starting with exclusive recipes, with the team and friends contributing and a mix of free and paid-subscriber posts.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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“Maxxing” is taking over the world. Every single thing is being optimized and maximized into some sort of niche online movement that can range from a complete joke to an incredibly sincere thing. To prove just how out of hand this whole maxxing thing is getting, I’m going to list every type of maxxing I can think of off the top of my head.

There’s looksmaxxing, softmaxxing, hardmaxxing, jawmaxxing, heightmaxxing, skinmaxxing, hairmaxxing, framemaxxing, leanmaxxing, fitmaxxing, gymmaxxing, stylemaxxing, scentmaxxing, fragrancemaxxing, voicemaxxing, posturemaxxing, tanmaxxing, peptidemaxxing, sleepmaxxing, protein-maxxing, fibermaxxing, hydrationmaxxing, watermaxxing, gutmaxxing, testmaxxing, sunmaxxing, stepmaxxing, longevitymaxxing, dopaminemaxxing, creatinemaxxing, rizzmaxxing, auramaxxing, statusmaxxing, moneymaxxing, wealthmaxxing, careermaxxing, jestermaxxing, friendmaxxing, socialmaxxing, pointsmaxxing, whimsymaxxing, cozymaxxing, nonnamaxxing, tastemaxxing, hobbymaxxing, analogmaxxing, offlinemaxxing, boremaxxing, slowmaxxing, homemaxxing, morningmaxxing, productivitymaxxing, joymaxxing, lifemaxxing, chinamaxxing, brainmaxxing, iqmaxxing, readingmaxxing, and shortform-maxxing.

Don’t even talk to me about pheromonemaxxing.

None of the above even touches on branded maxxing, since the number of brands and companies launching their own versions has become just as abundant.

The birth of maxxing-maxxing

Before going any further, it’s worth knowing where maxxing began. The term came out of the incelosphere, where it meant optimizing one part of your life in pursuit of romantic or sexual success, with looksmaxxing as the breakout example.

The language was borrowed from gaming the gaming terminology “min-maxing”, where players pump the stats that matter and dump the ones that don’t. As Nitsuh Abebe noted in The New York Times Magazine, incel forums already treated social life as a rigged game they were trying to beat. By 2024 the “maxxing” suffix had drifted into sleepmaxxing, jazzmaxxing, and even potassiummaxxing, with Dazed dubbing 2024 “the year of maxxing.”

“The year of maxxing” has reached its peak this year. That longevity can largely be attributed to Clavicular, real name Braden Peters, who became popular as a viral looksmaxxing influencer on Kick. He promoted smashing his face with a hammer to reconstruct facial bones and various other forms of “looksmaxxing” that perpetuated one’s own physical appearance as a problem.

Branded-maxxing

Maximizing something that’s been framed as a problem, whether that’s looks, sleep, or protein, is the core of most of these maxxing movements. It took all of 0.05 seconds for people to start joking about looksmaxxing and longevitymaxxing for being so self-serious and try-hard, and once a trend becomes a punchline, it becomes available to everyone. Brands have spent the last decade learning to speak fluent internet, borrowing slang and meme formats to prove they’re in on the joke and still culturally relevant. Once maxxing crossed over from sincere self-optimization into parody, it was only a matter of time before it showed up in a marketing calendar.

That opened the door for brands to jump in, and they didn’t hesitate. Marriott pitched Labor Day hotel stays as “weekend maxxing,” Harry’s sold its new razor on “jawmaxxing,” the Cheesecake Factory floated “cheesecake-maxxing,” and Carl’s Jr. rolled out a “Spicy Chicken Maxx” sandwich this summer. CeraVe got closest to the source material, posting a TikTok in March with its own “looksmaxxing protocol” that mocked bone smashing for facial symmetry before landing on lotion.

The appeal of using “maxxing” in marketing makes sense. Maxxing runs on extremes, and extremes sell for both people who take looksmaxxing dead seriously, as well as those who hop on something ridiculous purely to mock the people who do.

Brands are banking on that second crowd, hoping a joke about cheesecake or razors won’t carry looksmaxxing’s baggage. But the joke only works because the extreme version is real. CeraVe can parody bone smashing because someone is actually doing it. Once everyone is maxxing something, the word stops meaning anything.

That’s why the pendulum is already swinging back. As we noted in a recent TikTok, brands and consumers are now talking about slowing down and doing less. On a bell curve, one end is people who never optimized anything, the peak is people maxxing everything, and the other end is people doing less on purpose. The backlash even has a name: slowmaxxing.

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Welcome to NoGood Insights, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve.

Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

• Social citations are climbing across every major AI model, and owned brand content isn’t keeping pace

• Substack was measured by Goodie’s citation study for the first time ever, and Claude is the model driving nearly all of it

• Claude runs an entirely different social diet than every other model, TikTok and Substack heavy, and it has never once cited Reddit

• The same trust signal now winning audiences over is the one AI models are starting to cite, which changes what brands need to publish to show up in AI search

AI wants to stop being sloppy and start being something closer to a tasteful individual.

Goodie’s latest study, AI’s Social Diet: How AI Search Cites the Social Web, gives that theory some data to stand on. The study tracked 1,856,259 social citations across 10 AI surfaces and 29 social domains from January through August 2026. It found that social’s share of AI citations grew 47% in that window. It also found that Claude runs on a diet of long-form, single-byline platforms that almost no other model shares.

That pattern runs alongside the cultural backlash against AI slop and the rise of tastewashing to suggest that AI engines may be reaching for human-written content to borrow a little taste of their own.

Substack as the source

Substack appeared in Goodie’s social citation data for the first time this year, with 1,226 citations. That’s small at face value, but three models account for 72% of those citations: Grok (355), Claude (271), and Google’s AI Mode (262). Claude sends 7.7% of its own social citations to Substack which is 21 times the pooled rate and the highest newsletter weight of any model tracked.

Substack’s July launch of its AI detection tool sits neatly next to that finding. With the tool, the platform positioned itself as one of the few places left where the writing still belongs to a person, and that’s the kind of content Claude appears to favor.

Claude according to Claude

For the sake of curiosity I decided to ask Claude why it’s citing Substacks more so than other LLM’s. This is what Claude said.

I then decided to ask ChatGPT the same question.

Neither model can see its own retrieval pipeline, so both answers are educated guesses. Still, they overlapped on Claude’s distinct search setup, Substack’s long-form expert writing, and Claude’s lighter reliance on Reddit.

Goodie’s findings confirm Claude cites Reddit at effectively zero, but it’s worth noting Reddit has been suing Anthropic since June 2025, so the absence may be legal rather than editorial. ChatGPT is mirroring that at a smaller scale, with their Reddit citations falling from 8.0% of its total citations to 2.9% in mid-August.

ChatGPT also claimed Substack is disproportionately represented in what Claude retrieves. That could be an LLM throwing shade, but Claude’s own answer made the same point, crediting the sheer volume and accessibility of Substack content.

Experts as the source

Claude’s emphasis on “expert and B2B writing” lines up with the rise of intellectual influencers over the past year. Fatigue with AI slop and superficial influencer content pushed audiences toward educational, explainer-style creators, and most of those creators live on TikTok.

Claude’s TikTok numbers follow that audience with TikTok citations going from single digits to 62% of Claude’s social citations by mid-August. Anthropic has also partnered with thought leaders like Eugene Healey to position Claude as a tool for thinking, which puts the company’s brand strategy and its product’s citation habits in lockstep.

What we’ve arrived at is that Claude is citing more and more TikTok and Substack content, the latter specifically for expertise. At the same time, there is an anti-AI-slop movement running in tandem with a rise in intellectual content that Anthropic itself is actively partnering with to leverage Claude as something more human.

What it means for brands

This presents a unique opportunity, as well as a potential hurdle, for brands and companies looking to leverage themselves in AI search and citations.

With Claude taking more and more users from ChatGPT, as well as Reddit decreasing in citations from both ChatGPT and Claude, more and more brands may find themselves having to embrace long-form, expert-level content on platforms like Substack, TikTok, and YouTube to leverage themselves in AI search.

Here at NoGood, we’ve seen an increase in AI citations to our own Substack from LLMs. In the past 30 days, we’ve received views from Claude, Perplexity and ChatGPT. As Substack continues to see increasing citations and traffic from these engines, brands that embrace long-form, expert writing may find themselves benefiting from the same trend.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. Spotify teases the GTA 6 soundtrack with in-world billboards, and artists are running with it

Spotify placed in-world billboards teasing the GTA 6 soundtrack, and eight artists, including Travis Scott, Morgan Wallen and Keith Richards, posted coordinated Vice City art the same day to confirm their spots. Songs from earlier trailers already spiked hard on streaming, proof the game itself is now a music-discovery channel.

2. Amazon Prime Video adds TikTok-style news clips to court Gen Z

Prime Video is rolling out short-form, on-demand local and national news clips inside a dedicated News destination, starting on TVs and living-room devices before expanding to web and mobile. Amazon has no social platform of its own, so it's importing the format instead, following Peacock (March), HBO Max (July), Netflix (July) and Disney+ (August) into the same short-form pivot.

3. Meta launches "Meta One," a subscription layer across its app family

Meta rolled out tiered subscriptions (2.99–499/month) across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Meta AI, bundling analytics, audience insights, and AI tools that used to live outside the platform. 15 million subscriptions and trials so far, with Instagram's daily revenue up 475% week-over-week.

4. Instagram lets you add tagged posts straight to your own grid, and it's bigger than it looks for UGC

Mosseri called it a "small update," but it changes how UGC can live on a brand page: posts you're tagged in can now sit directly on your own grid instead of buried in the separate Tagged tab. Consumers are already skeptical of anything that reads as polished advertising, which is exactly why UGC works, and this gives brands a native way to make their own grid look less like curated brand content and more like real people actually using the product.

5. Sonos ditches spec-sheet marketing for an emotions-first campaign

"Love the Sound. Feel the System" swaps talk of calibrated acoustics for hand-drawn imagery and lines like "awe in the living room, love in the bedroom," backed by a heavy New York out-of-home push. It's Sonos' first full brand repositioning since a disastrous software update tanked its stock and cost its CEO the job two years ago.

6. Samsung enlists a real clinical psychologist to talk people into switching phones

The "Switchers" campaign has Dr. Orna Guralnik, known for HBO's Couples Therapy, sitting down with real-life pairs to unpack the emotional resistance behind sticking with an old phone, tied to the new Galaxy Z Fold8 and Flip8. Samsung's framing the purchase decision as a relationship problem and paired it with a Spotify playlist ("Switch Mix") built around the emotional arc of finally trying something new.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. YouTube says the mainstream just got redefined

YouTube’s newest Culture & Trends report argues shared culture just relocated, with it now living on channels with 500 million-plus subscribers instead of TV or old-school mass media. Reach is no longer the hardest metric to earn, but instead actually being understood is the new gap.

2. IKEA fixes Skyrim’s 15-year-old clutter problem

IKEA and agency Mother built KALLAX Storageborn into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a free companion voiced by Matt Berry that fixes the game’s long-mocked “over-encumbrance” mechanic with unlimited storage and auto-loot. Rather than just placing the brand in-game, IKEA turned its storage expertise into an actual mechanic, complete with a summonable Dragon Shout and a boss fight against a “Clutter Golem.”

3. Old Navy’s MrBeast partnership boosts back-to-school engagement

Old Navy tapped MrBeast for its back-to-school campaign as Gap leadership doubles down on creators as the primary driver of cultural relevance, with early engagement outperforming past seasonal pushes for the brand, which has been trying to break a sales slump.

4. Apple launched iPhone Duo. Then it got hijacked by Samsung and Duolingo

Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, at a September 9 event. The name handed Duolingo an easy joke, and Samsung piled on with mock “solidarity” over Apple copying its Galaxy Fold; Duolingo clapped back, calling Samsung an “ugly stranger” claiming it as a twin. The exchange outperformed Apple’s own keynote in social conversation, and Duolingo’s stock reportedly dipped nearly 5% that day.

5. Ramp brings back the corporate Broadway musical, this time for accounts payable

Ramp, a corporate card and spend management platform, is staging “Bill Pay The Musical,” a real one-night Broadway show about accounts payable at the Broadhurst Theatre on September 25, starring Billy Porter and free with RSVP for CFOs. It’s a nod to a real tradition: GE, Ford, Xerox, and Chevrolet all staged Broadway-style musicals for sales teams from the ‘50s through the ‘80s. Co-CEO Eric Glyman calls it a revival, arguing B2B marketing lost its nerve somewhere along the way.

6. Sydney Sweeney’s nude sports betting ad sparks backlash from Olympians.

Sydney Sweeney’s ad for sports prediction market Novig, where she’s an equity partner, has her posing nude across four sports, covered only by footballs, hockey sticks, and basketball hoops, with the tagline “Novig is just sports.” Female Olympians called it a “mockery” of women in sport, with boxer Skye Nicolson drawing a line between “looking sexy because you do sport” and “using sex to sell sport.”

7. Anthropic’s CEO calls for the industry to “pace the frontier.”

Dario Amodei published a plan for slowing AI development, calling for third-party evaluators embedded inside frontier labs, coordinated safety standards among Western AI companies, and cautious cooperation with China on high-risk uses like bioweapons. Anthropic is committing to the evaluator model unilaterally, and Sam Altman said OpenAI will follow suit. The post comes days after an Anthropic researcher publicly resigned, warning that leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives.”

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Elmer Saflor drew the “Running Away Balloon” comic all the way back in 2017, and for the better part of a decade it’s been one of the most popular meme formats with thousands and thousands of variations that nobody ever thought twice about. This July, Saflor sued a company called Memes App for turning his comic into a paid, commercializable ad template with no license, and is consequently asking for a permanent injunction, damages, and the company’s profits.

It paints a future for meme culture that isn’t just a hypothetical anymore. A filing in federal court about commercialized memes could set a real precedent for memes and fair use, and it could change the meme-jacking strategy that many brands have built their identity on.

The free ride

In early July, a local Seattle raccoon with a condensed spine named Jimothy the Raccoon won over the internet. Within a week of his story breaking, Jimmy John’s and Applebee’s had already slapped him on their feeds, and he even made it into an image that would be posted by the White House’s X account.

Prior to Jimothy’s viral moment we had the flag stunt on the Empire State Building that had Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov climbing to the top and holding a sign stating, “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.” Within 24 hours, brands like DoorDash, Cisco, Canva, and Duolingo posted their own variation with their own messaging on the flag.

Neither moment cost a brand a dime. Nobody involved had copyrighted their own virality, so fair use held up fine. Saflor’s comic proves that argument only holds until someone with a copyright registration decides to test it.

The exposure was already there

In the 2010s, Kelleth Cuthbert became known as the “Fiji Water Girl,” after holding Fiji water bottles at the Golden Globes. But Cuthbert never even signed off on being the “Fiji Water Girl” in the first place, so when Fiji ran a national campaign around her anyway, a lawsuit was filed and was eventually settled after several rounds of litigation.

The creators behind early internet memes Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat sued Warner Bros. over an unlicensed cameo in a video game and walked away with a settlement and a licensing deal. Additionally, Grumpy Cat’s team won $710,000 from a beverage company that had a license and still overstepped it.

The pattern holds across all of these, as it shows a meme without a rights holder is free to use, but a meme with one, even a reluctant one, is a lawsuit waiting for a brand that moves too fast. The WNBA players’ union has already taken the next logical step, barring licensees from producing merch off confrontational moments between players before a single brand gets the chance to post one, potentially creating a world where meme-lords could do the same.

Borrowed culture, real bill

The reality is that the grey area of memes is shrinking. Meme-jacking finally got successful, and success made it profitable enough for everyone to notice and want a piece of the pie.

Brands using memes as a sort of free distribution hack to borrow culture are now borrowing liability, and betting no one will care to collect. That bet gets worse and worse every year as the format grows in popularity and generates real sponsorship money and revenue. Saflor is suing over his comic from over 10 years ago now because his meme finally became worth suing over.

Brands built to survive this are the ones building a bit nobody else can legally borrow, the way Duolingo owns an unhinged owl rather than renting another meme, because you can either own the joke, or eventually pay for someone else’s.

Do you think brands should slow down on meme-jacking as the legal risk becomes common knowledge, or does the payoff stay big enough that getting caught is just a cost of doing business?

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Welcome to NoGood Insights, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve.

Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

• Intellectualism just moved online, and audiences are now rewarding creators who teach instead of perform

• Brands from Depop to Lightspeed Venture Partners are paying for proximity to expertise instead of buying reach the old way

• The same forces that made intellectual influencers valuable also made them easy to fake, and AI just accelerated the gap

• Real experts are now stuck competing on production value against people who have none, on a platform that rewards packaging over substance

Ready? Let’s get into it.

Intellectualism is so back, and it’s gone digital

Intellectualism goes back to Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece. It moved through the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution before landing here, in the intellectualism of the information age. It never really left. It just found new real estate.

That intellectualism can exist just about anywhere now. Globalization and internet accessibility opened the door for intellectual ideas to live on the same platforms as everything else, so Instagram, TikTok, and Substack became just as viable a home for a history lecture as they are for a dance trend.

How we got the intellectual influencer

Intellectualism online trickled in as people became fatigued with AI slop, brainrot, and superficial influencers. Pair that fatigue with the hard data that 78% of people prefer expert-level information over entertainment and that 74% of students utilize educational influencers for learning and the timing of the rise of intellectualism in influencing makes total sense.

The mass access to information, as well as the desire for it, has given way to a sort of commoditization of information. In late 2026, we’ve arrived at the intersection of accessible intellectualism, late stage capitalism, and modern marketing/advertising, which can be referred to as the intellectual influencer, or as what Battenhall describes as people who “gain trust through knowledge rather than popularity. They simplify complex ideas, break down research, explore history, science, culture or economics, and translate expertise into accessible, engaging formats. They are the intersection of education and entertainment, blending depth with platform-native storytelling.”

The brands are showing up

The intellectual influencer became monetized almost instantly. What started as a passion project to break down niche or academic topics turned into a real content category, and brands followed the audience.

Depop tapped Vivian Tu, founder of Your Rich BFF, to reframe resale through a financial literacy lens. Luggage brand July let Substack writer shape its move into handbags. Dior brought wellness podcaster Jay Shetty to Jonathan Anderson’s men’s debut, and Valentino has made “resident librarian” Jack Edwards a regular at its events, credibility he’s since converted into a contributing editor role at Esquire.

The finance and tech corner of the internet is running the same play. Claire Zau built an audience of over 350,000 explaining startup funding and AI news in plain language under the handle @Zauey. Lightspeed Venture Partners hired her into a hybrid investor-creator role, folding the explainer directly into the firm itself.

B2B LinkedIn creators are getting a lighter version of the same treatment, pulled into brand trips, given early product access, and sent merch, the enterprise equivalent of a gifting suite, because a founder’s trust in a niche expert closes more deals than an ad ever could.

The common thread across every industry is paying for proximity to expertise they didn’t build themselves.

The problem with intellectual influencers

Brands are borrowing the intellectual influencer’s actual currency, which isn’t just followers anymore, but also the presumption that they know something worth knowing.

Once brands started paying attention, the barrier to entry disappeared. Anyone could claim expertise without having any, and AI made faking it easy. A chatbot recombines what’s already been said, then hands it back dressed up as insight. The “intellect” on display is borrowed, not created. As puts it in his article “Intellectual Influencers: a brief historical introduction”, most intellectual influencers are simply “popularizers,” and audiences rarely catch the gaps in what they’re repeating.

Richard’s Substack

Intellectual influencers: a brief historical introduction

Since at least the late 19th century, writers and philosophers began to express their perspectives on matters of public interest in widely circulated newspapers. The Dreyfus Affair was the prime example—the case of a Jewish officer unjustly accused of national treason in France. His trial and conviction exposed the antisemitism of French society. A grea…

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a year ago · Richard Miskolci

The result is a flood of borrowed authority drowning out the people who actually did the work. Real expertise takes years to build; a prompt takes seconds. When both look identical on a 60-second video, the noise wins.

AI has made those gaps and weaknesses almost invisible. A creator asks Claude for an opinion, gets something flashy back, and turns it into a 60-second video that pulls a million views and a paid partnership. has pointed out that these influencers are built for views first, and that the expertise tends to dissipate the moment they’re in a real conversation with a CMO or on a podcast longer than 60 seconds.

calls it plainly: the intellectual influencer boom has created a new kind of grifter, one who needs little more than “very basic insight, mild levels of taste and zero credentials.” His fix is a checklist brands should be running before they sign anyone: does this person have real clients and outcomes beyond their own followers, credibility that exists off social media, and the ability to defend their thinking outside a scripted reel. As budgets keep shifting toward expert creators, that gap between the ones with real receipts and the ones without will only widen.

The skill set split

There’s a second layer to this nobody’s talking about, and that’s that reach and editing skill can now manufacture authority that used to take a career to earn. A sharp hook, a clean cut, and eighteen seconds of eye contact function as a credential in a feed that can’t tell the difference between someone who’s studied a subject for a decade and someone who asked Claude about it an hour ago.

The ability to manufacture authority has had a profound effect on real experts because now a researcher or specialist with real, hard-won knowledge still needs a hook, a face, and an editing rhythm if any of that expertise is going to translate into widespread reach.

Depth is expensive to build and cheap to fake, and the platform rewards whoever packages it best, regardless of whether you actually know what you’re talking about.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. The US Open’s influencer boom backfires as matches get disrupted

The USTA nearly doubled its content-creator credentials this year (to about 100, up from 54 in 2025) to widen the tournament’s social reach, but the result has been chair umpires shushing influencers filming mid-point, ring lights flashing during rallies, and players like Naomi Osaka, Jessica Pegula, and Daniil Medvedev publicly calling the behavior disrespectful. Wimbledon has already signaled it won’t follow suit, making the US Open a live case study in what happens when a legacy sports property optimizes for creator reach without guardrails for the in-venue experience.

2. Poppi expands its campus ambassador army for back-to-school season

Poppi kicked off its 25-stop Juicy Tour on September 1 at Penn State, working coast to coast through mid-November with stops at schools like Maryland, Florida, Texas, and San Diego State. Each pop-up leans into free product, exclusive merch, and a hangout vibe over a hard sell, with the brand noting dates and locations could still shift as the run continues.

3. “Aura farming” turns a gaming meme into a real-world youth trend across Latin America

What started as an online trend inspired by video-game characters “farming” for points has become in-person “aura battles” across Peru, Brazil, and beyond, where costumed competitors dance and pose for crowd approval. Organizers and academics frame it less as a popularity contest than a public display of good vibes. A low-cost, self-organizing format brands and platforms will likely want to piggyback on as it spreads.

4. Hoka turns runners’ own Strava data into a live outdoor ad

Hoka’s “Run Your City” campaign, built with Jellyfish, pits New York’s five boroughs against each other in a month-long mileage contest, with scoreboard-style screens across four Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods refreshing each week to show which borough is racking up the most mileage. It leans into a supportive tone that contrasts with Nike’s recently pulled “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated.” ad.

5. Apple hands the CEO seat to a hardware engineer for the first time since Jobs

Tim Cook worked his last day as Apple CEO on August 31 after 15 years, handing off to John Ternus, the company’s longtime hardware engineering chief, effective September 1. Cook moves into a new executive chairman role; the succession, announced back in April, signals Apple doubling down on product execution as it faces pressure to move faster on AI.

6. Chipotle hands its ad campaign entirely to 100 creators

Chipotle’s new “Behind the Foil” campaign uses zero brand-shot footage: 100 creators with 100M+ combined followers filmed inside 50+ restaurants with no scripts, launching Pollo Asado and Chili Lime Chips. It’s the first national work from new Chief Brand Officer Fernando Machado and agency KIDS, betting unpolished creator footage reads as more credible than a traditional commercial.

7. Instagram will start demoting AI influencers that don’t disclose

Meta now requires accounts featuring AI-generated people to carry an “AI-generated profile” label or lose reach on Instagram. The move follows a wave of undisclosed AI “influencers” and fake AI “doctors” flagged by outlets like the Guardian and NYT, though it only targets fabricated personas rather than the platform’s broader flood of AI-generated content.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Shortform-maxxing has arrived in 2026. Every social platform, every news outlet, every music app. According to TechCrunch Now HBO, Disney, and Netflix are joining in, each rolling out dedicated short form feeds inside their own apps.

Disney went a step further, striking a deal with TikTok that pipes fan-made Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars edits directly into its own vertical feed.

HBO, Netflix, and Disney are framing this as a way to help people search massive catalogs and find the next thing to watch. The real story arrives a few years later than that explanation lets on, right after the clipping economy became a legitimate source of content consumption and ad revenue.

The history of clipping

That surge in clip culture didn’t come from the streamers, brands, or ad agencies. It came from fans, specifically fans of Twitch streamers like Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed, and long form YouTubers like Outdoor Boys. Unpaid fans, or “clippers,” took six hour uncut streams and hour long videos, spliced them into bite sized pieces, and posted them across social as fun, easily digestible content. The format hit instantly. Almost overnight, streamers and YouTubers who had never posted a single clip themselves became some of the most-seen creators on Instagram and TikTok.

Free labor doesn’t stay free once someone notices the value. Creators saw how much of their audience arrived through someone else’s edit, so marketplaces formed to pay clippers directly, per view, per hour. Unpaid fan labor quickly became a real labor market.

How clipping gets monetized

The mechanics are almost insultingly simple. A brand or creator posts a brief on a clipping marketplace, sometimes as targeted as a specific show, sometimes as loose as “clip anything from this catalog.” Clippers, often teenagers, pick a campaign, cut the sharpest moments into fast vertical edits, and blast them across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and X; the same clip reposted a dozen times through a dozen accounts, because volume is the whole strategy.

The money is enough to pull people out of other work entirely. NPR profiled a 25-year-old in Belgium stitching together odd jobs and overnight shifts before a single viral clip earned him $2,500 in two weeks.

According to Tech BUzz, Clippers get paid per thousand views, typically 30 cents to $6 depending on platform and niche, and it goes straight into a bank account or crypto wallet. Traditional paid placement runs $40 to $80 per thousand impressions; clipping gets comparable reach for a fraction of that.

The clipping economy at scale

The scale and impact of clipping has far surpassed Twitch streamers and YouTubers, as reported in his article The Clipping Economy that TBPN, a daily tech podcast averaging roughly 7,000 live viewers per episode, reportedly landed a nine-figure sponsorship deal with OpenAI. The live audience had almost nothing to do with it. The audience watching the clips, re-clipped and reposted across the internet, had everything to do with it.

Fan edits and bootleg clips already let TikTok users watch an entire Netflix or HBO show in sixty second increments. Against that backdrop, the streaming service’s pivot to in-house short form stops looking like innovation. Disney isn’t clipping its own library because it discovered vertical video. Years of unauthorized fan edits already told it exactly which five seconds of a three hour show anyone actually wants to watch.

Do you think the clips and short form integrations are here to stay? Or are they just another phase that marketing is going through?

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. Spotify built poster theft into the poster.

The latest installment of Spotify’s Fan Life campaign uses street posters with perforated sections designed to be torn off and taken home, with a handful of them hiding artist-signed versions among the crowd. Fans have been ripping down gig posters for decades, so Spotify just stopped fighting the behavior and built the whole campaign around it.

2. Callaway and Good Good Golf’s new driver faces a major PR crisis.

The spot was meant to promote a co-branded driver, but instead it showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoulder-checking fellow creator Alexis Miestowski for reaching toward it. Callaway, which had approved the ad before it posted, ended the three-year partnership after Dick’s and Golf Galaxy pulled the merchandise amid the backlash. Apology posts went up fast, but customers know how long an internal approval process actually takes, and every new customer googling either brand now runs into this before anything else they’ve built.

Figma and Slate create their own microseries.

Figma and Slate both dropped original branded episodic content this week, joining the growing list of companies creating their own branded content series. The ad used to be the interruption between the entertainment, but the rise of branded shows has made the ad part of the entertainment.

Vaseline let the internet rename it.

A Korean beauty creator named Min Day Lee posted a skincare video pronouncing “Vaseline” as “Baseline,” and the internet decided it liked her version better. The clip crossed two million views, and the pronunciation spread everywhere, so Vaseline joined the joke, changing its social display name to “Baseline” and naming Lee the brand’s new CEO.

Pizza Hut dropped the word “pizza” from its own name.

The chain is going by “Hut” for the next 25 weeks to line up with the NFL season, covering the word “Pizza” on select storefront signs with football graphics, so some locations now literally read “Hut Hut.” It’s the same move Levi’s pulled this summer, covering its own logo with a white tarp after FIFA forced the cover-up.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Welcome to NoGood Insights, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve.

Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

• Away turned its community into a writers’ room with their latest series, actuallyaway, letting real travel stories from its audience become the scripts

• Bilt’s Roomies becomes the leading branded content series, winning two Webby Awards decided entirely by public vote

• Hinge’s No Ordinary Love is three chapters in and just became an audiobook, showing that a format can shift mediums without losing its core

• InStyle keeps The Intern going strong by rotating in new creators and celebrity cameos every season.

• The Kumar Method x Ramp saga shows what happens when a “twist” starts feeling like clickbait.

• Cava's Bowlmates proves a separate channel isn't a fix on its own if the show is just borrowing a trend.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

Brands are learning to entertainment first

For years, the branded content playbook was simple: post more, jump on trends, hope something sticks. That approach filled feeds, but it rarely built anything that lasted past the algorithm’s attention span.

Something’s shifted. The brands breaking through right now are building recurring shows with narrative arcs, with one question in mind: would someone actually watch this if they didn’t already care about the brand?

So many brands have tried their hand at a branded content series over the past year. Not all of them have landed. The ones that did share a few things in common, and the ones that flopped tend to share the same handful of mistakes.

Bilt set the bar first

Bilt built Roomies entirely in-house. The show follows a 25-year-old who moves from Ohio to New York and navigates roommates, rent, and the mess of young adulthood. It lives on its own account, separate from Bilt’s main page, so the show never has to fight a brand logo for attention.

That separation paid off. Roomies just won two People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Writing and Best Series. Those wins are decided entirely by public vote. Season 2 premiered at Sundance in partnership with UTA. A fintech company built a show good enough for a film festival, and did it without ever shoving their brand logo in someone’s face.

Bilt is the reason this whole category exists in its current form. Every brand attempting a content series now is, whether they'd admit it or not, working off the standard Roomies set: build a world first, keep the brand in the background, and hold the writing to the same bar as anything else in someone's feed.

Away is handing the mic to their audience

Away just launched actuallyaway, a channel built entirely around real travel stories submitted by its own audience. There’s a forum where people can share their own unexpected journeys, misadventures, and moments on the road, with the chance to have their story turned into a season.

This is the customer’s lens principle in its most literal form. Away is taking a real submission, i.e. two strangers who ended up stuck inside a train station overnight, and treating it like a TV show would: full scripts, cast members playing distinct characters, and a high-quality filming and editing style.

That level of production is what separates actuallyaway from any other UGC campaign. Real submissions are the source material but not the finished product. Away is turning someone’s memory into something that looks and feels like entertainment, which is exactly the kind of narrative commitment that keeps a series alive.

Hinge shows a series can outlive its format

Hinge just launched the third installment of , and each year makes it clearer this is a literary universe. Over the past three years, Hinge has partnered with sixteen contemporary authors to build three anthologies, each built around real couples who met on the app and each focused on a different stage of falling for someone.

The 2024 anthology sat with the icks and the pressure for perfection that show up in early dating. 2025 moved inward, exploring the excitement and self-doubt that come before someone admits how they feel, told through alternating perspectives from each half of the couple. This year centers on the early conversations themselves, the ones that happen before either person knows if it’s safe to be honest yet.

That progression is what makes the format hold up. Hinge uses the same real-couple foundation to examine a new part of the relationship each year, then finds the medium that fits that theme. This year, that meant a full audiobook narrated by the same authors who wrote the stories, available on platforms like Spotify, Apple Audiobooks, YouTube, and Substack.

Hinge even did its own research and found that Gen Z’s biggest barriers to connection are the fear of being “too much,” the fear of rejection, and not knowing how to build intimacy in the first place. The purpose of creating No Ordinary Love was to push back against a dating culture that rewards playing it cool, giving daters a version of themselves who says the truth instead of holding back.

That’s branded storytelling working at full capacity: real customers as the source material, authors as the craft layer, data guiding the format, and a message specific enough to a real emotional problem that it never once needs to mention the app to make its point.

InStyle proves a format can keep reinventing itself

InStyle casts actual staff members alongside creators and influencers playing heightened versions of themselves, in a series called The Intern and the roster changes almost every season. Season 3’s premiere alone hit 3 million views in 24 hours, with 99% of those views coming from people who didn’t already follow InStyle.

The format hasn’t changed much since season one, but what keeps it from feeling repetitive is the casting. New creators bring their own built-in audiences into InStyle’s world every season, and occasional celebrity cameos, with season 9 currently spotlighting actress Madelyn Cline from the Netflix TV show Outer Banks, which just aired season 5. These cameos give longtime viewers a reason to keep tuning in beyond the regular cast.

The Kumar Method x Ramp shows what happens when the twist breaks trust

The Kumar Method started as a simple, well-executed bit: a retired accountant promising to become the biggest accounting influencer in the world all while auramaxxing. And it worked. The account went from zero to a million followers in five days.

Then the story took a turn that’s still murky. Posts said Kumar had been killed off. A mysterious group called the Council accused him of misleading his followers. Kumar eventually came back in a co-authored post with Ramp, which by then had become his verified content partner, pointing followers toward a Ramp-hosted finance guide. Whether Ramp was involved in that arc from the start is still unclear. The moment a story looks like it exists to serve a sponsor instead of the story, the goodwill and trust built up over months can churn fast.

Cava’s Bowlmates borrowed a trend instead of building on its own

Bowlmates launched as a Instagram dating series where two contestants build each other a Cava bowl while getting to know each other. It lived on its own account, separate from Cava’s main page, and the first two episodes pulled in over 100k views.

The instinct to give the show its own channel was right, but the instinct behind the format itself is where it gets shaky. Cava’s team has said openly that the series came out of watching other creators run dating-show formats and deciding to build their own version. That’s a different starting point than Away’s forum full of real travel stories, or Bilt’s decision to build a world around what it actually means to rent. Bowlmates isn’t extending anything specific to eating at Cava. They just happened to use a bowl as a prop.

That gap shows up in the outcome. The series hasn’t posted since February, which is its own separate problem, but the deeper issue is that the format never had a reason to exist beyond “this kind of show is working for other people right now.”

So what separates branded content series from the ones that last?

1. The story has to come from something real. Roomies, actuallyaway, and No Ordinary Love all pull from customer stories.

2. A separate channel only works if there’s a reason to keep watching. Away, Bilt, and Cava all made the same structural choice, giving the series its own account away from the brand’s main page to separate narratives and voices.

3. Production quality signals commitment. actuallyaway and Roomies both look and feel like TV level production shows. It tells the audience the brand is serious enough about the story to treat it like one.

Where this leaves brands starting a series today

If there's one thing worth carrying into your next series, build it around something true to your customer and treat production like a real show. Posting volume never made anyone wait for episode two. Write a story actually worth returning to.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. YouTube overhauls how it counts views

Starting Aug 24, YouTube will count a “view” the moment any video, Short, or livestream begins playing, with no minimum watch time. This lands a week after YouTube separately raised the bar for new creators to qualify for monetization, so reach is about to look easier to hit right as it’s actually getting harder to earn from.

2. Away launches @actuallyaway, moving from posting to programming

The luggage brand launched a dedicated episodic Instagram account featuring short films built from real travel stories submitted by its audience. It follows a run of unconventional formats from Away, including whiteboard product education videos with its VP of design, a tween directed campaign, and an interactive “Amtrak Jazz” site.

3. Ramp partners with the viral “Kumar Method” account

The Kumar Method account killed off its lead character mid-series, brought him back in a reel co-authored by @tryramp, and now sends traffic to a Ramp-owned interactive "book" at ramp.com/thekumarmethod. The book gates content behind a work email, then routes visitors into Ramp's company-size qualification flow. Deal terms and when Ramp actually got involved aren't public.

4. Cursor is throwing dinner parties instead of demos

Cursor has been running invite-only creator dinners in SF, LA, and New York, with custom dining rooms, tasting menus, tech-themed gifts. They’re taking a page out of the DTC playbook and running it in a B2B context.

5. Chipotle and Jo Malone lean into Gen Alpha and gaming

Chipotle partnered with 16-year-old creator Salish Matter on a custom Kid’s Meal, while Estée Lauder’s Jo Malone launched its first gaming activation inside a “Fortnite” island to introduce a new fragrance.

6. Google gives publishers a tool to fight AI traffic loss

Readers can now embed a “Preferred Sources” button on a publisher’s site, flagging it as a source they want to see more across Search, Discover, and Google News. It builds on the version Google shipped to AI Overviews in May, which already has 345,000+ sources selected. Google says preferred sources get clicked twice as often.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Myspace owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook confirmed in a new documentary that they’re eyeing a second MySpace relaunch. The first attempt, back in 2013, cost $150 million and failed to recapture the site’s original magic after years of the company changing hands. This one looks primed for the same fate as Tom Anderson isn’t involved, and details remain scarce, but the internet MySpace is walking back into looks nothing like 2013.

Social fatigue has hit a new high. Millennials and Gen Z are trading smartphones for flip phones; public profiles for privacy and community. Call it the offline movement, and MySpace’s quirky, customizable, community-first UI happens to fit the exact demographic driving it.

MySpace could be a genuine remedy for that fatigue, but it’s not the only one. Disdain for algorithmic feeds nobody asked for has already splintered users into private communities and niche platforms of their own.

How Infinite Scroll and Algorithmic Feeds Created Digital Fatigue

The digital fatigue fueling this retreat didn’t happen overnight and instead crept up over the last decade, driven largely by three developments that reshaped how the internet holds attention.

The first was infinite scroll, which removed the natural stopping point for scrolling on a phone or computer. It’s technically a 2006 Microsoft patent, though the design is largely credited to Aza Raskin. Worth noting: Raskin has since disowned it, regretting that the frictionless model he built for convenience got repurposed by ad-based companies to capture attention indefinitely.

The second came in 2016, when Instagram flipped from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one, explicitly because a scrambled feed kept people scrolling longer.

The third was TikTok’s 2018 “For You Page,” which broke the model further by ranking content on watch behavior instead of who you follow. Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube all adopted a version of it soon after.

All three got sold as “improving the user experience.” To their credit, they did, at first. But by 2026, that same architecture is behind a dopamine addiction epidemic: Sprout Social found that 63% of Gen Z planned social media detoxes in 2024, and 47% of people have deleted a social media app over the stress and anxiety from using it chronically.

The fatigue got visible enough that the same brands and tech companies who engineered it are now selling the exit. Pinterest ran a national ad campaign promoting going offline. Anthropic turned a coffee shop into a “zero slop zone.” OpenAI sold merch stamped “Pause. Play. Prompt.”

Still, fatigue isn’t the same as departure. The Global Statistics suggests it isn’t resolving into a mass exodus so much as a relocation, less time online overall, but a real shift toward subscriptions over algorithms and community over broadcast.

What Is Dark Socials, and Why Are Users Moving There?

A luxury on social media used to mean virality, reach, and influence. Under this relocation, a new luxury is taking shape: untrackability. Privacy, in the sense people actually mean it now, is about being unmeasured instead of unseen.

That untrackability is what defines dark social: platforms and spaces where analytics can’t follow, and where community, privacy, and exclusivity matter more than reach. Discord, DMs, group chats, Substack, etc.

Discord is the clearest embodiment of the shift. A platform once built for gaming has grown into 259.2 million monthly active users, 78% of whom are there for reasons that have nothing to do with games. It has no algorithm, no For You Page, just 690 million registered accounts and 32.6 million servers built entirely on community and connection.

Substack proves the same pilgrimage in a different direction: subscriptions, maybe the most literal gate for privacy and exclusivity there is. Substack reports over 35 million active subscriptions and 5 million paid, a paid number that’s roughly doubled in two years. The platform takes no ad revenue and no algorithmic cut. Instead, it runs on a 10% fee that lets creators keep 90% of subscription revenue, the structural opposite of the feed model most people know. That combination makes Substack feel like something you’re in control of instead of just being an observer of it.

Even inside Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the public feed is turning into a funnel toward private conversation. Instagram’s Broadcast Channels are one version of that funnel, letting pages launch semi-private communities that have only grown more popular. The platform now treats “sends per reach,” how often someone DMs your post to a friend, as its single strongest engagement signal, and over 500 million people send DMs on Instagram daily.

Snapchat tells the same story. 53% of US Gen Zers say they primarily use social media for direct messaging rather than public posting, and 70% of the messages people send on the platform go to their five closest friends, not a broad audience.

The relocation is real. What it leaves unanswered is how does a marketer advertise inside a room they can’t measure?

How Brands Are Advertising on Discord, Snapchat, and Dark Socials

A few brands have found an answer. Snapchat built directly around it. With 469 million daily users spending most of their time in chat rather than public Stories, Snap launched Sponsored Snaps: ads placed inside a friend’s feed, tagged only with a small “Ad” label. A Kantar study found those ads drove 1.6x more attention and 1.2x more emotional engagement than the same creative on other platforms, and Snap’s own numbers show up to 2.3x higher brand awareness lift. Scale held too with Wendy’s and Experian each hitting roughly 50 million users in a single day. As product marketing lead Abby Laursen put it, the strategy works because brands show up “where real conversations are happening.”

As Discord became prime real estate for privacy and community, brands have moved in to reach consumers on different terms than a feed allows. Chipotle launched its “Chipotle Together” server alongside a Discord job fair that pulled in thousands of applicants. Samsung’s server hit 100,000 members in 12 hours. Gucci and StockX built around niche identity instead of chasing broad reach. The thread connecting all of it is that brands have stopped pretending they control this space the way they do Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. They’re renting it instead, in exchange for a community that actually wants to be there.

The payoff is still murky, as Discord’s lack of native analytics makes conversion nearly difficult to verify, and no brand has publicly disclosed a hard revenue number tied to a server. But in an era where virality itself is losing its shine, an engaged community is a net positive on its own terms, if nothing else.

The Risk of Brands Buying Their Way Into Private Communities

Zooming out, going offline turned into something people need an audience for, and brand community runs on the same rule. The instant a brand shows up to cultivate something private, it stops being private by definition.

Brands from Jack in the Box to Mentos have started paying the owners of servers they had no hand in building, buying their way into communities instead of earning a place in one. Strip away the Discord branding and it might as well just be influencer marketing again, a brand renting proximity to an audience it never built. Dark social is untrackable by design, and untrackable tends to mean unmonitored, at least for now. Every time marketing finds a corner the algorithm can’t see into, someone moves in and sets up shop.

MySpace already ran this experiment once, community over broadcast, and lost to a platform that promised the same thing at scale. The relaunch is proof the model never left; it just moved into rooms MySpace can’t get back into. So we’ll see if they can build their own room.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. Hinge turned real breakup texts into an audiobook.

For the third installment of “,” Hinge released its first-ever audiobook on Spotify and Libby, narrated by contemporary authors including Raven Smith and Rufi Thorpe. Each paired with a real-life Hinge couple to turn their early relationship texts into narrative stories. Past editions lived exclusively in written form, but the switch to audio rides the wave of audiobooks and podcasts hitting an all-time high in listenership.

2. Instagram redesigned its wordmark for the first time in a decade.

Adam Mosseri revealed the new text-only logo on Instagram and Threads, calling it “sharper and more modern.” The app icon itself remains untouched, but the lettering is tighter and more cursive, with the “r” and “g” becoming something of a meme as people are now referring to the whole redesign as “instagzam”.

3. YouTube is raising the bar for new monetized channels.

Starting February 2027, new channels will need to hit double the watch hours they currently do before qualifying for the Partner Program. The move comes as the creator economy becomes more and more saturated with participants.

4. Anthropic is putting an invisible watermark on everything Claude writes.

Claude models now embed a machine-readable mark into generated text, plus C2PA provenance metadata into generated images and files, so platforms can flag any content that passed through Claude. The move brings Anthropic into compliance with the EU AI Act, as well as mirror companies like LinkedIn, Spotify, and Substack adding AI Labels.

5. Gap tapped Gen Z talent for its fall denim push.

“Denim on Your Own” stars “Obsession” breakout Inde Navarrette and singer-songwriter Malcolm Todd, who recorded a cover of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” for the spot. The music-video-style ad rolled out across Gap’s digital, social, email, stores, and out-of-home, continuing the brand’s now-familiar formula: borrow a rising name from film or music, pair it with a nostalgic needle-drop, let the algorithm do the rest.

6. Crocs gave its logo a body.

Niles, a six foot crocodile built off the brands original clog silhouette, was introduced on August 13th after a month of easter egg teasers. He is being positioned as a long term character meant to handle an ongoing micro-series, further cementing that mascots are being treated less like mascots and more like IPs.

7. Pinterest and Zillow are teaming up on ad targeting.

Pinterest and Zillow just partnered up, allowing Zillow Elevate advertisers tap into Pinterest Media network, targeting Zillow consumers segments like buyers, renters, and house flippers. Kohler initially piloted the feature and saw 82% more incremental reach than a standard Pinterest campaign, signaling where ad targeting might be heading.

8. Alex Cooper’s beverage brand didn’t survive its second year.

Unwell Beverage Co., the Nestlé-backed hydration and energy drink line AlexCooper launched off the back of “Call Her Daddy,” is shutting down. The brand will sell through a final run of Halloween-themed flavors before ending production entirely, with Target, its main retail partner, selling through remaining stock.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Welcome to NoGood Insights, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve.

Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

• OpenAI’s first influencer trip, built around private cabins and farm-to-table dinners, drew backlash within days over the optics of a luxury retreat funded by an AI company.

• A Nantucket antique shop’s “No Influencers” sign turned into a public referendum, and the support it got proves the sentiment isn’t a fringe opinion.

• Creators like Audrey Peters are trading the old exclusivity aesthetic for less polished, more relatable formats to keep up with the algorithm.

• Emma Chamberlain, one of the format’s founding faces, stepped back from her podcast and called the creator economy a train headed for a brick wall, though the “wall” may be more of a slowdown than a stop.

• Brands like Starbucks, Gap, and Salesforce are shifting budget from influencers to employee-generated content, betting on trust that doesn’t need to be rented.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

The rise and fall of influencer marketing

For about a decade, influencer marketing has been the go-to method for brands selling a product on social media. However, over those ten years, the audience has slowly gotten more and more fatigued with paid partnerships and with influencers at large for helping to sell products they were visibly disconnected from. Flash forward to August 2026, and the word “influencer” has become more of a warning label than a job title, and the stories surrounding influencer marketing from the past few weeks support the idea that a so-called “influencer recession” may be upon us.

Camp, not summer camp

This month, OpenAI held its first influencer trip, inviting influencers to partake in private cabins, beekeeping, and farm-to-table dinners in the Hudson Valley, all while simultaneously letting these influencers play with the new ChatGPT Work tool.

The irony of the event was called out immediately, as an AI company funding a nature retreat while simultaneously closing in on a $500 billion data center deal read as poor taste. Attendees defended the trip by saying they valued being in the room with the people building the product; however, their followers didn’t care about that defense, since a nature retreat from an AI company was such a juxtaposition that it became impossible for the influencers not to seem like they were selling out.

Brand trips had already carried a reputation problem because they usually involve posting the same luxury swag bag to a following that is struggling to pay the bills. Take that and add the polarization AI companies carry, along with the inherent distrust people have toward influencers, and you have an influencer trip that did the opposite of what it was intended for.

The sign on the door and the writing on the wall

In Nantucket, a antique shop hung a sign that read, “No Influencers.” An employee called it a tongue-in-cheek push against the phone-first mindset, but the sign sparked a larger conversation around influencer backlash not unlike the response to the OpenAI brand trip.

Within days the sign became an online sensation on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Reddit. For some influencers it hit a nerve: one person with over a million followers took it personally and called the sign an attack on women entrepreneurs, but the shop held its ground, and the wave of public support it got hammered the point home even further.

The formula isn’t working anymore

While the wave of fatigue and distrust comes closer to shore, some influencers are building new boards and paddling out. Audrey Peters is building a following narrating every DoorDash order she places in a day and posting the videos online. The style and format stand in stark contrast to the "aesthetic" visuals of the stylized photos, brand trip recaps, and untouchable lifestyle that used to be the model for most influencers on social media. That pivot was a strategic one by Peters, as she recognized the old model wasn't hitting like it used to and shifted to an almost rage-bait style of content that exploits the response to seeing an expensive DoorDash order for views, followers, and engagement.

That shift in format points to a broader recession of the influencer economy, as the old formulaic influencer posts that were used by attendees of the OpenAI brand trip vastly underperform in comparison to a woman reading a DoorDash receipt. Finding a new place in the influencer market now means finding the next unglamorous, believable format.

An OG influencer is calling out the shift

Recently, Emma Chamberlain, who pioneered influencer marketing before there was a name for what she was doing, pulled an indefinite break. On her podcast, Anything Goes, Chamberlain told Emma Grede that she’d reached a point with YouTube where she felt “emotionally really depleted,” and that influencer marketing and the creator economy at large was a train that’s going to “hit a brick wall.” Chamberlain has since moved into a co-CEO role at Chamberlain Coffee, pulling back from the format that made her who she is in exchange for something sturdier to stand on.

Although the instances of OpenAI’s influencer retreat and the Nantucket “No Influencers” sign point to her decision being the right move, the actuality is that the landscape is just not what it used to be for her. Many experts have criticized her negative outlook on influencer marketing and the creator economy as being misguided, since on one hand the days of big payouts to influencers with large followings have indeed ended, but the “influencer middle class” has grown exponentially, and more and more people have found modest influencer careers that can support them financially.

The train isn’t going to hit a wall. It might get a little smaller, it might get a little slower, and it might switch to a different track, but it’ll keep chugging alongside the other mediums of marketing. The creator economy is in fact growing, it is simply the old model of influencer marketing that is shrinking. This is perhaps just the industry self-correcting into something more sustainable.

The new suite of influencers are employees

With influencer marketing slowing down, brands have been looking elsewhere for representing themselves online, and have landed on a source of trust that is already sitting in the building: their own employees.

Employee-generated content (EGC) skips the trust problem influencer marketing spent a decade building for itself and exchanges it for a partnership with people who already work there, so there’s no paid partnership reveal. Employee content also gets trusted at rates branded content never touches, and platforms reward a wide field of individual voices over one brand account repeating itself, meaning the ROI on EGC is a lot more than the ROI on influencer marketing.

That ROI is why Starbucks built a Partner Program around employee day-in-the-life content, why Gap expanded its own creator push to staff, and why Salesforce runs an advocacy program with a reported four-figure percentage ROI. Every one of them found that a real voice vouching for something works, and placed a bet that someone who actually works the floor lands harder than a polished campaign shot on a set.

It’s worth noting that most of these brands investing in employee programs usually do so alongside influencer programs as well. That’s because the influencer economy still has plenty of eyeballs left, it just has finally burned through the benefit of the doubt.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. Disney just let TikTok fans write its next chapter.

Disney and TikTok announced a “first-of-its-kind” global content-sharing deal this week. Fan-made TikTok videos using Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters will now live inside Verts, Disney+’s vertical feed. The pilot launches in the U.S. first, with other markets to follow.

2. LinkedIn just gave brands a co-sign button.

LinkedIn rolled out Collaborative Posts globally, letting members and Company Pages post jointly with up to five other people or brands, listed as collaborators once they accept. It works across text, video, image, documents, polls, events, and celebration posts, which covers most of what shows up in a feed already. The format is a quiet fix for a problem LinkedIn has had for years: two brands or two people doing a partnership had no native way to show it as one post, so they’d just publish the same caption twice and hope the algorithm connected the dots.

3. MySpace’s owners are done pretending it’s dead.

Chris and Tim Vanderhook confirmed a MySpace relaunch this week, minus original co-founder Tom Anderson. The pitch leans on nostalgia rather than competing with algorithm-driven feeds, and the numbers already back it: the platform has grown from roughly 200,000 users a couple years ago as people tire of the scroll. No launch date, no mockups yet.

4. DoorDash’s new storefront sells the stuff you’d rather not buy in public.

DoorDash and agency Loop launched CringeMart, an in-app section for purchases people avoid making face to face: UTI treatments, laxatives, condoms, hemorrhoid cream. More than four million customers ordered from this category last year. Tana Mongeau fronts a hidden-camera series ambushing shoppers at checkout, while billboards in New York and LA run a live condom counter tied to real order data.

5. DuckDuckGo’s answer to smart glasses is glasses that aren’t smart.

DuckDuckGo teamed up with Knockaround on $35 sunglasses with no camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery. The pitch is built entirely on subtraction: infinite battery life because there’s no battery, zero notifications because there’s nothing to notify, and a jab at reports of Meta Ray-Ban footage ending up with overseas data labelers. \

6. Reddit is quietly retiring the internet’s oldest reputation score.

Reddit is rolling out AI moderation tools meant to make karma and account-age thresholds matter less for new users, shifting enforcement to an LLM-driven “Rules Hub” already tested in 700-plus communities. The move lands right after a mixed earnings call: $805 million in quarterly revenue, but a stock dip on soft search referral traffic.

7 Tinders fix for dating apps is fewer people using the app.

Match Group is expanding Tinder’s in-person Events feature from its LA pilot to 26 cities by September and 75 by year’s end. Monthly active users fell 7% last quarter, and Tinder hasn’t posted daily active user growth in three years. Nearly half of singles 18 to 29 want in-person connection but find the jump from app to real life hard to make, so Tinder is trying to own that gap.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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In the least smooth writing transition of my life, let’s talk about a raccoon with a condensed spine. His name is Jimothy the Raccoon, and he has become the most recent example of a viral moment being picked up by brands. He even got used by the official White House Twitter.

The joke is simple enough: look at this cute, little, funny-looking raccoon. It’s a moment that is harmless and unique, and it works well for virality because it’s a rare, niche, and inoffensive news story in an otherwise tired and grim news cycle. Brands like Jimmy Johns and Applebees were early adopters of Jimothy, and within a week, Jimothy could be found on most brands’ social platforms.

Another recent example is the Empire State Building stunt from June 2026, where two daredevils climbed to the very top and waved a flag saying, “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.” Every brand on earth posted some variation of it, with the flag serving as an ad for whatever they felt like promoting that day.

of laid out in their article “brands have a participation problem” that the race for brands like Petco and DoorDash to make the funniest iteration of the meme eclipsed what the moment meant to do. If you read “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace,” and then look at your phone to see a billion-dollar company superimpose their logo on top of the quote, you can’t help but be riddled with irony.

Legal Mumbo Jumbo

In those two instances, nobody got hurt. Neither the daredevils nor Jimothy decided to copyright their virality in any sort of way, so these moments fell under “fair use” for brands to jump into.

In the United States, fair use is a legal doctrine that permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances, in the name of protecting freedom of expression. Those “certain circumstances” are the caveat. As Art and Media Law puts it, a meme’s transformative, often non-commercial nature can favor fair use, but that’s not a blanket rule, and every case is different. Substantially incorporating copyrighted elements of another work, especially in a way that could hurt the original’s market value, can tip a meme into infringement instead.

Despite that warning, brands that absolutely have commercial objectives and intentions will say “whatever” and post a meme with copyrighted material that could constitute infringement. The reason is cultural value: companies tend to view memes that use their copyrighted material as free advertising, and they’re hesitant to police it because doing so would create negative PR and probably fuel even more memes in the short term.

The Brands Get Burned

It’s usually the bigger brands with copyrighted IPs that will “let it go” and let the memes meme so long as it’s not creating an issue. “May the 4th” is a good example of that, as brands routinely post some company tie-in with Star Wars, but Disney is never seen knocking at their door with an open hand waiting for their piece.

When an individual willingly or unwillingly becomes the subject of a viral meme is when things often get tricky, as more often than not you’ll see those individuals copyright or trademark their own meme in order to take control of any money that comes from it, as well as try to control the meme itself.

In 2019 at the Golden Globes, model Kelleth Cuthbert was spotted in the background of countless photos holding a tray of Fiji Waters intended for celebrities walking the red carpet. The moment went viral immediately, and Cuthbert would go on to be known as the “Fiji Water Girl.”

As most brands would, Fiji jumped at the publicity and made her the face of a national marketing campaign, albeit without her permission or sign-off. The result was a lawsuit from Cuthbert claiming Fiji used her likeness without her consent. Several countersuits and rounds of litigation later, the suit was eventually settled.

In 2013, the creators of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat woke up to find that their viral memes had been used in Scribblenauts, a video game published by Warner Bros. and 5th Cell Media. The creators filed suit citing copyright infringement, which resulted in a settlement out of court and Warner Bros. becoming an official licensor.

Most notably, the beloved Grumpy Cat had already been turned into a licensed coffee beverage in 2018 called “Grumpy Cat Grumppuccino,” but Grenade Beverage didn’t stop there, putting her image on other products the original licensing deal never covered. By that point, Grumpy Cat had transcended being just a meme into a full-blown brand, with trademarks for the IP well established. This resulted in a legal battle between the two parties that ultimately ended with Grumpy Cat’s owners being awarded $710,000, and it’s a good reminder that even having a license doesn’t mean a brand can run wild with it.

These legal actions from meme lords have led many companies to tread more lightly in the open waters of the internet, but plenty have just found themselves skirting around potential infringement by leaning on the “fair use” argument. In response, people are now starting to stop the memes before they can even happen.

The WNBA Says No to Memes

In June 2026, WNBA star Sophie Cunningham went viral for a pointing gesture she made toward Phoenix Mercury veteran DeWanna Bonner. The moment became instant meme potential, earning reposts from the likes of the White House. But the WNBA had already been playing chess while meme makers were still bringing out their checkers board.

As confirmed by Complex, the player’s union prohibits its licensees from producing officially licensed products centered on confrontation-based moments between players, a policy that applies to companies including 2K, BreakingT, New Era, Lids, Panini, and other WNBPA partners. The union does permit use of the moment by Cunningham herself, since she has autonomy over her own image and likeness so long as it doesn’t include any WNBA branding.

That move to put legal guardrails up before a meme even happens is worth taking note of, since it only takes one entity prohibiting brands from cashing in on a moment before everyone else starts doing the same. That effect could potentially have a huge impact on how brands market themselves, as well as on the ever-growing meme economy.

The Reality of the Meme Economy

So why do brands keep chasing this stuff despite the legal risk? Because the payoff is enormous.

People like memes. When brands post memes, people like the brand. When someone sees enough memes from a brand, they eventually trust it enough to maybe even buy something. It sounds simple, but that’s mainly because it is.

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychology of Popular Media found that meme viewing during COVID was tied to stronger positive emotions and better coping, functioning as both a coping mechanism and a source of humor. Furthermore, in Forbes’s article “3 Things The Memes You Share Say About You, By A Psychologist,” it becomes evident that memes go far beyond being a simple joke, functioning instead as stress relief or shared experience, which often results in memes being shared en masse across Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook.

Brands ran with this during COVID because of its prevalence and resonance with users, but it never ended up stopping. Meme marketing instead grew to become the norm, and in the years since we’ve seen meme marketing campaigns like Duolingo’s become the new model.

As of 2026 it seems like that model has waned, but the memes are still there, and they’re still being made by brands. The question is whether the grey area will stay grey, and how “fair” fair use will be once entities like the WNBA start policing memes before they even happen.

After all, the meme lords that built a million-dollar economy on short, digestible photos are just screenagers that got knighted. Whether they can protect the castle has yet to be seen.

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We get it, you’re busy. So here’s our weekly digest to catch you up on all of the marketing news you may have missed this past week...

1. LinkedIn’s AI slop crackdown is landing right after Substack called it out by name.

On the heels of Substack’s AI detection tool launching on July 21st, LinkedIn introduced a new “Seems Like AI Slop” feature. The introduction comes after Substack took a direct shot at LinkedIn, holding it up as the prime example of a platform riddled with AI slop and “Claudefishing” its users.

2. ChatGPT just ran its first-ever brand trip, and the timing did it no favors.

OpenAI flew a group of influencers out for its debut brand trip, a 24-hour immersive experience in Wildflower, New York connecting influencers and AI innovators. The trip comes right as AI companies fight slop allegations and try to seem more human and tasteful. There’s no reporting on the event beyond the influencers’ own Instagram and TikTok posts, but those alone were enough to spark public backlash against the influencers participating in the trip.

3. Apple made its budget pivot official.

Apple rolled out Upgrade, a leasing program with Klarna letting customers pay monthly for Apple products instead of buying them outright, replacing the old iPhone Upgrade Program and arriving right as Apple raises prices over the memory chip shortage. It also lands days after the “Relax, it’s iPhone” campaign put the phone in the rain, the bath, and a dog’s mouth, a sharp turn from the “Shot on iPhone” era that, paired with Upgrade, signals a new direction for Apple.

4. Costco finally showed up on TikTok, and its first post is already doing numbers.

The retailer launched its account this week after years without one, which is odd considering the devoted online fandom that has been making Costco haul videos for years. Costco let a community build itself on the platform before it showed up to reap the reward. The launch itself pokes fun at the fact it waited this long to join.

5. Reddit wants to turn its viral posts into something you watch or listen to.

On this week’s earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed Reddit is building a video experience for watching or listening to its most popular posts, modeled on the TikTok trend of narrated Reddit stories over gameplay footage. With nearly 20 million TikTok posts tagged #reddit and another 10 million #redditstories, Reddit is essentially building the official version of a format its own content already fuels for free.

6. HBO Max just gave in to the vertical scroll.

The clipping economy just claimed another streaming service. HBO launched a “Shorts” feed of trailers and clips tailored to each viewer’s watch history, plus AI search for queries like “dysfunctional family drama,” joining Netflix, Disney+, and Peacock in admitting the same thing: a massive library is useless if people can’t find anything to watch, so the fix is TikTok’s scroll applied to prestige TV.

7. Doordash’s newest unpaid spokesperson might be an influencer just trying to survive the algorithm.

Audrey Peters went viral with a recurring series documenting every DoorDash order she places in a day. Vulture’s piece on the influencer recession argues the old model of simply posting pretty photos is over, and creators are shifting into whatever format the algorithm prefers now that the exclusivity aesthetic has become table stakes, pushing them to find new territory to stand out, even if that territory is a DoorDash receipt.

Any other news we may have missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Welcome to NoGood Insights, your bi-weekly pulse on all things growth. We break down successful brand campaigns, provide you with the best guides for all things growth marketing, and share emerging trends and insights to keep you ahead of the curve.

Here's a quick TL;DR of what's below:

• Substack rolled out an AI-detection tool built with Pangram, and the launch post pulled over 1,600 comments split roughly down the middle between relief and backlash.

• Cloudflare confirmed bot and AI agent traffic now outpaces human traffic online, landing at roughly 57% to 43%.

• TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Substack are each building their own version of AI guardrails, from visible labels to bot purges to detection scores.

• Anthropic and OpenAI are answering the slop backlash by selling the opposite of slop: pop-up reading rooms, merch, and campaigns built around stepping away from a screen.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

Proof of human

The AI industry spent years optimizing for volume, and now everyone downstream of that volume — publishers, platforms, and the AI companies themselves — are scrambling to prove a real person is still behind the words. Substack is scoring articles on AI footprints while TikTok, YouTube and Reddit are labeling and purging it.

Anthropic and OpenAI trying to brand their way out of the problem with coffee shops and merchandise. The tactics differ, but they’re all responding to the same shift: that the tools built to scale content have made the human element behind it a scarce resource.

Substack's answer to “claudefishing” just landed, and reactions are split

Substack CEO announced last week, in a post titled “Against Claudefishing,” that the platform is rolling out an AI writing detection tool. The goal is transparency for a user base that’s grown exhausted by AI slop and that comes to Substack specifically for what Best calls “the essential ingredient of culture”: a human on the other end.

The tool scans any text over 100 words and returns an estimate of how much was written by hand versus generated with AI, visible only to whoever requests the scan. It measures whether AI touched the text; it says nothing about whether a person still shaped the argument or stood behind the final draft.

That gap became the flashpoint as Substack’s announcement post pulled in over 1,600 comments, and the response split hard down the middle. Plenty of users pushed back on the idea that a detection score can capture the judgment behind a piece, especially since so many of them use AI to streamline writing, speed up research, or wrangle scattered ideas into a coherent argument. Commenter, , put it directly: “A detection score may tell you that a tool was involved. It cannot tell you who had the original thought, who shaped the argument, or who stands behind every word.” Another commenter named stated, “I’m neurodivergent and have lots of great ideas but sometimes struggle to get them straight. I use different tools as sparring partners to get where I want to go and say what I want to say.”

Support ran just as strong on the other side, with plenty of writers welcoming a tool that lets them stand apart in a feed increasingly clogged with AI slop. That instinct, the push to separate the human-made from the machine-made, isn’t unique to Substack. It’s showing up across the internet right now, and Substack just happened to be the platform loud enough to turn it into a comment-section brawl.

Slop fatigue: platforms are putting in the guardrails

The internet had a slop problem before most people noticed it. Ever since generative AI arrived, every social platform has become a breeding ground for AI slop that hardly bothers to pretend to be anything else. To make things worse, most of the accounts engaging with that slop, pushing it further into the algorithm, are bots and AI agents themselves. Cloudflare confirmed as much this year: bot and AI agent traffic online now outpaces human traffic, landing at roughly 57% to 43%.

That imbalance is why platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and now Substack are policing the use of AI, each fighting a different piece of the same war. TikTok requires visible labels on AI-generated video and audio that could pass for real, backed by content credentials that flag synthetic media even when a creator skips the disclosure themselves. YouTube leans on the honor system for labeling, asking creators to flip a toggle before upload rather than scanning for it afterward, but its monetization rules cut deeper, stripping ad revenue from mass-produced and repetitive AI content while leaving properly disclosed, original work eligible. Reddit has taken the hardest line of the group, purging roughly 100,000 bot accounts a day, tagging approved automation with a visible label, and routing suspicious accounts through human verification instead of an outright ban.

Every platform is drawing its own line between labeling machine output and purging the accounts built to produce it, and none of them agree on where that line belongs. Depending on who you ask, these moves are a win for users, but he slop fatigue driving them has also left tech and AI companies carrying a branding problem they still have to solve on their own terms.

AI companies respond by branding as human

The industry that built the machinery flooding feeds with slop is now trying to sell itself as the cure.

Anthropic set the tone first. It rented an old-school coffee shop in Manhattan for a week, filled it with paperbacks, coffee, and a pen station, and gave away caps embroidered with a single word: “thinking.” The pop-up carried the name “zero slop zone,” and the argument sat underneath the props rather than in any tagline, that Claude works best as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for one.

OpenAI made a similar bet with merchandise instead of a pop-up. Its first hardware launch, a coding-focused keyboard, arrived alongside a $70 basketball carrying the ChatGPT logo, part of a push called Pause. Play. Prompt. A company whose entire product lives on a screen is now selling a toy meant to pull people away from one.

Two different companies chasing two different customers have landed on one shared bet, that an AI brand earns more goodwill from a coffee shop or a basketball than from another product demo, and an industry that spent a decade building the feed people couldn’t put down is now selling the merch that proves you did.

The bill comes due

For brands watching this play out, the real takeaway sits underneath the props and the stunts. Anthropic and OpenAI earned credibility from a specific point of view delivered in a format nobody expected from a software company, backed by something actually happening in a real room. That's the problem most tech brands still need to solve, turning a genuine product truth into a brand moment people want to be part of, rather than a campaign that just borrows the surface of authenticity.

The platforms and detectors in this issue are chasing that same substance from the enforcement side. The brands that win this next stretch will be the ones that built trust before they needed to prove it, and that's the work worth starting now, not after the next detector ships.

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