Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. The So What comes to you from Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Joel Daly, co-founder and CXO. Read on for the “so what” of what gets lost when “AI” becomes shorthand for “bad.”

The most cutting aspersion you can hurl at a creative professional today is that the work that they’re so proud of is AI slop. It has become sport for digital detectives to try to sniff out clues that something has been created by generative AI — too inane or uncanny or trite to be the product of a real person. Every em-dash is suspect and every odd shadow an indictment.

But to some, there’s a broader, more profound tell of AI infiltration: everything looks, reads, and sounds the same. So many posts, websites, articles, and redesigned brands seem way too mundane and standardized that we assume a machine must be behind them.

This has reached a fever pitch in critique of almost every new thing in popular culture. Even the recent colossally awful and offensive Good Good Golf and Callaway Golf ad was accused of being an AI idea — as if humans couldn’t come up with an idea that bad. Closer to home for me, in D.C. Reddit communities, people have been posting and dissecting promotional flyers from bars and restaurants, calling out the “obvious” signs that they were made with AI. Nonsensical letters, factually incorrect renderings of Metro stops, an artificially generated sub sandwich — all evidence entered into the record.

Some of this criticism is fair. If you’re posting a flyer advertising your restaurant, you should, at bare minimum, use actual pictures of your food. An AI-generated sandwich is not a great substitute for showing people what they can actually order (not that a stock photo was much better). But here’s the problem I’m seeing with this local witch hunt: “AI” has become shorthand for “bad,” and that shorthand lets us off the hook. Once we spot the tell, we stop asking what, exactly, is wrong with the work.

Which raises a more interesting question: what are we actually objecting to when we say something we don’t like is AI? Because, let’s get real for a second. It’s not as though local restaurant flyers were a sacred artistic tradition before ChatGPT. We did not lose a generation of artisans hand-painting two-for-one margarita specials with oil pastels. In plenty of cases, the alternative was mediocre and utterly forgettable stock photography.

I’m not at all saying AI is harmless or that every use deserves a pass. We should be critical and deliberate about how these tools enter our work and our lives. But this constant breathless policing of AI is distracting us from confronting a more uncomfortable truth: if what we’re actually reacting to is the feeling that everything has started to look, read, and sound the same, then AI didn’t invent that problem. We did.

For years, we have been buried in optimization purgatory, from algorithmic feedback loops to A/B testing to dogmatic “best practices.” Feed algorithms gave us real and (nearly) immediate feedback on what’s working to reach people at a mass scale. They’ve allowed us to refine our work to better convey information, engage people, and make products more intuitive, navigable, and digestible. But they’ve also led everyone toward similar conclusions, similar standards, similar rules — and, unsurprisingly, similar outputs.

You can see the impacts of mass standardization whenever you pick up your phone. Social videos need a visual hook in the first few seconds or viewers scroll past, creating a predictable structure for nearly everything you watch. YouTube thumbnails have been optimized within an inch of their lives to draw you in — the face with a big, open-mouthed smile, the pointless red circle, the controversial statements in bold text. Every email (perhaps even this one — no comment) is A/B tested toward the headline most likely to earn an open. These nearly identical outputs are all designed to trigger a subconscious response, not one of true understanding and interest.

In many ways, these methods and techniques were born out of the right intentions. My years of work in usability, accessibility, and information architecture has taught me to ask questions like, What good is an email no one opens, or a video no one watches? And shouldn’t it be easy for people to find what they need? But there’s point at which the drive toward frictionlessness becomes so complete that everything begins to blur together. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on my phone and unsure about what app I’m in, what site I’m on, or whose content I’m seeing. Is it Uber or Lyft? Airbnb or Vrbo? Instagram or TikTok? And that is the deeper problem we keep mislabeling as AI.

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Blaming everything we don’t like on AI distracts us from more meaningful critiques of how the technology is entering our lives — and lets us pretend we had nothing to do with getting here. We built a world around optimal standards and averages, then trained machines on that exact philosophy. So of course the machines mushed everything together and handed it back to us in a homogenized, uncanny package. Banning, blaming, or fully surrendering to AI will not solve that problem. We put ourselves here, so it’s up to us to move ourselves forward.

If we want something interesting, new, or genuinely creative, we have to break out of the average. We can cede the mediocre to the robots. Let AI handle the competent, functional, and quite frankly forgettable work that already exists in abundance. And that creates an opportunity for us. We don’t have to throw out everything we’ve learned about what makes something usable or effective. We can build on those conventions, then take bigger swings when the idea calls for it.

For example, some recent client work brought me to Olivia Rodrigo’s website. It looks like a retro 2000s webpage: her bedroom, a poster you click for tour dates, and objects to poke around. When I first saw the site, my instinct was to roll my eyes because, as someone who designed websites like this 20 years ago, I remember exactly why we stopped doing it. We learned to put buttons in predictable places because consistency reduces cognitive load. And we were right. Those conventions made the internet easier to use, more accessible, and more intuitive. But, as a consequence, we also learned to optimize the personality out of the experience. Rodrigo’s site is less efficient, but it has a point of view. You explore it because you don’t already know exactly what you’re going to find. It reminds us that sometimes, a little friction is exactly what makes an experience engaging.

Maybe that’s the opportunity AI gives us: permission to stop obsessing over getting everything right. Creating something human (even if AI is present somewhere in the process) means being willing to get a little messy again. To try something that might not perform, might not convert, might not be immediately understood — and see what happens.

Which brings me back to how we critique other people’s work. We should absolutely call out an AI-generated sandwich that misrepresents a restaurant’s food. But we also need to get past “AI” as the end of the critique. If we want a more interesting creative culture, we have to make room for work that can actually succeed or fail on its own merits.

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. The So What comes to you from Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Colin Moffett, co-founder and CEO. Read on for the “so what” of the rise of AEO.

Martha Powell is 24, and she’s from Newport in south Wales. Often, in unfamiliar situations, she finds herself drawn to other people with Welsh accents since she worries that people may “make assumptions” about her based on the way she speaks. She also admits to “softening” her accent in some situations depending on where she is and what the moment calls for. This is a calculation so many people make in rooms full of strangers: do I sound like myself, or do I change the way I speak to fit in?

Reading about Martha in a recent BBC article made me think about how often brands weigh that same question. Brands code-switch all the time, but unlike Martha, they do it at scale. They change how they speak depending on who they’re trying to reach, where they’re showing up, and what they want to be understood as (read: cool). You can see this most clearly in the rise of “chronically online” brand speak that now litters Instagram and TikTok, designed to signal that a brand understands and belongs to Gen Z’s internet culture.

Now let me pause for a quick second and just acknowledge that both the stakes and the consequences are different in the comparison that I’m about to make. The situations that Martha is dealing with are based in prejudice, and the way she speaks can affect how she is perceived and even her livelihood. That’s not the same thing as a brand changing its tone. But I do think the comparison points to a larger shift in how we are communicating right now — and this shift has consequences for both brands and culture writ-large.

Because increasingly, we’re not only communicating with people; we’re also talking to machines. As AI becomes a bigger part of how people find information, marketers are spending more time thinking about how these LLMs find and interpret information — and, naturally, how to make sure their brands appear in the answers they generate. The practice of shaping your website and content so that your brand is more likely to appear in those answers is called Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO (think of it as the next generation of SEO). You’ve probably already used an “answer engine” without realizing it. Instead of giving you a list of links, an answer engine (like an AI chatbot) reads a question, pulls together information, and gives you a direct answer. But unlike traditional SEO, which is largely about helping a search engine find your content, AEO is also about helping an AI system understand and confidently repeat it.

But here’s the thing: AEO rewards a very particular way of speaking. It prefers language that is clear, explicit, and simple enough for a machine to interpret. Accordingly, AEO consultants are teaching brands to use the same kind of language: straightforward, authoritative and very, very neutral. Which brings me back to accents.

Recently, researchers at York University and the Vector Institute tested how leading language models respond to different varieties of English. They found that the models often favored Standard English over dialects, even when the meaning was the same. In other words, the models weren’t simply listening to what people were saying; they were also showing a preference for how they said it.

Here’s the important difference between human bias and machine bias. At least a boss or someone at a networking event hears the West Country accent and decides what to do about it. The machine simply corrects it without telling you, which indicates that there’s a “right” and “wrong” way to speak and that the “wrong” way needs to be “corrected.”

And that creates an interesting problem for brands. If we know AI systems favor standardized language, we have an incentive to make our language more standardized before those systems ever encounter it. We sand off the slang and the regional expressions, the quirks and the specificity and the cultural cues that make language feel like it came from a particular group of people — all to make ourselves easier for a machine to understand. And, sure, brands can optimize their language to be clear and legible to a machine, but that doesn’t mean they actually understand the people they’re trying to reach.

And this is where a lot of brand research falls short. We ask people to react to language we wrote, then report back on what they think of it. We hand people our vocabulary and then congratulate ourselves when they hand it back. If we actually want to understand an audience, we need to start with their language — not ours. What words do they use when they talk about your brand online? What phrases show up in search queries and on Reddit? What do they say in support tickets? What do they say when you’re not in front of them? Understanding these nuances is how you learn the “accent” of the room you’re trying to be a part of.

A great example of this “accent” fluency is from Peanut, the social network for mothers. Recently, the platform partnered with baby-care brand Tommee Tippee on a campaign to bring the word matrescence — the physical, psychological and emotional transition of becoming a mother — into the mainstream. While the word was coined in the 1970s, most people still don’t know it, and it isn’t recognized by major dictionaries. That’s what makes the campaign interesting. They didn’t invent a new phrase for their audience. They noticed their audience was living something the language hadn’t caught up to yet and put a spotlight on it.

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The funny thing about accents is that they don’t appear out of nowhere. They are the result of history, provenance (see my last piece), and proximity. It reflects where you’ve spent time and who you’ve spent it with. This is exactly the hard work your brand should be doing to stand out. Ask yourself: have you spent enough time with your audience to actually sound like you know them?

Here’s a test you can try on your language to gauge its fluency. Put a competitor’s name in your sentence and see if it still works. If it does, you don’t have an accent; you have category language, and you need to double back and hang with your audience some more.

Or just think of Martha at that networking event. She wasn’t scanning the room for the most ”legible” or “standard” voice; she was listening for the one she recognized and that would recognize her.

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. The So What comes to you from Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Quinten Rosborough, senior director of content. Read on for the “so what” of clipping, parasocial relationships, and the end of posting.

When was the last time you actively listened to the radio? I mean sat down, tuned into your favorite station, and really paid attention to a broadcast. Even as an avid NPR listener and supporter, 99% of my listening is done through the internet. And as far as music goes, it’s at least been a decade since I’ve really cared about what’s going over the radio waves. I still occasionally encounter it as background noise, but I think that for most people radio — at least in the way it existed for the last century — has lost its relevance.

For example, did you know that most electric cars don’t have AM radios? Electric motors cause signal static, and so carmakers just stopped including them. And if you were to buy a new Tesla Model 3 or Y, Rivian R2, or Slate Electric Truck, it wouldn’t come with a radio at all, AM or FM. Radio is slowly disappearing, and it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal at all.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written here on The So What you’ll know that I’m quite bearish on the social media economy — at least in its current form — and, as a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about a good analogy for the times I feel like we’re in. Is this like the end of Myspace? The initial years of Wikipedia? Or maybe a digital platform is an imperfect comparison.

Nearly a year ago, The So What’s Ryan Weicht wrote about the end of posting — about how, as feeds became more permanent and less private, and content became more professional and promotional, regular people like you and me were feeling less motivated than ever to share our lives on social media. People were spending less time creating content for public feeds and more time sharing directly via DMs, group chats, and other more private channels.

In the year since, the feeling of “posting ennui” has only gotten more acute. According to a study published by Incogni Research last month, 55% of people report posting less than they did 5 years ago, 53% have become stricter about who sees their posts, 47% have deleted a social media or messaging app because of stress or anxiety, and more than half feel like maintaining an online presence feels like work.

If you’re in the business of social media, these numbers should be alarming. This entire industry only works if there’s a steady stream of real posts from real people. Why? Because people appear to hate everything else. They hate digital ads.They hate AI-generated content. They’re even starting to hate content creators. The less people enjoy what’s being served on their feeds, the less time they spend on-platform. The less time people spend on-platform, the less companies are willing to pay to advertise on them. Budgets get smaller, ads get less effective, and we’re left with a system that pays people very little to make videos no one watches.

Why is this happening? And more importantly, why does it seem to be accelerating? One clue might be in the rise of “clipping,” a black- to grey-hat marketing technique that has quickly become a best practice. Clipping’s origins are in the Manosphere, where personalities like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, Dan Bongino, and more used hundreds of thousands of dummy accounts to game algorithms. The technique quickly spread to entertainment, where it’s known as “trend simulation.” Instead of seeding retrograde cultural opinions, the same types of accounts were used to give artists the appearance of virality and skew sentiment in their favor. I’ve personally lost track of the number of times I’ve heard clients say the words ‘clipping strategy’ without blinking an eye.

Gross marketing is everywhere, and I’ve done my fair share of it over the course of my career, but clipping feels particularly deceitful. It’s one thing to be advertised to; it’s another thing to be gaslit. As Lane Brown said in Vulture earlier this year:

Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both. On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that “everybody” is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas. We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell.

Another reason people might be posting less could be due to what researcher Danah Boyd calls “Parasocial Media”:

Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities. Instead, most platforms offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations. Since scale is valorized in this platform economy, we are encouraged to curate ourselves in pursuit of fame and attention. We can still, in theory, create content for our 15 friends, but it’s not clear that they will see what we post...

...Because of these shifts, we now live in a world of parasocial media. Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections, where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate. In a parasocial world, people dedicate their attention and emotions to tracking the dramas of individuals who exist at a distance.

Sound familiar? Earlier this year, Artemis Ward’s Olivia DuCharme wrote about The 4 in the 5: four twenty-something women documenting their lives in NYC in the style of a ‘00s sitcom. The 4 in the 5, like countless other influencers, in countless other cities, in countless other countries, aren’t looking for interaction; they’re looking to be watched, commodified, and handsomely rewarded by corporate sponsors. For them, the parasocial relationship is the entire point.

And it’s not just influencers. The podcast industrial complex — the millions of clips of people in rooms talking into microphones — work in much the same way. The podcaster Brace Belden calls this the “friendship simulator,” content that exists to make you feel like “a shy participant in an exciting conversation.” While immediately rewarding, Boyd and Belden both find these parasocial relationships as poor substitutes for the things they replace. Listening to an interesting conversation is not the same as having an interesting conversation. Watching someone live out their dreams is not the same as realizing your own. As John Sylvia, the owner of the now-viral anti-influencer Nantucket antiques store puts it, “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video.”

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Which brings me back to Ryan’s post from last year. People are tired. Tired of the performance, tired of the perfectionism, tired of the promotion, the politics and the lack of privacy. Posting has become work. And in an environment where people are working more and earning less, no one wants a second (or third) job. And in the last year, the incentives to participate have gotten even worse. Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day calls this “The Clear Channel Internet:”

All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people.

Oof. When framed this way, you can see how techniques like clipping, explicitly parasocial content, and other ways of putting our thumbs on the algorithmic scale end up eroding the foundation keeping this industry upright. They run counter to the reasons we decided to join these platforms in the first place: to make real connections with real people, not to be duped by bot armies and tantalized by unattainable lifestyles. The short term gains from these techniques are real, and are in many ways the only way to compete on these platforms. But what happens to social media once this race to the bottom reaches its end?

In his piece on Garbage Day, Broderick describes social media as a “new, worse version of TV”, but I’d argue his Clear Channel analogy paints an even more terrifying picture. “Clear Channel,” of course, is a reference to America’s largest broadcaster, the company now known as iHeartMedia. And if we’re being honest, when was the last time you actively listened to the radio?

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. The So What comes to you from Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Alex Marootian, making my So What debut. Read on for the “so what” of the Vogue-Dogue lawsuit.

What if I told you that one of the most important lessons in understanding internet culture is hiding inside a fight over a dog magazine? It’s a story about how a random one-person operation can become big enough to spur a major institution to file a lawsuit. How the internet is inherently self-referential and a natural breeding ground for remixes, satires, and, sometimes, just plain dupes. And, ultimately, how the rules of culture have changed now that anyone can participate in making it.

But let’s start at the beginning. In 2019, photographer and graphic designer Olga Portnaya introduced Dogue, a canine fashion publication, as part of a collection of “pup culture” parodies, which include Vanity Fur and Spawrts Illustrated. Dogue’s covers feature various pets in their own version of high fashion (furshion?), with stories ranging from NYC retailer Kith’s new line of dog-friendly fashion to a cover star profile of popular pet creator Oreoluwa Osoba, who’s amassed one million followers for his dog dad content featuring Duke, his miniature Schnauzer.

After two years of free digital publications, Portnaya released her first print issue of Dogue in 2021, which was followed by a Dogue trademark filing in 2022.

But then, in 2024, Vogue entered the chat. Its version of “Dogue” featured Pilaf, Demi Moore’s micro Chihuahua, as the cover star. Then Contributing Editor (now Editor-in-Chief) Chloe Malle introduced “Dogue” as the latest iteration of Vogue’s continued legacy of dog fashion, referencing an 1897 cover of Vogue which featured a Labrador. Though the two Dogues share a name, they are quite different in practice. Vogue’s version of “Dogue” is basically just Vogue, that is to say, obsessed with celebrities. From Lewis Hamilton’s Roscoe lounging poolside to Sabrina Carpenter’s Goodwin and Louie resting in a mini Mercades G-Wagon, have you really made it as a star if Vogue hasn’t put your dog on the cover of THEIR “Dogue”?

Soon after launching its “Dogue,” in 2025, Vogue sent a cease-and-desist letter to OG Dogue. Which brings us to the present day. Notably, throughout the lawsuit, both Dogues have continued to release their publications while a court decides who can be the one true “top Dogue,” as The New York Times puts it.

People with JDs can speculate about the legal rights that both OG Dogue and Vogue have to “Dogue.” I, on the other hand, see another problem lying within this lawsuit. Vogue has landed itself into a PR hot mess. Because this is a time when there’s mass distrust (even resentment of) institutional ownership, the “Dogue” controversy has ballooned from a simple trademark dispute into a David-versus-Goliath brand battle. Go into the comments section of The New York Times article or the many Reddit threads on this topic and you’ll see an overwhelming consensus: not that Dogue has ripped off Vogue. Quite the opposite. Why couldn’t Vogue partner with Dogue? Or, better yet, why can’t Vogue just chill out? While an audience less in-the-know on this topic probably loves Vogue’s “Dogue,” those like myself see this situation as a reflection of the ways people create original content on the internet. Which leads me to wonder…at what point does a massive brand like Vogue just have to accept parody?

Objectively, I can see Vogue’s legal argument of copyright infringement, and I can understand that Vogue is simply trying to ensure its “Dogue” property is the only one in town. But the internet-savvy consumer in me balks at the idea that Vogue actually feels threatened by a comparably tiny magazine who, in my opinion, has more of a right to “Dogue” than Vogue does. While Dogue could, in theory, aspire to market capitalization and endless brand deals, for right now at least, it is simply an Instagram account with 23.4k followers that features other dog-fluencers. Vogue, by contrast, has 51.4 million followers, and the dogs it features belong to the rich and famous. To argue that there is a possibility of Doguemeaningfully stealing a sizable amount of Vogue’s audience does not make sense. What Vogue does not understand is that, through this lawsuit, it is signaling that it doesn’t understand internet culture. And, because of that, it’s losing a level of credibility — all for what will probably end up being a marginal difference in its final sales numbers.

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Like I said earlier, the internet is inherently self-referential. These days, original IPs often find their start in parody or satire. Our current social media consumption is mostly based in the endless remix and reinvention of an original product until it doesn’t really even resemble the original anymore. At this point, there’s a fan account of almost anyone famous. By Vogue’s logic, should they be sued for potentially taking away lucrative likes and comments from the original celebrity’s posts? Should commentary channels and reviewers pay a fee to the original creator of the content? Should Tiktok edits of The Pitt to a trendy song that someone could conceivably make money off of be the subjects of lawsuits? No. Because in the age of social media and available free content, recycling, reproduction, and reinterpretation is how new things get made.

Lawsuits and bankruptcies can influence a brand’s legal and financial standing, but not its cultural impact. So if brands want to be with the culture — if they want to be relevant and popular and have long-term success — they need to fundamentally rethink how they deal with all the ways in which people interact with their IP online. Celebrities understand that, in the age of social media, having fandoms remix and remake your work is a sign of a thriving fanbase, not people trying to steal your money. The fact that someone can start a parody account, gain popularity, and become their own source of cultural conversation is one of the only ways the internet is still fun. To stifle that, to make people scared of creating or contributing to a conversation, is to stifle a generation of creatives that could help shape the coming years of cultural discourse (and, while they’re at it, strengthen your brand’s perception).

This is not to say that legacy brands don’t have a right to be worried. We need to have some source of truth so we don’t completely lose sight of what is the “real” product and what is a “dupe.” But while Dogue continues to be a small-scale organization that just wants to make funny dog fashion content, Vogue is only distancing itself from its consumers by implying that they don’t have the right to create things. That they can’t be inspired to make their own parody of something. That we are damaging their brand if we dare make a tacit joke about it.

To be adept at brand protection in the age of the internet is to welcome your fans and your tinkerers, not shut them out. While copyright should be legally protected, creativity and the need for reinvention should be culturally respected. If brands forget this and start going after anyone and everyone who’s just trying to have fun, they might potentially lose a stake in the cultural conversation. So don’t be like Vogue Dogue; be like Dogue Dogue. Harness your creativity and plant a flag in the space (or crate) you want to occupy.

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. By day, we work at Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Olivia, Director of Content. Read on for the “so what” of the Nantucket culture wars.

If you, by chance, should find yourself on a sleepy little island known for gray cedar shingles and lush blue hydrangeas, and if you, by chance, should find yourself walking across its cobblestoned streets into a craft guild and antique store, then you might be surprised to stumble upon a sign that reads NO INFLUENCERS.

Or, if you’re like me, then you know more than you ever really needed (or wanted) to know about that sign — and the so-called “culture wars” currently playing out on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Allow me to explain. The store in question is Four Winds Craft Guild, which has been a Nantucket staple since 1948. The artisan shop makes and sells classic Nantucket goods (including hand-crafted basket purses that can run you upwards of $2,500) and recently went viral for a NO INFLUENCERS quarterboard displayed inside, visible through the window from the street. It went up, presumably, after floods of young women started lining the streets outside Dairy Boy, the clothing and lifestyle brand founded by influencer Paige Paul (née Lorenze), which just opened its first brick-and-mortar three minutes down the street. (A brand I happen to really like — sorry, everyone!!)

@amymcaveetyYou’re lyinggggg 🤣 #nantucket #nantucketisland #dairyboy

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The sign was quickly met with equal amounts of praise and backlash. Praise from fellow Nantucket residents who feel as though their home has become someone else’s Disneyland, praise from fellow shop owners who are tired of freebie requests from mid-level creators, and praise from people who are sick and tired of influencers, period, and want to see them knocked down a peg. The backlash was led by Paige Paul herself, who, in a series of now-deleted posts, wrote:

If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a ‘No Influencers’ sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why. Mocking women when they become powerful in a new industry isn’t new. It’s just a strange message coming from a store that celebrates a craft with such a rich history of women shaping the island and its economy.

Soon after, Paul put up her own quarterboard in her Dairy Boy storefront reading EVERYONE WELCOME. Many creators, in turn, followed Paul’s lead by creating TikToks of their own, arguing that saying “no influencers” was a thinly-veiled attack on women, pointing to influencing’s long history as a female-dominated industry. Even Bath and Body works hopped in the conversation, posting a sign that reads INFLUENCERS WELCOME in one of their storefronts.

That response set off its own wave of backlash. There’s a specific ickiness to watching influencers — a profession whose mainstream generally steers clear of anything political, because, presumably, political opinions are bad for brand deals — reach for a word as loaded as “discrimination” the second a critique is aimed at them. And yet, as I’ve written before, this is the shape TikTok debates always take: an endless scroll of spicy takes, spicier countertakes, and the spiciest of counter-countertakes, each one more exhausting than the last. In this case, what started as a story about one little old sign in an antique shop quickly ballooned within days into a referendum on feminism, class, old money versus new money, and who gets to claim victimhood online.

In my opinion, as eye-rolling as it may be to hear about (predominately white) influencers complaining about discrimination, they might have an iota of a point. No camera and no filming signs are practically ubiquitous in places like museums and performance venues to protect privacy, and no one blinks an eye at those. So why choose the word “influencer” specifically? The shop owner claims it was a tongue-in-cheek joke, and it probably was. But I can’t help but wonder: why not just say “no filming”? Taylor Lorenz made a similar point in her deep-dive video on the topic: if the sign had said NO STREAMERS, we’d all know exactly who it meant (cough, Clavicular and Kai Cenat wannabes). Whether we want to admit it or not, “influencer” does tend to connote a specific kind of person.

What fascinates me about this sign debate is how quickly everyone — regardless of which “side” they’re on — seemed to agree on what the word influencer meant. Which brings me to a different sign that garnered a lot less attention. Three weeks ago, local Nantucket artist Stephen Pitliuk posted a video of a woman holding one of his pieces beside the line snaking outside Dairy Boy. The piece read: “I saw a line of Rhodes Scholars waiting outside of Dairy Boy on Nantucket” — a pun on Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s skincare and makeup brand, and, presumably, the type of woman standing in that line.

It’s a funny joke, but it also made me realize something. Nobody knows whether the women in that line are influencers. Or Rhode superfans. Or just plain-old normie tourists who hopped in line because they saw a TikTok. But somehow we all instinctively understand the kind of person the sign is talking about. And that’s exactly what happened with the Four Winds sign.

It’s worth noting that, while influencers have been flocking to Nantucket en masse recently, they didn’t invent the island’s appeal. Nearly three decades of Elin Hilderbrand novels, the growing slate of their Netflix adaptions (think: The Perfect Couple andThe Five-Star Weekend), and the rise of the coastal grandmother aesthetic had already primed the island as a cultural fantasy. Influencers and brands, in turn, simply poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning, making the fantasy easier to see, easier to buy into, and easier to imitate. And now, the people showing up are cosplaying the influencer lifestyle they’ve fallen in love with online.

To be clear, a lot of the locals’ frustration is more than valid. Tourists filming inside small businesses without permission and treating a residential island like an aesthetic backdrop is a real problem that social media — and influencers — have undeniably accelerated. But I also think the sign contains some genuinely misdirected angst at influencers instead of unsavory behaviors.

Misdirected or not, the sign certainly caught attention, earning mentions in The Cut, The New York Times, and the nightly news. And why it did feels a teensy bit hypocritical to me. This sign wasn’t simply put in the window for passersby to notice. It was photographed and posted to Instagram, a platform built to reward ragebait. Whether intentional or not, the shop used influencer mechanics to criticize influencer culture. And that’s an interesting contradiction we should all be paying attention to.

The So What

Zoom out, and I think this Nantucket story is less about influencers and more about the stereotype they represent. Walk with me for a sec. At some point over the last few years, influencer evolved from a profession into a personality. Increasingly, the word has become shorthand for someone who is vapid, has no social awareness, and treats the real world like content to mine. That’s a subtle shift, but I think it’s an important one.

You can see it everywhere. Creators who built their audiences on carefully curated aspiration are finding that mystique harder to maintain. From Amelia Liana’s carefully curated persona unraveling after her wedding to Nara Smith admitting the “tradwife” label gives her views on Call Her Daddy to Audrey Peters telling Vulture ragebait is the only way she gets views, the mechanics of influence are more visible than ever. That creates an uncomfortable reality. As Vulture recently argued, the “matcha-pilates-Alo” formula — quiet, aspirational, aesthetic content — isn’t enough anymore. In an oversaturated feed, creators increasingly have to provoke, polarize, or manufacture discourse just to break through. And while the algorithm might reward engagement bait, audiences are losing patience with it.

That creates an interesting challenge for brands. For years, partnering with an influencer came with a certain amount of borrowed credibility. Now, that label carries baggage. It doesn’t matter whether your specific creator partnership is thoughtful or well-cast. You’re working against a stereotype audiences have already decided to distrust before they’ve actually looked closely at what you did.

For now, at least, the way forward is to stop relying on borrowed credibility. A creator partnership may hand you reach, but, increasingly, it also includes you in the stereotype attached to the word “influencer”, which you can’t fully control. Instead, it’s time to do the hard work of building or communicating your own credibility through craftsmanship worth talking about, communities worth joining, and stories that travel without being engineered to spark outrage.

Because if, by chance, you take a page from an antique store who made a spectacle out of rejecting spectacle, you’ve already lost the plot.

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. By day, we work at Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Chris, Head of Creative and Story. Read on for the “so what” of New Balance’s approach to culture.

At some point in the mid-2000s, Kirk Taylor and New Balance first crossed paths. Kirk, still early in his career, was a senior account manager at a Boston-based agency whose roster of clients included New Balance, Heineken, Timberland, and other industry leaders. At first, Kirk and his team focused on consumer insights for the sneaker brand. Then came product launches, activations, influencer marketing, and product seeding. “From there, our work kind of morphed into the entertainment landscape work, where we were partnering with New Balance to sponsor big tentpole events aimed at celebrities,” he says. “Think the MTV VMAs.”

A decade earlier, New Balance’s slogan had been Endorsed by No One, which in practice meant that they did not pay athletes or celebrities to wear their gear. So, when Kirk and his team helped lead the company into the world of entertainment marketing, it wasn’t just a growth tactic — it was the beginning of a new era. “We had taken New Balance to places that they had not been before,” he tells me.

At some point, Kirk’s agency and New Balance parted ways. In the decade-plus that followed, he hopped onto the Heineken account, moved to New York, resigned, spent years consulting, joined the team at a shop near Baltimore, ran out of steam there, and then spent some time trying to figure out what would come next. At that point, in 2020, his stretch with New Balance was still a high water mark for him. He heard New Balance CMO Chris Davis speaking on a podcast and decided to shoot him a LinkedIn DM. To his surprise, Chris quickly responded and they had a nice exchange. Months later, Kirk heard Chris on another podcast and dropped him a line again. This time, he took his shot: he’d love to come back to New Balance. Chris, who’s known for being passionate and personable, lined up an interview for Kirk. A few weeks later, his full-circle return to the company was complete.

Kirk and I recently sat down to chat about the current landscape of entertainment marketing and his role helping to build the partnerships, stories, and experiences that ensure New Balance is always tapped into the cultural conversations that matter to its consumers.

You help lead global entertainment marketing at New Balance. A decade ago, that term often meant celebrity partnerships and big campaign moments. Today, brands are expected to operate more like cultural participants, showing up across niche communities, internet fandoms, local scenes, sports, fashion, music, and creators all at once. From your vantage point as a brand leader, how has entertainment marketing evolved over the years, and how is it continuing to evolve right now?

I’d say that entertainment marketing — and I’m not just talking about New Balance here, but entertainment marketing as a discipline — has probably gone the way that entertainment itself has gone. Which is to say that it’s become very fragmented. Not that long ago, maybe 20 or 25 years ago, when you thought about entertainment, you thought about a handful of verticals. Television, film, music — those were the pillars that we thought of as entertainment. But now you have the creator world, the influencer world, all of these things that comprise entertainment.

However you approach it, entertainment marketing has become extremely commercial. I mean, think about how many musicians have had sneaker deals just in the last ten, 15 years, right? When you look across the [footwear and fashion] landscape, it is a tactic that so many brands are investing in. I mean, Gap just hired a chief entertainment officer — and when you see this huge investment that a company like Gap is putting into entertainment marketing, it really shows you that companies are thinking about it from a big hire all the way down to niche opportunities to promote and build their brands.

When you talk about niche opportunities, you make me think of the different subcultures that you’re able to tap into along the way. At New Balance, you all first put yourselves on the map as a performance-focused brand for runners and for walkers. But these days, you’re just as likely to find New Balance on the courts of Roland Garros, in the pages of Thrasher, on the shelves of streetwear stores as you are at a marathon kiosk or a running store. So, at a moment when identity feels increasingly fluid and audiences move among subcultures more freely than ever, how do you think about building a brand that can travel across those worlds?

The foundation of everything that we do at New Balance is craft. And I think craftsmanship is a universal language that transcends geography, transcends industry.

So, New Balance is this athletic shoe brand, which means our focus is sport and athletes. And all of our athletes are perfectionists in their craft. Think about Coco Gauff in tennis or Kawhi Leonard and now Cooper Flagg and Tyrese Maxey, our lead guys in basketball. All these people are practitioners of craft — and that is something that we really, really lean into in our partnerships: craft and performance. And we craft shoes to match.

We’re also a lifestyle brand, and that means we’re hyper-concerned about delivering shoes with premium materials that have comfort as a hallmark. And delivering shoes that are on trend, but not trendy, you know what I mean? So that we’re part of that conversation, but we’re part of it as a leader and not a follower.

And through all of this, craftsmanship is the red thread that transcends all geographies and all of the verticals that we participate in.

New Balance finds a lot of ways to bring that craft thread to life, not only in your products, but also in your storytelling. On that note, I love the recent campaign you did for ABZORB 2010s. For those who haven’t seen it, it features Latin Grammy Award-winning artist Eladio Carrion, and it’s set at the Caribbean Social Club in Brooklyn, and it spotlights the legendary owner of that club, Toñita — a woman who’s kind of the matriarch of the Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn. The campaign lets the shoes live in this larger story about what it means to gather in the place where you belong, with the people that you belong to. And yet, the campaign feels hyper-local, it feels like it’s interacting with a real community, it has an emotional texture. Why do you think audiences are responding so strongly to that approach right now? That is, campaigns that feel culturally specific and emotionally lived in, rather than just kind of broadly aspirational the way former campaigns may have been?

The best marketing is the marketing that pulls on the emotional strings of a consumer. I think truly that’s what marketing is supposed to do: create an emotional connection. And right now, I think people are longing for a sense of community and connection to each other and the ability to see themselves in the products and the brands that they like. When brands get it right, they’re able to connect to consumers in a very visceral, emotional way that doesn’t feel over the top. It feels inclusive. And I think that campaign that you’re referencing — with Eladio in Tonita’s Place — it hits on all those notes. It’s a very New York story, it’s a very Brooklyn story, it’s a very Puerto Rican story.

Also important: That campaign was co-authored with Eladio. So, we didn’t just go to him and say, Hey, we have this idea for this campaign, about this shoe, and this is the tone and these are all the things we want you to hit. Instead, we work with our partners. We say, Hey, what are some of the things that are important to you in this story? And then we lean in. So, we worked with Eladio to tell a story that was authentic to him. He loves that place, he loves Toñita. And I should note that this was shot in October [2025] and it debuted in March or April [2026]. In between that time, Tonita and a version of her social club were part of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. It shows how important she is to that community, to Puerto Ricans, to New York — and that Eladio was given the space to connect to the dots.

How does that kind of authenticity translate into business success for New Balance?

We really want to be culturally connected, culturally adept, culturally resonant. We want to get to the heart of who our partners are and the heart of who our consumers are. And never to pander as we’re doing this. We want to find joy and connection in all of the things that we do. In that sense, it’s not necessarily about commercial success. I mean, we would have told a different story if we wanted to reach a big commercial scale. But when you’re co-authoring with a partner, telling stories that are authentic to them and to their community is most important. That’s what lets you connect with communities in visceral but meaningful ways.

That makes sense. One of the challenges of reaching across so many different cultures and categories is that audiences can immediately sense when you are overextending or chasing relevance, but maybe don’t belong there. New Balance has managed to show up in fashion, in sport, in music, in streetwear, in local community spaces, like Brooklyn — and you’ve done this without feeling fragmented. So, how do you maintain a coherent brand identity while still giving those different communities room to see themselves in the brand?

Through discipline. We try to keep our discipline in terms of our tone of voice, in terms of our storytelling and how we like to show up, down the people we partner with. Staying disciplined means not compromising our messaging just to chase something — whether it be commercial success, whether it be trends, et cetera. We know who we are as a company, as a brand, and we try to stay rooted in that. We are not trying to be our competitors. We kind of operate with a level of blinders on. And that’s true across the whole New Balance creative ecosystem. A wide swath of people, from our athletes to our entertainment ambassadors to our collaborators, I think all of these folks that we work with embody that discipline and those values that I’m talking about.

👟 Keep up with Kirk on LinkedIn, and follow New Balance on Instagram and TikTok.

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Welcome to The So What, a newsletter decoding cultural moments, why they matter, and what brands should do next. By day, we work at Artemis Ward, an independent creative agency in DC and NYC. I’m Colin, co-founder and CEO. Read on for the “so what” of why it’s harder than ever to gain your audience’s trust.

Everyone loves the moment on Antiques Roadshow when the nerdy expert rambles on about an object’s provenance — its origins, history, and chronological journey to the present — while its owner is just dying to hear the damn price. But you can’t get the price without the provenance! They go hand in hand.

If you squint, you can see these “Roadshow moments” playing out all around us. Now that AI content is ubiquitous, it’s harder than ever to piece together where content, written or otherwise, has actually come from — and that makes earning trust with audiences harder than ever, too. And as trust comes harder to come by, the question people are increasingly asking is not just what is this? but where did this come from, and why should I believe it? And that’s why I think provenance will become the most important way we can preserve human touch in the AI era, giving people the history, context, and accountability that make information worth trusting in the first place.

The scale of the problem in front of us is immense. Over half of new web content now shows hallmarks of AI generation, while a growing share of social interaction is driven by bots. It lends new weight to the “dead internet theory,” the idea that synthetic content and automated engagement are gradually crowding out genuine human activity online. Whether or not you buy the theory outright, the underlying concern is real. We can no longer assume that the platforms where information is shared, commerce takes place, and civic life unfolds are driven primarily by people. Information has never been more abundant, but trust in what we’re consuming is becoming increasingly scarce.

In a recent report, Gartner argued that trust is the new global currency in the age of generative AI. And that’s a big deal. For years, marketers competed for attention because attention was scarce. And, while it still is, creating things that can attract attention is easier than ever. AI can generate headlines, videos, images, and opinions at a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Now, the hard part is getting people to believe what they’re seeing.

Enter the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA for (sort-of) short, which is creating a common way for creators to attach a digital paper trail to the content they publish. Through C2PA’s product Content Credentials, creators and companies can attach a secure record to photos, videos, and other media that shows where the content came from, who created it, and how it has been edited over time. Camera companies like Leica, Sony, and Nikon have already adopted it, as have organizations including OpenAI, Adobe, and Reuters. Think of it as a digital passport for content, documenting where it originated and the journey it took before reaching you.

This isn’t just a content challenge, either. The same question of provenance is emerging in the physical world, too. As supply chains have become more complex and product claims have multiplied, consumers have less visibility into where the things they buy actually come from: how they’re made, what they’re made of, and whether the promises on the package are true. And while it currently only applies to Europe, the larger point is that the DPP and C2PA — two completely unrelated efforts — have arrived at the same solution to the same underlying problem: giving people a way to verify the story behind what they consume. Coincidence? You already know the answer to that.

The So What

Back in 1999, the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto argued that one-way broadcast communication would eventually erode trust. Even then, its authors warned that brands adopting a lifeless, corporate voice would slowly lose credibility because “markets are conversations.” They couldn’t have predicted generative AI, but they correctly guessed where things were going. Today, AI has made synthetic communication effectively free. Brands can produce endless content, simulate authenticity, and manufacture sincerity at unprecedented scale. Which is precisely why sincerity alone is no longer enough. In a world where anyone can tell a convincing story, the story itself matters less than the evidence behind it.

The reality is that brands need to stop saying they are trustworthy and need to start showing it. How long you’ve been around, claims about your performance, or general platitudes like “4X more effective” fall on deaf ears. In fact, the more claims you pile up, the more trust you end up eroding, as they just add to the noise. Instead, brands should start building their manifest, an inspectable record of where your product came from, where it is going, and the specific ways it improves the human experience of the people that use it.

Showing provenance is now a must-have, not a nice-to-have. As we learn to navigate a world overflowing with information, we will move from being the anxious consumer waiting for an expert to tell us what something is worth to being able to see the history behind it ourselves: where it came from, how it was made, and why it matters. The brands that build these manifests — creating a verifiable record of their products rather than simply making claims about them — will be the ones best positioned to earn trust in an increasingly synthetic world.

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Read on for the “so what” of why some brand creative just, well, sucks.

I’m not a gambling man (don’t get me started on sports betting). But if I had to, I’d wager each and every one of you readers have either sat in a creative kickoff, read a brief, or received feedback and felt:

(A) More confused than before

(B) So unclear you’re upset

(C) Like you were just told the exact opposite of what you’re being told now

(D) No creative spark at all

If so, congratulations! You are a normal human being. Come join the club. If not, either I fully don’t believe you, you’re a smart fridge tapping into our network, or you must be the luckiest person alive. Obviously, confusion, frustration, and mixed signals are inherent to peer-to-peer work. The fight against those forces — the struggle to better understand each other and perfect our communication — is just as important as the actual thinking, writing, design, editing, and managing.

But like any procedural mishap, there are some totally torched miscommunication patterns that tend to pop up quite a bit more than others. The good news? We here at this Substack are noting every instance and engaging in battle. Because if there’s one thing we won’t stand for, it’s not having a clear so what 😉 behind what we’re trying to say.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying we’re guilt-free when it comes to misapplying words that are…less than helpful. But, I rather hope that naming some of the top offenders will help us all get better, together, as brands and marketers, from the second we begin a project to its final touches. Because it’s doubly hard to produce good, culturally resonant (and relevant) creative work if the process underneath has lost its way.

Without further ado, let’s spin through…

👺 THE SO WHAT’S POOR PRODUCTION PLATITUDE PROSPECTUS 👹

Vol 1.1, First Edition, Section One, Chapter I

(1) BLANDIFIED 🥛🍞

These are words and phrases that seemingly every single brief, campaign, or positioning statement employs. They’re so overused in creative approaches that including them is either (1) table stakes (2) doesn’t differentiate your work or brand from any others’ or (3) meaningless (or contains too many meanings) because it’s said so often.

Common examples include:

• Irreverent, edgy: Ever since Wendy’s started dropping snarky tweets and Duolingo hopped onto TikTok with its blitz of unhinged content, a plethora of stragglers have longed to give their creative the same exact voice. As a result, any viral video now has about 50 brands in the comments all repeating the same various quips that show some knowledge of the online language of the day — but are, altogether, completely safe and totally bland.

• Human, conversational: What’s the alternative to this? If you’re not speaking conversationally, to humans, you’re…coding, I guess? A corporate drone? In a room full of Roombas? Of course you need to speak to your audience in their language.

What to say instead:

Go a level deeper than just understanding how young people talk and using those words and phrases. Give a specific genre to the way you want to speak and show up in your content: are you aggressively confident in your product winning? Warm and inviting, bringing viewers into a comforting embrace? Stern and knowledgable, but with a hint of dry humor every so often? These descriptors give a much better shape to your tone and set you apart from others who can’t put things into the right words.

(2) DISREGARDIFIED 👋

These platitudes are almost always thrown into briefs and comments aspirationally, with little commitment — or even intention — to actually follow through. They’re ways that everyone wants to work, or wants their work to be, but they too often are hamstrung by the many realities of legal, risk, brand, budget, numerous feedback layers, or product mandatories that they’re empty promises.

Common examples include:

• Authentic, genuine: Nobody wants to be “fake,” but very few brands truly want content that feels completely natural because most are selling something within the first three seconds.

• Disruptive, bold, unapologetic, exciting: These words suggest that you’re going to do something with real risk behind it, something with legitimate stakes that could backfire if not executed to perfection. Throwing a few snarky or cheeky quips into every third piece of product-emblazoned content doesn’t produce the same effect.

• Edutainment: If you’re going to use this word, you have to be willing to commit to the “-tainment” bit. Content that’s all explainer with no joy or premise otherwise doesn’t earn this label.

What to say instead:

You can say these words if you’re ready to accept that it takes legitimate deviation from the norm — and often risk — to truly embody them. If you’re not ready to let go of every piece of content flashing the logo and selling the product before consumers are settled in, you’re also not ready to be truly authentic, disruptive, or entertaining. And that’s fine. We all have budgets and legal teams and brand safety sticklers. But in that case, spell out the guardrails from the start and let’s ideate around them.

@dumbrblnd @dumbrblnd ♬ original sound - Ken

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(3) RESULTIFIED 📈 📉

You know when you’re hoping for someone to constructively tell you what they’d like to see from your work, and instead they only spit out the outcome they’d like to see? That’s a resultified word: the qualities it might take to achieve their goal are nowhere to be found; it’s just the goal itself hidden in clever framing:

• Scroll-stopping, thumb-stopping, viral: If there was a secret formula that makes content viral, we’d do it every time, and every piece of content would always be viral and everyone would get so much attention and push so many sales. Yaaaaay! But there’s not, and that’s the whole point of why creative work requires a lot of thinking and effort.

• Best-in-class, elevated: Well, yes, I’d hope we all want the work to be good.

• Surprise and delight, whimsy: Dipping a bit into blandified air here, but producing happiness and silliness is simply a reaction you want to happen, not an actual input to chew on.

What to say instead:

To make something viral, best-in-class, or surprising, you have to actually go out on a limb and guess what might make it so. Say what elements of the creative work you think isn’t bound to make something “scroll-stopping”; don’t just stop at labeling it not so. Explain what makes a specific piece of content “elevated”: is it shot on a certain camera, does it feature a special editing technique, does it use distinct words or clever turns of phrase? Without this specificity, creative practitioners are left guessing just as much as they were before the resultified platitude launched into the air.

(4) PEOPLE-PLEASIFIED 🫂 🫶

We all know, and some of us might be, people pleasers. Trying to do it all for everyone, hurting and upsetting no one. It’s a lovely aspiration, but in practice, it requires the individual to be vague, or avoid making decisions, or straddle lines without ever committing to a point of view, ultimately leaving others exasperated. Here lies the marketing version, where you attempt to do too much and then speak to no one.

Common examples include:

• Target Audience — Gen Pop: The worst offender. Pretty much saying “please everyone.”

• Target Audience — Gen-Z, Millenials, 18–54: These refer to such broad audiences, located in so many different places, with so many different circumstances of life, that you might as well have said “Gen Pop.” These identifiers can only be effective when attached to further demographics.

• Target Audience — Core and New Customers: This is a contradiction and a lack of decision making in disguise. Speaking to an audience that’s thoroughly educated on your product is a vastly different task than speaking to those who have no idea who you are (and need convincing).

• Target Feature — All our key benefits: Unless you offer very few benefits…it’s likely going to be difficult for you to stuff a mention of every single product benefit into each singular message. And that’s nothing to say of the whiplash it’ll leave your audience with.

• Tone of Voice: Professional yet approachable, premium but accessible: “Yet” or “but” aren’t inherently bad when it comes to defining creative elements like tone, and, when used skillfully, can provide particularly interesting twists to work with. That said, they can also be used to hide indecision, sandwiched directly between two opposite words without any further explanation.

What to say instead:

Pick a lane, and own it. I promise you, your message will be much stronger if you can identify who you want it to move most and dig deep into the cultures that audience belongs to. Explain where your audience is located, the interests they gravitate towards, the specific benefits your product provides, and how those benefits can solve a problem in audience members’ lives. And do it in a manner of speaking sharp enough to deliver a consistent voice throughout the work. And don’t do it alone. Work collaboratively, between brands and marketing teams together, and define those parameters through collective research, thinking, and alignment.

(5) CLANKIFIED 🤖 🪫

Yes, we live in the age of AI everywhere. And yes, AI can be helpful in a lot of circumstances. But it should never be the final product, submitted without human review. I’m not here to outright bash the use of AI, but I would love if we all were a bit more educated on the ticks of AI creative (writing in particular) and made an effort to limit them. Or you might just find yourself in a room thinking you’ve got something great and buttoned-up, while those in the know will consider it a COPY-PASTE job frantically done.

Common examples include:

• It is not just X, it’s Y: Everyone knows about the dreaded em dash, but people haven’t fully caught onto this turn-of-phrase trope yet. There are a few ways AI deploys the wording, but it generally involves naming an opposite[thing], wedging in a “not” or “isn’t” and following up with the “true answer.” The sentence can usually be consolidated to “it’s Y,” or cut entirely. Almost always, it sounds a lot deeper than it really is.

• And that [thing]? It’s the answer: AI loves to pose readers a question and immediately answer it, in as grandiose and show-stopping a way possible. Declarative statements abound in robot prose.

• Buzzwords like delve, tapestry, symphony, unlock, seamless, game-changing, landscape, leverage, etc.: This list is endless and ever-changing. It also depends on what tool you’re using. Generally, the words make your subject sound lofty and business-forward, likely the result of endless LinkedIn CEO thought pieces being fed into the data pile. Sometimes, it’s worth it to say things plainly.

What to say instead:

It’s difficult to write without using any of these specific words, phrases, or em dashes. Even as I was editing this article, I caught myself using a “this is not X, it’s Y.” However, the reason these phrases pop up is because they are the statistical mean of all writing, or, at least, of the writing your AI assistant thinks you want to see. As such, adding your own voice, sounding less LinkedIn formal and more you, and using the above devices when they really make sense will both improve your writing tremendously and stop the instant turn-off you’ll face when someone believes they’ve spotted algorithmic hands in your work.

The So What

Whether it’s brand-to-audience, brand-to-marketer, or marketer-to-marketer, these platitudes and poor production prosaicisms wedge themselves everywhere from internal conversations to external work. No one piece of the puzzle is solely at fault, but the consequence is convoluted creative without a clear cultural payoff.

Ultimately, the foundation of good creative is razor sharp, specific consensus on four decisions:

1. Who it’s for

2. What it needs to say

3. How it needs to sound

4. How it wants to reach its goal

And each one of the platitudes above dodges a decision on one or more of those key points. “Gen Pop” dodges who it’s for. “Authentic” and “bold” dodge what it needs to say. “Elevated,” “whimsy,” and “edgy” dodge how it needs to sound. “Thumb-stopping” dodges how it wants to reach its goal. And AI writing deployed without prompting, review, revision, and tuning dodges it all with a substance-less algorithmic soup.

So, the next time you delve into a tapestry of elevated seamless creative processes leveraging best-in-class, scroll-stoping techniques to develop an unapologetically edgy but authentic campaign that unlocks the hearts and minds of Gen Pop, consider going a level deeper. Work with the teams around you to define a direction. Make a decision and explain it concisely and, specifically, why you did so. Commit to an actual who, what, and how, and come out the other end with work that feels like it has a shape and a soul. The risk will be thrilling.

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Read on for “the so what” of the influencer wedding nobody saw coming.

A secret wedding just broke the internet. And no, much to my dismay, it wasn’t Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s.

Rather, about a week ago, British lifestyle creator Amelia Liana announced she was married. Which shouldn’t have been that crazy — after all, isn’t that the circle of life? Fall in love, get married, post on Instagram? — except for the fact that, based on everything Liana had ever posted, she wasn’t dating anyone, let alone engaged. And the fact that none of her wedding photos featured her husband. (We still don’t know who he is, unless you’re part of the Reddit faction that claims to have tracked him down via some good old-fashioned LinkedIn stalking.) And, perhaps most crucially: Liana’s whole brand is being a proudly single woman in her thirties, navigating the dating world and building a beautiful independent life, one luxury shopping vlog at a time.

So, needless to say, the wedding announcement came as a surprise — and was met with mixed reviews across Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. Many people were happy to see an influencer keep their private life private.

“If this true it’s the coolest way to announce a weeding” [sic]

“OMG, in a world where people announce the relationship, engagement, wedding, baby, house, and even the divorce in 47 parts… Honestly, that’s the flex. Keep some things private. We don’t need a Netflix series for every life update.”

“Hot take but it’s really refreshing to see someone who profits from social media not monetize the living **** out of their wedding like everyone else…some moments are best enjoyed in private. I didn’t post my own wedding photos. My husband doesn’t use social media either. I kind of love that she did it like this.”

Others were more skeptical, questioning whether Liana’s lack of sharing was a decision to protect her privacy or a strategy to earn her more engagement.

“At first I was really happy for her but the sheer volume of videos made to trending sounds is astounding. Did she just stand around and do this her entire wedding day? How sad.”

“Twenty four (24!) posts since she announced getting married 5 days ago and not one featuring her husband… this is genuinely weird and I’m kind of turned off from all of it now.”

“She is rakingggggggg it in by doing drops like this. Her engagement has never been this high ever. I respect keeping it private but I’m saying now that she is posting it’s weird that she only posts herself.”

Regardless of which side of the split you fall on, the reaction to Liana’s announcement is so divided because we aren’t used to seeing this kind of restraint from influencers. Take Jazmyn Smith, for example. One year ago, the New York-based influencer documented her entire wedding weekend across dozens of posts alongside her influencer besties, earning a People exclusive for her real-time posting strategy. Or take Brigette Pheloung, better known as @acquiredstyle, who, just two months ago, transformed her bachelorette trip (aptly named Acquired a Husband) into a fully branded content event. Over the course of the five-day celebration, she posted almost constantly while spotlighting Swan Beauty, the AI-powered smart mirror company that funded the festivities and flew her guests to St. Barths on a private jet.

If we take Liana at face value, her announcement may reflect a broader shift in how influencers create content about their personal lives. Rather than documenting every milestone as it happens, some creators seem to be reclaiming a little distance between living the moment and posting about it. Just a few weekends ago, another New York City influencer Eli Rallo went dark during her wedding weekend. After months of sharing every detail of the planning process, she hired a dedicated content creator, stepped away from her phone, and returned about a week later with a carefully curated recap. Even Pheloung, the bachelorette phenom, waited nearly three weeks before posting content from her intimate wedding ceremony. And yet, neither creator sparked the same kind of polarized response as Liana. Which raises an interesting question: if all three creators chose to share less, why did only one provoke such a strong reaction?

Because, I’d argue, the real story isn’t about privacy at all. Rather, it’s about the integrity of Liana’s personal brand. More specifically, it’s about what happens when the identity at the center of a creator’s brand no longer matches the life they’re actually living. And those are two very different conversations — with very different implications for anyone attaching their brand to a creator’s.

Spend five minutes on Amelia Liana’s channels and a clear theme emerges. Her YouTube catalog is full of titles like LOSING FRIENDS, SINGLE IN MY 30s & LIFE UPDATE Q&A (3 months ago) and WHY I DON’T TALK ABOUT DATING (1 month ago) — years of content about navigating loneliness, independence, and dating in your thirties. (Several of these videos, we now know, were posted while she was engaged, if not married.) On TikTok, the framing is less explicit but still recognizably from the same world: luxury shopping hauls, GRWMs, lifestyle snippets, and the occasional cheeky, trend-driven video that leans into the aesthetic of “single girl living,” even if it isn’t explicitly stated. Taken together, this content builds a very specific identity (what I’d call luxury through independence), a version of adulthood where success, freedom, and aesthetic fulfillment are constructed on your own.

@amelia.lianayou don’t even wanna see me trying to flirt

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Across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, Liana has built a cumulative audience of roughly 2 million followers who show up for that specific story: the relatable yet aspirational idea of a woman navigating her thirties independently. And that’s what makes the fallout from her wedding more than the average influencer controversy. The parasocial relationship at the center of influencer marketing depends on a simple belief that you are being let into a real life, not a constructed one. In Liana’s case, her audience was investing in her specifically, rooting for her dating life, relating to her loneliness, and seeing pieces of themselves reflected in what they understood to be her lived experience.

So the backlash isn’t really about the fact that Liana got married (like I said earlier, people fall in love, get married, and post on Instagram). It’s that she was never actually single while she was selling the experience of being single, which means the vulnerable dating reflections and lighthearted independent-girl content all take on a different meaning in hindsight. Sure, the girls’ trips, the luxury shopping hauls, and the solo routines were real. But the organizing idea behind all of them wasn’t. And that retroactively recasts years of Liana’s content as fiction.

Which leaves an uncomfortable truth for anyone in the business of content creators: if a persona is what audiences are buying into, what exactly are they being given access to?

The So What

The influencer economy runs on manufactured intimacy. Creators invite you into their bedrooms, narrate their dating lives, share their insecurities in real time — and what makes that valuable to both audiences and brands alike is that it feels real. Liana didn’t owe anyone access to her relationship. But by building a years-long “single in my 30s” identity, she created an implicit expectation that the content she was creating reflected her actual life. Of course, not every creator who keeps parts of their life private is misleading their audience. But every creator who’s selling a specific identity — single, struggling, self-made, whatever it may be — is making an implicit promise that their identity is real.

For brands, that’s a real risk. The traits that make a creator valuable (relatability, intimacy, the feeling of being let in) are the same traits that make their persona commercially powerful. The more central that persona becomes to a campaign, the more expensive any mismatch between story and reality becomes. Which is exactly why milestones like weddings matter so much in this business: they’re high-attention moments when a creator’s story gets stress-tested.

So the real question for brands isn’t whether a creator will share a milestone, but whether the life they’re sharing is the one they’re actually living. Because, if Liana’s story is any indication, those are two very different questions.

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Devin Perry and Andrea Cheung met in San Gabriel, Calif., when they were in sixth grade — and they’ve been at each other’s side ever since. Twenty-year friendships like this can breed many things: trust, familiarity, endless stories — and peculiarly similar sensibilities. For Devin and Andrea, this has all been true. But unlike most people, they’ve taken their friendship and turned it into a rising brand in the world of fashion. That brand is called Street Grandma.

Founded in 2020, Street Grandma is an independent streetwear label headquartered in L.A. and emanating directly from its founders’ shared perspectives on fashion (and the world) that they’ve been honing — consciously or not — for a few decades now. Specializing in what they call “exaggerated silhouettes,” Devin and Andrea design and produce oversized clothing for women that combines unique and imaginative designs with an unwavering commitment to comfort. “At our core, we just kind of want to be comfortable,” Andrea tells me.

But Street Grandma is more than just clothing — and this is what has allowed the brand to both stand out and stand the test of time (six years of time and going). As the Los Angeles Times puts it, “For Street Grandma, oversized is a lifestyle, not a trend.” This translates into marketing strategies rooted in a shared love of otherworldly storytelling (like Little Women-inspired clothing and photo shoots), wild immersive events (like a fashion-inspired wrestling night with emo vibes), and riotous collections of memes borrowed from far and wide (like A Bug’s Life + young Elijah Woods + a 400-year-old rat plague + more) that spotlight a one-of-a-kind POV at work.

In today’s non-stop world of fashion, breaking through can seem nearly impossible. I caught up with Devin and Andrea to talk about what makes the Street Grandma brand tick and how they successfully chase timelessness in an industry driven by trends.

In an interview back in 2021 — not long after Street Grandma was born — you talked about standing up a company that’s about more than just products, but that’s actually a platform to showcase the people who wear your clothes. Five years later, how has this ambition shaped your approach to building Street Grandma’s brand?

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

We intuited from the beginning that it was not only about the clothes. It was about the style that we loved — about women’s style — and this gap in the market that we felt like we were really searching for. And so, we realized that not only did we want to provide those clothes for ourselves, but we also wanted to connect with the other women who want these clothes, too, and see what happens. Which is to say that our approach has been to market both the clothes themselves and the mindset behind the clothes.

And I feel a real sense of gratitude for how fun it’s been getting to really engage with those people, to connect with women that feel like us, who are kind of tomboyish, but also incredibly girly. For us that has meant trying to connect with them emotionally while also communicating: Hey, you might also like these kinds of clothes, because you’re tapped into culture in the same way we are.

Given that approach, in what ways do those people become part of the Street Grandma brand story?

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

When we first started, there was this person that we always described to ourselves as “Street Grandma.” And we did so many exercises about who that person was until we started calling all those girls we wanted to reach “street grandmas.” It became an actual noun. And we could see who those girls were so clearly. It’s like this roster of girls who represent a particular style and attitude. And throughout the years, as we’ve gotten closer and closer to Street Grandma [the persona], it’s just become much more clear who street grandmas are. Very free, very funny, but kind of sensitive….

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

And she’s also interested in the culture, interested in fashion, tapped into it, but in a way that’s accessible, not pretentious, not unkind, not mysterious — but also not uncool. Still cool!

We love fashion, but we also really hate feeling excluded or uncomfortable in retail settings, at events. We try to find people that feel this way, too.

You have an L.A. showroom, but it’s not a brick-and-mortar shop that’s open all the time, and you’re not sold through other retailers. Most of your sales appear to be direct-to-consumer online. Given your identity as an independent, niche brand, how do you successfully market yourselves to that specific audience you’re after?

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

Most of our marketing is through Instagram and TikTok, and we show up through a combination of photos of products, photos of people in the products, and memes. We want our photoshoots to feel fun and to create a story that draws people in. The objective needs to be more than to just feel cool. We’re interested in creating a story for people to follow — one that really connects with our customers and connects to us.

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

The other thing that has been really successful for us is marketing the brand as Devin and me — us, as people. We don’t want to be influencers, but we have to be part of the story. I think a lot of people are really interested in the process behind the business. When we started [back in 2020] we were like: Okay, we have enough figured out, we know what we’re talking about, but we also know there’s a lot of room to grow. People want to see that trajectory. And people have really connected with us as two girls who are absolutely bootstrapped — like, no outside resources, no investors, just trying to make this thing work, doing everything that we can, you know? And people are invested. For the people that like Street Grandma, I think part of it is definitely the clothes, the photo shoots, and all that stuff, but I also think that they like the story about the two of us trying to be an independent brand in L.A. People want to do that themselves, which is why they want to follow along.

This seems like a founder-friendly moment we’re in right now. People want to identify with brands, which means they want a sense of the people behind the brand. And they’re also interested in how the brand operates behind the scenes — how you manufacture, how you produce the stuff that you produce. From the beginning, you’ve had a real focus on sustainability and making sure that things are ethically sourced and produced. How do you see those values playing into your public-facing brand story?

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

The finished product is what most people see, but I think people have become really interested in the back of house, too. They think it’s really cool that we’re right there making everything. We actually have this series on Instagram that takes you behind the scenes, and it’s been really fun to bring that lens into the showroom.

To answer your question, the sustainability part is a big pillar in terms of how we operate, but I don’t know if it’s a big part of the brand story. What do you think, Devin?

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

I think when we started, it was one of the most talked about pillars of the brand, and that was because it was part of the foundation we’re built on. Andrea had just finished her master’s in environmental science, and we were like: We can’t compromise on this. We’re not making something if we’re going to pollute the earth. So, it was something we talked about a lot initially. But now it almost feels common to care about these things, like it’s almost assumed.

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

And we’ve never felt the need to really turn these into talking points. These are the things we just felt like we’re supposed to be doing, so they’re operating values.

To state the obvious, you’re working in fashion. It’s a fast-paced industry. And because it’s so fast-moving, I’d imagine it can be easy to lose your sense of self as you chase trends and ever-changing market appetites. How do you avoid that trap and allow yourselves to stay focused on who you are and what you’re doing?

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

I love this question, because this is what made me want Street Grandma to exist in the first place. There’s so much about our style that’s in our name — Street Grandma — and we can’t really stray from that. We’re not chasing trends. We’re in an area of style that we felt was missing, and that’s created this really clear North Star that we always return to. Sure, the exact interpretation of those two words [Street Grandma] has changed and shifted a little over the years. But from the beginning, we’ve always been very interested in exaggerated silhouettes. And that’s given us space to be interested in [the act of] exaggerating things — things that can feel different, things that can exist in unexpected contexts.

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

And while we love the exaggerated, we’re also two people that hate any type of fussy things. Everything that stands the test of time always ends up being functional and comfortable. We talk about this all the time when we’re in the design process. This looks really good and we look fabulous and we’re really happy about that, but is this gonna make me want to rip my skin off? That’s the measure of success. I just can’t be choked by my clothes. I can’t be itchy. And ultimately, that does help with the trend chasing, you know? At our core, we just kind of want to be comfortable.

The So What

Given that, I’m wondering what you make of what fashion designer Anna Sui has said: “To me, fashion is like a mirror. It’s a reflection of the times. And if it doesn’t reflect the times, it’s not fashion.” What are your thoughts on that? And in what ways would you say Street Grandma reflects the cultural moment we’re living in right now?

STREET GRANDMA: ANDREA

I think it can be hard to pinpoint how we’re reflecting a cultural moment, because culture is so fragmented. When I was younger, it felt like everybody was watching the same show, like there was so much more unity in everything that we were consuming. But now it moves so fast. Everybody has their own algorithm. Nobody is really on the same page.

So, for us, we’ve been trying to create a more insulated space, where we do stories that are very, very specific. They are stuck in a moment of time, and they don’t move outside of this time. We try to take people back to a specific feeling of nostalgia or memory, to a specific kind of world, and fully immerse everybody in it. Last year, for instance, when we were doing our wedding collection, we imagined a very specific, fake wedding, and we said we’re not using any kind of language or any visuals that are outside of that wedding world. We want to give people a place to stand still for a minute and enjoy themselves.

STREET GRANDMA: DEVIN

Caleb Hearon, the comedian, had this great quote that I can’t stop thinking about: “I do think that we’re in a cool recession. There’s too many people trying to do things they think are cool. More people need to do what they want to do and then tell us why it’s cool.” If we’re just trying to reflect what the culture is, then we’re only getting this really diluted version of cool. So, we never forget to keep looking at each other and asking: What do you think is cool? What do you think is cool? We would rather spend time convincing people that what we’ve decided is cool is actually cool than always chasing culture and just becoming some diluted version of what everyone else is already doing.

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About a week ago, a Bronx-born woman, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, sat on a New York City subway car and proclaimed that you can’t be a New Yorker unless you were born there. Half the Internet agreed. Half absolutely lost their minds.

Why did J.Lo’s hot take hit so hard?

First of all, we need to understand the context of the moment. This video dropped days before the New York Knicks were set to play game three of the NBA finals back in New York. The Knicks hadn’t been in the finals since 1999, so tensions were naturally high. At the same time, this conversation was playing out amidst the backdrop of the FIFA World Cup, where 47 nations visiting North America are playing 104 matches over the coming weeks. If you were looking to celebrate or mourn some part of your identity, this summer is certainly a good moment for it.

Especially since we are currently living in what some are calling a “connection recession.” The institutions, places, and narratives that have always given us a sense of belonging have been eroding faster than they can be replaced. National identity can be confusing or complicated. Church membership continues to drop. And the post-pandemic workplace is a shambles. This leaves people searching for connection, that all-important feeling of belonging. And where’s an easier place to find connections than sports teams?

Connection can often come from shared suffering, too. Speaking of, let’s go back to the Knicks for a second. Twenty-five years of shared agony is something that is endured together. It can become a big part of your shared identity, and it’s a long enough period of time for it to be passed down to the next generation. A gift of suffering generously handed from parent to child. It’s also why J.Lo saying you have to be born in one of the five boroughs to be a New Yorker can resonate with people. Identity is more powerful when there is scarcity to it. It’s even more special when not everyone can claim it. Especially in a larger cultural moment that feels so contentious and confusing, for better or for worse, people look for the hard edges to bind themselves together. If you didn’t wallow in yearly disappointment for a quarter century, you didn’t earn inclusion into the club.

Connection can be about defiance, too. This is evident in Boston ahead of the Scotland group stage World Cup games. The Tartan Army has arrived with their kilts and bagpipes and have joyfully taken over the city. Not content with winning their first game, 5,000 Scots also took over a Red Sox game and essentially sang in unison for nine innings. Scotland never makes it out of the group stage and everyone knows it, but they know the party is the point regardless. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, Mexican team fans easily sold out Azteca Stadium for their first game. Their fans had no problem paying high ticket prices to represent their team at a historic site that hosted one of the most mythic moments in World Cup history — Maradona’s Goal of the Century in 1986. Meanwhile, the US Men’s National Team game was sitting with thousands of unsold tickets days before kickoff. Scottish and Mexican fandom is inherited, but the U.S. fandom is still being built.

So what does this summer of sports really mean for brands — and how can they join the party? Because we’re in a connection recession, people are searching for belonging, but simultaneously scrutinizing it as well. Whether connection is built on suffering, defiance, or shared identity, communities develop a sharp instinct for who belongs and who just showed up for the highlight reel. This especially applies to brands. You can choose to glom onto cultural moments for your own benefit or you can find synergies between your brand and communities that already exist.

A great example of this around the Knicks was the collaboration between the team and the beauty brand Saie, an official sponsor of the Knicks and the New York City dancers and the first-ever beauty brand to become an exclusive sponsor of the team. At first glance, it’s a surprising pairing, a clean beauty brand stepping into the center of basketball culture at Madison Square Garden. So what right does it have to be there?

From the Saie Office

The Story Behind Our Knicks Partnership

We have big plans for tonight: Cheering on the New York Knicks in Game 3 of the NBA Finals—and we could not be more excited…

Read more

3 months ago · 33 likes · 4 comments · From the Saie Office

You could argue, like J.Lo, that Saie earned it on geography alone because they’re a New York brand. But I’d argue that’s not enough.

What Saie did was dig past the surface and find the part of their identity that genuinely mapped onto who was actually in that building. Women have been in the stands at Knicks games forever, consistently present, yet consistently overlooked. In a way, that fanbase is not so different from the Knicks themselves, a team that had been there, waiting, long before their championship moment arrived.

Take it from the Saie team themselves:

Laney looked around at the crowd — all these women, completely locked in, completely lit up — and realized: not a single brand was talking to them directly. That realization became a lightbulb moment.

That lightbulb moment, I’d guess, was that the women in MSG had been through their own kind of drought — waiting for a brand to pay attention to them. Saie understood that Knicks fans were a community, not just an audience. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Audiences are assembled, but communities organically exist. Typically, brands build audiences, not communities, but they certainly can discover them, recognize them, and find authentic ways of lending them a hand.

The So What

The Knicks just won the NBA Finals for the first time since 1973. If you’ve been a fan throughout the drought, you don’t need anyone to explain what that means to you. And if you haven’t, no amount of explanation will suffice. That connection — between people who lived it and people who watched it — is exactly what brands need to understand about the moment.

This summer of sports is really a stress test for belonging. Who’s here, who’s earned it, and who’s just showing up for the highlight reel. In a connection recession, people aren’t just hungry for belonging; they can also be protective about it. They notice who shows up in important moments, and why. In Saie’s case, they looked around MSG and noticed women in the crowd that every other brand was ignoring. So they celebrated them.

So, if we return to J.Lo’s hot take, no, you don’t have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker. Or to be a Knicks fan. Or even to be a Knicks sponsor. But you do have to know what it means to show up and belong.

The brands that break through culturally this summer won’t be the loudest or the most clever — they will be the ones that understand that the celebration only means something because of everything that came before it.

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I rarely, if ever, feel completely assured of my ideas. Be it due to tight timelines, secret stakeholders, or (most likely) my own neuroses, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt to 100% confident in any creative decision I’ve ever made.

That was until last Monday, the beginning of round four of the Artemis Ward Music League (If you’ve never participated in a Music League, think Cards Against Humanity meets Turntable.FM: players anonymously submit songs based on a weekly theme then vote on their favorites; the person with the most points at the end of the season wins). As soon as I saw the prompt, I was hit with a bolt of divine clarity, a transcendent confidence as my mind, body, and spirit aligned toward absolute truth. A song that references a famous person? There was but one answer: “B---- I’m Bill Clinton” by Lil B “The Based God” (a track that, if not made clear by its title, is not safe for sensitive ears).

My submission quickly hit a snag — all but three releases from Lil B’s discography of 70 mixtapes, 10 albums, and 3 EPs have been removed from streaming services. And with Music League powered exclusively by Spotify, my hopes of a round four victory were dashed.

Experiences like mine have become increasingly common. While MP3s and MP4s purchased on iTunes 20 years ago will work on any phone, computer, or television, there’s no guarantee that the files currently available through digital service providers (DSPs) will be there next month, let alone next year. How many times have you logged onto Spotify, Netflix, or HBO Max only to discover the thing you’re looking for is no longer available?

The original promise of the streaming era was one of convenience: we’d trade the costs of ownership for the ability to stream any song, show, or movie we’d like anytime, anywhere, all for the price of a cup of coffee. But as of late, it doesn’t feel like DSPs have held up their end of the bargain, and the market has responded accordingly. Over the last year, physical album sales increased while digital albums sales decreased, print book sales have risen for the first time in three years, and 4K UHD Blu-Ray sales rose for the first time since 2018. We’re experiencing a collective subscription fatigue, and as a result physical media more popular than it’s been in years.

I like to think of physical media’s resurgence as a manifestation of the “Slippy Mindset,” a term originally coined within the IndieWeb community that I think just as well applies to how many people are redefining their relationship with technology writ large. According to technologist Lu Wilson, who coined the phrase, slippyness is the opposite of stickiness. It’s a way of using technology that keeps you from being locked into a particular platform. If you’re slippy, when a technology breaks, or changes, or gets enshittified, you aren’t locked in. You can take your stuff and go elsewhere. If it sucks, you can hit the bricks.

Being slippy means you’re not stuck.

When you’re slippy, it’s easy to change plan, or rebuild something from scratch. It means you’re not locked in to using a certain tool.

If something breaks, you can choose to fix it, or let it die. It’s ok, because it won’t take long to rebuild it from scratch. - Lu Wilson

To be slippy is to use technology in a way that minimizes switching costs. Physical media is inherently slippy. If you don’t like your Blu-Ray player, you can buy a new one without having to worry about whether or not your DVDs are going to work. Digital platforms, however, are not. You can’t leave HBO Max without losing The Sopranos. You cant leave ESPN Unlimited without losing the ability to watch the NBA Finals.

And once you start to look for it, slippyness starts to show up everywhere. Want a new pair of headphones? Bluetooth is how you know that whatever you pick will work with your phone. Eying a new wallet? Thanks to ISO 7810, you can rest assured knowing that any credit card, photo ID, or hotel room key will fit. Thinking about a new car? SAE J285 is what ensures your ability to refill at any gas station.

Slippyness is the interoperability that makes the world work. Imagine choosing your television based on what kind of cables it used, or your email provider based on what kind of emails it was compatible with. It’s no surprise then that people are beginning to recoil at the idea of being locked into their DSPs.

The So What

It can be tempting to think of technology as as a story of linear, irreversible improvement, to believe that what comes next is inevitably better than what came before. The wheel as the first in a chain of advancements that led to the EV, the abacus the first in a chain that led to the internet. Movie theaters gave way to VHSs, VHSs to DVDs, and DVDs to streaming. What comes next will be even better, and then we’re never going back. Right?

Of course not. Progress is a myth. Computers are getting larger, not smaller. Life expectancy has plateaued, the current generation has fewer rights than their parents. Culture is stuck.

Depressing? Yes. But also, somewhat liberating? When technology stops feeling inevitable, it also stops feeling mandatory. What physical media’s resurgence teaches us is that people don’t want technology; they want control. And, when given the choice, they’ll choose interoperability over exclusivity every time.

Which brings me back to last Monday’s Music League submission. With Lil B’s Red Flame missing from streaming services, not only was “B---- I’m Bill Clinton” unavailable, but that moment (and my inevitable round four victory) was unrecoverable.

My solution? “Im Paris Hilton.” Also Lil B, but from the Blue Flame mixtape, which is on Spotify (for now). Also, however, not the right answer. I came in third.

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Read on for “the so what” behind the Off Campus product placement palooza.

If you (1) have been online sometime within the past two weeks, (2) are a BookTok boy or girlie, or (3) are within three degrees of someone who is, you’ve probably heard of Off Campus: Amazon Prime’s hit new steamy drama based on Elle Kennedy’s books that has viewers across the country kicking their feet like it’s swim practice. Hot off the heels of its book-based, FYP-sweeping cousins Heated Rivalry and The Summer I Turned Pretty (Season 3), the show is the latest in a string of streaming triumphs that have almost instantly spun up ravenous binge-watching fandoms. And with a sniff of success, as we all know, comes brands wanting to get in on the action.

So, though many a So What writer would gladly chat about their biggest swoons with you (hit up our comments and ), the thirst trap I’m covering today doesn’t involve hockey hunks. Nay, we’re staying hydrated with the endless stream of product placement that Liquid IV delivered across the eight episodes of Off Campus Season 1.

For those unaware, Liquid IV wasn’t just tucked away in an offhand moment during one episode. Rather, the brand was woven into a primary arc of the show’s plot (sponsorship of the fictional Briar University’s hockey team) — along with shoppable pause ads and a 30-second spot featuring the in-character actors. And while there was also no shortage of space for run-of-the-mill product placements (see TikTok and Reddit for proof), it was Liquid IV’s brazen integration into the storyline that caught my eye.

As Carina Adly Mackenzie, a showrunner and novelist who has navigated these deals herself, pointed out on Threads, the brand’s fictional “sponsorship” was a vehicle to introduce genuine conversations about the characters’ financial situations, further relationships, point out how corny ad shoots can feel, and even hint at how many buyers really use the product: for a hangover-killing hydration boost following a night out. The brand didn’t mandate unrealistic positivity, but rather tried to find legitimate, human ways into the conversation.

That’s not to say that everyone instantaneously accepted the product placement. Plenty of people took to the internet to spoof over-the-top sponcon or even share how the advertising made them want to buy the product less. And many of the scenes (cough, the bar scene) could feel shaky in their execution to ad-attuned viewers. But by and large, the parties of this partnership are likely marking this a success: the show got its funding and exploded in popularity while the brand got immense exposure and faced relatively little internet skewering.

Ultimately, whether or not Liquid IV executed a smooth landing is up to you to decide; what we’re more interested in is the self-awareness with which they did it all. Not only was the brand clearly in on the bit during the show itself, it kept that same energy in its ads and social presence as the show took over our algorithms, including replies to seemingly every post mentioning Liquid IV (see here, here, here, and here) as well as its own organic online sarcasm. This extended, meta humor bought the brand even more grace, turning what could have been viewer ire over sponslop into a harmless joke at worst and appreciation for unobtrusive show funding at best.

In today’s age of everything-has-and-is-advertising and brands-have-tried-everything-under-the-sun sponsorships, meta humor and self awareness is hardly a new tactic writ large, but its application to product placement in Off Campus might be.

Yet just because it worked for Liquid IV doesn’t mean I’d giving a resounding endorsement for other brands to follow suit. For one, they’d have to have the same instincts when it comes to finding a show ready for insta-stardom, a plot line where their product slots easily into the characters’ world, and the willingness to be butt of the joke. But even with that perfect trifecta, I don’t think this is a solidified strategy moving forward. At best, it’s a brief, fragile détente.

Because now that it’s been done once, the window where self-aware product integration feels disarming rather than disappointing is already closing. Once every show is doing meta placement, it stops being charming and becomes another irritating trope. The distance between cool and cringe is a lot closer than you might think.

So the ultimate pattern to pull from this thirst trap is that self-awareness, like any other bit, has a half-life. It’s a hard thing to replicate on purpose, because the moment it becomes a playbook, it’s just another recognizable piece of the performance. Audiences have already learned to see through one layer of advertising. They’ll learn to see through two.

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Read on for “the so what” of the internet’s new favorite girl group.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been really bored by TikTok lately. Despite the brief reprieve of Off Campus edits I’ve been enjoying, I haven’t seen anything truly new or noteworthy in a while. (And no — the Butterfield dot cakes don’t count.)

That is, until one week ago, when I found The 4 in the 5.

Who’s that, you ask? Well, I’ll allow them to introduce themselves:

@4inthe5Mind you, this is your first impression of us. 🤭 Welcome to The 4 in the 5 Boroughs! We hope you stick around. #4inthe5 #nyc #corporategirlies #friendgroup #blackwomen @Yvanna Bollanga @Drew Townsel @Ms. Sade @Madisen Sue

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Okay, okay. If you’re feeling a little lazy or not in the mood to watch a TikTok, I’ll help you out. The 4 in the 5 are four women living across the five boroughs of New York City (ha, get it?). There’s Yvanna, the glamorous one: a model, ballerina, and social media strategist who loves the spotlight. Then there’s Drew, the ambitious one who works in luxury fashion and owns a media company; Gabi, the stylish one, an investment-banker-turned-private-equity girlie who is most certainly not a finance bro; and Madisen, the outgoing one who balances full-time work in luxury client relations with grad school.

Their introductory video, narrated in an early-2000s movie trailer voice and set to the Sex and the City theme, opens with a simple premise: ”four women in the five boroughs of New York City who are determined to build beautiful, successful lives without sacrificing fun in their twenties.” Who can argue with that? Evidently, not a single one of the 2.7 million people who watched their first video, which racked up 553k likes across TikTok and Instagram.

Most young-twentysomething day-in-the-life making-it-in-New-York-City influencers get served to you once and then disappear forever. So if an account does manage to beat the odds and go viral in a saturated space, it’s worth asking why. I’d argue that the answer lies in their comments section.

“Close enough, welcome back Tony, Maya, Joan and Lynn!!” (A reference, of course, to the early 2000s sitcom Girlfriends)

“I NEED THIS ON NETFLIX”

“Spectacular give me 17 seasons and a prequel”

“Guys, I wanna watch this on Bravo!”

“Glad I found you all during season 1”

“This is everything and more. We the people need episode 2 IMMEDIATELY”

Notice how nobody is commenting like they’re watching an influencer. They’re treating these four women like characters on a TV show. And once you notice that and rewatch their intro video, you realize that’s exactly what The 4 in the 5 is. The intro credits. The narration. The theme song. It’s a pilot in everything but name. And their premise — four women determined to build beautiful, successful lives without sacrificing fun in their twenties — is the same foundation of every girl-group show ever made (think Girls, Girlfriends, The Bold Type, Emily in Paris, I Love LA, and, yes, Sex and the City).

Since their first viral video, The 4 in the 5 have committed fully to the bit. Most of their content follows a TV-show format, complete with episode premises, voiceover narration, and scene transitions cutting between each girl’s day-in-the-life. They do normal TikTok trends, too, but their signature series always follows the same programming: “Welcome back to The 4 in the 5, four girls living in the five boroughs of New York City and doing it fabulously.”

Of course, it wasn’t too long before brands took notice. Just two weeks after The 4 in the 5’s first viral video, Nordstrom came calling. The ad opens on Yvanna asking, “Do you guys know what you’re wearing this weekend?” Gabi replies that she has no idea, and Madisen laments that everything she ordered didn’t make it on time. Gabi suggests shopping in-person at Nordstrom. The narrator interjects: “What started as a hunt for an outfit quickly turned into a full-on shopping spree.” As the story unfolds, you almost forget you’re watching an ad (which is, of course, entirely the point).

Soon after, the rest of the cavalry arrived. In about a month, the girls have landed deals with Nordstrom, UberEats, Coach, Vaseline, e.l.f., and Polène, and yet, every single ad feels like an episode written into a season arc. The UberEats partnership, for example, opens on a glam girl’s nightmare. The narrator sets the scene: “There’s nothing worse than getting ready for a night out and realizing your holy grail product is gone — which is exactly the crisis Drew found herself in tonight.” Drew panics when she realizes she doesn’t have a powder puff, so she calls Yvanna. Yvanna’s out of bronzer, so she adds Madisen. Madisen wants a new fragrance, so she adds Gabi. As the screen splits into a Brady Bunch-esque FaceTime, Gabi comes to the rescue, reminding the girls that Ulta Beauty is now on UberEats, so they can just order whatever they want. UberEats saves the day, and the girls get their essentials just in the nick of time. Phew! (And before you roll your eyes at the brand deals, remember that product placement has been baked into your favorite shows since, well, forever.)

More than brand attention, perhaps the biggest indicator of The 4 in the 5’s influence is that they already have their first copycat. Just ten days ago, an account called @4thegirlsatl appeared on TikTok, their first video opening with, “Welcome to Four the Girls, four girls in Atlanta building careers, navigating life, and redefining what having it all actually looks like together.” Sound familiar?

@4thegirlsatlWelcome to Four The Girls🥂 @Ayanna Alexis 🦋⚡️ @Niya Merius @Alicia.aes @Allanahjoi Inspired by the girls who showed us what’s possible @The 4 in the 5

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Sure, there are a few tweaks. The girls narrate the videos themselves instead of using the now-signature AI movie-trailer voice. The soundtrack swaps the Sex and the City theme for Saweetie and Doja Cat’s “Best Friend.” But, structurally, the resemblance is hard to ignore. It’s the same episodic format and the same ensemble dynamic, just in a different area code. Whether this qualifies as inspiration, imitation, or the internet’s newest IP discourse is a debate best left to the comments section. What the appearance of @4thegirlsatl does confirm, however, is that this style of episodic girl-group storytelling has become compelling — and valuable — enough to replicate.

So what, exactly, makes this format so successful? I’d argue The 4 in the 5 matter for two reasons, and they’re worth unpacking separately before you see how they work together.

The first is a phenomenon I like to call the rising star creator. Unlike the micro-influencer grinding it out for years, the rising star is a normal person who happens to go viral with their first video. Audiences latch onto them because of their relatability (they’re normal people, after all) and aspirational qualities (because their success reminds them of the American Dream of celebrity). As the rising star grows in popularity, their fanbase is rooting for them to succeed — even to land their first paid partnership. Brands that work with the rising star early (like Nordstrom) get to be part of their story, signaling to audiences that they’re paying attention to the same things they are. That cultural fluency cannot be underestimated.

The second is an argument that’s been circulating recently: your FYP is the new TV network. Recently, Betches sparked a debate about whether the eight-episode-season era is killing TV culture, mourning a time when “you knew when you signed up to watch a TV show…you were committing at least 8 months of your life to the cause.” That kind of devotion — the slow burn, the character arcs, the will-they-won’t-they you had to wait seven days to resolve — streaming largely abandoned in favor of tight, tidy limited runs. But the appetite never went away. Gen Z grew up binge-watching, and now that there’s barely anything left to binge, they’re hungry for something worth committing to. Take one viewer, who left this comment on The 4 in the 5‘s page: “can yall post more I binged everything now im having withdrawals.” That kind of parasocial relationship used to take three seasons to build. The 4 in the 5 did it in a matter of weeks. And if you need any more convincing that FYP is a network, look no further than the @4thegirlsatl debate. Audiences were quick to point to The Real Housewives and its eleven franchises as a precedent. Good formats get replicated. That’s just television, baby.

When you put these two things together — the intimacy of a rising star with the structure of episodic entertainment — you strike gold: the conditions for fandom. The next great show might already be on your FYP, accumulating a fanbase that is fiercely loyal and eager for them to go mainstream. Brands that understand that episodic TikTok content is a fundamental shift in how stories are told and how audiences form are the ones audiences will remember as being there during season one. After all, nobody brags about finding a show after it gets big.

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We’re Olivia, Ryan, Quinten, Colin, and Chris, five writers who see culture a little differently. By day, the five of us work at Artemis Ward, an independent strategy-led creative agency with offices in DC and NYC.

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The internet already has plenty of people telling you what’s happening. What’s harder to find is the why — what a cultural moment actually reveals about audiences, attention, identity, relevance, and where things are heading next.

That means we don’t stop at what happened, what’s trending, or what went viral. We go further: why this resonated, what it reveals about where culture is heading, and what brands, marketers, and creatives should actually do with it.

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Culture moves through memes, sports, fashion, fandoms, creators, algorithms, aesthetics, brand campaigns, and niche communities most people haven’t discovered yet. No one person can cover all of it. So we built a team instead. Each of us brings something the others don’t, covering a different corner of the internet and the world around it.

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Meet the team.

Name: Olivia DuCharme

Role: Director of Content at Artemis Ward

What I Write About: What’s going viral and why

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Name: Ryan Weicht

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While Leetha Filderman’s multi-dimensional career has spanned public health, strategic planning, fundraising, and more, there’s a common thread that holds everything together: an obsession with the power of collaboration to bring about social change. So, it’s little wonder that she found her way to PopTech, a global community that fosters conversations and collaborations at the intersection of technology, science, and creative expression in order to accelerate positive change in the world around us. At the center of this community is an annual forum that Wired Magazine has called “the TED for real thinkers.”

PopTech was started in 1996 (ten years before Leetha arrived on the scene) by former Apple CEO John Sculley and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe. Back then, it was hosted in the small, coastal town of Camden, Maine, and was called the Camden Technology Conference — an annual gathering focused squarely on the social impacts of information technology and other emerging innovations. By the time Leetha joined the organization in 2006, initially to co-design the impact side of the org, the name had changed to Pop!Tech (the exclamation point has since been retired) and PopTech had begun its evolution from tech to broader topics around science, creativity, and culture. Just look at the hundreds of speakers and performers who’ve participated in PopTech over the years, including Adam Gopnik, Malcolm Gladwell, John Fetterman, Esther Perel, Marcia McNutt, John Legend, Jill Sobule, Reggie Watts, and, as Leetha will proudly remind you, hundreds of speakers who are not yet household names but are leading pioneers in their fields.

As Leetha steers PopTech into its 30th year, she’s ready to build on this legacy while keeping her eyes squarely on the future. We caught up to get her take on driving cultural conversation, cultivating loyal communities, never losing sight of the reasons you’re bringing people together in the first place, and curating the 30th annual PopTech forum, which is coming this October to Washington, D.C.

I want to start with a big congratulations. Poptech is celebrating its 30th year — such a big milestone. In what ways has PopTech morphed since its founding to stay relevant and remain on the cutting edge of cultural conversation?

We have always worked in an ultra-competitive space. We’re compared to TED, Aspen Ideas, SXSW, and Skoll World Forum. We applaud all these entities and have lots of colleagues across all of them. But to make sure PopTech’s best is yet to come, we remain focused on delivering what’s always been distinctive to what we do, constantly innovating, constantly looking at what’s next. We’re not really into nostalgia and looking to the past. The past is our springboard into the future.

Our first decade was about exploring the impact of rapidly emerging technology on society. The second decade coincided with the dawn of the “thought leadership forum” — when TED transitioned from an intimate Monterey gathering to something much bigger, and a real market for what I would call “knowledge media” emerged. At this time, PopTech became highly regarded for our curatorial expertise by identifying and spotlighting relatively unknown thought leaders in science, tech and the creative arts — something that’s been a distinctive hallmark of PopTech ever since. The next chapter was really about acting on the ideas and inspiration coming from the stage and connecting people — people in the audience, people on the stage — by creating a structure to act on what they heard. So, while our yearly forum is our public-facing, most known entity, we’ve grown an entire portfolio of high-impact projects. To support that work, we designed two fellows programs that have mentored and accelerated the work of emerging innovators, scientists, and creative individuals, many of whom have collaborated with us on projects. As we look toward our fourth decade, we are amplifying our commitment to stewardship and community-building.

In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker talks about this centuries-old Japanese practice called ichi-go ichi-e, which roughly means “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” Based on what you’ve just described, I think this really captures the spirit of PopTech — the way that you embrace the uniqueness of the experience each time you bring people together, especially your annual forums. How do you make each gathering a one-of-a-kind experience? What are the elements that set you apart from those other competitors you talked about earlier?

For many years now, we’ve had a theme for each year’s forum. It’s not a literal thing; we don’t say, we are literally going to discuss XYZ. It’s primarily a way to define the moment we’re in as a society. And I think that brings vibrancy, energy, and relevancy to our work.

Another key ingredient is that we always try to bring in new voices. A lot of the people on stage are experts within their respective fields, but they are not well-known to the general population. If you ask people who come to PopTech what our secret sauce is, they say: I go to PopTech to hear presenters talk about what’s next, and then literally a year or two later, I see them on the TED stage. So, for us, I think it’s about always bringing in new voices both on the stage and in the audience.

And finally, we are committed to diversity, intimacy, and a spirit of generosity. This spirit of generosity is often not recognized from the outside, but once you’re part of PopTech, you see that it is the foundational element of the organization. People are ready to give, support, share, learn, push back — whatever’s needed.

“In so many ways, PopTech is the quintessential American brand. We convene, we ideate, we debate, we celebrate great ideas — all of which shape the American Dream.”

I love that. I think that spirit of generosity is also what makes you a real community and not just a forum or an event series. So, it makes sense that, these days, PopTech encompasses an entire network of people that are active all year long, in different places. What’s your approach to community building and how do you make sure that the waters remain fresh?

We, as an organization, have always been driven toward the common goal of meaningful human connection. What does that mean? And how do you pull that off? These are the questions we constantly ask ourselves. Because some connections happen naturally, but a lot of them have to be thoughtfully engineered, for lack of a better word.

In the case of our annual forum, that means learning together, conversing together, disagreeing together, debating. When you have that openness — that acceptance that it’s okay if you don’t agree with me, but we’re going to find a civil way, not a polarizing way, to have that exchange and recognize our differences — then community starts to happen. Coming to a shared respect for a cultural moment, or a political movement, or a scientific discovery — that takes effort. And if you invest the time to have a genuine back-and-forth conversation and an openness to hearing both sides of the coin, I think you’re tapping into something that’s really defining for us at PopTech.

This year not only marks PopTech’s 30th birthday, but also America’s 250th birthday. This year’s conference theme is Civil, which I’m guessing is no accident, given where we are as a country heading into America 250. How do you hope that PopTech can participate in our current national conversation?

You know, we’re not a political organization — that’s not our goal, not our mission, it’s nowhere in our bylaws. If anything, we’re agnostic in terms of political sides, and I think it’s been really important for us to stick to that. Do politics surface in these conversations? Yes, of course they do. We’re a global convener and we have people on our stage and in our community who come with diverse ideologies. To be honest, we didn’t give a lot of thought to the 250th anniversary of our country because we aren’t a political or a national brand.

And yet, in so many ways, PopTech is the quintessential American brand, right? We convene, we ideate, we debate, we celebrate great ideas — all of which shape the American Dream.

So, the theme for this year — civil — isn’t political commentary; it’s a reflection of where we are as a country and a world right now. And if you throw that word out to any group of people, everybody’s going to have a different association with it. Civil liberties. Civil servants. Civil rights. Civil disobedience. Civil society. It’s a complex word that’s so distinct for this moment in time. We’re in a moment that’s broadly defined by fragmentation, pessimism, information overload — things that are recurring stressors for people. Yet in the midst of this, we’re committed to finding pathways to meeting, learning, thinking, and building together.

“The ability to bring people together intentionally and in a meaningful, goal-driven manner is critical.”

You clearly think a lot about what it means to bring people together in purposeful ways. To broaden out a little beyond PopTech, we’re seeing an ever-growing appetite among brands to curate and host valuable in-person experiences that let them really cultivate communities and connect with their audiences in ways that are memorable and — to use your word — meaningful. Do you have any advice for brand leaders who are leaning into strategies that include substantive in-real-life experiences for their audiences?

We will see more changes in the next three years than we will have seen in the last 30. In a moment of AI prowess — technology that could potentially outpace us, depending on who you read at any given moment — the ability to bring people together intentionally and in a meaningful, goal-driven manner is critical. It’s probably more important now than it was ten years ago, when it was much easier to come together — when you actually came together every day at the office, and as a family, a time when we were not as far-flung. I think being together in person — as long as there’s a meaningful goal that you’re trying to accomplish — is more important now than ever.

So, for me and for PopTech, our priority is bringing people of diverse backgrounds together to provide an opportunity for shared learning, ideation, and an expanded sense of self. To come together in meaningful ways. And I think if brands can do that — that is, make people feel like they’re part of something meaningful — then they’ll be on the right track, too.

📲 Keep up with Leetha on LinkedIn, and follow PopTech on Instagram for all the latest — registration for this year’s PopTech is open now.

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Refilling someone’s wine glass at the exact moment they reach for it. Welcoming a quiet guest into a conversation she’s been hovering on the edge of. Making four-course meals appear out of thin air. We all know the perfect dinner party host when we meet one — the dexterity and generosity that look almost otherworldly, even when we know the real trick is that they cared enough to pay attention.

This is the point in the story where I admit that I got something wrong in my last piece, Brain Rot Dropout Club. Or at least I got the vantage point wrong. My premise was that we need to serve our audiences a consistent and steady diet of high-quality content to be effective. I got the role wrong. The brand isn’t the chef; it’s the host.

Creating durable brands in this day and age isn’t about cooking constantly, serving too soon, and obsessing over how much was eaten. Yes, the quality of what you serve matters, but so does the kind of room you are creating. The buffet line that most brands are creating may feed our algorithms and drive attention, but it doesn’t necessarily build durability. Durable brands are like a dinner party: fewer dishes, more intention, and a reason to stay.

A durable brand is one that doesn’t have to keep reintroducing itself. It builds rather than refreshes — it gets more recognizable, more trusted and more itself the longer it stays in the conversation.

A recent example that brings this home beautifully is Rachel Karten’s interview with FIGS CMO Bené Eaton on the role of social media in their brand. FIGS makes medical uniforms. Oh, and a tux for Noah Wyle, actor in medical dramas like The Pitt and ER, for the Emmy Awards.

@wearfigsWith Noah Wyle and eighteen healthcare professionals, advocating for YOU. #wearFIGS

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Everything FIGS does “is about telling the story of the people who are wearing FIGS.” This, to me, was the pivotal line from the interview: “Social is where we listen, learn, and reflect our community back to itself.” The best listeners are the best hosts. And in a world where we are tired of being marketed to, it’s refreshing to be invited in. Another brand that takes this concept to the logical extreme is fashion brand Aimé Leon Dore, who has famously created a “neighborhood as brand world” in their native Queens, N.Y. — where they utilize “friends and family” casting for their content and even have a real table in their café.

There’s another morsel in the FIGS story that stands out. Eaton credits FIGS’ in-house team for much of their success due to their proximity to the work. I’d push back gently and say proximity isn’t the dominant variable. It’s familiarity. A consistent team, either in-house or out, that takes the time to listen and learn and truly get to know your audience can accomplish what churn or deaf ears can’t. Cycling through people or agencies and brand new campaigns creates breaks in the conversation and more work for your audience.

A durable brand is a dialogic brand. One that keeps meaningful conversations going with their audiences over time, so familiarity and connection build instead of resetting each quarter. Brand affinity is born from the discipline to stay in the conversation with a known audience for long enough that they see themselves in it. As Priya Parker, the author of The Art of Gathering, writes, “A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others.” That’s the move we should all aspire to.

The algorithms and the metrics tend to reward those that talk the loudest. But nobody wants to be cornered by the loudest person at the dinner party. We want to be at a party with a good host who creates an environment where everyone feels represented in the conversation. This requires a strong sense of self, patience, and trust in your audience. But the rewards are worth it, because the brands that figure this out will be the places where audiences feel comfortable pulling up a chair and staying a while.

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Last year, I wrote about the phones-free listening party Tyler the Creator held for his album Don’t Tap the Glass. Inspired by the fear of being filmed that kept his friends from dancing in public, the session offered a brief escape from the digital panopticon we find ourselves in, a place where people could — quite literally — dance like no one is watching (or filming, as it were).

Around the time of Tyler’s listening party, similar conversations were happening in dance music, as DJs around the world began seeing fewer people dancing and more people crowding DJ booths to capture content. Over the course of the last year, the conversation around cell phones and live music has only gotten louder, reaching its apex this month at Coachella, where video after video of the festival’s seemingly lifeless crowds went viral.

@keira.smallwoodLike why is everyone always so still 😭😭 #coachella

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For olds like myself, who can remember getting same-day Lollapalooza tickets for 80 bucks (and have the confirmation email prove it), the scenes from Coachella are particularly jarring. Keepsakes have always been an important part of concert-going. Merch, photography, live albums, ticket stubs — all ways people have memorialized the time they got to see their favorite bands. However, for us memorializing was secondary to singing, dancing, and otherwise enjoying the music. If the dispatches from Coachella are to be believed, it seems that memorialization has become the point entirely.

The videos coming out of the festival are reflective of a shift in the way audiences of any event — from community gatherings to multi-million dollar brand activations — are participating in culture. If you’re reading this piece, you’re probably involved in the creation of cultural events in some capacity. The Gen Z Stare has come for General Admission. What’s your game plan?

@shanbrown.1The UK could NEVER! Why was everyone doing the mannequin challenge all of a sudden? 😂 #justinbieber #coachella #tems #wizkid #esscence

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It’s no coincidence that the music festival’s recent growth in popularity occurred alongside the growth of Instagram. Coachella is the preeminent music festival precisely because of its grammability. The desert, the celebrities, the kitsch of Palm Springs — you’d be hard-pressed to find a better place from which to post.

However, zombified crowds aren’t exclusive to Coachella. Rachel Grace Almeida describes a similar scene in her exploration of mainstream club culture, The Great Regression.

Perhaps it’s debatable whether the dominating dance scene was ever a progressive force that truly broke free from the conventions of society. But what’s clear is that electronic music has increasingly become an attraction rather than an active practice of liberation. Instead, we’re drifting further into a state of neutrality, a cultural void where detachment is being generously rewarded. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the seismic rise of Keinemusik.

...when footage of Keinemusik’s Hï Ibiza set went viral in 2024, it sent all corners of the dance music community into hysterics. In it, a torrent of phones engulf a room full of frozen bodies, a flatlined vibe that not even Port’s mammoth 2024 hit “Move” could resuscitate.*

@tpp.attireAll about the vibes though right guys… #i#ibizar#ravef#fypd#danceh#househ#housemusicd#djd#dc10ibizah#hiibizau#ushuaiap#pachaibizap#pachaa#amnesiaibizac#covasantar#ravescened#dancehousee#edenibizad#dancingm#musicthepartypeople

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Personal recordings have always been a nuisance to the live performer. But only recently has its use bordered on the anti-social. It takes a cursory internet search to find stories of people recording an artist’s entire set, clearing sections of the floor to record TikToks, and even FaceTiming with friends. From Indio to Ibiza, more and more people are beginning to see concerts not as events to experience but as moments to capture. At the same time, we’re seeing artists bristle at their shows becoming conduits for generating content. At clubs like Berghain, door staff put stickers on the front and back of everyone’s phone. At the recording of his live special for Netflix, Harry Styles banned all cellphones and handed out 20,000 disposable cameras. And in borrowing from the world of stand-up comedy, many artists have begun partnering with companies like Yondr to have fans lock their phones away during their sets.

How did we get here? What compels us to take terrible videos of incredible experiences? Why are we spending hundreds of dollars to watch a concert through a six-inch screen?

@breannaogrodnikZiggy got to hear his fav girl ❤️❤️ #jessiemurph #concert#patterdaleterrier #pray #sing @J E S S I E M U R P H

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In his book The Tourist Gaze, the sociologist John Urry describes how photography — being seen and recorded, and seeing others and recording them — became intertwined with modern-day tourism.

*Photography gives shape to travel. It is the reason for stopping, to take (snap) a photograph, and then to move on. Photography involves obligations. People feel that they must not miss seeing particular scenes since otherwise the photo-opportunities will be missed.… Indeed much tourism becomes in effect a search for the photogenic; travel is a strategy for the accumulation of photographs and hence for the commodification and privatisation of personal and especially of family memories….

What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photographic images, which have already been seen in tour company brochures or on TV programmes (see Selwyn, 1996). While the tourist is away, this then moves on to a tracking down and capturing of those images for oneself. And it ends up with travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off.

To the traveler, photography serves as an act of validation: validation that you did what one is supposed to do in a space. Validation that the experience you had matches the one you imagined sharing before setting off. Validation that you actually went there, and it was worth it. And as the philosopher Agnes Callard puts it in The Case Against Travel, validation that “you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.”

In a world where its not unusual for a concert ticket to cost as much as international airfare, and online posting has become “a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting,” it’s not surprising then that the live event has come to resemble the tourist attraction. As with contemporary tourism, the live event, too, has become “a strategy for the accumulation of photographs,” a place where people can track down and capture for themselves the images, videos, and TikTok trends seen on their feeds. How else would you prove that you were actually there? If the reason for going to the concert is to later prove that you had went to the concert, why let something inconsequential like dancing get in the way of a video?

Perhaps, then, we cringe at these videos from Coachella for the same reasons we cringe at the archetypical “tourist” — they both suggest you can capture the entirety of a moment, of a culture, as a digital keepsake. That what something looks like can be a faithful approximation of what it is.

In the world of tourism, this superficiality is often destructive. It’s what the writer Henry Wismayer calls “tourism’s intractable contemporary paradox.”

Here is tourism’s intractable contemporary paradox — that the democratization of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacralizes the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints.… Each revolution designed to make travel more accessible and convenient seems, in time, to exact lamentable collateral costs. Airbnb-style rentals hollow out the very neighborhoods their users profess to cherish. Google Maps, online translators and internet reviews diminish host-visitor interaction and nullify the process of getting lost that is a non-negotiable precondition of serendipitous discovery.

While Wismayer is writing about the tourism here, his analysis rings true for cultural consumption as well.

It’s no wonder then that we (hopefully) find the Coachella vids so jarring. We’re watching a throng of people flatten a thing we love into a pixelated mess. It’s no different than those images of the piles of trash at the basecamp of Mt. Everest or the giant cruise ships parked in the Venetian Lagoon.

Which brings me back to that Tyler the Creator listening party. In many ways (but in fewer words) he was grappling with the same questions artists are asking at the festival stage, the arena show, and the DJ set. The same questions brands need to be asking with every partnership and activation. How can we make this a space where culture is celebrated and not consumed? How do we create moments that people can meaningfully enjoy and not mindlessly appropriate? At what point does user-generated content go from the thing that amplifies your message to the thing that cannibalizes it?

I’d suggest the answers to all those questions can be found in the very title of the album Tyler played on that night last summer:

Don’t Tap the Glass.

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Monday marked the 130th running of the pinnacle of marathon racing. The Boston Marathon, every runners’ dream race qualification and the signal for a massive athletic return from hibernation, came and went, with LOTS of fitness advertising in tow.

Of course, that’s hardly a surprise these days. Most large, popular races are mini conventions of sorts for running brands. Whether they’re established players or aspiring ones, the endless expo tents, run club gatherings, brick-and-mortar pop ups, finish-line activations, and freebies all scream: “PAY ATTENTION TO US!! WE’RE THE KEY TO YOUR ATHLETIC SUCCESS AND OPTIMIZATION!! 💖✨”

Which is probably why Nike decided to put up this sign in their Newbury Street flagship store, a few blocks away from the finish line:

RUNNERS WELCOME. WALKERS TOLERATED.

👹 The reaction? Immediate online backlash for being elitist and anti-inclusive, leading Nike to pull the sign and issue an apology.

Moments like these are why, as an agency, we’re constantly receiving RFPs and briefs that reflect the following phenomena:

• 🙋 Audience Indecision: Instead of identifying a specific persona, niche, or demographic group to target, brands will either give us a laundry list of various groups to speak to within a single campaign or simply ask us to made ads that reach the general population

• 🚩 Fear of Backlash: Guardrails, checks, and flags galore, wincing at the slightest whisper of risk or provocation

This isn’t happening without reason. As corporate budgets shrink and consumers’ pockets tighten, many marketing teams (and their agencies, to boot) are being asked to do more with less. And while the algorithm helps brands reach broader audiences, it also means that there’s a record of every missed-the-mark post, and any consumer’s ire has the possibility to ignite a fire that burns with legitimate financial and legal consequences.

But trying to make magical work that speaks to everyone and pleases them all is not the solution. On the contrary, it mostly just results in boring creative. Here’s the recipe for 🥀 totally torched work: (1) avoid committing to saying anything remotely unexpected, or having an identifiable point of view (2) blindly co-opt trends of the moment once they’re already popular and (3) fail to dig any deeper into who is most important to reach and what drives them emotionally.

As always, the answer is in the audience. But the audience can’t just be gen pop, and, if it is, there must be a good reason for it. When possible, it’s always better to get more specific, understand the context of where your creative will be seen, and find the human truth instead of the business truth. But that’s not easy, and there are a plethora of traps that lead to failure…which is why I’m so interested in this Nike sign.

Sure, the copy was a miss in general. Every great marathoner started somewhere (probably involving walking), and nobody’s immune to a bad day. But the real fatal flaw was the placement of the message: a public storefront on Newbury Street, one of the most heavily trafficked retail avenues in Boston. Yes, Nike’s brand voice has always been about high standards, elite exclusivity, being at the top, and doing what others fail to do. Yes, they were likely trying to speak directly to the crowd of Boston qualifiers, extending that “not for everyone, only for the best” mentality. And that’s a strong POV! But when you broadcast a 1% message to a 100% space, you’ve misread who you’re speaking to and how it will impact them emotionally. The message was less of the problem; the medium was the culprit.

The ad also tripped across the fine line between an eye-catching, unexpected, resonant POV and ragebait. The argument for the unexpected does not equate to “any publicity is good publicity.” As mentioned above, there are real consequences to employing offensive language for attention.

Take Burger King for example. When the company posted “Women belong in the kitchen” for Mother’s Day in the UK (and…eventually followed up with a discussion on gender disparity in restaurants), viewers were upset. Few believed that Burger King was actually expressing a bigoted belief, but the use of bigotry to deliberately offend for attention alone read as a cynical bait-and-switch.

On the contrary, when Burger King posted a video featuring a time-lapse of a Whopper slowly rotting — and in the process, emphasized its lack of artificial preservatives — the company divided audiences, and certainly provoked some EWWWWs, but ultimately made a highly effective ad with a specific, authentic, emotionally resonant message without weaponizing anger.

For today’s links, take a spin through a few more of our favorite good and bad ads:

• What happens when you have something to say, and say it right:

  • Don’t Buy This Jacket — from Patagonia

  • Be a Forever New Yorker — from StreetEasy, and also my favorite subway ad that I’ve seen recently

  • Hiring a Graphic Designer — from the City of LA

  • Our Blades Are F***ing Great — from Dollar Shave Club

• What happens when you misread the room:

  • Live Louder with Kendall Jenner — from Pepsi (remember this one?)

  • The Unity Hoodie — from Gap

  • We Are All Investors — from Robinhood

  • The Gift that Gives Back — from Peloton

The So What

Great creative requires the bravery to accept that not every ad should be for every person. If you want your message to effectively grab a group of people, you must be willing to accept that others might not “get it.” The difference between a brand with a devoted group of followers and a brand that’s mildly interesting to a vague blob of people is the willingness to take risks in communication.

Which would you rather be?

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Have you noticed that everything is “-maxxing” right now? There’s looksmaxxing (optimizing your appearance to its fullest potential); sleepmaxxing (squeezing every last percentage point out of your sleep score); fibermaxxing (a.k.a., increasing your fiber intake the same way we’ve all collectively quintupled our daily grams of protein); and friction-maxxing (intentionally seeking out all the inconveniences of daily life). There’s even nothing-maxxing — essentially, the long-lost art of sitting around and doing nothing, ideally for long enough stretches of time that you can post about it. Whatever the activity, the suffix says it all: you’re taking it to its (il)logical maxx-ed out extreme.

At first glance, it’s easy to read this “maxximalist” moment as a full-blown return to excess: doing the most, all the time, in every category of life. Gone are the clean-girl days of yore, replaced instead by louder aesthetics, colorful analog hobbies, and pure, unabashed whimsy. But if you actually pay attention to what people praise (and what they drag) online, you’ll realize that things aren’t so simple. Take some examples I’ve found while scrolling over the last two to three weeks.

First, on the topic of food and bevs:

• Adding sprinkles to your morning matcha? Embracing whimsy. ✅

• Doordashing every single one of your meals to your apartment? Doing the most. ❌

And before you say, “Olivia, that’s just wealth signaling,” let’s talk about outfits for Coachella — a time when the expectation is to go all out. I mean, after all, if you’ve already spent all that money on wristbands and flights and lodging, you might as well give the people what they came for, right? WRONG! Let’s take a closer look:

• Having your mother, a famous fashion designer, design custom outfits from fabrics you hand-selected? Going hard. Diva slay. ✅ (See comments like: “This series has me in a chokehold” and “Such a flex that your mom can make you a custom fit 🥰”)

• Ordering thousands of dollars worth of outfits while claiming you have nothing to wear (even though you’re an influencer who gets free clothes on the daily)? Doing too much, for sure. ❌

Or, let’s talk weddings! One of life’s seasons when going over-the-top is more than acceptable, surely. Well, not so fast:

• Recording your multiple outfit changes on your wedding day? Amazing! ✅

• Recounting all the cosmetic procedures you’re getting before your wedding day? Now we’ve gone too far. ❌

@totallynot.ellaryanLike this CANNOT BE FOR REAL. Why are we talking about PROCEDURES IN PREPARATION FOR A WEDDING???? Why are we putting these ideas into people’s heads ?!?! Let people LIVE and get married without feeling bad about not buying 10000 products on tiktok shop. Your wedding should be a celebration of authentic unification of you & your partner, with people who SUPPORT AND LOVE YOU UNCONDITIONALLY. (This is bigger than just what eli rallo said in the one video i am referring to)

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Individually, these examples might read like random internet judgments. But if you consider all the evidence together, it points to two conclusions. First, as my colleague Ryan Weicht wrote recently, we’re living in an age of contradiction. Second (and more specifically), we’re operating within a set of unspoken rules about when doing the most — also known as being “extra” — is acceptable and when it crosses a line. Allow me to explain.

Let’s look at all my ✅ examples together: sprinkles on matcha, custom Coachella fits, multiple wedding outfit changes. What do they share? I’d argue that they’re all doing something: they’re either additive to or in pursuit of an experience. The sprinkles make the matcha more fun, the custom fit makes the festival more memorable, the outfit changes make the wedding more of a fashion moment. The ❌ examples work differently because they seem to be just about buying things. Ordering food to avoid going outside, buying more clothes instead of going through what you already own…the extra-ness feels hollow, accumulation for its own sake.

That said, the line isn’t clean, and it was never meant to be. The same behavior lands differently depending on who’s doing it, what platform you’re on, and how the comment section is feeling that day. Take the wedding procedure TikTok: despite the critical stitches and callouts, a vocal chunk of the internet had that creator’s back entirely. (See: “The fact that anyone is judging omg im gagged why can’t a girl pamper herself in peace.” “Your transparency is a gift this wedding szn!!” “I did all this and I’m a pleb. This is so normal why are people dragging you lol.”)

So, then, how do we make sense of “extra” when it’s a moving target?

The honest answer is: you kind of can’t. See below:

@texaspommysquadAre you extra or basic? #fy #funny #petsoftiktok #dog #pomeranian #ponytail

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The So What

Normally, this is where I’d pivot to what all of this means for you. Instead, I’m going to tell you what we did with it.

At Artemis Ward, we have a running belief that the answer is in the audience. If you look closely enough at what people celebrate, adopt, mock, or reject, you can usually find the tension a brand should be responding to and the role it can credibly play within it.

So, loyal So What reader, you may remember my colleague Quinten Rosborough posing a scenario for you all two weeks ago:

Pretend you work at a creative agency. Let’s say it’s independent, has a track record of doing cool, thoughtful work, and is named after a 19th-century humorist. You’re hard at work one day and a brief crosses your desk: a CPG brand wants your help creating a new campaign. The only requirement? The concept has to feature a celebrity spokesperson. How do you decide who to choose?

Now, let’s add a bit more context. Say the brand is Seventh Generation and the product is a powerful dish soap that doesn’t rely on dyes, artificial fragrances, or a laundry list of unnecessary extras to clean your dishes. In a category that has long equated “more ingredients” with “more effectiveness,” this brand’s strength is what it doesn’t have. So, the question becomes: how do you show up in a culture that loves going all out…but only in certain places, for certain reasons, and in certain contexts?

Enter Don’t Do Extra — a campaign that celebrates going hard for the things that deserve it and keeping everything else refreshingly, unapologetically extra-free. Nine times out of ten, we’re willing to bet that everything else = doing the dishes. And if you're going to make that case to the internet, you need someone who lives it. Which brings me to the face of our campaign that we’ve been teasing: the one and only, the iconic Keke Palmer.

Keke is, undoubtedly, the internet's darling. Just take a look at a screenshot I took while we were deep in the throes of Don’t Do Extra planning:

But, more importantly, she’s someone who genuinely embodies the campaign’s logic. Keke goes hard where it matters: her work, her podcast, her partnerships, her forthcoming wellness brand, her fashion, her family, her willingness to be completely, unapologetically herself. And she’s famously unbothered about keeping the rest of life simple.

You can watch the Don’t Do Extra hero video below. But before you go, consider this your AW-verified permission slip: Be extra when you want to be. Just don’t do extra where it doesn’t belong. (And yes. That means in your dish soap. Go buy some Seventh Generation.)

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