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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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:

• Polaroid’s second anti-AI campaign draws a hard line

• On “tastewashing”: tech brands borrowing credibility and craft

• A24 ‘s controversial research deal with Google DeepMind

Ready? Let's get into it. 

🚫 There’s no middle ground on AI anymore.

Every brand is now being asked a question it didn’t use to have to say out loud: what do you actually think about AI? Audiences have stopped extending patience to brands that hedge. Conviction gets rewarded in either direction, but a middle-of-the-road position reads as evasion, and evasion doesn’t stay neutral for long. Someone else writes your opinion for you, it’s rarely flattering, and it’s always out of your hands.

Polaroid picked a side. A24, conversely, tried to hold the middle and got burned for it.

📸 Why use Polaroid cameras when you have AI?

That’s a question Patricia Varella, Creative Director at Polaroid, answered in their latest campaign, “The Best of Summer Is Analog.”

The truth is, generative AI tools can create any image in seconds. So instead of relying on product features to sell to Gen Z, Polaroid leaned into the one thing AI will never replicate: the moment itself. They put up a billboard on Coney Island Beach that reads: “Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.”

Their OOH ran across New York, London, and South Korea with lines like “Dance like nobody is recording.” Brands can’t just show up and claim their product solves a problem or fills a gap anymore. They have to convince people that they play an irreplaceable role in their lives. And when a brand positions itself as a role, the user stops evaluating the product and starts seeing themselves in it.

That self-identification is what builds the relationship and turns into brand loyalty.

At a time where tech companies are “tastewashing” left and right, the timing of this campaign couldn’t have been better. Tastewashing is a phenomenon where tech companies use brand marketing and PR strategies to intentionally associate themselves with art, aesthetics, and the illusion of taste.

But more often than not, the definition of the word taste is blurred and part of the reason is that taste was never meant to be objective in the first place. What reads as tasteful to one person can read as try-hard to another, and that ambiguity gives brands room to work with. If taste can’t be measured, it can be claimed, and claiming it is a lot faster than developing it. So instead of building a sensibility over time, plenty of tech companies are shortcutting straight to the performance of one.

👅 So why are tech companies obsessed with taste?

Taste is inherently profitable. We’re at a point where AI can help you do almost anything at ten times the speed, so the only thing left is deciding what to do with all that execution power. AI is and will always be a fundamentally tasteless technology by design, not because the tech is flawed, but because it’s built to trend toward the mean: what’s most popular, most likable, most likely to keep people engaged. You get more volume, but you lose variance.

That’s created a divergence between two definitions of taste that have very little to do with each other.

• Taste as personal inclination: the slow, friction-dependent development of a sensibility for what’s niche or genuinely different

• Taste as market discernment: the ability to identify what people want and what will sell.

Klaas, who writes calls the second one “taste at work”; the ability to consistently make decisions that drive positive business outcomes. Practicing taste at work isn't the same thing as having taste, and most tastewashing depends on nobody noticing the difference.

Which brings the story back to Polaroid. A line like “go jump in some water before the data centers drink it up” could easily read as the same shortcut: friction and analog aesthetics borrowed for credibility. The difference is that Polaroid’s entire product and mission run on physical, analog hardware. There’s no gap between the aesthetic and the substance behind it, and this isn’t even the first time they’ve made the case.

🌎 The role of AI branding in a “tastewashing” world

Since 2022, over 15 billion AI-generated images have been created using text-to-image tools, and some now mimic camera-style photography so closely that they force a second look. You could type “generate an image of a beach in the style of a Polaroid picture” and get something that passes at a glance.

Polaroid isn’t riding a wave of anti-AI sentiment because the timing is convenient; it’s a brand using the AI conversation to draw a hard line around what it is - the same move tastewashing makes, just pointed in the opposite direction. Both treat AI as raw material for identity. Polaroid just tells the truth about which side it’s on.

Take A24’s research partnership with Google DeepMind. A24 built its entire reputation on human creativity, so the question everyone asked was simple: why take $75 million from Google’s AI lab?

The backlash wasn’t really about the technical terms of the deal. Moreso, it was about what the partnership signaled: Google borrowing A24’s creative credibility to win over an audience it could never reach on its own. A24 clearly understood the risk. Google gets zero access to A24’s content library or data, and Scott Belsky, who leads A24 Labs, has been clear this isn’t about making films cheaper or faster.

The “research, not production” framing exists specifically to keep A24 from looking like it handed artists’ work over as training data. But none of that mattered once the deal went public. The moment a brand built on human craft becomes the face of the technology that threatens that craft, trust starts to wear thin, regardless of what the fine print says.

For a studio people saw as anti-brand, the collaboration tainted its credibility almost overnight.

People want to choose who they give their engagement to and when. So when Polaroid drops an anti-AI campaign for the second year running, or when a company like A24 announces a partnership with an AI lab, they’re each making their position legible. They’re saying, “I am this,” and audiences get to filter themselves accordingly: stay and support the brand, or walk away.

What Polaroid and A24 prove, from opposite ends, is that the middle ground on AI doesn’t exist anymore. Not because brands aren’t allowed to explore it, but because audiences no longer grant the benefit of the doubt long enough for nuance to land. A24’s own statements about creative control and research-only framing were true, and it didn’t matter. The backlash arrived before anyone had time to read the details.

Tastewashing exists because brands assumed taste could be borrowed. Polaroid and A24 are proof of the opposite lesson: in a market this skeptical, the only credibility that survives contact with an audience is the kind you’ve earned, one repeated, undeniable position at a time.

What are your thoughts on the role of AI branding?

Leave a comment

What’s an industry hot take you’ve been too shy to say out loud? 🤔

We’re building NoGood’s first-ever 2026 State of Organic Social Report, and we want YOUR voice to power the data behind it!

From the rise of anti-AI marketing to the slow death of follower count, this report covers the trends, shifts, and chaos reshaping social right now.

But the data is only as good as the people behind it, and that’s where you come in.

Share your unfiltered opinions in our 3-minute, anonymous survey. There are no wrong answers, just real ones.

Take our survey here

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

NoGood is building our first-ever State of Organic Social Report, and we’re starting where any good research should: with the people closest to the work. Our organic social team pooled their observations and landed on eight themes that feel indicative of where the discipline is heading.

But a trend report is only as credible as its sources, and the most valuable source in this industry is the practitioner community itself. Whether you’re a social media strategist, brand manager, or founder, your instincts and convictions about where this is all going are exactly what this data set needs.

To everyone subscribed to our newsletter, we want to thank you for your support. You’re part of a community that’s equally invested in the conversations and shifts we’re excited to dig into, and that means something to us. This report is as much yours as it is ours, and we’d love for your perspective to be part of it.

The survey takes three minutes and is completely anonymous. We’re not looking for polished answers, just honest ones. Every response directly shapes what the data reflects, and findings drop this summer.

The mic is yours. 🎤

Join the conversation

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

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

• The Ozempic economy of ideas: The internet is being flooded with content at a pace we’ve never seen before, and most of it looks identical. The brands leaning too hard on AI are destroying the one thing that makes their content worth citing.

• A24 partners with Google’s AI Lab: A24 just made a bet that could either redefine what an indie studio is or unravel everything that made it one.

• The World Cup marketing wars: Adidas paid for the World Cup. Nike never did, and still walked away with a third of the credit. The brands that win the tournament all have one thing in common, and it has nothing to do with the size of the check they wrote.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

✍️ The Ozempic Economy Of Ideas

Understand what happens when AI rewrites the internet

Ozempic’s rise to cosmetic fame is no coincidence. Our cultural obsession with quick fixes, life hacking, and rapid results created the backdrop for the miracle weight loss drug to flourish. Social media laid the groundwork, delivering instant gratification and increased social pressure that normalized optimization and immediacy at all costs.

But Ozempic’s rebrand has distorted the market. According to one study from the National Institute of Health, affluent consumers obtain the drug off-label, limiting supply for at-risk individuals with obesity or diabetes who already experience barriers to healthcare access.

AI content generators are just another version of the miracle drug, and with enough resources, you can buy your way to the top. As a result, smaller brands and creators are being squeezed out of conversations as they battle for visibility with resource-rich competitors.

However, humans are getting remarkably good at detecting AI slop and can smell a quick fix from a mile away. AI’s “this, not that” phrasing and overuse of the—beloved—em—dash have gained widespread attention.

AI slop could also be harming your brand’s visibility and reputation across LLMs. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) research shows that LLMs are also beginning to detect and downvote AI content that doesn’t add net-new value or appear credible.

Marketers need to embrace AI, sure, but healthy skepticism and guardrails are needed for your brand to succeed in the long term.

Learn how to create original content

🎥 A24 Partners With Google’s AI Lab

What happens when an indie film studio uses AI?

A24 built its entire reputation on human creativity. So why did they just take $75M from Google’s AI lab?

Google’s DeepMind just announced a partnership with A24 to build AI-powered filmmaking tools.

The existing conversation around AI-powered creativity has sparked debate about low-quality output and job loss.

So what we’re seeing here is Google borrowing A24’s creative credibility to win over its creative audience.

A24 clearly understands the reputational risk, which is why Google gets zero access to A24’s content library or data.

Scott Belsky, who leads A24 Labs, says that unlike most AI deals, this isn’t about making films cheaper and faster.

The “research, not production” framing of the partnership protects A24 from appearing like it’s “selling out” artists’ work as AI training sets.

Because the moment a brand built on human craft becomes the face for the technology that threatens that craft, the trust starts to wear thin.

This is either the smartest move A24 ever made, or the most expensive brand risk in independent film history.

What are your thoughts on A24’s partnership with Google?

Leave a comment

⚽️ The World Cup Marketing Wars

Find out which brands earned a slice of the largest pool of human attention

Strip away the football and the lesson is blunt. You do not need to own the rights to own the conversation. You need a role. Every brand that has ever won a World Cup owned one of these:

1. The object. Adidas and the ball.

2. The emotion. Coca-Cola and the celebration.

3. The mythology. Nike and the player as a cultural figure.

4. The ritual. McDonald’s and the family routine.

5. The utility. Visa and the transaction layer.

And there’s a sixth role now, the one that decides 2026: earn the group chat. A World Cup campaign hasn’t really landed until someone wants to forward it. Not because it was targeted at them, but because it gives them social currency: a clip, a joke, a player cameo, a ridiculous edit, a limited drop, a song. The group chat is the modern fan zone. Win there, or prepare to overpay for attention everywhere else.

One more thing, because it kills more World Cup campaigns than bad budgets do: respect the fans’ intelligence. Football fans have VAR-level sensitivity for cringe. They can hear an American campaign say “offsides” like it’s a LinkedIn post. They know when a celebrity doesn’t care and when a brand learned the sport from three TikToks last week. You cannot fake football fluency for a month. You can partner with people who have it, be specific, and let fans lead the language.

The World Cup is global, but fandom is local. Mexico won’t experience 2026 like England; Egypt won’t experience it like Argentina; and inside the US alone, Miami, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles will feel like four different tournaments. Strong central idea, local edges. That beats “football brings us together” soup every time.

The brands that won the moment

What’s an industry hot take you’ve been too shy to say out loud? 🤔

We’re building NoGood’s first-ever 2026 State of Organic Social Report, and we want YOUR voice to power the data behind it!

From the rise of anti-AI marketing to the slow death of follower count, this report covers the trends, shifts, and chaos reshaping social right now.

But the data is only as good as the people behind it, and that’s where you come in.

Share your unfiltered opinions in our 3-minute, anonymous survey. There are no wrong answers, just real ones.

Take our survey here

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: What do brands consistently get wrong when planning campaigns for the World Cup?

A: Something that I have noticed with respect to the two most recent World Cups: bigger is not always better, and the spotlight can be incredibly impactful. I am thinking about the cinematic universes on par with Marvel that Adidas and Nike have each created. Nike created a 6-minute commercial with every single footballer and celebrity you know. Adidas actually went beyond using as many celebrities as possible, opting to create an ensemble of fictional characters who happened to be the best 3v3 players in the world, all narrated by Timothée Chalamet, who yells at you curtly and navigates his way through NYC traffic.

Look, sometimes simple is better. My favorite World Cup ad of all time features Neymar and his Beats (by Dre). His father’s words of encouragement, delivered minutes before the match, are overlaid, and Beats lets the viewer draw their own conclusions about the importance of music beforehand. In the end, the product sells itself. The lesson to be learned here is: dozens of celebrities or made-up local folklore will never have the same impact as the singular spotlight and a prospective customer coming to their own conclusions.

Q: Do brands need an official sponsorship to own a cultural moment like this?

A: Absolutely not! It might shock some people to know this, but Nike has actually never been an official FIFA sponsor. That’s right, they’ve spent the past few decades sponsoring players. And what could qualify as ‘owning a cultural moment’ more than providing the swoosh on the cleats worn by the player who scores the World Cup-clinching goal?

When comparing an official sponsorship to everything else on the outside, the idea of ‘ownership’ is incredibly important. Nike has tried to own the impact of the players themselves. But how many other cultural moments are there throughout the entire World Cup? The celebration, the anticipation, the coordinated line dances, hell, how about the sprint to the bathroom during the new match breaks FIFA has implemented for this WC? ‘Official’ doesn’t matter nearly as much as finding your cultural niche and owning it.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Shelf Life: The Fake Empire of “Authentic Marketing” by

• 44% of social marketers feel like their boss doesn’t understand social media by

• What Comes After The Suspicion Economy

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Breaking down Levi’s World Cup strategy

• Rhode taps creators for product development

• Cash App leans into TikTok trends for a Gen Z payment wand

• The 7 levels of logo rebrands

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

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

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

• Metrics worth tracking in 2026: Have you been tracking the same metrics for five years? If so, you’re already falling behind. We break down which ones are worth your attention.

• Behind Nike’s World Cup ad: Nike dominates a different conversation in the World Cup ad roster. And the question everyone is asking, “Who did it better, Nike or Adidas?” is the wrong one to ask.

• Creative is the new targeting: Chances are, your paid content is fighting the algorithm. Without treating your ad creative like a content strategy, you risk losing your audience to an algorithm that prioritizes storytelling over generic messaging.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

📈 Metrics Worth Tracking In 2026

Uncover your brand’s full story with advanced metrics

The biggest shift in organic social media right now is a move away from pure visibility metrics toward intent and trust signals. The smartest brands are asking better questions of their data, demanding a bigger story that goes beyond the surface, and starting with knowing which metrics are actually worth tracking.

1. Share of Voice: Out of every conversation happening in your category right now, how much of it is yours? Share of voice is the difference between knowing you showed up and knowing whether anyone noticed, relative to everyone else in the same room.

2. Citations & LLM Visibility: Your social content and what others say about you on social media directly influence how often your brand surfaces in AI search. The two are no longer separate conversations.

3. Saves: If you think about social as a landing page, a save is the closest thing to a bookmark. It means your content did its job and provided something relevant for both the present and the future.

4. Shares: When someone shares your brand’s post, it signals your content is worth passing along. A public share extends your reach organically and signals that your content is worth amplifying.

5. Comment Quality: It’s a much better proxy for community health than comment count. And if you know how to read yours, it can be useful for audience sentiment, market research, community building, social proof, and even crisis detection.

6. Watch & Video Completion Rate: The algorithm rewards completion, meaning the more people watch your video all the way through, the more the platform pushes it to new audiences.

7. Brand Sentiment: Brand sentiment is less about the numbers at a glance and more about how people feel about your brand, also known as cultural currency.

Dive deeper into these 7 metrics

⚽️ Behind Nike’s World Cup Ad

T-minus one day until the World Cup and Nike made it just in time

Nike’s World Cup ad gained 16 million views on X alone within 24 hours.

“Rip the Script” is a 6-minute film packed with over 30 global stars, including Kim Kardashian, Channing Tatum, and Young Miko.

The film follows a director losing control of a production as soccer’s biggest stars refuse to stick to the script.

Most brands approach the World Cup as a time to celebrate the game and spotlight the athletes.

Nike approached it as a cultural moment that belongs to everyone, not just avid soccer fans.

Each celebrity cameo is a door to a different audience, and the cast’s range mirrors the diversity of the tournament itself.

Assembling a cast that spans genres, cultures, and fan bases signals that this moment belongs to all of them.

Soccer has always been a sport that crosses cultural and geographic boundaries, and Nike built a campaign that reflects exactly that.

Even Nike’s VP, Helena Thornton, said the wide cast was designed to reach a U.S. audience that historically hasn’t been soccer-first.

Sports moments have always been bigger than the sport itself.

And brands are just starting to design campaigns around that idea, reaching beyond the fan base and into culture.

What are your thoughts on Nike’s World Cup ad?

Leave a comment

🎯 Creative Is The New Targeting

Learn why broad targeting and niche creative go hand-in-hand

When you hand an ad platform generic messaging, stock imagery, basic CTAs, and impersonal ad copy, the control we once had is further loosened. Creative with a real POV, one that tells a story, speaks to a specific person, and has something to actually say, will push performance and signal algorithms. The more specific and substantive the creative, the better the system understands who it is for.

1. Persona-Driven Hooks: The fastest way to signal specificity is your opening line. The mistake most brands make is writing hooks that try to include everyone. Not only is that inefficient for performance, but it also gives the algorithms little to work with.

2. POV-Driven Storytelling: Beyond the hook, niche creative has an actual perspective running through it. It takes a position on something. With this, you may have to assume some context about the viewer’s life, their frustrations, what they’ve already tried. This POV is not about explaining what your product does or is, but it starts with the why before the what.

3. Localized Creator Content: A local creator filming in a recognizable neighborhood, referencing something culturally specific to their city, and speaking in the cadence of their community earns a different, higher-intent quality of attention from the right viewer. Those engagement signals are what algorithms optimize against.

Read the full breakdown

🎉 Special Announcement Incoming…

We just won a Gold Drum Award for Search with SteelSeries!

A few years ago, we won a Drum Award for TikTok SEO. That recognition was for what we built for ourselves.

This time, we took those same search instincts and applied them to our clients. Our goal: help brands show up and get cited, not just by search engines, but by AI.

Getting a brand famous on ChatGPT is no small thing. We’re proud to be the team doing it, and even prouder to be winning awards for our clients while doing it.

Two AI search awards down and we’re just getting started. 🏆

🔍 The AI Search Deep Dive

Here are 2 AI search articles written by our very own CEO, Mostafa ElBermawy, to add to your reading list this week:

• Marketing to Agents

• Did Google Just Kill AEO/GEO?

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: How do you evaluate comment quality without it becoming too subjective?

A: Instead of analyzing every single comment, a best practice is to perform an audit on a regular basis. Looking at general trends helps keep bias and opinion out of it. For example, instead of categorizing comments as cute, funny, sweet, etc. I look at the quality as a whole. Are there a lot of questions, complaints, and praise? Are comments generally positive, neutral, or negative? Are they directed to the product/service or the brand itself? From there, you can explore specific themes.

Q: Where most brands are falling short on LLM visibility, what’s a first step worth taking?

A: It’s important for brands to consider the bigger picture when it comes to AEO. Now, your content is not only responsible for reflecting your values, positioning, and messaging on your owned accounts, but it also directly shapes how AI LLMs will pick up and convey your brand to real people. Because of this, brands have to be even more prescriptive when writing their narrative on social. A few tips to get started:

1. The macro: Identify your brand pov, values, guidelines - know them well and stay consistent. Everything you do, say, and post should circle back to the core foundation of what your brand is and how it shows up. This is key for AEO because before you figure out how you want LLMs to talk about you, you have to determine if you’re feeding it the right information. And that always starts with brand (not creative, not OOH, not activations or partnerships)

2. The micro: once the above is clear, you can begin to experiment with platform-specific tricks like captions, descriptions, comments, keywords, etc.

None of this has to happen overnight or in isolation. Start slowly and see what works.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Is Brand Purpose Dead? by

• The Best Brand Inspiration Is Not Online by

• Fake Fans by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Analyzing the “Larp YouTuber” phenomenon

• Explaining the Google icon change controversy

• The “why” behind Anthropic’s $400k copywriter

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

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

Here’s a quick TL;DR of what’s below:

• Spotify’s new logo sparks controversy

• How to approach Reddit for AEO

• Social is the new landing page

Ready? Let’s get into it.

🪩 Spotify’s New Logo Sparks Controversy

Breaking down Spotify’s disco ball fiasco

How did Spotify’s new disco ball logo become the most divisive thing on the internet this month?

For its 20th anniversary, Spotify swapped its iconic green circle for a green disco ball.

You might be thinking that an app icon change isn’t a big deal, but the redesign has proved surprisingly controversial.

This apparently unforgivable change sparked backlash so loud that Spotify responded, saying, “We know glitter isn’t for everyone. Our temp glow up ends soon.”

But the criticism reveals something more interesting.

App icons have become deeply personal — and when a familiar symbol shifts even slightly, people notice in a way that feels almost territorial.

What started as backlash snowballed into a full cultural moment, with other brands like Notion dropping disco versions of their own logos, spurring what the internet is now calling “discomorphism.”

That’s weeks of earned attention from a single temporary icon change.

So was this a win despite the backlash?

Leave a comment

🔍 How to Approach Reddit for AEO

A complete guide for adding Reddit to your AEO stack

Reddit is one of the most-cited sources across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, with formal data licensing deals signed by Google and OpenAI and a pending lawsuit against Perplexity over unauthorized scraping.

For marketers, that means Reddit threads are shaping what AI answer engines say about your brand right now, whether you participate or not. The framework we like to use for Reddit AEO comes in three stages: crawl, walk, run.

1. Crawl: Spend weeks or months observing before posting anything. Learn your target subreddits’ rules, tone, and inside jokes (these are often critical). Notice how users describe their problems, their workarounds, and their competitors and yours. Upvote threads (hell, maybe even downvote a couple if you’re a hater). Follow active discussions. Pay attention to which posts get removed and why. This stage feels actionless, which is why most brands skip it… It’s also why so many brands fail at Reddit.

2. Walk: Start commenting, but only when you can add genuinely useful information. No sales language. No forced product mentions. If you work for the company being discussed, say so (*person's name* at *company name* here, happy to answer your question about growth marketing). A disclosed identity earns way more goodwill than a burner account ever will, because Redditors respect transparency more than almost anything else.

3. Run: Once you have some credibility, you can participate more actively. Answer category questions. Jump into brand-relevant conversations. Support discussions that feel native to the community. You’re not pitching; you’re contributing. Post your own threads, consider starting your own brand’s subreddit. The timeline on this is slower than marketers usually want. Expect 3 to 6 months before you see meaningful citation movement or AEO impact.

Become a pro at Reddit marketing

📱 Social is the New Landing Page

How to turn your socials into conversions

In the past, people have dismissed social media as an afterthought, but it’s often the first entry point for consumers to your brand. Data from We Are Social show that 44% of online adults use social media to research brands before a potential purchase. Your social media is one of the first entry points consumers have with your brand, and they’re often making purchase decisions on the spot as a result.

Depending on your brand, here are some things that users might want to find out about you by snooping on your socials:

What do they actually offer? Can I trust this brand? What’s their vibe like? Do their values match mine? Can I see myself purchasing from or supporting this brand? Do I belong within this community?

When existing followers or first-time visitors to your brand are on your social media, they are running countless queries and making a series of snap judgments because engaging with a new brand often comes with risks: quality control, long-term investment, or the fear of external judgment. On the fundamental level, their brain tries to reduce uncertainty as fast as possible, and social media is often the best place to do so (not only on your brand’s profile but through UGC as well).

The reality is that all of this happens fast, so your socials have to showcase your brand’s strengths right off the bat: reducing uncertainty, building trust, and creating enough emotional pull to turn a quick glance into intrigue.

Re-organize your social profile with us

🎉 We Have Some Exciting News…

We just won the first-ever Shorty Award for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)!

GEO is a brand new category at this year’s Shorty Awards, and it means so much that we’re the first team ever to take it home!

To the SteelSeries team, thank you for trusting us and for being bold enough to invest in a new channel while everyone else was still asking questions about it. Thank you to the NoGood team that built the playbook from the ground up, and to the Goodie AI team for building the tool that made this all possible.

AI search is becoming one of the biggest channels in marketing, and we’ve been ahead of it from day one. Congrats to everyone involved — this one’s for you!

If you want the blueprint behind wins like this, our CEO is running a live 2-day AEO masterclass on Maven June 10–11.

Sign up here

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: What is the 9:1 rule on Reddit and what does the “9” actually look like in practice for a brand account?

A: The Reddit 9:1 rule is an anti-spam guideline stating that for every 1 piece of self-promotional content you share, you should contribute 9 genuine, non-promotional interactions (comments, posts, or upvotes) to the community. For a brand account, the 9 looks like answering questions in your niche without linking back to your product, weighing in on industry debates with actual expertise, sharing useful outside resources, asking thoughtful questions, and upvoting content you find valuable. The goal is building a posting history that signals to both moderators and Redditors that you’re a participant in the community before you’re a brand.

Q: Do you have a hot take on using Reddit to grow brand visibility?

A: Ignore the upvotes. Our research at Goodie has found that AI models often source threads with relatively low upvote counts, meaning a post with modest community engagement can end up cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers while a thread with thousands of votes on the same subject gets passed over. Focus on whether your content fits the community and whether you’re being helpful, interesting, or funny. If the upvotes come in, that’s a good signal you’re posting strong content. For AI visibility, the signals are more obscure.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Your Campaign Needs More On-Ramps by

• The Clipping Economy, Explained by

• The Feed is Fake by Vulture

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

@nogood.iothe red flats queen definitely stole the spotlight at the Met Gala 💅👠 @redflatsqueen #redflats #metgala #trendbreakdown #halloweencostume

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🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• Entertainment infiltrates the marketing org chart: A job title that didn’t exist five years ago is showing up inside some of the biggest marketing orgs in the world. The brands paying attention to this trend are starting to look a lot less like advertisers and a lot more like media companies. But what’s driving this shift?

• Adidas drops the best World Cup commercial: At a time when Nike is facing mounting pressure, Adidas locks in its positioning right before the biggest sports moment of the decade. And with one five-minute short film, they may have already won the marketing game before a single World Cup match was played.

• Creating long-form content (the right way): Short-form content gets all the attention, but long-form has been playing a different game for a while now. From AI search citations to brand affinity, its role in a content strategy has never been more consequential. And we break down exactly how to do it well.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

📸 Entertainment Infiltrates The Marketing Org Chart

Why brands like Ramp and Gap are hiring “storytellers”

The percentage of LinkedIn job postings that include the term “storyteller” doubled in a single year. Executives said “storytelling” on earnings calls 469 times in 2025, up from 147 times in 2015. Notion merged its communications, social, and influencer functions into a single team, calling it “storytelling”.

These shifts in the marketing org chart are indicative of where the biggest brands believe attention is going and what it will take to hold it.

Two weeks ago, Ramp posted a job listing for a Head of Content. The mandate was written directly into the listing: “Ramp is building a media brand, not a content calendar.”

This is not the first time Ramp has signaled where it’s headed. Six months ago, we wrote about Ramp putting Kevin from The Office in a glass box for seven hours to process expenses by hand while their software handled 600,000 in the background. Function-forward fintech marketing was getting replaced by something built around characters, narrative, and a live event that generated its own UGC flywheel.

What they’re building toward is becoming the publication that finance leaders actually seek out, the authoritative voice at the intersection of technology and finance that trade media is no longer positioned to be.

Gap hired a former Paramount executive to build a world around the brand rooted in music and cultural partnership. Ramp is hiring a media builder to turn proprietary spend data into content that no trade publication can produce.

The formats are different, but the underlying question still stands: what does it actually take to earn attention from the people you’re trying to reach, and are you willing to build the organization around that answer?

Let us know your thoughts

⚽️ Adidas Drops The Best World Cup Commercial

How Adidas’ brand strategy shines through in their latest ad

Adidas just released the best World Cup Commercial so far.

Adidas dropped “Backyard Legends,” a five-minute short film featuring Timothée Chalamet, Messi, and Bad Bunny.

In this “true story” reenactment, Chalamet is determined to end the streak of a legendary street soccer crew that hasn’t been beaten for 30 years.

But instead of selling performance, Adidas places the spotlight on the feeling of playing the sport.

Compare that to their rival, Nike, whose strategy has always been product-first and performance-focused.

At a time when Nike is facing backlash over a design flaw in its World Cup jerseys and declining sales, Adidas solidifies its positioning during one of the biggest sports moments of the decade.

Adidas has always owned the journey-over-destination lane, and this campaign locks that in right before the World Cup kicks off.

By closing with “You Got This,” the brand positions everyday players as the legends, shifting the spotlight from performance to the joy of the game.

That kind of emotional brand messaging is what builds loyalty amongst viewers beyond the game.

Which brand do you think is winning the World Cup marketing wars?

Leave a comment

🎥 Creating Long-Form Content (The Right Way)

The methodology for long-form content creation with AI search in mind

Does long-form content actually matter? Short answer? Yes. A lot. While short-form content has its value and can help you maximize your reach, long-form content is how you maximize your value (both inside and outside of YouTube).

1. Search Engine Dominance

Long-form content is favored by Google’s algorithm because it is more comprehensive and helps answer questions thoroughly. Google is undisputedly the largest search engine in the world, and YouTube is the second-largest. Together, they work in tandem (giving you double the exposure). But the value of long-form YouTube content extends beyond traditional search.

2. The Shift to AI Search

One of the top sources of answers for AI chatbots is YouTube long-form content! This means there is a massive untapped opportunity for the creators and brands who prioritize long-form content to gain additional authority. This kind of exposure is something you simply cannot replicate through traditional social media algorithms. Instead of just providing an answer, your video and brand become the answer.

3. The Numbers Don’t Lie

According to Marketing LTB, long-form content attracts 77% more backlinks than short posts, resulting in greater authority and more organic traffic over time. SQ Magazine reports that YouTube users worldwide watch over 1 billion hours of content every day. Long-form has one ingredient that short-form has a genuinely hard time replicating: a real connection with the viewer. Think of short-form like fast food. Most of the time, it’s forgotten the second after you’re done. It’s a lot more difficult to form a relationship with.

Learn the basics of YouTube SEO

📢 Events To Keep On Your Radar 📢

AI Search: Off the Record — #NYTechWeek

Join us on June 3rd in SoHo for an exclusive evening on what’s actually working in AI Search right now.

We’re bringing together founders, search marketing leads, and growth operators for an honest conversation about everything from agentic commerce to social as an AI citation source.

Food and drinks courtesy of Carbone and Levain Bakery. Come talk shop with some of the most recognizable brands in tech, retail, and media.

June 3rd, from 6 PM to 8 PM.

Register here

2-Day AEO Masterclass Course

On June 10–11, NoGood’s CEO is running a 2-day live masterclass built for teams ready to move from awareness to execution.

What you’ll walk away with:

→ A full AEO framework built from real brand audits and millions of data points

→ How social and earned media directly shape what LLMs say about your brand

→ The exact tools and metrics that track AI visibility across every major surface

→ Live Q&A with Mostafa. Bring your hardest questions.

This is the playbook. Built by the team that created the first AEO course on Maven.

Are you ready to make the shift?

Sign up here

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: With AI citations in the picture, how should brands approach “evergreen” content versus trending content?

A: If you’re creating content purely to share information on an evergreen topic,  AI already does that better than you. But here’s what AI doesn’t have: a perspective. Our little caveats, biases, and strange takes are what create entertainment, something AI genuinely can’t replicate. The shift isn’t toward more information. Instead, it’s toward more nuance. Whether that’s humor, a take so unexpected that even the most advanced AI has a stroke trying to comprehend it, or just a voice that feels undeniably real. If you’re going to create evergreen content in 2026, you need the sprinkle on top that makes it yours. More difficult? Yes. More competitive? Absolutely. But people still crave the human element, and honestly, they’re going to crave it even more as AI floods the internet. Evergreen content isn’t dead; all it needs is a pulse.

Q: If short-form gets you in front of people and long-form gets you in front of AI, where does each format fit in a brand’s strategy?

A: Short-form is great for reach, but long-form is where a brand gets remembered. Think of short form as your handshake and long form as your business card. The mistake most brands make is treating them as separate strategies instead of letting them work together. Short-form creates curiosity, but long-form answers it. And with AI citations now pulling from long-form content, there’s a brand-new audience to tap into: the non-doomscroller. The person who isn’t mindlessly scrolling a feed but actively asking questions and looking for real answers.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• We’re All Maxxing Now by

• The Analog Revival Did Not Take Place by

• Brand Strategy ≠ Design Strategy ≠ Marketing Strategy by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Analyzing the Scientology speedrun trend

• GTA 6 is bigger than you think

• Why are TikTok AI overviews taking over?

• The return of XBOX

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• What Claude Design means for designers: Anthropic's latest release sent Figma's stock down 7% and sparked a familiar debate: will AI replace graphic designers? Those who've spent years sharpening their craft aren't becoming less relevant. Their taste, creativity, and instinct are about to become their most valuable assets.

• Pinterest leverages the analog trend: Pinterest's new campaign tells users to put their phones down. For a tech brand, that contradiction is exactly the point. Their latest film and Coachella activation were both built around one idea, but can a tech platform pull off the analog trend without it feeling like a stunt?

• Using Claude for design (the right way): Developers were first to lean into Claude, but designers are catching up fast. Most are using it wrong, and the gap between those who get it and those who don't is already starting to show. We break down exactly how to use it.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

🎨 What Claude Design Means For Designers

Claude Design may be Anthropic's most controversial drop yet

Will Claude Design replace graphic designers?

Anthropic just launched Claude Design, a new tool that lets users turn a text prompt into a polished design prototype.

Figma's stock dropped 7% the same day it launched, and Adobe wasn't far behind.

Many believe this will put graphic designers out of their jobs.

But let's take a beat and look at what Claude Design is really built for.

Claude Design is not made for designers.

It's made to give founders, marketers, and non-designers a way to turn an idea into something tangible without needing a design background.

And when you think about what AI-generated designs look like, it tends to blend in rather than stand out

Without creative direction, you're going to get the same typography, layout patterns, and visual language recycled back at you.

And that's where human creativity becomes non-negotiable.

A designer using this tool as a lever will bring the taste and architectural thinking that make the output truly unique.

Claude’s philosophy has always pushed users to lead with their thinking and then use the technology to execute on that thinking — not the other way around.

Claude Design may get you to the starting line faster, but the rest of the work still takes creative instinct.

Do you think Claude Design will replace designers?

Leave a comment

❌📱Pinterest Leverages The Analog Trend

How Pinterest used the analog trend to repostion themselves

Why would Pinterest, a tech brand, tell their users to put their phone down?

Their new campaign, "How Did They Do It?", is a 60-second film made from home movies and photos submitted by Pinterest employees, capturing what life looked like before social media.

The message is simple: Pinterest is a tool to get inspired by, and then get off of.

They brought this to life at their Coachella brand activation, where visitors had to lock their phones in a pouch to experience it.

Going analog has been a trend for a while now, with people going so far as to purchase dumb phones and delete social media apps.

Brands have been leveraging this shift to show they're culturally relevant and in tune with what their users actually need.

But when a retail or lifestyle brand taps into the analog trend, it fits so naturally that it barely registers as a statement.

When a tech platform does it, the contradiction becomes the campaign, and that tension is what makes it land twice as hard.

Pinterest wants users to see it as a place to visit, take what they need, and then leave to go do the thing.

It's a similar philosophy to Claude's approach to AI.

Claude pushes users to keep thinking and use the technology as a lever for their own ideas rather than a replacement for them.

The goal shifts from dependency to momentum.

Tech companies tapping into the analog trend use it to reinforce why their product exists in the first place.

And Pinterest is reminding users that the app was always meant to be a means to an end, not the end itself.

What are your thoughts on Pinterest's latest campaign?

Leave a comment

🖌️ Using Claude For Design (The Right Way)

The methodology for using Claude as a tool, not a replacement

Since its 2023 release, Claude has built a reputation among LLMs for reasoning through complex problems, processing large volumes of context, and generating structured outputs. Developers leaned in early and with the release of Claude Design, designers are starting to catch up.

What gets overlooked is Claude’s capacity to accelerate design workflows, particularly in branded data visualizations and repetitive production tasks. The challenge now is knowing how to use it correctly. The strongest designers will treat it as a lever for their own ideas, not a replacement for them.

Training Claude on your data visualization references, such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and other assets, can speed up workflows immensely for both the design and marketing teams when creating assets like pitch decks and blog imagery. We recommend using a three-part process to leverage Claude.

Create with Claude using our 3-step plan

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: Do you think Claude will replace graphic designers?

A: Claude Design, just like any other design program, is a tool for us to convey our ideas. As designers, our goal is to convey ideas and brand messages visually through static and motion assets, and AI platforms like Claude Design are another design tool we can leverage. AI will always be improving, and as designers, it’s our job to keep up to date with these new and evolving platforms to speed up and adapt our workflows. So I don't believe designers are going anywhere in the near future, but I do think how we design and our workflows will continue to change, especially with the influx of new AI tools.

Q: What should designers do to protect their creative voice as more AI tools drop? (best practices/advice)

A: It’s always important to remember that the message and intent behind your design will always be one of the most important things about your design. While AI tools may improve at creating assets that are visually pleasing to look at, it’s important for designers to maintain good QA standards about whether the design presented by AI follows the brand and whether it’s conveying the primary message of the design. For designers, always remember that your voice is important, you're shaping the brand's visual identity, and your intention behind the design is always primary to the assets.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Stop Thinking In Archetypes, Start Thinking In Generes by

• Behind-The-Scenes Is The Real MVP For Brands by

• Stop Calling It Community. You're Running a Group Chat With Merch by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Breaking down the rise of anti-AI marketing

• Dr. Seuss refreshes their content strategy

• What happened to Abercrombie & Fitch?

• Will Apple’s smart glasses fail?

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• Breaking down YouTube’s Coachella strategy: This year, YouTube makes Coachella even more accessible, turning it into a multi-screen experience. From toggleable screens to shoppable merch, YouTube is betting on becoming the platform audiences go to during the biggest cultural moments.

• EGC content dominates Coachella: While influencers posted GRWM videos, marketing teams were busy posting their own content. The teams behind your favorite brand activations pulled the curtain back on what it really takes to prepare for Coachella, turning BTS content into an EGC moment.

• The importance of cultural currency: Cultural currency is the permission your audience gives you to exist in their world. For brands, it comes down to whether you can prove fluency in the codes, references, and values of the communities you want to reach. Your job isn’t to manufacture cultural moments, but to recognize which ones you can step into without disrupting the very thing that made them matter.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

🎡 Breaking Down YouTube’s Coachella Strategy

YouTube places bets on one of the biggest events of the year

Is Coachella the next Super Bowl?

This year, YouTube is streaming Coachella in 4K as a full multi-screen experience.

All seven stages will be streamed simultaneously, with four stages viewable at once, paired with toggleable audio feeds.

There’s even a shoppable store built directly into the stream, via QR codes, so viewers can shop limited-edition festival merch.

This is more than just your typical livestream.

YouTube is building a platform strategy designed for long-term engagement and monetization beyond content creation.

By integrating on-demand content, interactive features, and commerce, they’re creating a continuous cycle of content consumption during moments like Coachella.

YouTube is already the most-watched streaming platform on television, surpassing Netflix and Hulu.

It dominates the living room for content and now they’re coming for the bigger picture.

Coachella has cultural weight like the Super Bowl, but YouTube is removing its high barrier to entry.

With a 24/7 Coachella TV channel and shoppable merch baked into the stream, YouTube is engineering the ritual around the event, not just airing it.

And now, they’re betting on becoming the default platform for national moments that don’t belong to any one network.

What are your thoughts on YouTube’s Coachella strategy?

Leave a comment

📸 EGC Content Dominates Coachella

Why marketing teams should post more BTS content at Coachella

Coachella? ❌ Corpchella? ✅

This year, the most interesting Coachella content came from the marketing teams behind the brand activations.

Except this kind of content came from their personal accounts, not brand ones.

Every Coachella weekend, the comments say the same thing: “The marketing team deserves a raise.”

And that’s exactly why EGC works best when it comes from moments like these.

Audiences watching Coachella from their couch aren’t just experiencing FOMO anymore.

They want to understand the logistics behind the aesthetic and how these moments are brought to life.

Take Emma Jean, who works on the marketing team at Kopari Beauty.

She posted full day-in-the-life videos leading up to Coachella weekend, breaking down the prep and the work that goes into coordinating directly with influencers.

Beyond typical GRWM content, this pulls back the curtain for fans who want to see what goes on behind the scenes.

For the side of TikTok that lives for Coachella marketing breakdowns, Corpchella is the antidote.

EGC content reaches a completely different viewer; one who wants to understand the work behind the aesthetic, not just consume it.

And unlike influencer content, EGC builds brand trust, which impressions alone can never guarantee.

Your marketing team has a story worth telling.

Give them a platform to tell it, because the content cutting through can sometimes come from the person who built the room they’re standing in.

Should more marketing teams post BTS content at Coachella?

Leave a comment

📈 The Importance Of Cultural Currency

Learn how to earn cultural currency on socials

Building cultural currency on organic social requires knowing which moments are yours to participate in, and which ones you should let pass. Not every trending sound, meme, or cultural reference is worth jumping on, lest you want to risk eroding cultural trust just for the sake of timeliness.

The appropriation of attention is so relentless that consumers have developed sophisticated filters for what feels authentic versus what feels extractive. Strategic selectivity matters more than speed, and restraint often signals a higher degree of cultural intelligence.

To help understand when it makes sense for your brand to participate in culture, we can take a look at the trend lifecycle and how culture moves through different subgroups. Trends generally move through predictable phases of rise and decline:

• They start in subcultures or niche communities where early adopters create something genuinely novel.

• The trend gains momentum as more people discover it and recognize its cultural value.

• Then brands notice. The first brand to participate often gets celebrated for being culturally aware and timely. The second brand might still land well.

• By the fifth or tenth brand jumping in, the trend has lost whatever made it culturally interesting in the first place.

This is why being late to a trend is usually worse than not participating at all. When you show up after the cultural moment has peaked, you’re basically outing yourself as participating based on a delayed reaction rather than genuine cultural fluency. It comes off as scrambling to stay visible rather than having something meaningful to contribute.

Read more about cultural currency

🔍 Want To Build Your AI Search Strategy?

NoGood’s CEO, Mostafa ElBermawy, is running a 2-day live AEO Masterclass to give you the playbook to change that.

📅 April 29–30

Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

→ A clear framework for assessing how AI search is impacting your brand visibility today

→ Proprietary assessment sheets to measure impact across your digital assets

→ A proven strategy that works across the leading LLMs right now

→ Real brand examples, hands-on exercises, and live Q&A with Mostafa

→ Detailed AEO guides for self-study and ongoing execution

This is for marketers, founders, and growth strategists who want a first-mover advantage before the rest of the field catches up.

Sign up here

Can’t attend? Watch our SXSW panel conversation on The Measurement Gap!

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: How has the creator economy changed what brands need to deliver at Coachella?

A: The creator economy has completely raised the bar for what brands have to show up with today. Creators aren’t just attending the festival anymore,  they are producing, and their audiences expect something unique that is worth watching. That pressure has made everything more experiential and more gamified. It’s no longer enough to set up an ordinary pop-up in the desert, I saw first hand how brands are bringing Coachella-exclusive drops, wild collabs, and over-the-top activations that would stop you mid-scroll and in person. The brands that stood out, like Rhode’s invite-only desert event or SKYLRK’s 9,000-square-foot oasis on the festival grounds weren’t just marketing - they were the content. The competition is to be so unmissable that it doesn’t matter if someone was in the desert or just watching from their couch, they still felt like they missed out.

Q: Do you think Coachella has earned the cultural weight of the Super Bowl, or is that comparison still a stretch?

A: Honestly, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all, I think it’s the new normal. The Super Bowl sells you a 30-second spot on TV while Coachella sells you an entire cultural moment that plays out across two weekends, across every platform, and in real time.  And what sets it apart isn’t the reach, it’s the want. Watching Rhode’s desert activation or walking past the 818 Outpost, you don’t just see a brand, you feel like you need to be part of it. That’s something a TV ad simply can’t manufacture.  From 818 to Rhode to Barbie’s first-ever festival activation, these brands aren’t buying ad space, they’re building desire.  When a tequila brand and a skincare line can share the same cultural moment and both feel completely at home, that tells you everything about where culture is right now.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• The case for why corporate content doesn’t have to be boring by

• Why personal brands are NOT the future of branding by

• How to build a brand Gen Z obsesses over by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• LEGO’s World Cup commercial receives backlash for using AI

• Breaking down the Starbucks Coachella house controversy

• Hailey Bieber starts a new Rhode trend

• The Harry Potter remake changes everything

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• Aerie doubles down on its anti-AI stance: Aerie goes anti-AI in its latest campaign with Pamela Anderson, but this isn’t the first time. Back in October, Aerie made a pledge to be “100% real” and not to retouch their models using AI. This time around, they’re taking that pledge to the next level, turning a stance into a standard.

• The extractability principle: There’s a reason why some content gets cited by AI and some content doesn’t. The truth is, AI models don’t read content the same way we do. As more people turn to AI to search for and discover new products, creating content for both humans and AI models becomes a non-negotiable.

• The truth behind OpenAI ads: ChatGPT ads are now live, but there’s an underlying threat brands haven’t caught up to yet. Competitors can buy the ad slot underneath organic mentions of your brand. Brands that haven’t already established their organic presence on LLMs will fall behind at an accelerated pace.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

📸 Aerie Doubles Down On Its Anti-AI Atance

Aerie taps Pamela Anderson for their “100% Real” campaign

Aerie was anti-AI before anti-AI was a marketing strategy.

Last week, Aerie dropped a campaign starring Pamela Anderson as the second installment of their "100% Aerie Real" pledge.

The ad opens with Anderson prompting a fake AI system to build models, a direct dig at brands that actually generate AI models for campaigns like H&M’s digital twins.

The models then transform into real versions of themselves, Anderson steps onto a real set with them, and she closes the ad with one line: "You can't prompt this."

Pamela Anderson was one of the most heavily scrutinized figures of the '90s.

Her move to go makeup-free and step away from manufactured beauty standards made her a natural fit here, but it's Aerie's broader stance that stands out.

Aerie didn't just commit to keeping AI out of their own content.

They're requiring every creator they work with to make the same promise.

As platforms push generative content deeper into every feed, Aerie draws the line with its creator partners.

They have openly admitted to using AI for backend business operations.

But when it comes to how people are represented, Aerie keeps it real.

Luxury brands like Hermès have been positioning human craft as the ultimate premium.

Aerie is just the first major consumer brand to take that same idea and make it mainstream.

While most anti-AI campaigns stop at the ad, Aerie is making it a standard.

What are your thoughts on Aerie's Anti-AI campaign?

Leave a comment

🔍 The Extractability Principle

Learn how AI models cite content

Extractability can be seen as a spectrum with seven contributing factors, each of which we’ve identified through analyzing citation patterns across millions of data points in our Goodie AI research.

1. Text density: Text density is the volume of extractable text per content unit. More text means more material for models to match against queries, and more potential chunks to retrieve.

2. URL stability: Ensure that your content resolves to a persistent, accessible address. Stable URLs allow content to be discovered and indexed in the first place and enable models to cite it with a reference that users can actually visit.

3. Structural clarity: How well your content is organized into discrete, parseable units that create meaningful chunk boundaries. A well-structured article with headers, distinct paragraphs, and a logical flow helps retrieval systems segment content into units that can be evaluated independently.

4. Entity precision: Entity precision requires using clear, consistent, unambiguous names for the things you’re discussing. When you refer to your product by five different names, you fragment the entity signal.

5. Semantic clarity: Semantic clarity is how unambiguous your statements are when standing alone.

6. Information architecture: This requires being intentional about where the most important information lives within your content.

7. Metadata richness: The extractable information outside your main content body, such as titles, descriptions, tags, alt-text, captions, chapter markers, and schema markup.

Learn how to do an extractability audit

🤖 The Truth Behind OpenAI Ads

More on OpenAI’s effect on organic strategy

It’s important to understand the difference between ChatGPT and Google Ads (spoiler: you can’t buy your way to the top anymore).

While Google Ads follows your traditional “pay to play, but the more you pay, the better you play” system, OpenAI ads appear below the conversational answer, meaning that if your brand isn’t already organically part of the answer served, your ad has no relevant context to attach to.

This creates a higher bar for content quality across the board. Because a competitor’s ad can appear immediately after the AI mentions your brand (or worse, immediately after a “cons” section about your product), then your organic presence needs to be strong enough to shape the narrative before the ad slot even enters the picture.

As AI becomes the first stop for high-intent questions, the brands that excel organically won’t be the ones who optimized for pure search rankings, but those whose content is structured to think like an advisor.

That means two things practically:

• First, your technical foundation matters more than ever. ChatGPT favors sources with high topical authority, recent citations, and clean structured data. This includes schema markup that makes it easy for AI to parse and cite. If the model can’t cleanly extract your expertise, it will look elsewhere.

• Second, the type of content you create needs to change. Answering complex questions thoroughly, credibly, and in a format that AI can summarize will get you cited. And that’s the new metric that matters.

Understand that intent is king for AEO, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Learn about the effects of OpenAI ads

🔍 Want To Build Your AI Search Strategy?

Join our CEO, Mostafa ElBermawy, on April 16th at 12 PM EST for a FREE lightning course that shows you how to build your AI search strategy from the ground up.

What to expect:

• Learn how AI search is impacting organic growth

• Learn how social is reshaping AI search presence

• Build an AI search strategy & future-proofing content

• Measure & track AI search performance

If you want to increase your brand visibility outside of Google’s 10 blue links, this one’s for you. (Stay tuned for a full 2-day course in the near future)

Sign up for our free course

🏆 Some Exciting NoGood News…

We are finalists at the Shorty Awards!

From scaling mental health support to 100K+ users with Mirror: Journaling & Insights, to making SteelSeries the #1 AI-recommended gaming brand — this is the work we show up to do.

🎖️ Finalist: Social Good Campaign

46,000 Crisis Interventions in 8 Months: Scaling Mental Health Support When America Needs It Most 🗳️ Vote here

🎖️ Finalist: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

GEO from Zero: How SteelSeries Became the #1 Retrieved Gaming Brand in AI Search🗳️ Vote here

Voting is open through April 8th, and we’d love your support! Huge thank you and congrats to the amazing teams behind the work.

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: Is “being cited by AI” more credible than “being cited by Google,” or are both equal?

A: In terms of dollar bills, Google still has the clear-cut advantage here. But in terms of conversion rate, LLMs can actually drive up to 9x higher rates than traditional search. But for credibility specifically - AI has a much more rigorous process in order to cite something than Google does for its rankings. AI accounts for reviews, public sentiment, impact, and other things while Google (historically) has relied on keywords to inform what surfaces in its ranking.

Q: Now that brands can buy ad slots in ChatGPT, does that make its responses more or less reliable?

A: I would say much less, haha. However, due to the fact that ads have been rolled out in such a small capacity and such a precisely targeted manner, the impact on overall credibility is somewhat small, at the moment. However, ads threaten to destroy all credibility for LLMs - so they should be very thoughtful and careful about when and where they are served.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Social Teams Need To Think More Editorial by

• How To Build Your Marketing Strategy in Claude by

• The Science of How AI Picks Its Sources by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Sprite refreshes its brand logo

• The Devil Wears Prada 2 movie popcorn bucket analysis

• Alix Earle enters her founder era with Reale Actives

• Everyone hated AI… until Ted did it

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

Let's talk

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• The rise of anti-AI stunts: Because of AI, the internet can no longer fully trust what it sees, hears, or reads online. As more companies roll out new generative AI models, the average user struggles to keep pace. Now, brands are working twice as hard to make sure their work is protected. Human craftsmanship just became the new premium.

• A guide to search engines in 2026: Are search engines still a thing in 2026? Yes, but it’s not just Google you should be paying attention to. We break down how Google Search works today and what brands need to do to stay visible.

• The impact of analog marketing: Doomscrolling is out, intentionality is in. The internet is obsessed with going analog and being more intentional with how we spend our time. Brands are picking up on this behavioral shift and have found their own ways to participate.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

🤖 The Rise of Anti-AI Stunts

Why human craftsmanship is the new premium

Anti-AI marketing is a strategic positioning approach where brands publicly distance themselves from generative AI, emphasizing human creativity, craftsmanship, and authenticity in their work.

5 examples of anti-AI marketing

1. BTS (behind-the-scenes content): One of the most effective anti-AI tactics is to pull back the curtain and show audiences exactly how the magic happens. Behind-the-scenes content has transformed from a nice-to-have bonus into a necessity, serving as proof of human craftsmanship and creative labor.

2. Tagging & crediting: Whether it be in the form of captions, LinkedIn shoutouts, end-of-video credits, artist tags, or anything in between, these credits aren’t nice-to-have extras anymore. In creative work like animation, illustration, or design, audiences now actively demand that credit be given where credit is due.

3. Adding AI disclaimers: The most powerful statements can also be the simplest ones. Brands are dropping cut-to-the-chase disclaimers about not using AI. A simple statement like this immediately confirms that what people consumed was real, not a facade.

4. Taking the direct approach: While some brands are avoiding the AI conversation entirely, others are calling it out loud and proud, using it as the perfect contrast to make their own point even stronger.

5. Using visual storytelling: The best kind of anti-AI approach brands can take is the one where their work speaks for itself. Visual storytelling evokes emotions and feelings that AI just can’t replicate because of their nuance, from camera quality to color grading.

In an environment where nothing feels real anymore, these declarations serve as a seal of authenticity, guaranteeing that a real person did the work. They’ve become the only reliable way for consumers to distinguish between handcrafted content and machine-generated content.

More on the future of anti-AI marketing

🔍 A Guide to Search Engines in 2026

How to adapt your content for search engines beyond Google

As Google continues to evolve, the metrics brands relied on even a year ago are starting to lose signal. Fewer clicks, more zero-click answers, and AI-mediated discovery mean success now shows up after the SERP (not just on it).

If you want a clearer picture of impact in 2026, these are the metrics that actually matter:

1. Conversation rate (CVR): With AI Overviews answering simpler queries upfront, the traffic that does reach your site is often more qualified. These users arrive with complex, comparative, or commercial intent that the AI can’t fully satisfy, making CVR more important than ever.

2. Time on page (engagement): Engagement still matters, but not as a vanity metric. Longer, meaningful time on page tells RankBrain and related systems that your content successfully handled a complex need that an AI Overview alone couldn’t resolve.

3. Brand mentions (linked and unlinked): Brand mentions are becoming a proxy for authority. Even unlinked mentions contribute to how AI systems understand brand credibility and entity trustworthiness (a core component of H-E-E-A-T).

With AI-powered features and generative experiences baked directly into the SERP, Google’s job is no longer just to rank pages, but to deliver the best possible answer as efficiently as it can, even if that answer never requires a click.

Read our full search engine guide here

📸 The Impact of Analog Marketing

How brands are reshaping their social strategy for the analog movement

In short, analog marketing comprises all the “traditional” physical marketing assets that were swept up into the digitized world years ago, such as print media, OOH, direct mail, experiential, and broadcast (that’s TV and radio for my Gen Zs out there).

But why is the analog revival happening now?

Our offline interests and hobbies have become fodder for our online presence. It’s not that we think the digital world is real; rather, we’re starting to see the real world as a place that exists in order to fuel our digital identities.

On socials, this manifests itself in one main way: people are starting to view social media as their personal libraries, one that can elevate their cultural fluency in real conversations.

Analog is happening now because we’re seeing the effects of doom scrolling on our mental and physical health, and we’re sick of it. The attention-deficit and loneliness epidemics are just the tip of the iceberg, and analog is our lifeboat.

According to CNN, searches for “analog hobbies” jumped 136% in the last six months, and craft kit sales are set to grow 86%.

Where analog marketing may have started as a trend of making “old” things cool again, it goes a step further, going beyond nostalgia. It’s no longer a trend because it’s not rooted in any single activity. Instead, it’s the general practice of being more intentional with how we spend our time.

Many label Gen Z as phone-obsessed social media addicts, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. What we really crave is an existence that has nothing to do with our phones.

More on brands doing analog marketing

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: If every brand starts doing experiential and editorial, does the value of analog marketing collapse under its own weight, or does the bar just keep rising?

A: Both. The value of real-life experiences doesn’t deflate just because more brands are buying into it. That said, when every brand does a pop-up or leans into editorial marketing, viewers quickly glaze over the mediocre. What survives is the stuff that’s genuinely rooted in a brand’s identity and isn’t dependent on the format alone. For example, the Adidas ravioli works because it’s Adidas + marathon culture + food obsession, three things that actually belong together. Whereas a tech brand doing a pop-up just because pop-ups are trending is exactly the “vulture” behavior consumers are quick to call out. Ultimately, the bar rises, and that’s actually good for brands with real cultural credibility and tough luck for the ones just chasing the trend.

Q: Are we moving toward a world where a smaller, more engaged audience is culturally more valuable than a massive one?

A: 100%, and it’s clear in the way we’re reporting on performance. Instead of followers and likes, we’re focusing on shares, saves, and completion rate as health metrics. A brand with 50K followers who save everything and share it with their close friends is seeding culture in a way that 5M passive scrollers never could. The analog revival is partly about this: people curating more intentional feeds means the audiences who do follow you actually chose you. Instead of collecting followers, we’re earning organic advocates, which is a fundamentally different relationship. The more interesting follow-up question is whether this shift changes how brands should think about partnerships (both influencer and brand). The question of micro vs. macro returns!

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Should your brand start a “side quest” account? by

• Opting out by

• It’s time to brand by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Reformation roasts Timothée Chalamet through email

• How Alysa Liu became the internet’s latest obsession

• From dance campaign to music video: Gap x Young Miko

• Apple is the new budget king

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Young Miko didn’t star in a Gap campaign. Gap starred in a Young Miko music video.

Gap just dropped their Spring 2026 campaign, “Sweats Like This” with Young Miko. But this isn’t just another one of their signature dance-forward campaigns.

Gap has been blending fashion, music, and dance for years, previously highlighting artists like Troye Sivan, Tyla, and KATSEYE.

Most campaigns to date have been around 90 seconds, built around a song that wasn’t originally by the artist featured.

Young Miko changed that format.

“Sweats Like This” runs for 3 full minutes and uses Miko’s own GRAMMY-nominated hit, “WASSUP.” Instead of inserting an artist into their brand world, Gap built the world with her, turning a one-time campaign into a full creative partnership.

This is also Gap’s first-ever Spanish campaign, a milestone that reflects a broader cultural shift in who shapes global fashion conversations, as we saw at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny.

This signals Gap’s intention to play a bigger role in music, dance, and entertainment moving forward. Recently, Gap hired its first-ever Chief Entertainment Officer, who is responsible for shaping Gap’s entertainment world through music and cultural collaborations.

As the worlds of fashion and music continue to merge, Gap is leading the charge of bringing “fashiontainment” to life. And their campaign with Young Miko is the clearest proof yet of where this is going.

Where do you see the future of “fashiontainment” going?

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Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• The Staples Baddie saves Staples: One post from a Staples employee and suddenly, people are adding Staples to their Target runs. Creator @Oblivion's passion for creating content about Staples is a perfect example of EGC. However, we keep seeing one common comment: add her to the social team at Staples. But is that the right move?

• AI marketing trends in 2026: As AI startups are pressured to keep up with the pace of innovation and follow behind leading companies like Claude and ChatGPT, we developed a list of AI trends for 2026 that we’re keeping our eyes on to help you stay ahead of the race.

• How to build a UGC strategy: Despite all the praise the Staples Baddie receives from marketers for her EGC (ourselves included), it’s important to recognize the importance of UGC as well. Both strategies play a role for brands, but in their own respective ways. And we’re providing you with the tools on how to build one.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

🔴 The Staples Baddie saves Staples

Why this EGC strategy works for Staples

Staples is currently trending thanks to @Oblivion, the self-proclaimed “Staples Queen” who’s going viral for simply working at Staples.

But instead of posting typical “day in my life” style videos, her TikToks pull back the curtain on what services Staples offers.

Staples built its reputation on being the go-to place for office supplies like printer paper, fax machines, and toner cartridges.

Then the “Staples Queen” came in and revived a brand people had almost forgotten. Her content wasn’t scripted or brand-approved in any way, and that’s what made her content unique.

EGC creators have something UGC creators don’t: insider knowledge. A UGC creator can rave about a brand’s product, but an EGC creator knows every corner of a brand, and that’s a POV that can’t be faked.

Now, the internet wants Staples to officially hire the Staples Queen. But is that the right move?

Staples has since sent her a personalized “Staples Queen” PR package and regularly engages with her content. And while the internet is rooting for a full collaboration, how Staples responds could either amplify or dismantle what she built.

@Oblivion’s case is unique because her passion for Staples drove her to post about their services, inspiring others to explore them. The moment she loses that creative autonomy, it no longer feels like genuine employee advocacy.

Audiences will feel that shift, the same way they watch micro-influencers get big and slowly stop caring. The smartest move Staples can make is to lean into what’s already working: her EGC content.

Whether that looks like a collaboration, commission, or even tapping her as an in-house creator, the creative freedom that got her here has to stay intact.

How do you think Staples should respond to the Staples Queen?

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🤖 AI marketing trends in 2026

A list of AI trends we’re keeping an eye on

1. Paid advertising hits LLMs: OpenAI announced plans to test ads in the U.S. for users on its Free and ChatGPT Go tiers. After that. Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads poking fun at the idea of advertising inside AI assistants.

2. AI agents become commonplace: They are already reshaping how commerce, marketing, and everyday tasks work. The clearest proof of how quickly this is happening is OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that launched on GitHub and can autonomously schedule calendar events, read and send emails, all through the messaging apps people already use.

3. AEO is far from old news: AEO has been around for a few years now, but it’s only going to get more difficult to gain visibility in 2026, because now that people are finally catching on to the fact that it’s a non-negotiable, everyone will be doing it. This requires that both newbies and AEO veterans continue to innovate and find new optimization approaches.

4. Hyper-personalization meets a privacy reckoning: With AI, personalization has evolved into hyper-personalization: real-time, behavior- and intent-driven experiences tailored to individual users across every touchpoint. However, there are new rules around how you deliver that personalization because the regulatory landscape has reached an inflection point.

5. Flight to authenticity: One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is underestimating their audience, thinking, “surely this reader won’t be able to tell this article was written by ChatGPT.” Brands should de-slop their marketing in 2026, or face the wrath of search engines, social platforms, and users alike.

Access the full list here

📸 How to build a UGC strategy

A complete guide to UGC for 2026

1. Set your objectives: When you’re first building a UGC program, it’s best to start small and scale up when you feel confident in your approach. The first step is to set clear objectives on a few platforms. Think about where your audience naturally gathers, and go with your gut!

2. Identify your sources: Select the right creator partners. Important factors to keep in mind include the creator’s natural style, tone of voice, and content type. Remember, we choose UGC to authentically connect with new and core audiences; this can only be done by trusting our creators to take the reins and lead concept development.

3. Curate & leverage content: As you begin briefing creators, ensure you are clear about your expectations, vision, deliverables, and timeline. It’s in your best interest to be very clear on where this content will live on your channels.

4. Stay engaged: Actively monitor your channels and comment sections to observe how your community responds to creators. Pay attention to platform-specific trends, how your content is received, and the cultural context to formulate a comprehensive understanding of your strategy.

5. Evaluate & improve: To accurately track your UGC marketing strategy's performance, measure key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your goals. Once you’ve outlined overall performance and identified which UGC was at the top and bottom, you can begin to strategize ways to improve content for the next round.

Read our full UGC strategy guide here

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: How can brands motivate employees to create content without compromising on the authenticity that makes EGC work?

A: The brands that have a strong EGC performance or even strategy aren’t running internal content mandates. They build an environment first where employees actually want to publicly celebrate working there, hype up the organization, and develop their expertise. That looks like recognizing creators publicly, giving them creative latitude over format and tone, and treating their personal brand growth as a company asset rather than a liability. The moment EGC becomes a content quota, it reads like branded content wearing a costume, so avoid this at all costs. Even a “suggested” brief carries weight. The moment an employee has a framework in hand, they’re working from someone else’s idea, and audiences can feel it. The conceptual territory must start and end with the employee. The brand’s job is to create the conditions, not the content. For first-time creators especially, the format that seems to be breaking through is quite simple: short, personality-forward video.

Retail and lifestyle brand employees are making quick clips about rare customer perks or comedically fielding FAQs about products. Think the Staples employee turning routine customer service moments into genuinely funny content. On the other end of the spectrum, employees at major tech companies like Google and Amazon are filming long-hour days or unexpectedly cool day-in-the-life vlogs that pull back the curtain on what different career paths actually look like in practice. Not the polished version from a recruiting page, but the real one. Both work for the same reason: the employee owns the angle entirely. The brand just happens to be the backdrop.

Q: Does EGC create the kind of relationship between brand and audience that UGC does?

A: UGC and EGC both borrow credibility from real people rather than the brand itself, but they build different kinds of trust. UGC is peer validation: a customer saying, “I chose this, and here’s why.” EGC is insider access: an employee saying, “I live this, and here’s what it’s really like.” One signals social proof, the other signals transparency. The audience relationship is different because the implied contract is different... a customer’s endorsement is optional, which makes it feel earned. An employee’s voice carries that same authenticity only when it doesn’t feel scripted. Where UGC has a natural edge is community.

When customers create around a brand, they generate a feedback loop that compounds, think Strava or Glossier, where the audience essentially becomes the content ecosystem. EGC doesn’t replicate that network effect in the same way, but it builds something UGC can’t: organizational credibility. The trust that comes from inside an institution hits differently than the trust that comes from a customer review. Which is exactly why the strongest content strategies don’t choose between them. EGC, UGC, and branded content aren’t competing priorities; they should be viewed as complementary signals that reinforce each other. One without the other leaves gaps in the story a brand is trying to tell.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• Post Luxury Status Symbol #4: Hyper-Niche Expertise by

• Treat LinkedIn like an ecosystem by

• Has hype surpassed art? by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Dove uses Reddit in an OOH ad

• Fan editor gets hired by HBO

• Punch the Monkey goes viral alongside IKEA

• What happened to Y2K design?

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She posted a “Previously On” montage that hit 3.5 million views and landed her a DM from HBO on New Year’s Eve. Now, she’s an Associate Producer making trailers and promo content for the network.

Does this mean any fan editor has a chance of getting hired for a full-time role?

The line between fan-made content and commercial content has already blurred. As entertainment becomes more social and social becomes more cinematic, the gap between what a fan makes in their dad’s basement and what a studio puts out is getting harder to spot.

Commercial content undergoes rounds of approval and is subject to brand guidelines. By the time it hits your feed, a lot of the raw emotion has been polished out.

Fan editors don’t have any of those guardrails. They work off taste and a deep understanding of what the community actually responds to, rather than marketing to a general audience.

Fan editors also live at the intersection of two worlds most marketing teams struggle to bridge: high-production storytelling and the fast, instinctive pace of social media. Melanie knew which moments the fandom cared about, and exactly how to make someone stop scrolling.

That’s not a skill you can fake. It builds over years of participating in fandom culture and knowing how it works. Fandom has always been a cultural force, and now media companies are starting to treat it like a talent pipeline.

What are your thoughts on HBO’s decision to hire a TikToker?

Leave a comment

Welcome to NoGood News, 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. Plus, exclusive interviews with some of the best in the game.

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

• The cost of virality: Everyone wants to go viral, but only a few brands ask what happens after. The truth is, the attention you earn isn’t yours; it belongs to the platforms that serve their own engagement metrics.

• Build your Reddit marketing strategy: Reddit is the ultimate home base for community-driven, conversational, and almost raw user-generated content. It’s the go-to platform for users seeking answers to any niche question or decision, and now, brands are tapping in. So much so that they may have just found a new home for social content.

• Understanding query fan-out: Query fan-out is the reason some brands rank in AI search results while others go invisible. And your brand’s visibility depends on whether your content surfaces for any of those queries, most of which you’ve never seen and can’t predict.

Ready? Let's get into it. 

📈 The cost of virality

The truth behind what it means to "go viral"

TikTok’s For You Page rewrote the rules of virality entirely. The FYP doesn’t care about your follower count, nor does it prioritize content from accounts you follow. Instead, it serves an endless stream of content selected by algorithm.

Pre-FYP virality was something that happened to content as it moved through social networks.

Post-FYP virality is something the algorithm decides to make happen.

The platform chooses what goes viral based on engagement signals, watch time, and retention metrics that creators and brands can influence, but never fully control. The For You Page model has since been adopted by Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and virtually every social platform trying to compete for attention.

This is the environment brands operate in now. Viral marketing used to require building an audience first, then creating something that audience would amplify. Today’s viral marketing requires creating content that an algorithm deems worthy of amplification to people who’ve never heard of you. The mechanics of spread have been automated, industrialized, and the power has almost entirely shifted from human networks to algorithms.

The false promise of viral attention assumes that you own the viral attention that you garner. The truth is, you’re renting attention from algorithms that owe you nothing and can revoke access without explanation.

Learn more about rented attention

📱 Build your Reddit marketing strategy

Why Reddit matters more than you think it does

With the introduction of AI mode and Google AI Overviews, users increasingly access out-of-the-box answers to their questions, rather than going through the traditional search-and-click-the-blue-links motions we’ve been so used to since the dot-com boom.

To Google’s credit, the tech giant clearly saw this shift coming, seeing as they signed a $60 million deal with Reddit in 2024, allowing the search engine to use Reddit as a training source for its LLMs. OpenAI followed with a similar partnership shortly after, and for an obvious reason: Reddit’s conversational format and authentic user discussions were exactly what AI models needed to sound less robotic and more human.

As of today, Reddit (along with other social sources like YouTube and LinkedIn) is consistently one of the most-cited domains across LLMs, based on an analysis of 5M+ citations across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Which means the question we as marketers should be asking at this point is no longer “should we optimize for AI search?” It’s “what information are AI models actually parsing through when they research entities?”

News flash: they’re not just scanning your carefully crafted website copy or your owned thought leadership content. They’re also indexing whatever people happened to say about you on Reddit two years ago. And that becomes part of your brand reputation, whether you participated in shaping it or not.

Learn more about Reddit marketing

🔍 Understanding query fan-out

Everything you need to know about who shows up in AI answers and who doesn’t

Query fan-out is an information retrieval technique in which AI search systems expand a single user query into multiple subqueries, executing them in parallel to gather comprehensive information before generating a response.

Think of it this way: traditional search takes a single question and returns a ranked list of pages. Query fan-out takes one question, breaks it into 5-20 related questions, searches for all of them simultaneously, and weaves the best answers together.

How to optimize content for query fan-out

1. Create modular, self-contained sections: Each section should independently answer a specific question. Use clear H2s and H3s that match natural language queries.

2. Use structured formats: AI systems preferentially select certain content types such as tables, bulleted lists, FAQ sections, how-to schemas, and comparison schemas.

3. Address entity-attribute coverage: Fan-out analysis reveals which entities (products, companies, concepts) and attributes (features, specs, prices) matter for your topic. Gaps represent optimization opportunities, so fill them systematically to ensure comprehensive coverage.

4. Maintain freshness: AI systems heavily weight recency for time-sensitive topics. We’ve found that content updated within the last 90 days gets cited 2.3x more often than content older than 12 months for dynamic categories.

Read our complete guide to query fan-out

🎙️ Q&A with an expert

A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game

Q: What’s the biggest mistake a brand can make when they first approach Reddit marketing?

A: Treating it like every other social channel. Most brands show up on Reddit with the same playbook they use everywhere else (think: polished marketing copy, promotional posts, link sharing) and then wonder why they get downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Reddit’s entire culture is built on rejecting this exact approach. The biggest mistake is thinking you can optimize your way around the authenticity prerequisite.

You can’t automate helpfulness, or A/B test your way into trust. The brands that succeed on Reddit are the ones willing to show up as actual humans with actual expertise, answering real questions without immediately steering every conversation back to their product.

Q: Do you think brand participation on Reddit destroys the authenticity that made it valuable?

A: Not if the brand actually has something useful to contribute. The problem is, most brands tend to show up hollow and treat Reddit like a distribution channel instead of a conversation. But when you look at the brands doing it right, they’re adding to the authenticity culture, rather than taking away from it.

Contrary to popular belief, Reddit doesn’t hate brands, but it does hate smoke and mirrors. The authenticity only gets destroyed when brands fake participation by using agencies to astroturf, deploying canned responses, or trying to game the system. If you’re genuinely helpful and transparent about who you are, Reddit makes room for that. If you’re not, the community will tell you to leave.

That’s the filter working exactly as it should.

✍️ We wish we wrote this

Articles that caught our eye these past 2 weeks:

• The Creator Economy Shift by

• Why Are We So Good At Making Ourselves Mad by

• How to Do B2B Influencer Marketing by

👀 Keeping up on the socials

Because IYKYK is better than FOMO:

• Dove r/eal Reviews Campaign

• Apple Music’s Super Bowl Halftime Strategy

• The Most Controversial Super Bowl Ads

• Rating Super Bowl Ads

🚀 Ready to meet your NoGood partner?

Tell us where you are and where you want to be — and we’ll help get you there.

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One was responsible for the most-watched half-time show, the other wasn’t.

Apple Music has been sponsoring the Super Bowl halftime show since 2023 after Pepsi ended a 10-year sponsorship deal.

But Apple Music has something Pepsi never had: real-time cultural intelligence.

They can see what 120M+ people are streaming in real time, which artists are trending, and which moments are going viral across different audiences.

Pepsi picked performers based on popularity and safe bets, whereas Apple Music picks based on data + cultural momentum.

This resulted in 4 of the top 5 most-watched Super Bowl halftime shows in history being Apple Music’s picks:

• Bad Bunny: 135 million views

• Kendrick Lamar: 133.5 million views

• Michael Jackson: 133.4 million views (by Pepsi)

• Usher: 123.4 million views

• Rihanna: 121 million views

But Apple didn’t stop at the 15-minute performance – they turned the halftime show into an entire content ecosystem.

Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Apple Music users were able to listen to a variety of playlists from “Bad Bunny Essentials” to songs handpicked by the artist himself.

Apple Music Radio played songs inspired by Bad Bunny’s background days before the Super Bowl and hosted a “Halftime Show Press Conference” to interview Bad Bunny.

In person, fans can visit select Apple stores to hear the artist’s discography in Apple Spatial Audio, turning his music into an interactive experience.

Even people who attend the Super Bowl can find local food spots using Apple Maps’ custom “Let’s Eat” guide.

According to Apple Music, Bad Bunny listens on Apple Music were up 7x right after the Super Bowl halftime show and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” became a top 10 song in 9 U.S. cities.

By separating the halftime show from the game itself through their content ecosystem, they made it accessible to people who don’t care about football but love the performances.

And Apple Music’s access to real-time cultural data enables them to curate specific events and interactive moments to further push the halftime show.

That’s how a 15-minute TV moment becomes a global, on-demand event that lives beyond the stadium and beyond Super Bowl Sunday.

What are your thoughts on Apple Music’s Super Bowl strategy?

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