Which mostly meant me jogging behind her with one hand hovering an inch above the seat, promising I wouldn’t let go—and then letting go.

She learned the basics last week in Copenhagen, at a bike park built expressly for kids: miniature streets, real stoplights, a whole protected world engineered so that learning to ride carries almost no risk at all.

Yesterday was the real thing. Our actual street. No miniature stoplights. No guardrails. Just a helmet, and my heart in my throat every time she picked up speed.

This is the fundamental contradiction of teaching a child to ride a bike: you are responsible for keeping her safe, but she cannot learn until you allow her to become slightly unsafe.

As long as your hand is firmly gripping the back of the bicycle, you’re preventing the fall. But you’re also preventing her from discovering that she can keep herself upright.

Eventually, you have to tolerate the wobble.

As I watched her make the tiny journey from I am holding you to you are doing this yourself, I started thinking about how carefully we now manage that handoff—and about a place from my own childhood that took an almost comically different approach.

It was called The Mad Hatter.

If you grew up in Toronto in the ‘80s, you already know. If you didn’t, you’re about to think I’m making this up.

The Mad Hatter was a birthday-party venue housed in a strip mall basement where parents sent their children into what, in retrospect, appears to have been a lightly supervised dungeon run by teenagers.

For some parties, the experience began before you even arrived: the Mad Hatter sent real black funeral hearses to collect children from their homes. We climbed into the back, where we were given buckets of candy and a tiny television to watch on the way.

Once the doors closed, children were ushered through a series of rooms containing activities that sound less like an organized birthday party and more like rejected challenges from an early season of Survivor.

There were food fights. Pillow fights. Water fights conducted in a tiled room using giant wet sponges. Children climbed into industrial laundry carts and crashed them into one another like bumper cars.

I remember emerging hours later, soaked and sometimes bruised, completely exhilarated by the chaos of it all.

It was, obviously, incredible—made even more so by the fact that parents were not allowed inside.

I recently discovered a Reddit thread where people who had been to the Mad Hatter as children were comparing memories of the place.

One person described it as “the hottest ticket in town,” then recounted whipped-cream fights on concrete floors and shopping-cart collisions before asking, “How did no one lose a finger?”

Another wrote, “It feels like a half-remembered dream.”

One person summed it up: “Best birthday party of my life.”

So what was it about this objectively terrible idea that made it so unforgettable?

It wasn’t simply the danger. It was how completely the experience belonged to us.

Our parents weren’t hovering at the edges of the room. They weren’t taking pictures, negotiating conflicts or reminding us to be careful. They didn’t even know exactly what was happening.

For a few hours, we inhabited a world with its own rules.

The stories that came out of it belonged to the children who were there. The adults could hear about them afterward, but they couldn’t fully enter them.

It gave us something increasingly rare: an experience that had not been entirely anticipated, observed or controlled on our behalf.

To be clear, I’d never send a kid into that basement today, and I’m not suggesting that that slippery concrete floors and industrial laundry equipment represent a lost ideal of childhood. Some things disappear for good reason.

But the Mad Hatter’s afterlife online suggests that the experiences people carry with them longest are often the ones they had room to make their own.

The same tension shows up in the way brands approach participation.

Brands are very good at deciding what they want people to experience. They’re less comfortable leaving room for anything they didn’t plan.

Notice where the value in the Mad Hatter actually lived: not in anything the venue broadcast to us, but in what happened between us. The shared chaos, shared bruises, shared disbelief that any of it was allowed.

What the Mad Hatter understood—however irresponsibly—was that its job was to build a container vivid enough to matter, then get out of the room.

The question for brands is how to create something so specific, vivid and real that the people who experience it are still finding one another decades later.

Brands increasingly say they want people to participate, contribute and feel a sense of ownership. But what many of them actually create is an extremely controlled simulation of participation.

They want the energy of a food fight without allowing anyone to throw food.

The reason The Mad Hatter remains so vivid for so many of us points to something brands often miss when they try to build community: people need enough agency to make an experience their own—to develop rituals, language, relationships and stories that no one planned for them.

When that happens, participation becomes more than following instructions. People take the starting point and build something new together.

That does not mean abandoning responsibility or removing every boundary. The Mad Hatter may have taken that philosophy several shopping-cart collisions too far.

But at some point, you have to loosen your grip. To accept that people may take the experience somewhere you did not plan.

They may develop language you didn’t approve, care about something you didn’t anticipate or use what you created in a way you never intended.

There will be a wobble. And that won’t necessarily be evidence that the experience is failing.

It may be the first sign that it no longer belongs entirely to you.

Until next time,

Sara

You can’t script genuine participation. But you can create the conditions that make people want to take part—and give them enough room to make something their own.

Community Catalyst™ is my eight-week strategic engagement for mid-size consumer brands ($40M+ in revenue).

Together, we’ll identify the communities that matter most to your growth, understand what drives participation within them, and build a roadmap for giving your brand a credible role in what they care about and create together.

I have one opening remaining for Q4. Reply CATALYST for details.

Every few weeks, the marketing world finds something new to lose its collective mind over.

This week, it was a line going down—and fast.

The line in question tracked how often ChatGPT cited Reddit, and according to data from Promptwatch, a platform that tracks how brands and sources appear in AI-generated answers, it had dropped precipitously.

In a single day, said the report, Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations fell roughly 90%.

In other words: ChatGPT had been turning to Reddit with remarkable frequency. Then, seemingly overnight, it all but stopped.

For marketers who’d spent the past year rethinking Reddit’s role in their strategy as its conversations increasingly surfaced in AI-generated answers, that was a pretty big deal.

The hand-wringing started immediately.

Was Reddit’s reign as one of AI’s favorite sources over? Had all those brands that spent the last year scrambling to figure out Reddit wasted their time? Was it time to rethink your GEO strategy again?

The answer: probably not.

“Something changed in ChatGPT’s retrievals, but not in Reddit’s standing,” Alex Dor, Director of Strategy at Reddit marketing agency RECHO told me. His advice to brands: “Watch the trend, not the headline.”

Overblown or not, the citation panic got me thinking about how we got here in the first place.

How did Reddit—a notoriously messy collection of conversations between strangers—become so valuable to the machines tasked with generating the world’s most sophisticated answers?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Laura Nestler, Reddit’s EVP of Community. We didn’t talk about AI at all, but it turns out that our conversation captured the tension at the center of this moment: the more sophisticated our machines become, the more valuable our human conversations seem to be.

And while Reddit may be one of the clearest places we see that tension playing out, its implications extend far beyond the platform.

In today’s newsletter, I’m unpacking what Laura shared about what makes human community uniquely valuable right now—and what brands can learn from it, regardless of where the latest AI winds blow.

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Not a metaphorical map. A literal one, charting the brands, creators, communities and interests that command the attention of their target audience.

Let me explain.

When I work with brands, part of my work involves mapping what the people they most want to reach care about, and where the brand fits into that picture.

To do it, I work with the brand to pick a handful of social accounts whose followings, taken together, represent the audience they’re trying to reach.

Think of it like casting a net: each account brings in a slightly different group of people, and together they provide a cross-section of the people the brand wants to matter to.

Then I take a sample of the people who follow those accounts and look at what else they follow.

On average, each person follows around 2,000 other accounts—that’s 2,000 individual clues about what they’re paying attention to. Across a sample of 500 people, that means about a million tiny slices of information about what this audience cares about.

Then I map how all of those accounts connect to one another.

Accounts followed by many of the same people in our sample cluster together. Accounts with less overlap sit further apart.

The result is thousands of dots, each representing something this audience follows. At first glance, it looks like a giant blob.

But it’s actually an eerily crisp picture of the world this audience has built for itself, one follow at a time. I think of it as a sort of Rosetta Stone for who these people are, what they care about, and how those things connect.

You might find beauty and celebrity culture tangled up with status and aspiration in one corner; wellness, productivity and self-improvement clustered somewhere else; and entertainment, internet culture and shopping forming an entirely different world.

The combinations are often surprising. Things that look unrelated from a marketer's point of view turn out to live right next door to each other in people's actual feeds.

And because brands are dots on the map too, you can see where a brand sits in relation to everything the people it wants to reach care about.

Or, as I discovered this week, whether it sits there at all.

When I pulled up the map for my client, their competitors were there, and they weren’t.

Admittedly, when I told them this, it was kind of awkward. Someone asked the question everyone was thinking:

“Does that mean we’re irrelevant?”

OOF.

The honest answer is no. And yes.

On the no side: this is a big, established brand. People know it. People use it. It has awareness and customers and scale, and one blank space on one map doesn’t erase any of that.

On the yes side: among the particular people the brand was trying to matter to, not enough followed it for the brand to register on the map at all. Put simply: they didn’t care enough about this brand to follow it.

Okay, it isn’t great news for this particular client.

But also, as I told them: it is a huge opportunity.

Because when you’re not on the map, you get to decide where you want to be.

You get to ask: Which cultural worlds do you want to inhabit? What do you want to become known for? Who do you want to matter to—and, just as importantly, who are you willing not to be for?

Sure, their competitors were on the map, but their competitors weren’t particularly distinctive within it. They sat smack in the middle, surrounded by the things everyone follows—visible, but not strongly associated with any particular corner of culture.

My client, on the other hand, had something their competitors didn’t: the freedom to decide where and with whom they wanted to build relevance.

They weren’t trying to escape an entrenched cultural position. They had the opportunity to choose one.

That got me thinking about how many brands would probably find themselves in exactly the same position. We tend to assume that if a brand is big enough, known enough, used enough, it must also be relevant.

But awareness and relevance aren’t the same thing.

Awareness means people know who you are. Relevance means you matter to them.

Awareness has never been easier to manufacture. Brands can buy reach. They can put themselves in front of millions of people. They can flood feeds with content—and now, that content can be infinitely replicated.

But none of that guarantees them a meaningful place in the worlds those people actually care about.

A lot of very large brands have ended up in exactly this position: widely known, widely used, and culturally homeless.

In some ways, that’s the logical endpoint of ages and ages spent pursuing mass appeal.

The broader the audience, the broader the message. The broader the message, the fewer sharp edges it can have. Anything too specific risks alienating someone, so brands sand and sand until what’s left is recognizable to almost everyone, but resonates with almost no one.

You can become very big that way. You can also end up belonging nowhere.

The instinct is to fix this by trying to be everywhere: more content designed to make the brand feel relevant to more kinds of people.

But if trying to matter to everyone is part of how brands become culturally homeless in the first place, the answer isn’t to try even harder to matter to everyone. It’s to find your people—and plant a flag where they already are.

You don’t need the whole map. You just need somewhere on it to call home.

Until next time,

Sara

Want to know where your brand can matter most—and to whom?

That’s exactly what an Audience Atlas® is designed to uncover: a map of what your audience cares about, the communities they organize around, and where your brand has the greatest opportunity to build relevance. Because the goal is not to be everywhere—just somewhere that’s unmistakably yours.

Reply ATLAS to learn more.

Not documentaries. Not retrospectives on how the city has changed. Just people, walking around.

YouTube, it turns out, is full of this stuff. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of videos documenting otherwise unremarkable days in the city.

Suits crossing Midtown. Joggers in Central Park. A windy ride on the Staten Island Ferry. A slow drift through the East Village.

Nothing really happens in these videos. People buy newspapers, wait for the light, hail cabs, eat lunch on a bench.

Nobody is staring down into a 6-inch rectangle of glowing glass.

That absence is jarring. It not only changes the posture of every person on the street. It also anchors everyone entirely in the physical world, because there’s nowhere else to go.

Part of the appeal is anthropological—taking in the storefronts, the clothes, the lost architecture.

But I realized I wasn’t really watching to see what New York looked like. I was watching to see what unmediated presence felt like.

This particular strain of throwback content is, admittedly, niche. But the impulse behind it is hardly isolated.

We tend to talk about nostalgia as a trend. But at this point, it feels more like a permanent condition.

Nostalgia has become an ambient layer running underneath everything, across every category at once. Our fashion is nostalgic. Our food choices are nostalgic. Music, packaging, interfaces all borrow from the visual language of the past.

I call it perma-nostalgia: the past is no longer somewhere we occasionally retreat to. It’s become part of the texture of the present.

The evidence is everywhere:

Vinyl is selling better than it has since the ‘80s. Pop’s biggest hits are built on interpolations of songs its listeners are too young to remember firsthand. Snack brands are reissuing the exact packaging their buyers ate off of as kids. Scratched-up digital cameras and flip phones are selling like hotcakes on resale marketplaces.

So why exactly does the past feel quite so irresistible right now?

Nostalgia tends to become most powerful when the future stops feeling like an upgrade.

For much of modern consumer culture, aspiration pointed forward. The next version would be better. The next technology would make life easier. The next generation would be more prosperous than the one before it.

That bargain feels shakier now.

We’re living through extraordinary technological acceleration at the same time that many of the basic markers of progress—owning a home, raising a family comfortably, achieving financial security—feel increasingly out of reach.

The future may be arriving faster than ever. That doesn’t mean people believe their lives will get better when it does.

And when the future stops being where you project your aspirations, the past becomes a very compelling place to put them.

But there is no single past we’re all reaching for.

Nostalgia may be everywhere, but it isn’t one big cultural phenomenon so much as thousands of smaller ones, each organized around a different version of what was lost—or what we imagine was.

And around those different versions of the past, communities form.

There are Y2K obsessives cataloging the design language of early-2000s technology.

Archive fashion accounts dissecting 1996 Helmut Lang runway shows down to the cut of a jacket.

Disney adults collecting maps and ephemera from the parks they remember as kids, and sneaker collectors treating original Jordan colorways like cultural artifacts.

These communities aren’t simply reminiscing. They’re reconstructing—digging up, cataloging and reanimating hyper-specific fragments of the past.

And wherever cultural energy gathers, brands inevitably follow.

The problem is that you can reproduce the codes of nostalgia almost perfectly without understanding what people are actually attached to.

Because it’s never just the object. It’s what the object represents.

The flip phone isn’t just a flip phone. It’s an internet that felt smaller and weirder. The mall isn’t just the mall. It’s a Saturday afternoon with nowhere else to be. The disposable camera isn’t just the grain. It’s taking a photograph you wouldn’t see until later.

And those old videos of New York aren’t really about old New York. They’re about a city that feels grittier, cheaper, less optimized. A version of life that seems to have moved at a different speed.

Which is why cultural appetite for a particular era doesn’t automatically give every brand permission to participate in it.

Consider Gap. Its latest campaign with Hailey Bieber is built entirely around 1996, the year she was born. And it works because Gap has unusual permission to play there.

The brand didn’t just reference that world. It helped build it.

Its old campaigns, denim, logo and stores aren’t props from the ‘90s. They’re part of how people remember the decade. When Gap reaches into its archive, it’s pulling from a cultural history it actually participated in.

Now imagine a brand founded in 2015 staging the same tribute to 1996—it could get every detail right and still feel completely wrong.

One brand is reaching into its own history. The other is borrowing someone else’s.

That’s the difference between nostalgia as aesthetic and nostalgia as an expression of belonging—and it’s why understanding the communities carrying these memories forward matters so much.

They know which details are sacred, which references ring true, and more importantly, what feeling they’re trying to keep alive.

For brands, that means starting with the community, not the decade.

A mood board can tell you what an era looked like. A community can tell you what it meant—and why people are reaching for it again now.

That’s the part you can’t fake with the right font, soundtrack or archival reference.

Understand what they find worth preserving from that past—and whether your brand has a meaningful role in carrying it forward.

Until next time,

Sara

Want to understand the communities shaping your audience—and where your brand has a meaningful role to play?

That’s exactly what we uncover inside Community Catalyst, my 10-week strategic engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

I have one client opening for Q4 remaining. Reply CATALYST to learn more.

The “Can you believe this?” The “How is this real?” The “This has got to be satire, right?”

OpenAI had flown a group of creators to a luxury retreat in New York’s Hudson Valley, where they previewed ChatGPT Work—OpenAI’s new agent for complex workplace tasks—over farm-to-table dinners, spa treatments, and branded gifts, including monogrammed pajamas and jars of OpenAI-branded honey.

Comment sections quickly filled with accusations about the negative impact of data centers, extreme water consumption, environmental destruction, and AI’s growing concentration of power.

By the time I traced the outrage back to its source, the creators who’d been on the trip were already in full-blown damage control.

Some deleted posts. Others disabled comments. Others went into overdrive explaining why they’d attended in the first place.

On the surface, it looked like yet another influencer marketing controversy—a creator trip gone wrong thanks to an unfortunate confluence of bad optics, bad timing, and bad luck.

In reality, it exposed a foundational force that determines whether brands inspire belief or incite backlash.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how that force works, examine why two brands running remarkably similar strategies landed in opposite places because only one had built it, and share the 3-part framework I use to tell whether a brand has earned the right to bring people together, long before the first creator walks into the room.

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It’s called Errands.

Created by 26-year-old New York-based filmmaker Noah Blau, the concept is painfully simple: follow a friend around the city as they attempt to complete a single mundane task.

One episode is just a guy wheeling a newly purchased air conditioner down the sidewalk on a hand truck.

Another follows a poet taking a broken CD player to a repair shop in Chinatown.

Another shows someone trying to hang a curtain.

Shot on an old camcorder and scored with low-fi jazz flute, it’s wildly unpredictable—people get lost, errands go sideways, and half the time they don’t even finish what they set out to do.

That’s it. That’s the show. And it has a cult following.

A few days later, I read about a new campus ritual called “SABSing”, short for “see and be seen.”

The term describes the practice of students intentionally lingering in high-traffic spots—the quad, the library steps, the campus coffee shop—hoping to bump into someone they know. One student, quoted in Town & Country, which reported on it, described SABSing as “the opposite of going to a trendy bar or restaurant just to take a photo and leave,” adding that it’s all about “seeking out real-life unpredictable interactions.”

My first reaction was to roll my eyes. Isn’t SABSing just… students hanging out on campus? Giving it a catchy acronym felt like an awful lot of branding for something as old as campus life itself.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Errands and SABSing are both responses to the same hunger.

For as long as I can remember, we've lived inside a culture that constantly nudged us to aspire upward. Social media supercharged that instinct, serving us an endless stream of lives that looked just a little more beautiful, productive and put together than our own.

Eventually, though, that endless highlight reel started to feel exhausting, ubiquitous and airless.

What Errands and SABSing point to is that perhaps the most extraordinary thing left is an ordinary life that hasn't been optimized away.

Look closer at what’s actually being celebrated, and it isn’t really the errand or a campus lawn. It’s the conditions underneath—enough unstructured time to let a task take all afternoon, neighborhoods where you walk instead of drive, friends who live close enough to run into by accident, enough slack in a day for something unplanned to happen. Those are the things that have become scarce.

There’s an irony here, of course. The moment ordinary life becomes aspirational, it stops being purely ordinary.

Errands is still shot, scored, edited, and posted. SABSing is, by the students’ own admission, a bit of a performance. The unoptimized life is now, itself, a thing to be seen doing.

Noah Blau seems to get this intuitively, and to push against it. Asked by The New York Times whether he’d ever feature someone like Taylor Swift on Errands, he said “that would probably be the worst thing that could happen to it.” Translation: its entire power comes from being about ordinary people doing ordinary things.

That’s the tension creators are navigating. It’s also the tension brands are about to inherit.

For a long time, the commercial world fixated on selling a more optimized life. Skip the line! Reclaim the time! Remove the friction!

Those promises made perfect sense when aspiration meant getting to a better life, faster.

But if aspiration is shifting toward ordinary life itself, brands have to sell something different.

Which is why, these days, the most valuable thing a brand can offer may no longer be a shortcut through daily life, but a reason to stay inside it.

Until next time,

Sara

If the next era of brand building isn’t about helping people escape everyday life, but helping them find more meaning within it, then the question becomes:

What role can your brand genuinely play in people’s ordinary lives?

That’s exactly what we answer inside Community Catalyst, my 10-week strategic engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

Together, we’ll identify the communities your audience already belongs to, uncover what they’re really seeking, and build a strategy that earns a place in the moments that matter most.

I have one Q4 opening remaining.

Reply CATALYST if you’d like to explore whether it’s the right fit.

A pizza arrives. He pops open the box, and stamped directly on the inside lid—right above a slice of warm pepperoni—is a bold QR code from DraftKings, promising $20 in free bets if he places his first wager right now.

You used to have to go to Las Vegas for this much temptation. Today, you just have to order dinner.

That’s not an accident.

It’s a strategy aimed squarely at the first generation to come of age inside an economy engineered to monetize temptation.

While every generation has faced temptation, Gen Z is the first to grow up inside an economy designed to identify moments of vulnerability—and convert them into transactions almost instantly.

For the first time in history, nearly every human vulnerability—a spike of loneliness, a bout of boredom, romantic insecurity, financial anxiety—has become a frictionless commercial opportunity.

To better understand what it means to come of age in this environment—and what it means for brands—I spoke with , a generational researcher currently in the sixth year of a decade-long longitudinal study following 60 Gen Z participants from the time they’re 18 through 28.

“We’re in a moment where young people feel immense shame for doing things that any generation of young people would do if they grew up right now,” Kim says.

“The marketing arm of the world of temptation is so strong. They don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe, yet the executive functioning skills required to navigate today’s environment are off the charts.”

In today’s newsletter, I’ll unpack how an economy built around monetizing vulnerability is reshaping young adulthood, why it’s pushing young men and young women toward dramatically different worldviews, and why the next great marketing opportunity isn’t becoming better at targeting vulnerable people, but helping them realize they’re not navigating this new reality alone.

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“I got internet influenced into watching Heated Rivalry. And I’m obsessed.”

She didn’t watch the show because she saw a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, because of a trailer or a targeted ad.

She’d been pulled in by fan-made content on TikTok. She’d seen the edits, the memes, the theories, and became completely invested.

Her relationship with the show had started long before she’d ever watched it.

Fandom had brought the show to her, and now she was bringing it to us.

My friend’s text laid bare a shift happening across the marketing landscape that I’ve been tracking for a while—and one that’s about to become the centerpiece of a talk I’m giving next month at the Copenhagen TV Festival, where I'll be speaking to senior leaders from broadcasters, streaming platforms, studios, production companies, and creative teams from around the world.

Historically, the TV marketing playbook went like this: make the show, spend millions yelling as loud as possible to manufacture awareness, and hope a fandom formed after the fact.

But what is becoming increasingly clear in a world where attention has moved into group chats and closed feeds and comment sections, is that the most powerful force shaping what people watch isn't what studios promote. It's what fans share.

A trailer can tell me a show exists. Fans make me feel like I need to watch it.

They carry a show to the next viewer and, by the time that viewer presses play, they’ve helped other people create a relationship with the characters and the story.

Which leads us to a single, unavoidable truth: audiences aren’t just passive viewers anymore. They’re collaborators in how a show spreads.

If that's true, then fandom isn't just an outcome—that thing that happens at the end of the line if the stars align. It's also an input.

And it means that if we want fans building after launch, we have to start asking—right from the jump—what creative ingredients we're giving them to build with.

I’m starting to realize that may be a provocative statement for a room full of people whose job is literally to get television in front of audiences.

Because I'm suggesting that some of the most important marketing decisions for a television show are made long before the marketing department gets involved. They're made in the DNA of the show—in the characters people obsess over, the relationships they root for, and the worlds they don't want to leave.

I keep asking myself: Am I pushing a bridge too far here? Or is this exact discomfort the reason this talk needs to happen in the first place?

Where I’m landing: Surrendering control to fan edits on TikTok is a hard sell for executives used to polished, highly orchestrated campaigns.

But pretending attention hasn’t moved behind closed doors, and continuing to buy megaphones fewer and fewer people are listening to feels even riskier.

This isn’t just a television problem, of course.

It’s just the highest-stakes example of an industry trying to manufacture attention in a world where audiences prefer to create their own.

Across every category, attention is becoming less something brands can purchase—and more something communities choose to create.

If I'm right, it has profound implications for how television gets made, not just how it's marketed.

Which is exactly why I want to put this idea in front of the people shaping the future of television—even if I'm a little nervous they'll tell me I've completely lost the plot.

Until next time,

Sara

P.S. Want to attend the festival and hear me deliver this provocation live? Check out the details for my talk, Unlocking the Power of Fandom in the Post-Social Era here.

Fandom doesn’t just emerge if the stars align.

It starts much earlier—with understanding who your future obsessives are, what they care about, and what kind of world, product, or story they’ll want to build on.

That’s exactly what I help brands do through Community Catalyst, my 10-week strategic engagement for companies doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

Together, we identify the communities that matter most to your brand uncover the cultural signals shaping them, and build a strategy that gives people something worth talking about, sharing, and making their own.

I have one Q4 opening remaining.

Reply CATALYST if you’d like to explore whether it’s the right fit.

At first glance, there was nothing particularly unusual about these influencers.

One documented her progress taking beetroot every day. Another spoke knowingly about Traditional Chinese Medicine. Others dispensed health advice from offices with diplomas hanging behind them, shared personal health struggles, or described the life-changing effects of supplements directly to camera.

They looked like the kind of people you see every day on TikTok and Instagram—casual, relatable, speaking from personal experience. Authentic.

Except, as it turns out, none of them were real.

They were AI-generated avatars created to sell health supplements by mimicking the language of authenticity—a set of familiar behaviors and conventions we’ve spent years learning to trust online.

I was still thinking about those fake influencers when I heard Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, on a podcast this week. The host, Lenny Rachitsky, asked him how the rise of AI-generated content would impact Instagram.

Mosseri’s take: “In a world where there’s an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are going to seek out… authenticity.”

Mosseri has been making some version of this argument for months: the more synthetic the internet becomes, the more valuable “authenticity” will be.

It’s a familiar refrain.

For as long as I’ve worked in social media, authenticity has been the holy grail.

Whether you’re a creator, a brand, a founder, or really anyone trying to connect with people online, the prevailing wisdom has long been some version of “be authentic.”

I spent years giving much the same advice. During my years at Meta, when I counseled countless creators across Facebook and Instagram, I uttered the word “authenticity” more times than I can count.

But as AI content floods our feeds, there’s just one problem: it has become increasingly clear that authenticity itself can be convincingly manufactured.

And suddenly, “authentic” no longer necessarily means “human.”

Which raises a much bigger question: if we can no longer tell what’s human by looking at the content itself, where should we look instead?

In today’s newsletter, I’m exploring why the answer may have less to do with what someone posts and more to do with the people around them. And why, as authenticity becomes infinitely reproducible, community becomes more important than ever—not only for creators, but also for brands trying to earn trust in an increasingly synthetic internet.

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The debut novel from has a one-line premise almost impossible to resist: A wildly successful tradwife influencer who has built an empire romanticizing “the good old days” somehow wakes up in 1855 and has to actually live there.

I was sold. Evidently, so was everyone else: Yesteryear is now a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Tradwives have fascinated me for a while.

What began as a highly recognizable corner of internet culture has become something much bigger: a cultural and increasingly political battleground over gender, work, motherhood and what women’s lives should look like.

We all know the visual language by now: sourdough starters and flowing dresses, immaculate kitchens and many children, all wrapped in a highly aestheticized rejection of modern life.

Its platonic ideal might be Hannah Neeleman, better known online as Ballerina Farm, whose pastoral vision of motherhood, homemaking and farm life has made her one of the most visible—and debated—figures associated with the tradwife phenomenon.

Tradwives have also become one of those internet communities whose complexity is easily reduced to caricature from the outside.

I wanted Yesteryear to take me inside—to go deeper than the discourse around tradwives, to help me understand what makes the aesthetic and ideology so compelling, and why this particular vision of womanhood has found such a receptive audience right now.

And I wanted it to do that in the way only fiction can: by allowing me to inhabit a worldview I might otherwise only observe from the outside.

It had the perfect premise to do exactly that.

Which is why what the book does instead is so frustrating.

One of the things I’ve learned from studying communities is that what people are doing is often less interesting than why they’re doing it. The visible behaviors are usually expressions of something deeper: a need, a frustration, a shared belief about what the world gets wrong and how life could be different.

Tradwife culture has taken hold at a moment when many women are exhausted by an impossible accumulation of expectations.

We are supposed to build meaningful careers while raising well-adjusted children, maintaining beautiful homes and equitable marriages, staying healthy and desirable, cultivating friendships, pursuing hobbies, making organic snacks and somehow being grateful for the privilege of doing all of it at once.

It’s not hard to see why a fantasy built around opting out might resonate.

Sure, the answers tradwife culture offers can carry deeply troubling ideas about gender, power and whose version of “the good old days” we are actually remembering. But the questions underneath them are worth taking seriously.

What if life could be simpler? What if domestic work was treated as meaningful work? What if you could reject the premise that doing everything is the ultimate expression of female empowerment?

There are reasons millions of people find the answers tradwife culture offers to those questions compelling, and that was the complexity I hoped Yesteryear would wrestle with.

Instead, the book feels surprisingly uninterested in why anyone would be drawn to this world in the first place.

Natalie, the book’s protagonist, is so thoroughly constructed to be disliked—vain, hypocritical, narcissistic, selfish and deluded—that there is very little tension in watching her worldview collide with reality. She has built an empire selling women a fantasy of the past, and now she is going to learn exactly how terrible that past actually was.

Oh, burn.

Everyone around Natalie is similarly flattened into a type: the doltish husband, the wealthy and controlling father-in-law, the careerist feminist roommate, the five children who won’t stop needing things. They don’t so much have interior lives as represent tropes, or positions in the argument the book is making.

The book never quite escapes its own “serves you right” posture.

The problem—aside from making the whole exercise feel hollow—is that proving a caricature wrong doesn’t help us understand why the thing being caricatured became compelling in the first place.

That lack of curiosity is particularly striking given how Burke came to the subject.

Before writing Yesteryear, she built an audience on TikTok talking about feminism, internet culture and tradwives. She has described becoming deeply involved in the online conversation around tradwife culture while also researching it through her work as an editor at Katie Couric Media.

In other words, she spent a lot of time immersed in the online world surrounding this community—presumably watching its content, studying its narratives and participating in the discourse around it.

Yet reading Yesteryear made me think about the difference between being immersed in the online world around a community and actually understanding the people inside it.

The internet has collapsed that distinction.

We can watch hundreds of videos made by people whose lives look nothing like ours.

We can read their comment sections, learn their language, follow their arguments and watch their internal dramas unfold in real time. We can become fluent in how a community presents itself—and in how the internet talks about it—without ever really understanding what belonging to that community gives the people inside.

Communities become especially easy to flatten once the internet gives them a name. Gym bros. Disney adults. Preppers. Wellness girlies.

The label becomes a kind of shorthand. A handful of highly visible behaviors come to stand in for everyone inside, and eventually the caricature becomes so familiar that we stop asking what might exist underneath it.

Which may be why reading the book often felt like scrolling a feed.

I’ve started thinking of books like this as meme books: books that are more interesting as an idea of a book than as the book itself.

From the outside, there’s an irresistible premise, a cultural provocation, something you immediately want to talk about. But like a meme, everything is compressed into something you can recognize instantly. You realize the surface was the whole thing.

Admittedly, “What if a tradwife influencer actually had to live in the 1850s?” is an irresistible premise—and it’s perhaps no surprise that Hollywood saw the appeal immediately. The book was optioned before publication, with Anne Hathaway attached to star as Natalie and produce the adaptation.

But an irresistible premise can also become a trap when the premise itself is doing most of the intellectual work.

A novel should complicate the premise that got you to pick it up. It should make the people you thought you understood harder to categorize by the time you put it down.

I kept waiting for Natalie—and everyone else who orbits her—to become harder to categorize.

All of which is particularly interesting, because Yesteryear spends a lot of time examining the ways women judge, police, resent and constrain one another, alongside the ways men diminish and constrain women. Yet the novel itself often seems guilty of the same flattening. From page one, the book has already decided what kind of woman Natalie is, and it rarely allows her to become anything more complicated.

There is a strange irony in writing a novel about the danger of reducing women to prescribed roles while reducing your central female character to one.

I’ve seen versions of this dynamic again and again in my work studying communities: the easier a group is to caricature, the harder it can be to remain curious about the people inside it.

Maybe that’s because understanding someone can feel dangerously close to excusing them. But understanding why someone believes something is not the same as agreeing with them. Curiosity is not endorsement.

In fact, the communities we are quickest to dismiss may be the ones that require the most curiosity. If millions of women are watching tradwife content, the interesting question isn’t whether life was objectively better for women in 1855. We know the answer. It’s why the fantasy of it feels so powerful in 2026.

For all the time Yesteryear spends dismantling the tradwife fantasy, I finished the book no closer to understanding why so many women are drawn to it.

And maybe that’s my real takeaway from Yesteryear: The more visible a community becomes, the easier it is to mistake the caricature for the community itself.

That feels worth remembering at a moment when so many brands are fixated on community.

It has never been easier to watch communities from the outside.

Understanding them is harder, and requires asking the question Yesteryear never answers: What deeper need—personal, cultural, psychological, social, political—is this community actually fulfilling?

That’s where community-powered strategy begins.

Until next time,

Sara

Tradwives didn’t become a cultural phenomenon overnight.

Like most cultural shifts, the signals were visible long before the mainstream started paying attention.

I help brands spot those signals early—identifying the emerging communities, behaviors, and beliefs that matter to their future customers, then building a strategy for how to participate.

That’s Community Catalyst, my 10-week strategy engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

I have ONE Q4 opening left. Reply CATALYST to learn more.

They commission expensive research. They buy subscriptions to social listening platforms. They analyze sentiment, run surveys, and build increasingly sophisticated dashboards designed to tell them what customers are thinking.

But those tools can only analyze the conversations that already exist.

The harder challenge is building a brand people actually want to talk to—so the company can discern shifts in consumer sentiment before they ever show up in a dashboard, report or survey.

Oatly, the Swedish oat milk giant, has spent more than a decade doing exactly that.

From the outside, this looks like a triumph of creative branding. But the real engine is hidden in their org chart—a reality that became clear when I spoke with , Director of Community Management at Oatly. She leads a team supporting roughly 60 markets, and is responsible for systematically scaling up dedicated local community teams in regions wherever customer conversations begin to accelerate.

What surprised me wasn’t the ambition of the operation—though that alone is impressive.

It was where the conversation kept going.

Every time I asked her about community, she answered by talking about a different part of the business—from product innovation to managing health misinformation to public affairs to campaign strategy.

I went into my conversation with Åsa expecting to learn how Oatly manages its community. Instead, I learned how the community helps manage Oatly.

By the end of our chat, I realized I was getting a real-time lesson in how to build a company that learns from its customers.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll unpack the three organizational decisions that put Oatly’s learning loop into practice—and why they all stem from one deceptively simple principle at the heart of the organization.

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If you wanted to meet ambitious creative people, you went to Upright Citizens Brigade or The Groundlings. That’s where aspiring writers, actors, comedians, and directors found each other.

Many of those same people were also spending nights and weekends making YouTube videos together.

Some of those collaborations started in the improv theaters. Others started because someone stumbled across someone else’s videos online. Pretty quickly, the lines blurred. The improv community spilled onto YouTube, and YouTube created entirely new creative circles of its own. One collaboration led to another. Cast members became creative partners. Creative partners became roommates, business partners, and lifelong collaborators.

Looking back, it’s remarkable how many of today’s writers, actors, comedians, and creators first found one another in those overlapping communities: Ellie Kemper. Nick Kroll. Ben Schwartz. Michaela Watkins. Kumail Nanjiani. Paul Scheer. Issa Rae. Pete Huyck. So many others.

At the time, it didn’t feel like an industry. It felt like a sprawling network of people making things.

Looking back, I realize I was watching a generation of creative people find one another, just as the internet gave them entirely new ways to build.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in years.

Then this week, I walked into a room that brought it all rushing back.

It was the first anniversary of Pufferfish.

Officially, Pufferfish is an agency. In practice, it feels more like the center of an emerging creative scene.

I first heard about Pufferfish co-founder in 2024 after the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest—the internet spectacle he engineered—became one of the year’s defining cultural moments. A year later, I interviewed him for this newsletter, and I’ve been following what he’s been building ever since.

Pufferfish’s anniversary party felt like a flashback to 2007-era Los Angeles, except it was in New York City, and instead of comedy troupes and YouTube collectives, people were building companies.

Every conversation started with what someone had built and ended with what they were building next. Ideas became introductions. Introductions became collaborations. Every few minutes someone would pull another person into the conversation because “you two need to meet.”

The first person I met was Henry Kornaros, the 26-year-old co-founder of Public Opinion, which has become one of my favorite windows into internet culture. What started as a man-on-the-street show has grown into an internet-native media company with more than 1.5 billion views across hit franchises, original reporting, and a commercial studio creating work for brands like Ralph Lauren and Nike.

Then there was Christian Baiocco, co-founder of Life on Film, a company that has bottled Gen Z’s fascination with the analog and turned it into a media business. What started as a simple idea—hand disposable cameras to strangers (and the occasional Post Malone or Dua Lipa)—has grown into more than four million followers, over a billion views, and the foundation of a new kind of film media company.

And then there was Anthony, who wasn’t simply celebrating his agency’s first birthday. Together with co-founder Talia Schulhof, the pair are building a company that takes the mechanics behind internet-native participation—the same instincts that turned the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest into a cultural event—and applies them to brands.

Around them was a room full of founders in their twenties and early thirties who, a generation ago, would probably have been trying to get jobs at Condé Nast, CAA, or Warner Bros.

Now, they’re building their own Internet-native versions of those companies.

Creative scenes aren’t new. Brian Eno coined a word for what they produce: scenius. Not individual genius—collective genius, born from networks of talented people making one another better.

In the past, those networks often formed inside institutions like art schools, magazines, improv theaters, and production companies.

Sure, the communities were always there. What’s changed is that they’re no longer orbiting the institutions. Increasingly, they are the institutions.

That’s what I saw at Pufferfish: a new kind of creative institution taking shape.

Most rooms like this only make sense in retrospect.

Years later, someone writes the story about all the people who happened to be there before anyone knew their names. This one felt recognizable in real time.

I've learned not to ignore that feeling.

Until next time,

Sara

The brands that stay culturally relevant aren’t just watching what’s already popular. They’re learning to recognize the communities that will shape culture next.

That’s the work I do inside Community Catalyst, my 8-week strategy engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

Together, we’ll identify the communities where your future customers are finding one another, understand the values and relationships forming inside them, and develop a strategy for participating before those communities become obvious to everyone else.

I have ONE opening remaining for Q4.

Reply CATALYST if you’d like to learn more.

But let’s face it—some conversations need more time to breathe than a 20-minute keynote can afford.

Yesterday, we finally had the space to explore those ideas in much greater depth during Fangirl Summer School LIVE.

Rachel joined me for the full hour, and what started as an unpacking of our keynote became a much broader conversation. We explored ideas we’d only hinted at on stage, dug into the brand stories we’d had to leave out for time, and connected the dots between fandom, community, and modern marketing.

By the end, it felt less like a webinar and more like the conversations she and I have every week about fandom, community, and culture—and where brands fit into all of it.

If I had to distill our hour together into three ideas, it’d be these:

👇 Want to watch? The full replay—and my three biggest takeaways from the conversation—are behind the paywall.

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At 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET, I’m hosting a one-hour interactive masterclass expanding on the keynote I delivered at Cannes about what fangirls can teach brands about earning attention, relevance, and the kind of loyalty money can't buy.

At Cannes, I made the case that fangirls are the most underestimated marketers in the world. Today, we’ll get operational.

I’ll break down what fangirls can teach us, and what it means for brands trying to earn the kind of devotion fangirls understand instinctively. Plus plenty of live Q&A, so bring your questions.

And for the first 30 minutes, I’ll be joined by my Cannes co-presenter, cultural strategist and girl-culture expert .

The details:

🗓️ TODAY: Wednesday, July 8 at 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET

📍 Live right here on Substack (once I go live, paid subscribers can join from the notification Substack sends, from my Substack publication, or from the reading queue in the Substack app)

⏱️ One hour, including live Q&A

This one is exclusively for paid subscribers—and if you’ve been on the fence, this is the moment. Upgrade today and you’ll get access to the live session, the replay, and everything else behind the paywall.

Can’t make it live? No stress. The session is recorded, and paid subscribers will get the full replay delivered to your in-box after we wrap.

UPGRADE TO JOIN LIVE:

Subscribe now

Already a paid subscriber? You’re in. Watch for the link to join—and come with questions.

See you at noon (PT) / 3 PM (ET)

Fair warning: this is my first time going live on Substack, so come for the fandom mechanics, stay for the possibility of technical chaos!

Sara

It began last Sunday evening in Tompkins Square Park. Hundreds of people gathered around a stage where a giant papier-mâché woman towered over a small orchestra. Before the performance began, the audience was given one instruction: no phones, no photos, no recording.

In the days that followed, the festival continued with workshops on flirting and dating offline, mending clothes, operating shortwave radios, and an event called "Google in Real Life," where attendees answered each other's questions using nothing but their own expertise. There were 16-mm film screenings, a Fourth of July beach cookout, and tarot readings.

The weeklong festival, which wraps today, is called the Summer of Ludd, named after the Luddites—a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who fought for their livelihoods and autonomy in the face of industrialization, but whose name has since become synonymous with being “anti-technology.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of it was advertised online. The only way to hear about it was through posters around the neighborhood or booklets tucked into local community spaces.

Even the organizers remained anonymous, communicating with the press exclusively through a blue cloth puppet named Gowanus, according to WIRED.

Reading about it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t just looking at a quirky festival. I was looking at the next chapter of a much bigger story.

Back in February, I wrote about driving to Malibu for a horse manifestation workshop (yes, really) and accidentally joining what I called the Offline Economy—a fast-growing market of analog clubs, digital detox retreats, and screen-free experiences.

My argument was that people weren’t paying to disconnect from technology. They were paying for permission to reconnect—with presence, with one another, and with parts of themselves that are increasingly difficult to access through a screen.

The Summer of Ludd is one expression of where that impulse leads.

And after years spent studying communities, I’ve become convinced their formation tends to follow a remarkably consistent path.

First, a private need becomes shared recognition—wait... you feel this way too?

Then, shared recognition becomes identity—maybe this says something about who we are.

Finally, identity becomes community that starts creating culture of its own—a name, a mascot, a founding mythology, gatherings, shared rituals.

A few years ago, The New York Times profiled the “Luddite Teens”—high school students carrying flip phones who had formed a club around having a healthier relationship with technology. I remember thinking the story wasn’t really about flip phones. It was about people recognizing themselves in each other.

The Summer of Ludd is what happens when those seeds of recognition begin to grow.

That’s the story hiding underneath the festival.

Most people will never attend something like the Summer of Ludd. But millions recognize the feeling behind it.

As far back as 2021, Pew found a third of U.S. adults had tried to cut back on their phone or internet use—nearly half of adults under 30. Five years later, that impulse has only compounded.

Brands shouldn’t look at the Summer of Ludd and ask, How do we become part of this? Communities like this aren’t asking brands to sponsor them. If anything, they’re explicitly rejecting that.

They should ask, What collective need became powerful enough to create this?

The opportunity, then, is in designing for that need: creating spaces that reward presence instead of distraction, and helping people find one another in real life instead of simply giving them something else to scroll.

The Offline Economy shows us people will pay to unplug together.

The Summer of Ludd shows us it’s no longer just a market. It’s a movement.

Until next time,

Sara

Communities don’t begin with a marketing campaign. They begin with a shared human need.

That’s exactly what we uncover inside Community Catalyst—my 8-week strategy engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

Together, we’ll identify the unmet needs shaping your audience, uncover the communities already forming around them, and build a strategy for showing up inside them that earns attention, relevance, and lasting loyalty.

I have ONE spot left for Q4. Reply CATALYST if you’d like to learn more.

If you want to understand the future of brand loyalty, spend a day on Martha’s Vineyard.

I’ve been on this picturesque island off the coast of Massachusetts for nearly a week, and somewhere between my first lobster roll and my forth trip to the Chilmark General Store, I stopped seeing people and started seeing sweatshirts.

The Black Dog oversized crewneck. The sun-bleached Larsen’s Fish Market hoodie. The cropped pullover stamped with “Aquinnah.”

They’re everywhere.

Not just sweatshirts, of course. Also baseball caps, canvas totes, ceramic mugs, bumper stickers, and infinitely distinct versions of the neighborhood general store tee. And even though they all say something seemingly different—specific on-island coordinates, names of famous beaches, logos of local businesses—they’re really all shorthand for some variation of ‘if you know, you know.’

On this island, merch isn’t just a souvenir. It’s a uniform. Every piece of cotton or canvas is a signal of shared insider lore.

It’s a powerful social symbol, and one that the corporate world is suddenly desperate to replicate. And as brands have realized the value of that signal, they've begun chasing it with surprising intensity. Over the past year, we’ve seen the enterprise tech world make some downright bizarre pivots into manufacturing merch.

Consider Palantir—a highly polarizing, multi-billion-dollar defense tech giant that builds data systems for military operations and government intelligence—which recently dropped a $250 custom-engineered, American-made bull denim chore coat complete with a hard-nosed quote from its CTO stitched into the lining.

Meanwhile, AI heavyweight Anthropic hosted an exclusive New York coffee pop-up where people lined up around the block to score a minimalist dad hat printed with the word "thinking"—a nod to its latest reasoning models.

And the e-commerce platform Swap skipped the apparel rack entirely to execute a full-scale brand takeover of London’s AIR MAIL newsstand, wrapping an entire historic storefront with their own branding, and curating a set of direct-to-consumer products and limited-edition branded apparel inside.

None of these companies are trying to build apparel businesses, of course. What they are trying to do: borrow symbols of belonging to turn complex, cold enterprise code into high-status identity assets for their brands.

And while the results are often impeccably sleek, the strategic logic is entirely inverted, because it operates on the assumption that you can engineer organic community sentiment from the top down.

None of this is to say these drops don’t work; internet subcultures are highly susceptible to clever branding. But there is a profound difference between an item that is merely coveted and one that carries lore.

The most meaningful artifacts aren’t valuable because of a logo or a fabric choice—they’re valuable because of the insider rituals, localized jokes, and shared identity they represent. In other words: people aren’t just buying cotton. They’re telegraphing context. And that context can’t be manufactured in a vacuum; it has to be authored by a community.

To unpack what a community-powered merch strategy looks like when done well, I spoke with Erica Gray and Claire Kraemer from Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media—a company that has mastered the art of turning deep-cut cultural context, born entirely from a fan base, into a physical uniform.

The pair helped me map out the three distinct phases of community authorship—a framework any modern brand leader can use to turn insider lore into an acquisition strategy.

Once that framework clicked, it was impossible to unsee—most obviously in the absolute frenzy around last month’s $2.99 Trader Joe’s tote.

Read more

At least, it won the conversation.

I spent the past week at Cannes Lions, and somewhere around day two I started keeping a mental tally of how many times I heard the words fans, belonging, participation, and yes, community.

From stages. At beach clubs. Around dinner tables. Over rosé (of course).

I heard “community” so many times I lost count.

It wasn’t confined to one category, or one kind of marketer.

Luxury brands were talking about community. CPG brands were talking about community. B2B companies were talking about community. It felt like every other conversation eventually found its way back to the same conclusion: the future belongs to brands that build communities, not just audiences.

As the week went on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the industry has finally aligned around what matters. What still feels like a giant question mark is how.

How do you go from being merely visible to becoming genuinely meaningful?

How do you stop marketing to communities and start becoming part of them?

How do you create customers who don’t just buy your product, but build your brand alongside you?

These are the questions the industry is implicitly wrestling with—even if they’re not fully articulating them yet.

As it happened, I’d spent the previous few weeks building a keynote called Fangirl Summer School around exactly those questions.

Together with cultural strategist and girl culture expert , I gave the talk twice during Cannes week—first at Collins House and then at Reddit’s “Community Deli,” their HQ at Cannes.

We designed the talk around a simple observation: the industry has largely agreed on what matters. We wanted to give marketers a practical framework for how to build it.

The premise: if marketers want to understand how communities actually get built, they should spend less time studying brands and more time studying the people who’ve been building communities all along—fangirls.

By "fangirl," we weren't talking about a demographic. We were talking about a mindset: a way of moving through the world that's driven by genuine enthusiasm, deep expertise, and a desire to bring other people into the fold.

Rachel’s role was to make the case that fangirls aren’t just passionate fans—they’re builders, organizers, culture makers, and some of the most sophisticated community architects on the internet.

My role was to translate what they’re doing into something marketers could actually put into practice. The framework I shared on stage boiled down to three ideas.

The first: be obsessively specific.

Most marketers still believe growth begins with reaching more people. Fandom operates on a different assumption: become indispensable to a specific group first, and let growth emerge from there.

On stage, I told the story of a sixteen-year-old One Direction fan who accidentally built one of the most sophisticated information operations on the internet—and what it teaches us about why specificity creates scale.

The second: get in the room.

You can’t build cultural fluency from a dashboard. The strongest community builders don’t just measure communities; they participate in them.

I unpacked how Dove’s phenomenally successful r/real reviews campaign—which just won a Gold Lion at Cannes—would not have existed if members of the team hadn’t spent months immersed in Reddit first.

The third: don’t just give people something to consume—give them something to build on.

The strongest communities make people feel like contributors, not spectators.

I went deep on one of my favorite recent examples of a TV series that became a global phenomenon not because of its marketing budget (spoiler: it didn’t have one), but because fans kept expanding the experience for one another.

Walking away from Cannes, I found myself thinking that the industry has figured out where it’s headed.

Now comes the harder part: learning the skills to get there.

Because community asks brands to do things that don’t always come naturally.

To be obsessively specific when everyone else is chasing scale.

To get in the room when dashboards are faster.

To give people something to build on instead of something to simply consume.

Those aren’t campaign tactics. They’re commitments.

So before saying “community” one more time, ask yourself—are you really ready to make them?

Until next time,

Sara

Want to go deeper? Join Me for Fangirl Summer School LIVE

I only had twenty minutes on stage at Cannes. That was enough to introduce the framework, but not nearly enough time to show you how to put it to work for your brand.

Soon, I'll be doing just that: hosting a one-hour Fangirl Summer School LIVE session exclusively for paid subscribers here on Substack.

We’ll go far beyond the keynote, unpacking the stories behind each of the three principles, breaking down the mechanics behind it all step by step, and spending plenty of time on live Q&A to show you how to put all of it into action.

The session will take place during the week of July 6 (specific date and time TBA—watch this space for details).

Become a paid subscriber today to receive your invitation, plus access to the recording if you can’t attend live.

Subscribe now

Right now, somewhere in a boardroom in Hollywood, an over-caffeinated agent’s assistant is frantically scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, or Markiplier.

All three are YouTube creators who successfully leapt from the digital screen to the silver screen.

Parsons’ Backrooms opened to $81 million domestically—the biggest opening weekend in A24’s history.

Barker's Obsession, a supernatural horror film shot in just 20 days on a $750,000 budget, has gone on to gross approximately $286.5 million worldwide.

Along with Markiplier’s Iron Lung, which turned a sub-$3 million budget into a $50 million-plus global box-office hit, they represent a trend Hollywood keeps getting caught flat-footed by: internet-native creators building IP more lucrative and culturally dominant than anything coming out of traditional studios.

But Hollywood is overlooking something fundamental: while it’s true that the next breakout hit is very likely being built right now by a talented creator, studios are too narrow in their definition of what a “creator” actually is—and where they are building. The next breakout IP may look less like a film and more like a virtual world, meaning its birthplace will almost certainly be Fortnite: one of the internet’s most powerful world-building platforms, powered almost entirely by independent creator-developers.

Before you dismiss Fortnite’s creator ecosystem as some niche corner of the internet, know this: Fortnite now reaches more than 220 million monthly active players, with over two-thirds of them spending time in worlds built by creators every week.

And despite the lingering industry stereotype, this population isn’t just a monoculture of teenage boys playing first-person shooter games.

Driven by pop culture moments like virtual events with Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande and emerging genres like fashion simulators and tycoon games, the audience is diversifying at an astronomical rate. In fact, it’s projected that the overall platform split will reach a perfect 50/50 gender balance over the next five years.

These creator-built environments on Fortnite used to collectively be called “Fortnite Creative,” a designation meant to separate them from the platform's flagship, developer-built Battle Royale mode that you probably associate with the platform. Today, that boundary has vanished entirely as user-generated worlds have become the primary way the platform operates.

The emergence and massive popularity of these creator-built worlds represents a structural rewrite of how community forms online—from gathering around content to gathering inside experiences.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke with the team at Chartis—a company helping brands navigate Fortnite’s rapidly growing creator ecosystem—to unpack why virtual worlds are becoming one of the internet’s most powerful organizing forces, how creators are turning participation into community, and what it means for brands when collective attention shifts from watching content to inhabiting it.

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I was at Sqirl, a restaurant a few blocks from my old apartment in Los Angeles. For much of my first chapter in the city—now more than a decade ago—it was my center of gravity.

Back then, I was practically living there. It was my default setting for solo breakfasts, for Saturday morning brunches with friends that somehow dissolved into the afternoon, and for those “I’m just going to answer one email” stop-ins that became two hours spent lingering over ricotta toast.

Eventually I moved out of the neighborhood, and then into a completely different phase of life. And L.A. being what it is—where moving five miles away might as well be moving to another state—I hadn’t been back in years.

Then I heard Sqirl had started serving dinner. When a friend suggested we go, I jumped at the chance.

The meal was perfect—the best parts of its DNA translated for the evening.

Throughout dinner, I kept thinking about a wall that had been at the restaurant for as long as I could remember: a permanent plaque listing its regulars, organized chronologically by year. My name had been added to it more than a decade ago, and I wondered whether it was still there.

So after we ate, instead of heading straight for the door, I wandered inside, past the counter and the display case, looking for that small piece of my history.

I was half-expecting to find a coat of paint where it used to be. After all, L.A. neighborhoods reinvent themselves constantly. I figured that piece of the past would have been erased, and that would have been okay.

But then there it was—my name on the wall. Right there in the 2015 section, alongside a bunch of other regulars who’d started going that year, many of whom I’m still good friends with.

I stood there for a moment, a little stunned. Ten-plus years had passed. An entire global pandemic had rewritten the world—and the restaurant industry. I’d changed careers, built a business, started a family. And yet there was my name, still hanging on the wall.

Standing there, the distance between then and now evaporated. It was permanent, undeniable proof that while I had been busy caring about this place, it had held onto a piece of me, too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Jeff Klein, founder of San Vicente Clubs, who recently shared on a podcast that people misunderstand what makes his members clubs so valuable. The product isn’t hospitality, he said. It’s psychological safety.

Standing in front of that wall, I realized psychological safety has a compounding effect. Given enough time, it turns places into personal landmarks.

How many brands become reference points in the story people tell about their own lives?

Most aren't built to. They spend all their time trying to figure out how to trigger the next transaction.

But the rare ones focus on becoming meaningful, understanding that the deepest form of loyalty isn’t about getting consumers to adopt a brand’s identity, but about the brand accurately reflecting the customer’s identity. They don’t just remind you of who they are. They remind you of who you are.

In a world that moves too fast, the brands that endure are the ones that become reference points for our personal narratives. They don’t just sell us things; they act as custodians of who we are, so that even when life changes completely, we can go back and find ourselves again.

Until next time,

Sara

The brands that endure don’t just sell products or services. They become the spaces where people locate a piece of themselves.

That’s exactly what we build inside Community Catalyst—my 8-week engagement for brands doing $40M+ in annual revenue.

I’ll help you move past short-term transaction cycles and design a roadmap for attention, relevance and loyalty that lasts.

I have just ONE open slot left for Q4. Reply CATALYST to claim it.

I lived for Sassy magazine.

For the uninitiated, Sassy was the cult teen publication, in print for less than a decade in the late 80s and 90s, that flatly rejected the glossy, suffocating perfection of traditional girls’ magazines like Seventeen and YM.

Instead, it delivered alternative music dispatches, unfiltered conversations, and a worldview that actually treated me–a teenage girl trying to figure out how the world worked and where the hell I fit inside it–like an intelligent human being rather than a boy-crazy caricature.

On the day of the month my copy arrived in my mailbox, it kicked off a sacred ritual: I would lock myself in my bedroom, spread out on the floor, and inhale every single page.

To me, Sassy wasn’t just a monthly publication. It was a portal to a secret community.

Its pages delivered an electric promise: that somewhere out there, in a world infinitely smarter and cooler than my daily teenage reality in Toronto, a collective of girls was asking the same urgent questions, obsessing over the same indie subcultures, and trying to figure out exactly who they were becoming, just like me.

For the last fifteen years, the media industry has largely operated under the assumption that this kind of tactile magic was obsolete, and that the surest way to reach young people was to meet them not in the real world, but inside an algorithmic feed.

Today’s teenagers, however, are staging a mutiny against that digital status quo.

Many are actively seeking out the exact things digital platforms spent a decade trying to eradicate: physical proximity, un-tracked spaces, and shared IRL experiences.

From packed craft circles and skate crews to zine collectives to offline “luddite clubs”, a new counterculture is taking root—one built on participation, creativity, and belonging instead of passive scrolling, algorithmic tracking, and performance.

This behavior is driving a massive macro-renaissance for tangible, highly focused connection.

According to YPulse’s recent Hobbies and Passions data, an incredible 87% of teens ages 13 to 17 now actively pursue at least one hands-on hobby. Instead of defaulting to digital creation, they are turning toward tactile, craft-based outlets like junk journaling, knitting, and needlepoint.

All of this is fueling the rise of everything from dumbphones and digital cameras to vinyl records and, yes, physical media like magazines.

One print media veteran has been paying close attention to this shift, and is building a brand directly in its path: Paula James-Martinez. Paula is the founder of Cuqui (pronounced “cookie”), a premium print journal and offline club for teenage girls launching this summer.

What makes her approach so unique, and such a vital blueprint for consumer brands to study, isn’t just what she’s building. It’s how.

Rather than treating community as an afterthought, James-Martinez has woven it into every stage of the company.

Because of that radical commitment, Cuqui isn’t just a case study in the return of offline media, or a throwback to the spirit of Sassy—though it is both.

It’s a case study in what happens when community becomes the foundation of the business itself.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll unpack how community is shaping every stage of Cuqui‘s evolution—from identifying the opportunity to designing the product to driving distribution—and why this approach is the definitive launch playbook for the next generation of consumer brands.

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