A decade ago, when I was in high school (YIKES), trying hard was the worst thing you could possibly do. I would have pointed at anyone trying hard and called them cringe for being such tryhards.
But in 2026, being a tryhard might be the best compliment a person or brand can get.
AI can spit out a full song or visual in seconds. Consequently, anything that looks easy now looks suspicious and is subject to AI allegations.
Effort is one of the few things brands can still prove, and the smartest ones are making things that took effort and time.
Wendy’s put out an emo EP. Chipotle carved an orchestra out of vegetables. Oura built a tiny city by hand to sell a ring.
None of it is efficient, but the effort behind it is the message: it tells you a real person cared enough to put the work in.
The branded entertainamnt space
The tryhard era started with brands making their own entertainment.
In our 2026 Social Trend Report, we clocked how Gap hired a Chief Entertainment Officer, Ramp offered up to $350K for someone to build a media brand, and 68% of the marketers we surveyed now put entertainment value ahead of product messaging.
The branded micro-series was the first wave of this shift, and branded music looks like the next one. In addition to Wendy’s and Chipotle, e.l.f. is on its second, “Mirror Mix,” released through its in-house entertainment arm, e.l.f. Made.
Music is the natural next step. A branded micro-series needs your full attention every time it plays, but a song runs in the background on the subway. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I’ll replay a song twenty times before I rewatch episode three once.
The vegetable orchestra
Of every brand making music right now, Chipotle tried the hardest.
The fast food chain recorded “From Ground to Sound” inside Abbey Road’s Studio Two with the London Vegetable Orchestra, a five-member group of classically trained musicians who play instruments made from vegetables.
The instruments took three months and dozens of iterations to build, and each one had to be played at peak ripeness. Chipotle released the song alongside a full film of the process, proving it was made by humans with the utmost effort.
Chief brand officer Fernando Machado put it bluntly: “Any brand can release a song or develop a sound mnemonic.” His case was that this one couldn’t exist without Chipotle’s own produce.
Releasing a human-made album shows that your brand cared enough to do the work, which is exactly what AI-generated music can’t prove. Like tech, AI music has a taste problem, and it’s become a volatile space with growing legal issues, too.
In July, a Munich court ruled that Suno, the platform that turns a text prompt into a full song, infringed copyrights by training on music like Boney M.’s “Rasputin” without paying for it. GEMA’s lawyers got Suno to spit out near-copies of hit songs just by typing in the lyrics and a style.
For brands, that makes a human-made album the safer bet as well as the cooler one. Nobody has to wonder whose song a vegetable orchestra was trained on.
Proof of work
AI tracks are flooding streaming platforms the same way slop flooded our feeds. The brands trying hardest are making things you can watch being made, and music is just one version of it.
Oura’s new “Wear Your Best Life” campaign took it to an extreme.
Director Sam Walker and 35 modelmakers spent three weeks in Prague building a dozen sets and eight model cars at 1:10 scale. There’s a working subway and a rooftop pool with real water in it. The stars are human hands wearing Oura rings, walking and skating around town like tiny people.
Even this kind of thing can be faked now. AI video tools can mimic stop-motion down to the thumbprints and the choppy frame rate. So Oura posted a making-of video, much like Chipotle did with their Vegetable Orchestra.
At this point, the behind-the-scenes footage is the most convincing part of the campaign, and it shows you put in the effort.
On effort and being a try hard
Effort is the operative word. The emo EP, the vegetable orchestra, and the tiny city are all just vehicles for it.
Now that you can generate literally anything with a prompt, making something that obviously took time and skill is what sets a brand apart.
So I take it back, high school me. I point at these brands, in an article on a writing platform that takes a lot of effort itself, and I say, “I like this..”
Keep trying hard, kid.