We hate brands. We love marketing.
The duality of it all: social media, marketing, media, culture, AI, and the year 2025.
A mutual feeling that we all had throughout 2025 was “I wish things were better.” I mean, if we’re being honest, this feeling or vibe, whatever you want to call it, hasn’t left the cultural zeitgeist in years. But we, as people, as an industry, and as a society, always manage to get through it.
But how? That’s what this post is about. And I don’t have the answers for everyone or every single fragment of society, but here it goes.
Before you go further, Attention is like money–you can waste it or invest it. If you invest it in my paid newsletter, you’ll get dividends for years.
We hate social media. We survive social media.
As marketers, we keep ignoring the most obvious fact that people no longer consent to or provide input on what they see on social media unless they really don’t like it. A majority of people either spend their time scrolling through a feed of content that requires no action from them as users, or they default to YouTube and rewatch stuff they already like.
More specifically, the input that people provide is post-viewing, the content gives birth to new intent. People aren’t opening platforms with a pre-established intent as they once did.
What this means for marketers and creators is that every time someone opens social media and sees your brand, you have to re-establish consent to be on their feed through creative, and build intent in the mind of the viewer to give feedback like comments, likes, and saves through purpose.
The rumour of Netflix buying WBD solely because Friends is leaving the platform is rooted in the behaviour we see across YouTube and streaming channels. People aren’t trying to find and discover new stuff, and you can’t blame them. Platforms have been trying to reach this level of frictionless consumption for years. People either default to what they love or shut off and let the algorithm run the thing.
This dynamic makes us feel like we are stuck because it’s designed to do so. But at the same time, the pressure it creates on brands and creators is somewhat positive, as everyone on the production side needs to reinvent themselves to manufacture consent and intent with every post. Everyone feels exhausted on social media, but no one really leaves the platform.
And even if someone leaves one platform, the same incentives exist everywhere. Even a platform like Substack now has a wide variety of writers who take advantage of this dynamic. Ever since it introduced the Notes feed and focused more on discovery, there are creators who cater to audiences defaulting to scrolling the feed, and users who do exactly that.
Short answer: If a social media app has a feed and an algorithm, people will either default to XYZ or shut off and scroll. Creators and brands in search of revenue will cater to that dynamic without much to say, and artists who just want to publish their work and want people to discover it on their own will be forced to do the same. No matter what happens, and no matter how exhausted we feel, no one really leaves.
And yes, every app is kind of the same, but decentralized enough to make you feel scared about losing your audience on one platform, so the pressure is to be everywhere.
Media is dying, but there is new media to save it, which mimics the dying media.
No matter what happens, there are always industry events and chatter claiming that something new is on the verge and that it’s just a transition, that the media landscape is doing okay. Well, it isn’t. So many good journalists were laid off this year. They launched their Substacks, only to see their old employers launch Substack newsletters too, and now they are competing with them.
I know everyone acts like they’re happy about it, but behind all those Substack launch posts is a story of someone being laid off and, more importantly, deplatformed as an important voice. Now their voice is lost among thousands of others. You have that segment of media, and then there are…
Creators on Substack, TikTok, and YouTube with newsletters, channels, and podcasts that already have audiences bigger than most journalists and some media publishers. They are trying to be the new media, and some of them already are the new status quo.
But they act like fools. They aren’t even self-aware of their power. More importantly, instead of setting a new standard, the “new media” is obsessed with the aesthetics of old media. Their podcast sets are designed like radio shows. Their livestream news content is a replica of CNBC and Wall Street in the 90s. Some of them publish news as if they are Reuters, an independent source with no biases, while being funded by a specific party.
Even when we move away from news-focused media, creators in other spaces are also trying to mimic what came before them, with an excessive use of Apple Garamond in content.
Why is that? Because creators and platforms grant non-journalists and pseudo-intellectuals distribution, but they don’t lend them authority. By using the aesthetics of traditional media, they try to legitimize themselves as respected sources, and that’s how we got through 2025.
Not everyone is buying into the “new media” that uses “old media” aesthetics because of trust. Some people crave nostalgia. They want news in that old style, packaged as infotainment.
Short answer: old media isn’t dead, and it will never die, but it can’t afford to be distribution-first anymore. Meanwhile, distribution is everything for new media, and the aesthetics of old media come later to legitimize what they do. Once that’s done, old media acquires them, the cycle repeats, people lose jobs, and standards drop.
Advertising industry is…having a rebirth.
What’s happening in our industry now, after decades of mergers and consolidations, was inevitable. We were able to resist it for a while, at least longer than other categories. What Cindy Rose at WPP, the IPG-Omnicom merger, and the success of Publicis’s new strategy tell us is simple: the managerial class and the promise of security are here.
If you’ve read any CMO report from Gartner, Forrester, or McKinsey, you already know that every year CEOs and CFOs either say the relationship between marketing and the C-suite is one percent better or one percent worse. And the tenure of CMOs continues to fall. Some agencies are spending more than half a year to close a client, and the costs of creative pitches couldn’t be any higher. It’s a huge f**king mess, and the innovative solution to this problem is, you guessed it, CRMs.
The brilliant idea is to sell advertising using dashboards and marketing tools that are already available for free. But just like everyone keeps spending on Salesforce and Microsoft keeps integrating Copilot while no one uses it, it doesn’t matter if marketing CRMs or the agency OS are useless. They give a sense of security to the C-suite. In past newsletters, I’ve shared data showing that around 50% of the MarTech stack goes unused, and most people in the C-suite don’t care to fact-check the data they see in dashboards.
Despite all of that, holding companies will keep firing more people, and they’ve already laid off thousands, all in the name of AI and automation. It’s advertising and marketing. You can increase productivity on paper as much as you like, but you will come back to the people you consider unproductive in one way or another. I can’t tell you how many creatives and strategists I know who were brought back to work for the same brand or agency as contractors after being fired less than a month ago.
The advertising industry is in a bad state, but the overall market will survive, because what WPP, Publicis, and Omnicom promise is security. They are insurance policies for CMOs at brands hiring them. The same brands will be hiring small and independent agencies to do the creative work.
You’ve probably read many other marketers writing about this supposedly new era of advertising. I may not be as articulate as them, but one thing I can tell you is that many of the voices talking about this are looking at it through a small hole. This exact thing happened to every other industry. CRMs and industry OS tools are just a market that big agencies refrained from, and now they’re doing it. Soon, it will be a side project. I’ll see you in an advertising version of r/salesforce.
Short answer: big agencies are finally doing CRMs at scale, and it looks like a big deal now, but soon it will be just a small segment like MarTech. It’s being done to promise security to CEOs and CFOs, who always panic and cut marketing when the economy is bad. People are losing jobs, which is bad, bad, but it will get better soon. As we all know, advertising is messy, and we get the job done by living through that mess, not escaping it.
We hate brands. We love marketing.
2025 was a big year for marketing campaigns becoming cultural events. From GAP’s Katseye collaboration to Coca-Cola’s AI-generated campaign, people heavily debated the ethics of marketing, brand love, nostalgia, and ragebait + AI-slop campaigns. As a curator, I saw so many pages and creators discussing marketing as experts and brand stans. You had Outlander magazine organically covering some of the biggest campaigns from Heinz and The Ordinary, while creators like Nicky Reardon broke down the marketing genius of certain campaigns. Everyone was all-in on marketing, but brands?
First, can you separate the brand from marketing? I think you can. In recent years, the number of communities and Instagram pages talking about good ads has nearly doubled. Twitter and Threads accounts constantly resurface celebrity collaborations that brands have done. All of that doesn’t necessarily change the way the zeitgeist feels about the brand or the overall category. Advertising, as an industry, remains one of the least trusted professions.
People are also tired of inflation. No one is really that in love with Walmart’s Gilmore Girls collaboration that they forget the price increases. More importantly, they won’t defend Walmart on TikTok when someone blames the company for the decline of small businesses or calls out corporations. Another scenario is the “give your marketing team a raise” crowd. Marketing lovers aren’t fighting the influencer health police in stores doing ingredient breakdowns of Olipop or Diet Pepsi.
In these instances, brands as a demographic aren’t the cool kids. Even Louis Vuitton isn’t safe from being hated on as a brand. Monogram hate is at its peak, but everyone still comes back to congratulate the brand on a good marketing post. And as I’ve mentioned before, if you do anything relatively creative, people applaud it as anti-AI marketing.
The big question for 2026 is this: how can brands bridge the gap between people applauding good marketing and people defending the brand because of good marketing? This question will only get bigger as the years pass, because trust in institutions, advertising, and corporations has been declining for years.
Short answer: brands need to figure out a strategy that unites their marketing efforts with community building so that the overall perception of the brand remains positive. And this won’t happen just because one brand decides to do it. It needs to be an industry-wide effort to set standards and act more ethically.
P.S. Zoë Yasemin wrote a great newsletter on luxury fashion, which is quite relevant here. Brands like Zara are doing good enough marketing to enter conversations around the meaning of luxury and art in fashion, while actual luxury brands are putting out marketing that looks like AI slop.
We hate the system. We love brands.
Brands are becoming media brands, but it shouldn’t have happened.
Brands are saving print media, but it shouldn’t have happened.
Brands are creating third places, but it shouldn’t have happened.
Marketers and creatives on social media won’t stop asking brands to save the culture they themselves broke. And audiences celebrate even the tiniest steps brands take to fix what they broke.
Who took away third spaces? Parks and community halls were replaced by what? Most of the time, brand stores and factories. Who stopped funding print media? Brands. Who saturated the media market and made people feel annoyed by ads? Brands.
Am I going crazy or what? A brand creating a third space for people to socialize isn’t fixing the problem, it’s benefiting from it. We have a system that allows brands to take over public space and rewards them when the problem isn’t being solved by anyone. Heineken is drinking well from this system, and so are retailers. I’ve read too many articles about teens meeting in specific brand-owned mall stores. And I can’t recall the name, but last year it was reported that one mall brand had employees dedicated to keeping teens talking and socializing in their stores. There’s also a rise in luxury brands opening coffee shops inside their stores.
All of this happens for two reasons. One, the system takes too long to fix the problem, long enough that once problems turn into keywords like “loneliness epidemic,” the incentives are too high for brands not to engage.
Two, people are asking brands to save society by selling their attention. TikTok videos asking brands to comment and support sick people don’t exist without brands evading comment sections. Creatives asking brands to save magazines don’t exist without brands constantly using reference culture and editorial styles lifted from archived magazines. Marketers asking brands to save whatever still exists do so because, honestly, they’re out of touch.
The point is that people recognize nothing new is safe from brands and marketing. Anything remotely mainstream will be capitalized on by brands in some shape or form. So what some people have figured out is to give attention to old mediums and say “print is alive” or “whoever fixes third spaces will win Gen Z,” to make brands engage with declining industries. Even though it’s a lost cause, because brands can’t fix the system long term, people have adopted this strategy to get something out of brands in the short term.
A more neutral way to describe what I’m saying would be this: brands today are expected to do far more than marketing because we no longer believe long-term fixes are possible.
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AI Debates: You Just Don’t Get It, Do You?
The cultural war around AI is exhausting, and we aren’t getting rid of it anytime soon. OpenAI and Sam Altman have goals that don’t really have a relationship with people debating whether the use of AI is ethical or not. And there is no debate around the scale of AI funding and the dream of AGI being absolutely bonkers and scary for everyone in the world. The stakes are way too high, and you can tell from the headlines of the last three months that Altman isn’t particularly happy about the state of OpenAI. Shall we go through some of the marketing-focused arguments that keep coming back to haunt us?
Pro-AI folks often say people aren’t being logical about why they hate AI-generated content. And yes, often people engage in arguments that aren’t particularly accurate. For example, when people shame brands for using AI by pointing out how much water AI uses, they might be wrong in the sense that AI prompting doesn’t, by itself, overconsume as much water as we think.
But that doesn’t call for the elimination of those anti-AI comments, because the construction of data centers and other types of AI training consume more resources than usual. People may be misinformed, but their actions against AI are a net positive for everyone, including AI companies. There have been internal reports and research revealing that some people at OpenAI feel the focus on monetization, happening mainly through AI slop generation, is costing the company further progress. Similarly, Meta’s “golden AI card” left the company for related reasons.
What’s more logical than growing shareholder value? Do you really think these companies are happy with people abusing their platforms to create low-tier AI slop, which most brands are now producing? These companies are in debt. The only reason they allow people to abuse the platforms today is for the sake of platform adoption.
On another note, most people are generally anti-slop, not anti-AI. You don’t see people complaining about the AI-generated voiceovers that many influencers use these days, or about consuming videos filled with AI brainrot. People tend to hate GenAI content when brands try to get away with using AI, or when they attempt to replace human work with it. That’s often the case for small brands. For big brands, the story is simple: you have the money, so why aren’t you supporting artists?
Another argument isn’t particularly brand-focused, it’s about marketers who like or dislike AI use. People who don’t buy into AI are often labeled as luddites, and history tells us technological advances have only moved us forward, not backward. This is one of the more cookie-cutter arguments.
And yes, some people are panicking about AI more than they should. But unlike previous technologies, most people didn’t actively participate in or experiment with AI on their own. A lot of people are being asked to opt out of AI after being enrolled automatically.
There are companies that aren’t actually asking people to be trained in AI, instead, their courses are training AI to replace the employee. You’re seeing “luddites” everywhere because not everyone consented to AI in the first place. People need time, especially when it comes to using AI for more than random tasks they previously automated through other apps or interns.
The last argument is all about productivity. Why don’t you try doing what you already do with AI? If you point to that viral study saying AI makes you worse at thinking, people often respond that it’s a “user error.” The platform isn’t at fault, it’s the user neglecting the learning curve. While that makes sense for a second, overreliance develops over time and hits you back when you’re already low and start delegating all the work to AI.
P.S. Not that I want brands to do this, but they could use a bot-farm strategy to flood social media with AI-slop marketing by using fan pages and fake accounts to push content. Or they could create a specific channel for the brand and position AI content as creative experimentation.
Chat, am i cooked?
I’m tired of marketers only talking about culture moving at a fast pace while asking brands to be fast and slow at the same time. Culture doesn’t move that fast, we are just documenting every ounce of it, not creating culture by the minute.
Also, people like me and trend forecasters rarely build culture. They are parasites documenting culture and rebranding it, while the people engaged in culture have no clue about the classifications being made about their work.
Performative Everything: Why are we calling each other performative? You know that the kids who started this trend were subjected to an online world that judged them all the time. Them calling each other performative isn’t for fun, it’s unhealthy. Social media made them that way. We’ve got to do something about it!
Brands doing serialised content: Like I said above, this type of content works because people default to what they like. People aren’t genuinely fans of never-ending content. Don’t focus that much on content supply; know your audience and do something that makes them more likely to take control of their consumption.
6-7 & Brainrot concerns: Please take into context that we used to leave kids alone. Now we document everything they do. Kids are already over these trends by the time they reach the mainstream. But we document the shIt out of everything, and I don’t know if that’s good for kids trying to live their lives.
Creator Economy ruined everything: I’m tired of this culture of creators saying, “I created content for 3-4 years, failed, and now I have this many followers.” When people blend hustle culture with content creation, you get an economy fixated on content hyper-optimization and never-ending MrBeast-like challenges and titles. And the incentives get so high that YouTube Shorts viewership is hurting the overall existence of YouTube as a platform.
The kids will be off social media soon. I’ve been reporting on age-verification laws this whole year, and it’s become pretty clear that leaders across the globe are on board with this idea. Platforms don’t want to do anything themselves! The only counter they have is to say app store verification is the way. When age-verification laws take over the internet, platforms like Roblox (which is also being asked to do age checks) will be everywhere. A platform like that allows teens to do more than just engage with content, they can build their own space to interact with friends.
People keep talking about traditionalism in marketing, and fashion is back. Read the headlines, everyone wants an escape, and brands don’t want to risk anything in this climate.
Everything is Keyword: Nobody ignores clickbait titles anymore. It’s almost like people use those titles to create alternative videos breaking down the titles themselves. The actual content doesn’t matter; you only show a screenshot of the article you disagree with.
To be continued…
Switzerland has started an AI-Slop Marketing War
We now have a brand-first brainrot + AI trend, and the response to it is mostly positive. People are loving this AI slop fight between brands. It all started with Migros, and now everyone in the Swiss brand market is engaging in this type of marketing. Some brands from the German market have joined as well, Lidl Germany has decided to take part in the trend.
The Swiss supermarket chain created a viral social media post with GenAI visuals, but the song is human-generated. As a commentator under my Instagram post explains: “The Songs are sung by humans, its because AI models cant sing in the correct swiss dialects! Migros from Zürich sings ,,Grittbänz’’ The human shape loaf so called in zürich but in astrofries song which is from basel, they call it Grätimaa, so he sings grättimaa and you can hear its corret pronunciation with the dialect the word refers to. this cant be AI atleast not yet.”
The human-assisted factor is allowing brands to ride the wave and use AI for visuals, defend it as them having fun, and call it a trend. Overall, it’s a messy situation, but it has gotten attention from many mainstream brands you may know, like Lindt, Aldi, Thomy, and a few others. Even sports channels are engaging with it.
The viral song and trend are called “Grittibänz.” The agency behind it did a video interview with Swiss media, where they said they were using Nano Banana for video and defended their actions as being fun and “not that deep.”
Other than brands using lazy AI visuals, the cultural appropriation of hip-hop needs to be pointed out, as there is no real value exchange happening. Brands are simply treating the whole situation as a normal trend; the focus is just on using the viral character and integrating logos and a couple of other brand assets.
My opinion on this Grittbänz trend doesn’t matter, as the level of acceptance it has received confirms that branded AI brainrot memes will haunt us in 2026. And heads of social media will need to make a decision on how they engage with AI memes.
Ad of the Week: Starbucks
Starbucks wasn’t always that soulless, at least not aesthetically. The brand embraced the global village coffeehouse aesthetic pretty heavily in the 90s-2000s era. As it was incorporated into the design language and store design.
The aesthetics were vibrant and warm, meant to invite people in, and they weren’t trying to simplify the vibe. The global village coffeehouse was first embraced by cafés and restaurants in its original form, nothing new.
What came later was Corporate Memphis, which stripped out the coziness and the sense of “a place” from the art style. What was left was an individualized version built for brands to treat people as customers.
Global village coffeehouse invited you in and didn’t ask you to change anything about yourself. Meanwhile, Corporate Memphis tried to sell you the dream (product) by simplifying everything and forcing you to see yourself in a generalized illustration.
I think we’ve gotten a little far from how Starbucks built its presence with the global village coffeehouse aesthetic, but the answer is simple: it had soul, and, in a way, Starbucks did too. It wasn’t always a corporate hellhole. First, it removed the aesthetics in the late 2000s. Then it replaced the vibe and culture of coffee and baristas. Now, it’s kind of a mess.
This is what Instagram in 2025 looked like
1. Instagram’s most popular growth hack of 2025 was “Quantity > Quality.”
What I’ve noticed this year is that creators and communities that posted consistently and kind of too much, like more than once or twice a day, went on to grow their audiences from 1,000 to 100k followers.
You may think this is old news, as this advice was given back in 2015 to 2017. You posted a lot and increased your odds of growing followers. That’s it. The difference today is that you stop posting in high quantities once you have one or two big posts and focus on that specific style of content.
I personally don’t like this strategy and don’t follow it, but I also pay the damages. I grew majority of my audience in 2024, and the algorithm showed me signs that I should stick to this or that topic. I didn’t do that, and well, I barely kept my unfollow-follow growth net positive.
If you’re a creator, you also need to manage your engagement rate to impress brands. So don’t be like me. Focus on the strategy of quantity in the first 60 days of your journey. That will help you build a keyword and authority bank in that XYZ niche. After those 60 days, choose your best performing formats and slow down. Focus on quality for the next 90 days. After that, the algorithm is likely to punish you again, so the cycle repeats.
2. The Yellow Serif Era: Brands & SMBs went escapist and served their version of traditional.
The first half of 2025 was filled with brands and SMBs, mainly cafes and restaurants, doing this trend of posting aesthetic reels with yellow serif font and voiceovers that romanticised this flimsy era of hanging out. All of that turned into a template, and everyone was doing it.
Socialisation-focused content became the norm for brands on Instagram. And the reasons are simple. One, the platform itself has been running ads focused on friends. Two, the algorithm isn’t niched or centralised enough to create the fast and relevant loop that TikTok has. So the focus is on content that gets into DMs, not just the feed.
3. The Rage, Moderation & Comments: It’s hell.
Instagram and Meta’s moderation efforts reached a new low in 2025, and the comment section became a war zone of dog whistles fighting with ragebait comments, while neutral comments became non existent. The image comments on TikTok didn’t particularly stop the racism, but the feature was easy to navigate, and most people fought back with their own images and memes.
On Instagram, the situation was less democratic. People spewing ragebait and racism were uploading, distributing, and creating GIFs and new codes of emojis to take over the comment section. Meanwhile, the general public used the same boring callouts that were not helping them stop the steal.
4. Instagram promised to punish content aggregators, but it only stopped curators doing image-focused content.
Nothing really changed when it came to Instagram stopping pages and companies like Barstool from redistributing existing video content. The pushback actually came for curators and political pages curating news and pop culture through screenshots and formatted memes. The algorithm detected that, and many communities were punished in the last three months. It’s just bizarre because when you report on current events using custom designs, the algorithm again limits that content. The simple fact is that screenshots of social media interfaces work better.
5. What I heard from creators and brands in the industry.
Carousels are performing really well and help them grow better than reels.
Reels are still a priority for audience reach, not engagement.
Broadcasts are less for promotions and more for long conversations and community building.
Stories are the place to get interactive with the audience through polls, questions, and BTS content that makes people question or drop a reaction.
Single image posts are for memes, Venn diagrams, and other forms of compact visual storytelling.
Horizontal posts are for creative experimentation.
6. The “Instagram Strategy” visuals that every creator or brand probably saw on their feed.
7. What the Instagram CEO said this year:
Taking long breaks from posting on Instagram hurts your account reach.
My guy constantly emphasised the need for brands and creators to create shareable content.
He tried to escape most questions about showing content from people someone follows and set the agenda of content discovery over content curation.
He asked creators to use trial reels and then asked some creators to stop abusing the feature.
He dunked the myth of “link in bio” decreasing post reach. But I don’t trust that statement because Meta as a company has spent the last year or so punishing publishers, not supporting them.
8. Instagram launched awards to celebrate creators that would’ve never made it if it wasn’t for TikTok, YouTube, and their followers.
9. Another Gen Z campaign celebrating the creativity of artists and creators was launched. It again starred everyone that didn’t actually grow with Instagram. But hey, we got some words of wisdom from Tyler, the Creator.
10. Instagram launched reposts. Good or bad, it’s a copycat feature that people accidentally click a lot.
11. Instagram search did improve and is somewhat more responsive. Creators are recommended to use keywords in their content. The platform is also indexing content on Google and creating automated titles for posts without a clear caption.
12. Instagram as a platform is still trying to be everything. They announced a TV app and a native iPad app this year.
13. Instagram changed the metrics again. The way views are calculated is apparently more accurate. Truth or just another excuse for low engagement that every creator experiences?
14. The platform launched a new dimension for image posts at 1080 by 1440 pixels and updated the post preview size in the profile grid to 1012 by 1350 pixels.
15. Does anyone actually use the friends feed and the Snapchat like map? Both features meant to connect teens aren’t particularly helping creators or the intended users.
16. Instagram added a follower count limit to live streaming, but who actually goes live these days?
17. Instagram launched the Edits app to rival TikTok’s CapCut. The platform constantly prompts creators to edit in the app for better engagement.
18. Instagram rebranded the trendy prompt based feed every platform is launching as “Your Algorithm” and says it will make the reels feed more accurate.
19. Instagram added a share only to feed option.
20. Instagram gave creators the ability to create custom AI chatbots and promoted this launch religiously for a while, but now it’s all silence.
21. The platform played around with monetization by offering bonuses in early 2025, but not long term options.
22. Instagram had, umm, a lot of teen safety problems and lawsuits.
Back on Sunday, until then…
Very interesting wrap-up!
It's amazing the lengths that social media companies are going to increase the time on the app.
I wish they'd put more attention on helping connect like-minded people connect with each other.
Personally, I would love to see social as more of a lace of connection and less of a perpetual marketplace.