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:

• Walmart, Banana Republic, Cava, and dozens of other brands have launched social series, and TikTok now lets brands pay to boost them.

• The For You page, the influencer recession, and short-lived posts all pushed brands toward recurring shows.

• Alexis Bittar, Bilt, and Walmart built their series around stories only they could tell.

• The format is getting crowded, and brand series now compete with Hollywood-backed shows in the same feed.

• Social spent a decade tearing down TV and is now rebuilding it.

• We rounded up 16 brand series we’re watching and will keep the list updated.

“[Insert brand] has launched a social series” is one of the most reliable headlines in marketing news right now.

Walmart, Gap, Banana Republic, Figma, and Crocs all have one, and more brands roll them out every week. TikTok is even letting brands build and publish episodic dramas directly in the app, then pay to amplify them.

When a platform builds a feature around a format, it’s officially a category. The feed now looks like a TV guide, and it’s left brands with a new problem breaking through.

How the feed became TV

The social series was a rational response to a few problems.

TikTok’s For You page broke the link between followers and views, so a brand posting every day could still be a stranger to its own audience.

The influencer recession taught audiences to spot a paid post from a mile away and distrust anything that looked polished.

One-off posts also disappear fast, so a series gives viewers recurring characters, a predictable cadence, and a reason to search for the next episode.

In our 2026 social insight report, 68% of marketers said they prioritize entertainment value over product messaging, and the org charts are following. Gap Inc. hired its first Chief Entertainment Officer, and Ramp was hiring someone to build “a media brand, not a content calendar.”

The brands doing it best

Alexis Bittar is the blueprint. Its character Margeaux Goldrich, introduced in 2024, now has a following that exists almost independently of the jewelry, and she carries the brand further than a product shot ever could.

Bilt kept its own logo out of the show. Taking cues from Brooklyn Coffee Shop, its series explores renting and city life, the exact emotional territory a rent rewards company should own.

Walmart’s contactless soap opera might be the smartest of the bunch. The plot came straight from years of shopper complaints, turning social listening into a script.

The social series gold rush

The issue is that everyone is doing this now, and we’ve seen gold rushes like this on social before.

Influencer marketing started as a cheaper, more trusted alternative to traditional ads, then curdled once every brand was buying the same posts from the same people. Clipping followed that same arc, and now the social series is next in line.

Brands that want to find the gold instead of other miners should consider a few things before launching a series in a field this crowded.

Know who you’re up against. Your competition is no longer just other brands. TikTok is building a real studio slate, and according to TikTok, its Issa Rae–backed micro-series Screen Time has pulled in nearly 580 million views since April. Your brand’s office sitcom now sits in the same feed as Hollywood-backed thrillers, so production value alone won’t carry it.

Start with permission. Before picking a format, find the story your brand has a real right to tell. If the premise could belong to any company, it belongs to none of them.

Skip the default formats. Dating shows, workplace comedies, soap operas, and coffee shop satires have become the stock programming of brand social. Cava and Bilt got there early with stories only they could tell, and copying them now gets you neither.

Post less, commit more. Putting an episode number on daily output doesn’t make it a show. A consistent cadence, recurring characters, and a season with an actual arc do.

Programming with a point

The social series isn’t going anywhere, oversaturated or not.

Social spent a decade tearing down TV and is now rebuilding it piece by piece; platforms are becoming networks, and brands are becoming studios.

The social series earned its place as the escape from the ad break. At the rate brands are launching them, it’s on track to become the new one.

The series we’re watching

These are the brand series we’ve been keeping an eye on this year. Some are seasons deep and some just dropped their first episode, but each one shows what happens when a brand starts with a story only it can tell. We’ll keep this list updated as more brands step into the programming business.

• Alexis Bittar: The Bittarverse

• Bilt: Roomies

• Walmart: Tap to pay

• Banana Republic: The Agency

• Ouai: Chopped

• Venmo: The Group

• Crocs: Unnamed Niles Series

• Albertsons x P&G: Rico’s Tacos

• Astral Tequila: It’s Midnight Somewhere

• Cava: Bowlmates

• Native (P&G): The Golden Pear Affair

• A24: The Board

• Dr Pepper: It’s a Pepper Fling

• Tower 28: The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls

• Nuuly: Heart On My Sleeve

• Hot Topic: Mall Rats

Still airing

The list keeps getting longer, which is exactly the problem. Every brand on it started with a reason to exist, and the next fifty will have to work harder to find one.

The social series earned its place as the escape from the ad break. At the rate brands are launching them, it’s on track to become the new one.

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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. Instagram reverses course on long-form video with “Features”

Instagram is adding a long-form video section called “Features,” which lets users upload horizontal videos up to 90 minutes, surfaced through shorter preview clips in Reels. The announcement video opens with Mosseri admitting he had long opposed long-form on Instagram, with the shift attributed to friends watching Reels together, including on TV apps. Mosseri called the platform’s performance-based video payments ROI negative and said long-form will need a model that doesn’t lose money.

2. Tubi and TikTok greenlight 10 creator-led series

Fox-owned Tubi selected 12 TikTok creators to develop 10 original series, part of a partnership aimed at moving short-form personalities into long-form streaming. The scripted and unscripted shows will stream exclusively on Tubi, expanding the Creatorverse Incubator first announced in March.

3. Chicken Shop Date is getting a theatrical farewell

Amelia Dimoldenberg is bringing the final series to cinemas for one night on November 24, combining all six episodes plus new material and ending with the unreleased finale ahead of its YouTube drop on November 27. Reaction was split with some critics questioning paying to watch a YouTube show in a theater, while fans argued the series launched her career and earned the moment.

4. Prada hires Disney veterans for a hand-drawn holiday campaign

Prada’s “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand” enlisted veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy to build a hand-drawn winter world starring Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu and Luther Ford. Coverage framed it as a deliberate no-AI production, with Mulan animator Tom Bancroft also serving as a lead animator.

5. Wendy’s is making a free retro RPG

Wendy’s announced WendyQuest: Legend of the Four Corner Stones, a free, Final Fantasy-style RPG coming to Steam, with enemies that poke fun at McDonald’s. The Steam page calls it fully human-made, and some players specifically praised the lack of AI in its production.

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

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It’s a bold move from a company that’s tried this twice before, but third time’s the charm, right?

Instagram’s long-form graveyard

Back in 2018, Instagram launched IGTV. It let users post videos between 15 and 60 minutes long, and Instagram built it to compete with YouTube with a standalone app and a dedicated tab on Instagram. It never took off, especially with TikTok launching a few months later and starting the short-form arms race.

Then in 2021, Instagram folded IGTV into a new format called Instagram Video, and by 2022 the IGTV app was gone and anything under 15 minutes became a Reel. Long-form technically survived, but Instagram stopped paying attention to it.

YouTube, Disney+, and Netflix went the other way

YouTube already made this exact pivot, just in reverse. It launched Shorts in 2021, opening another door for creators to reach new audiences without giving up what made the platform work.

Streaming services like Disney+, HBO Max, and Netflix have also introduced short-form tabs built from their catalogs, a move that comes directly from the flood of show and movie clips already posted on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

The shortform vs. longform equation

The reason these pivots to short-form work comes down to a simple equation.

Instagram is, at its core, an app for connecting with people, whether that’s personal relationships or parasocial ones with creators, celebrities, and brands. Most of those parasocial connections happen in the Reels tab, and converting that relationship into 90 minutes of attention is tough.

Someone who already sits through a 40-minute video on YouTube will happily watch a 40-second one, but someone in the flow of back-to-back 40-second videos rarely swipes over to a tab of 40-minute ones.

The paycheck problem

There’s also the issue of the paycheck.

Instagram has been cutting back on monetization opportunities for creators over the past few years. Variety states that the platform is funding longer-form content directly with some creators right now, but that it’s too early to share a long-term monetization model.

That’s not much incentive to make a long-form video over a short one.

Streaming platforms own their catalogs, so they don’t have to worry about a pay split. YouTube, meanwhile, has always had a generous ad share that’s allowed thousands of creators to support themselves and build careers on the platform.

TikTok lets someone else hold the remote

TikTok is also going after long-form video, but it isn’t building its own feed or app for it.

Tubi and TikTok announced the Creatorverse Incubator, starting with 12 creators who will bring 10 new series exclusively to Tubi. The slate went public this week, just a day after Instagram announced Features.

The split is the most interesting part.

TikTok identifies the creators, the shows debut exclusively on Tubi, and TikTok uses its Spotlight program to drive its users to Tubi.

It’s the smartest way around the equation. TikTok knows its audience moves from long to short much faster than short to long, so it keeps the feed short and sends long-form somewhere that’s built for it, without the short-form expectations.

Substack TV also did the thing

is also building a pipeline, albeit from a bit of a different angle. It’s audience came for long from writing, so it

Substack began its push into video with video posts in 2022, then launched a TikTok-like video feed in its app in March 2025. In September, it added a podcast tab built to help creators reach their existing listeners and help new ones find them, with short clips serving as the way into full episodes.

Then it took a step further by launching a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in January, and creators who already publish video don’t need to do anything extra, since their videos automatically show up for signed-in subscribers.

Substack says creators publishing podcasts collectively earn over $200 million a year on the platform, and the paywall follows them onto the TV. Since Substack is already starting to use longform, it didn’t have to figure out how to pay for it since subscribers were already doing it.

Instagram’s problem is that its trying to be an entire ecosystem. It’s been copying TikTok, Snapchat, BeReal, X, and now YouTube (again), all while still being a platform built for connecting people.

If anyone wants to take bets on IG copying Substack and launching a long form writing tab, leave a comment with a wager.

Competing for the same seat on the couch

Every platform is converging.

YouTube started as entertainment and added short-form. Instagram started as a social app and is trying to stretch into an entire ecosystem. Streamers started with the catalog and are now borrowing the scroll to keep people from leaving. TikTok decided it didn’t need a seat for itself.

For brands and creators, that changes the plan, because creators visit where they’re seen and stay where they get paid. Whichever platform figures out how to connect short-form and long-form, whether it’s under one app or through a partnership, and pay for both will win the creators.

The jury is still out on whether Features will succeed, but Instagram’s track record of chasing other platforms doesn’t inspire much confidence. At the end of the day, YouTube is just that guy.

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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. Apple Music rebrands with a logo literally shaped by sound

Working with Fred again.. and Nest Acoustics, Apple played music through a transducer into a shallow bath of mineral oil and filmed the ripples, which became the basis for the new identity/logo. Apple also released a behind-the-scenes film of the process, after some users criticized the minimalist black-and-white app icon that shipped with iOS 27.2.

2. Banana Republic launches a TikTok-first sitcom

Banana Republic has launched its first original programming, a five-part short-form series starring actor Jack Innanen, who plays every staff member at a fictional, struggling travel agency. The first episode passed 10 million views, and the series comes as parent company Gap Inc. leans further into entertainment marketing through its Fashiontainment platform.

3. Google turned Halloween searches into an interactive map

Google released Frightgeist, an interactive site built on its search data, where you can enter your zip code to see the top trending costumes near you and browse rankings for kid, pet, and couple costumes. Buddy the Unicorn from the horror film “Buddy” took the number one spot, and the whole site gives brands a free look at what people are actually searching for this spooky season.

4. Away makes John Summit its “Chief Destruction Officer”

After the DJ went viral for setting his broken Rimowa on fire in a parking lot, rival Away signed him to an exclusive partnership that puts its aluminum luggage through its own trial by fire.

5. Domino’s goes block-shaped with Minecraft

Starting Oct. 26, Domino’s is partnering with “Minecraft Dungeons II” on in-game items, packaging and giveaways to push the Domino, its rectangular personal pizza built for gaming nights. Domino’s is promoting it with VFX creators from the gaming space and rolling it out across 19 markets.

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 added dials that let you turn video, audio, longform, and community posts up or down, mute keywords, and label AI content.

• Facebook launched “Your Algorithm,” which lets you tell your Feed and Reels what you want to see in plain language.

• YouTube announced Custom Feeds, multiple homepage tabs you build by typing a prompt.

• LinkedIn is testing a Network tab that only shows posts from people you’re connected to or follow.

• Spotify launched Taste Profile, which shows how Spotify reads your taste and lets you correct it.

• MySpace announced it’s relaunching, with no date yet.

The algorithms spent the better part of a decade learning every swipe and link click, and then showed us what it thought we wanted with no input or questions. Now, the people who built those algorithms are handing us steering wheels.

Here on users recently took the wheel (or should I say dial?) On the company’s own page they published an article titled “You told us you wanted more control over your feed. Here’s the dial.” which outlines a new dial system for customizing what you see on your feed.

Users can turn video, audio, longform, and community posts up or down, mute keywords and phrases, fine-tune followed topics, and automatically label AI-generated material.

This dial system seemingly gives users control over the algorithm, while also of course correcting Substack as “anti social media” after it effectively became just another social media app.

The birth of the feed

Before anyone called it a feed, MySpace let you build your own corner of the internet by hand. You picked your Top 8, wrote your own profile CSS, chose the song that autoplayed when someone landed on your page, and saw updates from the people you chose to add. Once you were caught up, you were done.

Infinite scroll removed that stopping point, and Aza Raskin, the designer most credited with it, has since disowned it. Instagram went further in 2016, swapping its chronological feed for an algorithmic one that kept people scrolling longer. TikTok’s For You page finished the job in 2018 by ranking content on watch behavior instead of who you follow, and every major platform copied it.

We covered that history here 👇

The return of Myspace

When Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube adopted the FYP model, it felt like we’d reached the singularity.

Then in August, MySpace owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook announced plans to relaunch the platform. Their last attempt, in 2013, cost $150 million and went nowhere. This one looked like nostalgia-bait at first, but a pitch built on customization and control landed right on top of real algorithm fatigue. 63% of Gen Z planned social media detoxes in 2024, and 47% of people have deleted a social app over the stress of using it.

LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook hand over the wheel

The announcement of the MySpace return ended up being a real pulse check of those 47% of people. Here’s what took place immediately after.

September 18th - LinkedIn announces a Network tab where you only see posts from people you are connected with, or follow.

September 23rd - YouTube announces Custom Feeds, where you can have multiple prompt-built homepage tabs.

October 14th - Substack announces its Content preference Dials, and Facebook announces “Your Algorithm” for Feed and Reels, with natural language prompts

Every one of these keeps the algorithmic feed as the default. Most people scroll whatever loads first, so the dial really exists for the users who care enough to turn it, but these features don’t hand over equal amounts of control.

LinkedIn’s Network tab goes the furthest, taking the algorithm out of the room and showing you only the people you chose. Substack’s dials sit in the middle, letting you shape the mix while Substack still decides what fills it. YouTube’s Custom Feeds and Facebook’s Your Algorithm hand over the least, since both are the same algorithm with a text box attached, and that’s where the real trade lives.

The controls also feed the machine. On YouTube, anything you watch in a custom feed still lands in your watch history and shapes your main recommendations. Meta’s version is an algorithm you can talk to, and every prompt a user types is seen as a cleaner signal than a swipe

The music industry got here first. In March, Spotify launched Taste Profile, which shows listeners how Spotify reads their taste and lets them correct it, following Prompted Playlist, which builds playlists from a typed request. Like YouTube’s version, every correction becomes another lesson for the algorithm.

Marketing to an un-marketable feed

Marketers have been taking notes too.

For better or worse, marketers have figured out the algorithm. Brands that know what they’re doing can game an FYP for a ton of reach and engagement. That’s also why social media started to feel like a collective ad rather than a social space, and why platforms are now rolling out these controls.

But a customizable feed is a feed that can say no. Users can turn down video, mute the trend your brand just jumped on, or flip a switch and only see people they know. The users most likely to touch those dials are also the high-intent ones brands want most.

It was self-inflicted, but brands now have to strategize twice if they want to stay competitive, and reach those high intent users.

The first is more of the same: mapping trends, using social listening, and being a reactive participant in the mainstream.

The second is community building: groups, broadcast channels, Discord servers, newsletters, comment sections, the places where an audience opts in and keeps opting in.

The audience is already moving there as 53% of US Gen Zers say they primarily use social media for messaging over public posting, Instagram now treats DM shares as its strongest engagement signal, and Discord has 259 million monthly users with no For You page at all.

Giving a reason to opt in

The brands that hold up in the customizable feeds are going to be the ones that put in the effort.

That means building something worth coming back to, whether it’s a newsletter people subscribe to, a broadcast channel people they turn on notifications for, or a micro series people want to tune in to.

Substack’s own model shows how it works. The feed handles discovery, and the subscription is where the value lives. Its app drove nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions in the past six months, and more than half came straight from the Notes feed.

This also changes what’s worth measuring. Impressions show the algorithm showed up, but follows, saves, sends, and subscriptions tell you a person did.

In closing

In practice, every post should instead ask themselves these questions.

1. Would someone choose this? If the algorithm never served it, would anyone follow the account on purpose?

2. Does it survive a mute? Content built on a trending keyword is the first thing a dial filters out.

3. Would anyone send it to a friend? Instagram already treats sends per reach as its strongest engagement signal, and DMs are where the opt-in audience lives.

Posts that pass earn a place in the feed people build for themselves. Posts that don’t are renting space in the one the platform builds for them.

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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. Kelly Clarkson’s $15,000 bird feud turns into the internet’s favorite bit

It started when Clarkson posted that a Brooklyn shop owner sized her up like she couldn’t afford a $15,000 mechanical bird. The shop leaned into the attention instead of backing down, listing Molly at $15 million, and now the whole online fight has fueled a cycle of memes and online discourse.

2. TikTok signs a second microdrama deal, and this one puts creators in the lead

TikTok signed a multiyear deal with creator management company Made By Us to co-produce vertical series for TikTok and PineDrama. Its first deal, with Issa Rae’s Hoorae, produced “Screen Time,” the most-watched show on either app at nearly 580 million views.

3. Facebook lets you tell the algorithm what you want

Users can now type requests like “more cooking videos” into a chatbot-style box, and the feed adjusts within the same session. YouTube is rolling out similar prompt-built Custom Feeds this fall, and LinkedIn is testing a Network tab that shows only people you’ve connected with or followed.

4. Gymshark signs Megan Thee Stallion as its first-ever celebrity ambassador

The multi-year deal puts Megan in Gymshark’s Athlete programme. The launch campaign, “Megan Does Gym,” went live October 13 and shows her training with women from the brand’s community. The hero product is a pair of $48 red shorts, landing right in the middle of an online debate about women’s gym shorts, which Gymshark’s community picked up on right away.

5. Apple drops its first immersive horror movie on Vision Pro

Remnants, written and directed by Ti West, premiered October 16 in the Apple TV app exclusively on Vision Pro, taking viewers inside a haunted castle in Apple’s 180-degree Immersive format. Apple’s teaser skips the scares and shows real viewer reactions, which is a smart way to sell a headset most people have never tried on.

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

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But in 2026, being a tryhard might be the best compliment a person or brand can get.

AI can spit out a full song or visual in seconds. Consequently, anything that looks easy now looks suspicious and is subject to AI allegations.

Effort is one of the few things brands can still prove, and the smartest ones are making things that took effort and time.

Wendy’s put out an emo EP. Chipotle carved an orchestra out of vegetables. Oura built a tiny city by hand to sell a ring.

None of it is efficient, but the effort behind it is the message: it tells you a real person cared enough to put the work in.

The branded entertainamnt space

The tryhard era started with brands making their own entertainment.

In our 2026 Social Trend Report, we clocked how Gap hired a Chief Entertainment Officer, Ramp offered up to $350K for someone to build a media brand, and 68% of the marketers we surveyed now put entertainment value ahead of product messaging.

The branded micro-series was the first wave of this shift, and branded music looks like the next one. In addition to Wendy’s and Chipotle, e.l.f. is on its second, “Mirror Mix,” released through its in-house entertainment arm, e.l.f. Made.

Music is the natural next step. A branded micro-series needs your full attention every time it plays, but a song runs in the background on the subway. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I’ll replay a song twenty times before I rewatch episode three once.

The vegetable orchestra

Of every brand making music right now, Chipotle tried the hardest.

The fast food chain recorded “From Ground to Sound” inside Abbey Road’s Studio Two with the London Vegetable Orchestra, a five-member group of classically trained musicians who play instruments made from vegetables.

The instruments took three months and dozens of iterations to build, and each one had to be played at peak ripeness. Chipotle released the song alongside a full film of the process, proving it was made by humans with the utmost effort.

Chief brand officer Fernando Machado put it bluntly: “Any brand can release a song or develop a sound mnemonic.” His case was that this one couldn’t exist without Chipotle’s own produce.

Releasing a human-made album shows that your brand cared enough to do the work, which is exactly what AI-generated music can’t prove. Like tech, AI music has a taste problem, and it’s become a volatile space with growing legal issues, too.

In July, a Munich court ruled that Suno, the platform that turns a text prompt into a full song, infringed copyrights by training on music like Boney M.’s “Rasputin” without paying for it. GEMA’s lawyers got Suno to spit out near-copies of hit songs just by typing in the lyrics and a style.

For brands, that makes a human-made album the safer bet as well as the cooler one. Nobody has to wonder whose song a vegetable orchestra was trained on.

Proof of work

AI tracks are flooding streaming platforms the same way slop flooded our feeds. The brands trying hardest are making things you can watch being made, and music is just one version of it.

Oura’s new “Wear Your Best Life” campaign took it to an extreme.

Director Sam Walker and 35 modelmakers spent three weeks in Prague building a dozen sets and eight model cars at 1:10 scale. There’s a working subway and a rooftop pool with real water in it. The stars are human hands wearing Oura rings, walking and skating around town like tiny people.

Even this kind of thing can be faked now. AI video tools can mimic stop-motion down to the thumbprints and the choppy frame rate. So Oura posted a making-of video, much like Chipotle did with their Vegetable Orchestra.

At this point, the behind-the-scenes footage is the most convincing part of the campaign, and it shows you put in the effort.

On effort and being a try hard

Effort is the operative word. The emo EP, the vegetable orchestra, and the tiny city are all just vehicles for it.

Now that you can generate literally anything with a prompt, making something that obviously took time and skill is what sets a brand apart.

So I take it back, high school me. I point at these brands, in an article on a writing platform that takes a lot of effort itself, and I say, “I like this..”

Keep trying hard, kid.

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87% of them saw at least one movie in a theater in the past 12 months.

They’re averaging six to seven trips a year now, up from under five just a couple years ago.

That’s a 25% jump in a single year, the biggest of any age group.

For context, this is the generation Hollywood spent the last 5 years assuming had already left theaters forever in favor of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

But the truth is, it wasn’t about whether cinema was worth their time, but whether the content playing at the cinema was.

This selective taste is precisely what has fueled the current indie film renaissance.

It’s no longer just about the success of a single studio like Neon or A24, but a fundamental shift in the entire cinematic ecosystem.

New studios, new directors, and new platforms all rising at the same time, feeding off each other.

So today, I want to zoom out and really look at how this happened.

Beyond One Studio’s Story

The Hollywood Reporter framed this as a high-stakes turf war for the indie throne, a clear signal that we aren’t just witnessing a few lucky breaks, but the rise of a new industry powerhouse.

What’s interesting is the similarity in each of these studios’ approaches.

A24 built a membership program with exclusive merch.

Neon threw a screening of Anora specifically for sex workers and sold branded thongs.

MUBI sponsors a physical micro-cinema in East LA.

So beyond the movie put in front of you, companies are working hard to create something worth being associated with.

A marketing professor at Wharton put it really well recently, saying, “These studio logos have become identity markers. They’re shorthand for a specific kind of taste in a way legacy studio names just aren’t anymore, especially not for anyone under 30.”

The YouTube Pipeline

But where is the flood of new talent actually coming from?

The answer isn’t found in the hallowed halls of film school anymore; the new cinematic frontier is YouTube.

Curry Barker built an audience on a sketch comedy channel and then made his debut horror feature for under a million dollars before Focus Features eventually picked it up.

The Philippou brothers followed a similar path, evolving from viral stunt-filled videos to A24 regulars after the breakout success of Talk to Me.

Michael Shanks ran a YouTube channel since he was a teenager before directing Together.

Even Chris Stuckmann, who spent years as a YouTube film critic, just directed his own debut feature.

Historically, the industry overlooked YouTube’s potential to disrupt the cinematic landscape.

Today, however, the platform serves as a formidable decentralized academy functioning simultaneously as a film school, a global test-screening ground, and a living portfolio.

The real-time analytics provided by the platform offer a level of feedback that traditional film schools simply cannot replicate.

This brutal, data-driven honesty has cultivated a new class of directors who master pacing and narrative hooks instinctively by their early 20s, trading theatrical study for high-stakes practical experience.

The Upcoming Generational Shift

In 2019, Gen Z made up about 34% of the North American movie-going audience.

By 2025, that number hit 39%, and they’re now going more often than Millennials, Gen X, or Boomers.

Their motivation isn’t rooted in nostalgia.

Rather, they view the cinema as one of the last remaining places of purely communal experience.

In a theater, there’s no algorithm dictating the view, no second screen for distraction; it’s just a room full of people sharing a singular, synchronized reaction to a story.

Richard Linklater recently said, “The theatrical experience has been declared dead for 80 years, and it keeps surviving because people are fundamentally communal beings.”

Gen Z isn’t rejecting that instinct.

This shift is evident everywhere: tech brands are encouraging digital detoxes, dating apps are pivoting to in-person mixers, and run clubs are exploding in popularity.

This online generation is actively rebelling against digital isolation, yearning for physical spaces to connect and express themselves.

Because authentic face-to-face interaction has become so scarce, in-person community building has transformed from a basic expectation into a high-value commodity for Gen Z.

Indie As A Status Symbol

Which brings us to the part that ties everything together, because there’s a reason a studio logo can now function almost like a fashion label.

There’s a whole conversation happening right now around indie film essentially being a status symbol, the same way a certain sneaker or certain streetwear collab signals who you are before you say a word.

Letterboxd turned watching and ranking films into a public social act.

A24’s collaborations, like the streetwear drop they did around Marty Supreme, borrow directly from fashion mechanics: scarcity, ritual, and a drop that requires your attention and arguably a slight obsession to partake in.

Neon’s stunts work the same way.

The surface-level intention isn’t really to sell you a film; it’s selling you a membership in a taste tribe, and the ticket stub is actively acting as the receipt.

That’s the mechanism behind “the Letterboxd generation” as a phrase.

The shift isn’t just young audiences suddenly caring more about cinema as an art form.

It’s that knowing which studio’s slate to follow and which festival premiere to have an opinion on has become its own form of social currency.

And the industry has taken notice.

Reports of Netflix exploring the acquisition of Letterboxd suggest that even the largest players in the industry recognize they can’t buy an audience; they need a seat at the table where the culture is actively being defined.

The Introduction Of New Pathways

The traditional pathways to success have effectively vanished, and with the change of both talent and audience, the final component of the transformation lies in the industry’s underlying structure.

For decades, there was one main accepted path: attend film school, get an agent, screen at a festival premiere, and then hopefully a distributor writes you a big check.

At South by Southwest this year, a panel literally titled “Niche to Notice” declared that the model was dead for almost everyone except the top 1% of filmmakers.

A Sundance premiere doesn’t guarantee distribution anymore; sometimes it just leads to a film disappearing into an obscure streaming menu with zero marketing behind it.

As a result, these alternative pathways have evolved from secondary options into primary strategic needs.

Kickstarter has established a direct pipeline to Tubi, allowing fully crowdfunded projects to access a mainstream audience, bypassing traditional studio gatekeepers entirely.

Aggregators like Filmhub have further democratized distribution, allowing filmmakers to achieve a level of multi-platform saturation that once required the extensive resources of a major distributor.

Even the way movies get greenlit is changing.

Places like Angel Studios are letting the community vote on what they want to see before any funds are allocated to the production.

The marketing side moved just as fast.

Filmmakers now build their marketing on day one of production instead of waiting for the edit to be locked, growing an audience simultaneously as they’re in the midst of a project.

Ad tracking tools that used to be exclusive to venture-backed startups are now standard for indie releases, tying every dollar spent directly to a ticket sold or a rental streamed.

This new model operates independently of the traditional system, relying instead on the growing landscape of platforms with access to audiences on a global scale, yet offering it at a lower cost.

The New Wave

We are witnessing the rise of directors who bypassed traditional film school to refine their craft on YouTube, where algorithms demanded they master the art of narrative hook within seconds.

Simultaneously, a new generation of moviegoers has reaffirmed the theater’s relevance, frequenting cinemas more than their predecessors because they value the communal physical space as much as the film itself.

Studio branding has elevated from cinematic taste into a form of lifestyle curation—something to be worn, collected, and shared as a badge of identity.

Driven by a collective burnout with algorithm-fueled content, this shift represents a fundamental transformation in how cinema is created, funded, and consumed.

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. Oura swaps faces for hands in a miniature city

Oura’s new “Wear Your Best Life” campaign follows a cast of hands through a handmade miniature city, built to scale by a team of modelmakers. The hands turn everyday routines into tiny, choreographed performances. Every set piece is sized to fit a hand, so the story unfolds entirely through gestures and small, playful moments.

2. IKEA UK makes wardrobes the main character in a dating show

IKEA launched “Storage Is Sexy,” a dating series where singles choose a match based on what’s inside their wardrobes while the wardrobe owners listen in. Supporting posters borrow dating-profile language, with lines like “Tall. Well-built. Great in the bedroom.” The format takes a product feature like customizable storage and packages it as entertainment people would watch on its own.

3. Other Mommy gets a creepy billboard

To promote Blumhouse’s Other Mommy, a billboard that first looks like a standard static ad slowly changes as a tear rolls down Chastain’s cheek and her smile turns more unsettling. This shows how OOH can earn the most reach when it gives passersby something worth filming and posting.

4. Reddit cuts off free access to its content

Reddit is ending RSS feeds on November 13 and shutting down its public API in March 2027, saying AI bots have been scraping too much of the site. Tools that pull from Reddit, including social listening platforms and AI assistants, will now have to pay for access. That could affect how marketers track conversations on Reddit and how often Reddit posts appear in AI answers.

5. Bose plugs back in with noise-canceling wired earbuds

Bose released new noise-canceling wired earbuds for the first time in years. Bose’s audio president says wired earbuds are having a “cultural renaissance,” nodding to Gen Z treating wired headphones, digicams, and flip phones as a style statement and a break from always-on tech.

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

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*stops typing*

Alright I’m back. That first line hurt to write. I’m gonna be amazed if the editors let me leave all this in. If you’re reading this, we made it :)

Anyways… anyone else notice tech companies pushing cute little avatars for all of their AI agents?

AI has a bad reputation

To a lot of folks, AI is ugly inside and out in one way or another. addresses the inside uglies in his piece Don’t Worry, AI is Cute Now:

“Many see it as a tarnished product because it has been trained on stolen work. Others despise it because of the often bland, paint-by-numbers output it generates that has polluted every online space and platform.”

That hostility is valid, but the ugliness extends far past the ethics and morals most people cite as their core reason for being anti-AI. Visually, AI is also just straight-up ugly. It all looks bland and mundane.

In fact. Here’s a drawing of every AI ever.

Here they are for real.

They’re minimal and uninspired for the sake of being user-friendly, which, to their credit, is a key factor in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini’s success. But that plain look reinforces how people already see AI as robotic, cold, and prone to confidently making things up.

That’s a trust problem, and it’s a big one now that these companies want us to hand AI agents our data and our accounts. Chatbots have mostly solved their adoption problem, with millions of people using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every week.

Agents are a different story because when a chatbot gets something wrong, you get a bad answer you can ignore, but when an agent gets something wrong, the email is already sent or the file is already gone.

Handing that kind of control to AI takes trust it hasn’t earned yet, which is why, until Muse, agents mostly stayed inside the tech bubble.

The headlines aren’t helping. In one widely shared case, Replit’s coding agent deleted a company’s production database during a code freeze and then misreported what it had done. Anthropic has disclosed that state-backed hackers used Claude to automate parts of a cyberattack campaign.

Add a steady stream of data leaks and prompt-injection exploits, and it’s easy to see why most people won’t give an agent the keys to their digital life.

The “fixes” that didn’t work

Big tech companies noticed these issues a while ago and tried to fix them in a variety of ways before arriving at where we are today.

Anthropic first tried to address the issue with its “Keep Thinking” ad campaign, which aimed to position Claude as the intellectual’s AI by pairing the LLM with natural, tactile imagery to humanize it. The company even opened an anti-slop pop-up in an NYC coffee shop that emphasized reading and time away from the screen.

OpenAI tried a similar pivot by hosting an influencer retreat in upstate New York in August and by selling a $70 ChatGPT basketball tied to its “Pause. Play. Prompt.” campaign.

Both campaigns were textbook tastewashing, the first mainstream attempt to humanize AI by wrapping it in tasteful aesthetics and culture. Neither landed, since the average consumer saw right through the attempt.

Enter, cute AI

When those rebrands didn’t work, Big Tech went back to a tried-and-tested strategy of making AI cute. Meta did it first with its Muse Charm, which is effectively a little iPod Nano (I’m old) with an AI agent personified as a cartoony avatar.

OpenAI basically copied the idea with the launch of its own AI agents, which come with little avatars called Dots.

Anthropic hasn’t launched one yet, but here’s my pitch if you’re reading this, Dario.

Going cute is a tried and tested move. Insurance is a category people dread dealing with, which is exactly why GEICO has a gecko and Aflac has a duck. A cute mascot softens the edges and makes the product feel more accessible.

The cute AI that came before

Meta and OpenAI aren’t even the first to brand AI this way. Smaller AI companies have used cute characters for years.

Ollama, an open-source tool for running AI models locally, has used a cartoon llama since 2023 to make a technical product feel approachable.

Secret Sprite, which auto-writes blogs so AI assistants cite your brand, frames its service around “summoning a sprite.” In both cases, the mascot turns something abstract or unsettling into something friendly and human.

Whether the cute rebrand will work remains to be seen, but Meta’s Muse Charm saw a spike of 5 million downloads after Meta introduced its mascot, Jolly.

Given the negative public sentiment toward AI, it’s hard to see that spike as anything more than a novelty bump. Still, no one should underestimate the power of cute.

There’s also a real risk if this all backfires.

The more human an agent feels, the easier it is to blame the agent when something goes wrong. “Jolly booked the wrong flight” sounds a lot better than “I didn’t double-check before handing over my credit card.”

That’s essentially the whole thesis behind Black Mirror: the tech looks like the villain, but the real problem is how people choose to use it. Cute mascots might earn trust in AI in the short term, but they could also shift accountability away from the people who use it.

Do you think going cute will fix AI agents’ publicity problem, or will people see right through it?

Cover Image Credit: Brandon Smithwrick

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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:

• Brands are hiring like studios, and marketers now rank entertainment value above product messaging

• Authenticity turned into a style anyone could commission, and AI made audiences suspicious of all of it, so posting proof is what earns back trust

• Paid influencer partnerships are drawing backlash, so brands are hiring creators for what they know

• Follower count stopped predicting reach, because the For You page and social search now decide who sees your content

2026 threw the kitchen sink at social. The past decade wrote brands a playbook for growing online, but digital fatigue and a new generation coming online have handed them a very different roadmap.

Over the past few months, our Organic Social Team has been tracking platform shifts and cultural moments, and surveying social and brand marketers across our network.

We just published our findings in our 2026 Trend Report, For NoGood Reason. The full report runs over 60 slides, so we’re breaking down four of the biggest shifts here:

1. Brands turning into entertainment companies

2. Transparency vs. authenticity

3. Influencer marketing trading paid reach for real roles

4. Reach breaking away from follower counts

Let’s get into it.

The entertainment business of marketing

Brands used to pay their way into entertainment through product placement, but now they’re making the entertainment themselves. Gap hired its first Chief Entertainment Officer, and Ramp is paying up to $350K for someone to build “a media brand, not a content calendar.”

Algorithms made this possible. Studios and networks used to own the distribution pipe, but short-form social media gave access to everyone, allowing brands to publish their own programming for a fraction of what placement used to cost.

In our survey, 68% of marketers said they prioritize entertainment value over product messaging. The full report covers which branded series are actually landing, and why online-only shows now outdraw traditional TV.

Transparency vs. authenticity

Authenticity is dead. It died the moment brands realized they could commission it from someone else.

In our report we tracked a cycle that we call “The Authenticity Cycle.” It works as follows:

• Authenticity shows up as a trend.

• It settles in as relatability.

• Then it regresses into performance.

Take Merit Beauty’s messy sink shots, Kodak’s curated TSA bin, and Leon Bagels’ “candid” food and drink spills for example. All were styled to look like accidents. Each one attempted to sit at the start of the curve, but actually now sit at the final stage of the cycle.

“Messy” and “raw” started as a trend, settled in as relatability, and turned into performance the moment brands could commission it via aesthetics.

Generative AI made this even worse. Aritzia’s conveyor-belt shopping bags and KFC’s pickle-filled Pickle Puffer both got accused of being AI, but were in fact real.

In our survey, 76.6% said learning a brand using AI visuals hurts how they see it. With AI this is hard to spot, so posting proof is how a brand keeps that trust, and that’s exactly what KFC did.

The rise and fall of the influencer economy

The golden age of influencing is officially over. Influencing got so obvious, so in your face, and so constant that buying proximity in exchange for trust completely eroded.

Starbucks’ Coachella creator trip drew boycott backlash and OpenAI’s brand trip read as out of touch and sparked criticism of the involved influencers.

A Nantucket shop’s “No Influencers” sign was perhaps the clearest embodiment of the trend. The sign won the internet, and the influencer outrage over it resulted in online support of the shop.

Brands answered the recession by hiring expertise in place of buying trust. Audiences trust what a creator knows over what they’re paid to say, so SoFi hired finance educator Vivian Tu, Lightspeed hired AI explainer Claire Zau, and Rhode put creator Golloria to work with its formulator.

RIP to your follower count

You don’t own your followers anymore.

In one TikTok example from our report, 97.7% of a video’s views came from non-followers, and the Following feed delivered just 0.1%.

TikTok’s For You page broke the link between who follows you and who sees you. The feed learns from every watch and then serves whatever it thinks you’ll finish, whether or not you’ve heard of the creator.

Reels and Shorts copied the model, then built-in social search opened another door: someone can type “best coffee in Brooklyn” into TikTok and land on your video without knowing your name.

The big picture (sort of)

All four shifts point to an audience judging brands like everything else in their feed. Shortcuts to attention stopped working this year, so brands need to start focusing on earning their place online.

These four shifts are only part of the bigger picture. For every shift we’re tracking, read the full trend report and let us know what you think.

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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 internet revives the Chipotle margarita

Years of nostalgic TikToks and fan requests pushed Chipotle to revive its discontinued margarita for $6. The “Summon the Spirits Tour” hits one restaurant per weekend in October, starting in Denver and ending in New Orleans on Halloweekend, with a frozen version in Dallas. However, they’re now upset that it’s a one-time event and not a permanent edition.

2. OpenAI launches dots, with cute avatars built in

OpenAI’s new dots are always-on agents that handle tasks like booking flights and rescheduling appointments. Each one comes with a plush cartoon avatar, such as a frog, a heart, or a cloud in a beret. An agent asking for access to your apps is an easier sell when it looks like a toy, and Meta did the same thing earlier this month with Muse and its fuzzy mascot.

3. Spotify lets users edit their algorithm

US Premium users can now see how Spotify reads their taste and reshape it with plain-language requests. The changes carry into Discover Weekly, Made for You, and Wrapped. It addresses the common complaint that the algorithm keeps serving more of the same, and it arrives as platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn implement customizable feeds and algorithms.

4. Amazon’s new Kindles make tech fun again

Amazon’s redesigned Kindles come in brighter colors like Ube purple, Alpine Sky, and Seaglass Green, with bezels that match the body. Amazon also launched the Kindle Click, a $35 Bluetooth remote for turning pages from under the covers, on a treadmill, or across a tray table. Together with the MacBook Neo’s bright colors and the Beats 360 lineup, consumer tech is selling personality again.

5. Taco Bell and Duolingo take Taco Day global

Taco Bell is turning National Taco Day into Global Taco Day on October 6, built on the fact that “taco” barely changes across more than 30 languages. Duolingo brings a limited Duo Habanero Sauce, multilingual sauce cups, and the owl himself, appearing in four cities. It’s the next step in Taco Bell’s habit of claiming a calendar date as its own holiday.

6. NoGood launches its 2026 Social Trend Report

We just released “For NoGood Reason,” our first social trend report. Inside, we cover nine shifts reshaping social, including the influencer recession, tastemaxxing, and why your grid is now doing your website’s job.

Read the full report at nogood.io/blog/social-insight-report-vol-1.

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

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That was the moment I realized I’m so tired of meme marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud” piece where I long for the days when brands were sterile and every post sounded like it went through six levels of legal review. But I do want to talk about the state of meme marketing in 2026, because over the last few years it’s gone from a powerful playbook to what feels like the only playbook brands use. And the weirdest part is, I don’t even think it’s working anymore.

So how did we get here?

Before Brands Had Personality

Believe it or not, there was a time when brands didn’t try to entertain you on social media. Corporate social media used to be painfully boring. Every post sounded like it had gone through six rounds of legal review, because it literally had, and every reply was some variation of “We’re sorry to hear about your experience. Please send us a DM.” Brands acted like corporations, because they are corporations.

Then Wendy’s decided to break every corporate norm.

If you were on Twitter in the mid-2010s, you probably remember the day Wendy’s woke up and chose violence. They started roasting competitors and customers, making jokes nobody ever thought a billion-dollar company would make. And people absolutely loved it. Their Twitter account blew up overnight, and mainstream news outlets started covering their tweets. Most interesting of all, for the first time, people weren’t following a brand for its products. They were following because Wendy’s was genuinely entertaining.

Looking back, it’s easy to lump Wendy’s in with every other funny brand account. But if we do that, we miss what actually made Wendy’s successful. Yes, the jokes were funny, but more than that, they were surprising. Nobody thought a Fortune 500 company would ever behave like this, and the novelty was the marketing. Roasting people on Twitter isn’t some brilliant strategy. Everybody does it, except brands didn’t at the time, because none of them had the courage to try. It was new, and that’s what made it stick.

The Brand That Changed Everything

Following Wendy’s success, more and more brands started pushing the envelope over the next few years, experimenting with different brand voices and leaning away from corporate and toward entertainment.

Then Duolingo came along and shredded the envelope entirely.

Duolingo took the idea of a brand account posting the occasional meme and built an entire persona around it. They took Duo the Owl and gave him running jokes and recurring lore, all with the underlying reminder: do your Spanish lesson, or vanish. It was a massive success. Duolingo started making major appearances in pop culture, to the point where their mascot became a genuine internet celebrity in his own right. By tying their app to the content, Duolingo became one of the biggest brands of the early 2020s.

Of course, other brands were watching, and they wanted a piece of that pie. They’d soon find out that Duolingo’s success wouldn’t be easy to replicate.

The Copycat Economy

Duolingo spent years intentionally building a whole universe around their brand, full of in-jokes and lore. What they built couldn’t be replicated through a simple marketing strategy. That didn’t stop brands from trying to replicate it through a simple marketing strategy.

Instead of asking “Why does this work?”, brands started asking “How can we do this too?” A formula was extracted from Duolingo’s success, and it’s impossible not to notice, because now, in 2026, every brand is self-aware. Every brand is chronically online. Every brand is quirky and unhinged. And all of them are missing what actually made Duolingo’s strategy successful: novelty.

It’s the same thing that made Wendy’s successful in the 2010s. But one brand’s novelty can’t just be retrofitted onto every other brand.

To be fair, some brands do understand this distinction. Take Nutter Butter. They were clearly inspired by Duolingo, but they put their own unique spin on meme marketing, one that feels more akin to tripping on psychedelics. And that’s great. Not the psychedelics part, but the Nutterverse and its cryptic lore give the brand a unique presence that keeps audiences coming back.

It’s also worth saying that humor naturally works for some brands and not for others. That’s totally okay, but it’s important to recognize where your brand falls on that spectrum. Because, I’m sorry, the last thing we need is a quirky, chronically online TSA. Please, just let me get to my gate.

I think this disconnect is a big part of the meme marketing fatigue we’re seeing on a wide scale today. The harder brands try to have a personality, the more they end up sounding like every other brand, because at this point it’s just the meta. Marketing is more creative than ever, yet somehow it feels less original than it’s ever been.

Brands Are Renting Culture

From here on, I’m going to stop calling this phenomenon meme marketing, because that’s not really what’s happening anymore. It’s closer to reaction marketing. A lot of brands have relegated themselves to a formula where they don’t even try to create anything original. Instead, they take whatever is trending that week, coat it in their brand’s paint, and post it.

And it works, sort of. The trends these brands jump on are instantly recognizable, which drives strong engagement. But then the viewer scrolls and sees the same trend from another brand, and another, and another. None of these brands gain any tangible equity from their posts. They’re just hijacking a trend. People may like the post in droves, but they register it as the 21st brand to do the trend, not as something coming from a specific brand.

That’s the issue with reaction marketing. On the surface it looks like what Wendy’s and Duolingo did, but it’s inherently void of the novelty that made them pioneers. Fatigue sets in when brands can’t tell what should and shouldn’t go into their reaction inventory for the week, like the flag we talked about at the beginning.

This cycle is becoming increasingly transparent, too. Something genuinely interesting happens. People talk about it. Then hundreds of brands show up asking, “How can we make this about us?”

In the case of the Empire State Building flag, I’m not saying those brands had bad intentions. Quite the opposite. I think most of them are so stuck in this cycle that they’ve lost any intentionality beyond chasing engagement metrics. It’s why it feels like nothing online is allowed to just exist anymore. Every meaningful cultural moment becomes fodder for brands, and they’ve completely given up on creating those moments themselves.

Borrowing attention from trending culture is very different from creating something viewers will actually associate with your brand. Wendy’s pioneered a new expectation for how brands could behave online. That’s novel. Duolingo created one of the internet’s most recognizable characters, complete with recurring lore. That’s novel. Today’s brands are settling for reacting to everybody else’s ideas.

The Duolingo Paradox

From a surface-level perspective, this works, right? Reaction marketing gets likes, shares, and comments, and sometimes it even goes viral. But step back and ask what it’s actually building for the brand.

Engagement and brand equity aren’t the same thing. Just because someone engages with a post doesn’t mean they’ll remember who made it. I could show you ten funny brand posts right now, and I bet you’d love most of them. I also bet you won’t remember who posted half of them by tomorrow. That’s because reaction marketing is built on borrowed attention.

The most ironic part is that brands have spent years trying to copy Duolingo without realizing that copying Duolingo is the least Duolingo thing you could possibly do. Duolingo wasn’t successful because it followed internet culture. It used trends to create its own internet culture and did things no other brand would do. Duo the Owl gave the brand a personality through running jokes and lore. Nobody was waiting with bated breath to see which meme Duolingo would react to next. They were waiting to see what Duo would do next. The memes were never the strategy, and that’s what every brand copying the formula is missing.

Funnily enough, I think Duolingo has started to lose sight of that too. Over the last year or so, they’ve leaned into the reaction economy, and their novelty has diminished as a result. The last time Duolingo got attention for something that felt truly novel was when they killed off Duo the Owl, which is weirdly symbolic.

Some might chalk this up to the natural life cycle of meme marketing: what starts out disruptive eventually becomes familiar. But I think it has more to do with the fine line between meme marketing and reaction marketing, and even Duolingo has proven it isn’t above crossing that line.

Closing Thoughts

I want to be very clear: I’m not saying brands should stop making memes or stop being funny. But a lot of brands have sacrificed building real brand equity for cheap clicks and engagement. Most have stopped asking “What can we create?” and become far too focused on which trend they can hop on next. And when every company chases the same trends, using the same templates, making the same jokes in slightly different fonts, nobody stands out.

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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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