Perhaps the post-war period represents something of a familiarity cut-off. A point where the consumer spending boom exploded, and we moved from a world of rations and rubble into greater American imports and the sexual revolution. The world turned from black & white into colour and didn’t really turn back.

We’d expect anyone coming forward in time from before WW2 to be amazed by our hyper-modern, technically advanced world.

Look at all the things we’ve made, we’d proudly say to an imagined chorus of “oohs” and “aahs”. But we might be surprised by the reaction.

I remember an anecdote I heard Stephen Fry relate on TV once. An explorer visited a remote tribe and wanted to impress them in the same way we imagine impressing our ancestors. As per Reddit, “He pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it, and instantly made fire. The tribespeople were absolutely astounded and amazed by this magic little device.”

That reaction fuelled his desire to show off more of our inventions, so when an aeroplane landed nearby a few days later, he expected an even more rapturous reaction. But the tribespeople were “entirely unfazed”. Their logic was: you can produce fire with your fingers; of course you can fly. You can do anything!

We have our own ways of seeing the world, both as individuals and a collective society. Perhaps if we had the chance to travel many years into the future, we would be similarly unimpressed by futuristic society but totally amazed by some small change that caused us endless problems in the 21st century.

I felt something of that sense of wonder recently, when I visited Anish Kapoor’s latest exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (highly recommend).

I found myself staring dumbfounded at many of the pieces, particularly Kapoor’s well-known “Vantablack” (aka the blackest black ever created) and the twisted reflective sculptures that appear throughout the exhibition, both inside and outside.

In between wondering if Kapoor would ever consider making a Vantablack pair of jeans, I was endlessly entranced by the pieces. I shifted my position endlessly, changing the perspective to get a different view and see myself differently.

I also couldn’t help but feel, at points, like one of the apes at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Like the monolith in the film, Kapoor’s pieces are just there, with little context or application. They invite you to project your thoughts, feelings, and fears onto them, and they reflect an emotional reaction back.

The whole exhibition extends this theme, creating a sense of wonder and providing way more questions than answers. Is that patch of Vantablack on the floor an actual hole? Or just the Vantablack making it look like a hole?

Further dialling up the 2001 similarities, I was desperate to reject current societal norms and stick my hands into the sculptures at various points to take the mystery out of proceedings.

That sense of wonder can be difficult to find in everyday life, given just how familiar we are with everything. And while some tech can feel like magic at first - the first time you used an iPhone, with its flawless touch screen, or asked ChatGPT to do something for you - the magic wears off surprisingly quickly.

But perhaps we don’t actually need to stare endlessly at one of Anish Kapoor’s sculptures to reclaim our sense of wonder at the advancement of the modern world. Maybe we just need to pay closer attention to media headlines from around the world to get a sense of just how futuristic (and dystopian) our modern world truly is.

Writing on his blog in a piece called “New Worlds”, design consultant Ray Newman picks out a few of the headlines and news stories that exemplify just how Ballard-ian/Gibson-ian (delete depending on your preference) this modern life has become.

Robot deliveries, narco submarines, an IV drip clinic in the middle of Westfield - these examples do feel like something straight out of a science fiction story or movie.

Newman also includes “voice-activated computers” in his write-up. We’ve well and truly been through the hype cycle with Alexa and Google Home, so that we’re now bored of them as a technology. But to our metaphorical time traveller from 1996, it would still have been seriously impressive to have a robot living in your house that you could ask to tell you a joke or play Dodgy’s “Good Enough” on demand.

That was the factor that stood out for about the “New Worlds” piece: the individual technologies and media titles weren’t always that noticeable in and of themselves. Plenty of musical artists have already successfully straddled being made purely of code and being highly successful.

It was instead seeing them written down, in a long list, that truly gave a picture of how advanced (and sometimes dystopian) society is in 2026. We don’t see these factors on an individual day-to-day level: they’re normalised to the point of boredom. We may not have flying cars or commercial space travel, but taken in aggregate, our world is pretty futuristic. Which, to me, represents something of a change in perspective.

The importance of identifying a fresh perspective feels even more important at this time of year.

There’s a part of our brains that’s still wedded to the school year as a way of marking the passage of time. That could be because, like me, you have school-age children. Back to school is a real thing in many ways.

Or it could be that those days feel fresh in the mind, so you approach September with that same feeling you gave to a blank exercise book at the beginning of term: a fresh start, where everything is going to stay within the lines.

So as you approach September with this fresh start in mind, don’t underestimate the importance of bringing a fresh perspective to your work.

Get outside and try to look at things differently.

Visit somewhere near your office (either home or work) you’ve never been to before.

Reverse or shake up your route to your favourite lunch venue to get a literal change of perspective.

Step out of the day-to-day for an hour and chat through your strategic problems in a different venue, without the ping of a DM to distract.

Get your agency to undertake some fresh audit work to provide some new grist to the same old mill.

Or you could just get out of your own cultural bubble and try something different.

An artist you’ve never listened to before.

A YouTuber you’ve heard of but never clicked on.

A media title you’d usually shun, but that is actually hugely influential with your target audience.

It may even be as simple as going to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

I can’t promise you that it will be as eye-opening as travelling forward 100 years in time. But I can promise it will challenge your perspective and make you look at things differently, even if only for a moment.

I go to bed relatively early, so it was Sunday morning before I discovered Blonde’s existence - via Twitter, IIRC correctly (how quaint).

Spinning Nikes for the first time was initially strange and slightly unsettling, with its pitched-up vocals and sparse beats. It was a long way from the warm, inviting R&B of channel Orange.

Blonde wore its differences and uniqueness proudly; perhaps a reflection of its creator also coming out between the release of his two “proper” albums. Now, it stands as an undeniable classic: a pure snapshot of the 2010s, effortlessly mixing styles, genres and sounds in an exploration of youthful longing and reflection.

Blonde’s long-term impact contrasts directly with another album released on an almost identical date. Be Here Now by Oasis came out on August 21st, providing the inverse Blonde experience.

Whereas Blonde received no pre-promotion, Be Here Now stands alone in history as one of the most hyped album releases ever. Pre-streaming, albums generally came out on a Monday. Be Here Now was released on a Thursday (for some reason, its release date was on the cover?!?), and still it made it to number one with barely any competition.

Both albums received rave reviews, but with Be Here Now, there was a sense that the reviews HAD to be good. The hype demanded it. We all wanted it to be amazing, so we manifested those feelings, clinging to the parts of the album that evoked the Gallagher’s former glories.

History hasn’t been as kind to Be Here Now as it has to Blonde (I listened to it again while writing this piece, and it’s still disappointing). I’m sure there will be a slew of pieces next year when the album reaches its 30th anniversary. But I doubt there will be much of an outpouring of love. Even Noel Gallagher has pretty much disavowed his creation (the “Supersonic” documentary skirts around it so far that the film ends at Knebworth).

The lesson of albums released on (or just before) August 21st is to ensure you’ve got enough in the tank to demonstrate genuine impact in the long term. Blonde is a grower. It squirrels into your head, revealing its charms slowly over multiple listens. Be Here Now scoffs at such subtlety. It’s loud, over the top and completely overblown.

Being more Blonde, rather than just being here now, is often the way to go. The challenge with that is our consistently accelerating media cycle in the 2020s. In this environment, it’s easier than ever to lose perspective and a sense of time.

Case in point: it’s been just over a year since American Eagle launched its “Great Jeans” campaign with Sydney Sweeney, kicking off one of the year’s biggest discourses.

As far as American Eagle is concerned, the campaign was a complete triumph: the brand created work that transcended the cult of marketing and became instantly recognisable in the real world.

The company understandably basked in this glory. They stood by their thinking in the face of furious debate about how audiences interpreted their messaging. Once the initial furore died down, they began doing the victory lap at conferences and events, where they tried to convince everyone the whole thing was planned all along.

But did the campaign really deliver? Or is American Eagle riding high on the vibes being strong enough that their campaign is a success by default?

Sadly, we don’t have an insider willing to share the truth, but we have the next best thing - an intrepid Substacker with a nose for a story and the ability to parse financial reports.

’s post is sponsored by a brand health tracker, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling. If anything, the brand tracking reinforces Anu’s central point: the Sydney Sweeney campaign did not drive either brand favourability or increased sales for American Eagle.

WHAT'S ANU

The Verdict on Sydney Sweeney's Great Jeans, One Year Later

This issue of the newsletter is sponsored by Tracksuit, the always-on brand tracker built for marketers and agencies to answer the question “Is my strategy working…

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a month ago · 38 likes · 12 comments · ANU

Where American Eagle execs pointed to strong financial results for the brand post-Great Jeans, Anu highlights that most of this positivity came from another brand in the American Eagle stable.

Anu concludes that the campaign didn’t underperform because it was divisive; instead, American Eagle appears to have made the mistake of taking a position (whether deliberately or inadvertently) that was at odds with how its core consumers felt.

One of my old bosses always drummed into us the dangers of criticising other people’s campaigns. It’s impossible to know the dynamics at play in another business or agency-client relationship.

So to be clear, I’m not writing off the “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” campaign. I think, in all likelihood, the brand was surprised by how much it blew up, then had no choice but to lean into its new role as cultural provocateur.

But subsequent activations with Sydney Sweeney have attempted to focus purely on product, removing any provocation (intentional or otherwise) from the mix. That would indicate American Eagle wants to move away from Be Here Now-style BIG NOISE, into something more quietly successful (à la Frank Ocean’s Blonde).

And American Eagle isn’t the only brand trying to be more Blonde than Be Here Now. Except American Eagle appears to be doing it a bit more successfully than YouTube, the other brand which has been on my mind like a Frank Ocean track this week.

Garbage Day triggered the thought, as it reported on YouTube’s attempts to once again get “broadcast-style” programming going on its platform. The question Ryan Broderick posed was: why does YouTube commission shows that follow traditional broadcast tropes? This time it's going for a late-night talk show vibe.

Every other channel is terrified of YouTube encroaching into broadcast viewing figures (and revenue). The BBC hired the ex-head of Google in the UK to try and compete better with YouTube. Channel 4 has teams of people trying to make its YouTube strategy work. What’s the deal with YouTube wanting to do the opposite?

The indications are that, like American Eagle, the top execs at YouTube want to move into a world where its videos are more Blonde, and less Be Here Now. Ryan is stronger than that in Garbage Day, suggesting that YouTube is “embarrassed” by what is actually popular on YouTube. He asks, “Do you think YouTube keeps trying to be a traditional TV channel because they, too, live in shame of what they’ve done to the entertainment industry?”

My experience of YouTube is, in my little bubble of guitar, darts and football (in that order), much more positive. But I think Ryan’s directional point is spot on. Our cultural reference points are still defined by less fluid formats: summer blockbusters, the Oscars, prestige TV, big sporting moments.

YouTube videos don’t tend to make the cut any more. They used to, when there were fewer viral hits, or when Gangnam Style cracked the billion-views barrier. These felt like MOMENTS. The platform used to have its annual YouTube Rewind compilation too, but that sadly fell victim to the culture wars.

YouTube is hugely successful - but perhaps that success isn’t quite all they want it to be, as it was for American Eagle.

Its cultural impact also suffers from its sheer scale, as much as it benefits from it. The benefits are obvious: there’s always something to watch. Whether that’s algorithmically recommended entertainment or finding someone to solve a problem you couldn’t manage on your own.

But that fact is arguably YouTube’s greatest legacy, alongside its early moments, like “Charlie bit my finger”. Unlike, say, HBO, which has The Sopranos and The Wire in its locker, alongside more recent memorable moments like The White Lotus and The Pitt.

With its continued quest for original programming, it feels that YouTube is searching for something like that, the online equivalent of the “well-made 9pm drama”. Not Mr Beast and his many clones. Not, as Ryan puts it, shocking “your friend with a cattle prod in your bedroom on a livestream” and clipping it into a 90-second Short.

A quest to be more Blonde, to generate both the success and the praise, the awards, the prestige that comes with claiming the zeitgeist.

But as American Eagle, and plenty of other brands and artists, have found, those two things don’t always make natural bedfellows. Sometimes success is quiet, built up over time. Success doesn’t always demand your attention from the very first moment.

The question is whether YouTube, and other brands and businesses with similar desires, have the patience to go the distance required to attain Blonde status. It doesn’t perhaps require the same extremes as Frank Ocean, leaving it ten years between long-form releases (we miss you, Frank). But the Be Here Now pomp and bombast, where more is more, can only go so far.

It’s not your traditional bedtime story, as there’s no actual story. The book literally runs through the alphabet, with 26 child-friendly facts about notable bands and musicians of the time.

We’ve read it so many times now that we’ve started adding extra details and answering curious questions. Highlighting which bands we’ve seen live and explaining that, no, that person isn’t Catatonia; she’s called Cerys Matthews (although you’d be forgiven for thinking Catatonia IS Cerys Matthews).

In the book, D is for Disco 2000.

The entry mentions how the song is about meeting up with your friends in the year 2000. I then explain to Ivy that, when the song was released, the year 2000 was in the future, and now it’s in the past (“Wow! Really?”)

It’s one of a few Britpop references that roots the music firmly in the 90s. Although if you go and see Pulp these days, Jarvis makes a subtle change to the lyrics, tweaking “I never thought that you’d get married” to “I never knew that you’d get married”, to mark the passing of time. Similarly, in Girls and Boys, Damon changes the lyrics to “Love in the 90s, WAS paranoid” (emphasis mine).

One lyric that Blur wouldn’t have to change comes from the Parklife song “Bank Holiday”, where Damon scream/shouts “All our high streets look the same!”

The nature of high street homogenisation was different (Blur railed against “fun pubs”, when today it would likely be vaping and betting shops), but the vibes are the same. A sense of local identity slowly ebbing away against the remorseless march of capitalism.

But is it actually the case that all our high streets look the same?

And if we extend the cultural lens out further, is it the case that we exist in a big flat nothing? A flat nothing exacerbated by the primacy of algorithmic recommendations over human curation.

A new Substack article published last week aims to use data to prove, as per author ’s title, that “everything is starting to look the same”.

And the data does show that, as per Blur’s Bank Holiday, all our high streets do indeed look the same. Lauren mapped London’s streets for its food outlets, and then identified how many chains each one had. Unsurprisingly, the answer is a lot:

“Pick two London high streets at random and, on average, they already share almost half their food profile. For a city like London that sells itself on the variety of its neighbourhoods, that’s a lot of similarity.”

Lauren then highlights how chains like Gail’s use data and algorithmic recommendations to identify potential future sites to open. The algorithm fuels the further flattening of local culture.

The piece then provides additional data points that support wider societal flattening: song lyrics use fewer unique words than ever (to maximise algorithmic exposure), and the world of research has strong desires to embrace synthetic personas to reduce the difficulty (and cost) of conducting research at scale. Lauren’s data shows that synthetic personas, like much genAI output, flatten responses, providing only the median view rather than the sharper edges where insight gold is arguably found.

Lauren also finds that the top one per cent of movies rated by users since 2013 generate “nearly forty per cent of attention”.

This chimes with some Enders Analysis research I read a few years ago, which showed just how concentrated TV viewing was - and also the long tail of YouTube views beyond the biggest, most popular creators.

It comes back to the central tension at the heart of our modern tech-enabled world. We have infinite choice and infinite possibilities. We can listen to any song we want. We can ask the machine to handle any number of tasks.

But the freedom of choice is an illusion. The infinite paralyses us; so we end up listening to, watching and eating the same old things we’ve always done. The exact same things as everyone else.

The vibes on that assertion FEEL right, and we have increasing pools of data to prove it. But if it is the case that everything is the same and that the median rules us all, why then do we simultaneously also feel as though narrative cohesion has collapsed?

This summer, a song set a new record for weeks at number one; The Guardian highlighted that most people haven’t heard it. Memes and trends bubble in and out of the world but don’t gain the traction they might have done in the past when Twitter and Facebook’s trending topics helped amplify a central repository of stories. Brat summer was THE thing of 2024, but 64% of the population hadn’t heard of it.

Flicking through Ofcom’s Media Nations report to get to one of my favourite parts each year - the most popular TV shows - I wondered if this could actually be a data point that would help explain why everything looks the same, but we lack cultural cohesion.

Given that linear broadcast TV watching goes down every year, I hypothesised that the annual Top Ten TV shows would have progressively smaller viewerships each year. As our viewing habits become more similar and flattened out, I expected to see the viewing figures for the big “watercooler” moments get smaller.

But that wasn’t the case. What has actually happened is that the numbers for the top ten most viewed TV shows have remained relatively stable.

Instead, scheduled simultaneity (thanks, ChatGPT) has markedly dropped since 2023, perhaps unsurprisingly.

More interestingly, the type of content audiences watch has changed, especially over the past two years. The most popular shows are either family films (Moana 2, Wallace & Gromit) or part of the genuine cultural zeitgeist (Adolescence and Celebrity Traitors).

To quote my AI assistant, who helped me crunch this data, “what’s gone is the well-made 9pm drama”, which made up four of the most popular shows in 2023.

Which means, based on Lauren Leek’s and Ofcom’s data, the homogenisation of culture is part and parcel of the feeling that our collective cohesion has collapsed. We have an increasing gap between the top, most popular content, and everything else.

The narrative has become all or nothing; you’ve either seen The Odyssey, or you haven’t (and you must have an opinion!) It’s not even like a few years ago, when you’d either seen Barbie or Oppenheimer (or both). There’s been a hollowing out of the next layer of popularity down, exemplified by the point when “well-made 9pm adult drama” fell out of the top ten TV shows.

When it comes to the watercooler conversation, it’s inevitably shallow. The conversation gets stuck because you either end up talking about the biggest topics, which lack depth, or everyone is in their own cultural stream, watching one of the hundreds of “well-made 9pm adult dramas” in existence.

The chances of you watching the same series are lower than ever, almost as low as the chance of your algorithmic video feed having strong crossover (unless, like lots of family WhatsApp chats in the world, you spend all evening sending each other Reels).

You might also reasonably argue that the long tail of culture is richer than ever - that we have more choice, and creators have a much bigger chance of reaching an audience than at any point in the past. We’ve been doing the whole “culture is boring” narrative for a while now (I certainly have been writing about it for ages).

Little has changed in that time; the vibes remain much the same, particularly for communications teams. Get closer to your audiences, and understand firsthand which well-made 9pm adult dramas they enjoy (among other things).

But there are also other dissenting voices out there beyond mine. Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day has been cogently setting out his argument that short-form algorithmic video could be reaching a saturation point, leading people to go and explore other channels. He also recently suggested a future world with two distinct cultural audiences. On one side, those rigorously committed to human-made content, the metaphorical “well-made 9pm adult dramas”; on the other, people who just want to lose themselves in their algorithmic video feed and don’t mind if much of it is AI-generated. They just want to swipe and laugh, then share, before swiping and laughing some more.

As with Ivy’s choice of bedtime book, “swiping and laughing” as a way to spend an evening might not be a traditional leisure pursuit. But does that make it any less valuable? The long-term question will be whether our feeds, like our high streets, end up looking the same - and whether that will change our attitudes to how and what we consume.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, it’s the practice of artificially making something look popular, emulating a groundswell of public opinion by coordinated means.

According to ChatGPT, the term originated as a pun on “grassroots”. Where true grassroots campaigns grow from the bottom up, astroturfing campaigns are artificially placed. Hence astroturfing.

Astroturfing was relevant to my world mainly when blogs were the platform of the moment. We’d secure coverage from a blogger, and other people involved in the campaign would leave cheesy, anonymous comments praising the review. We’d then have to send a gentle note reminding everyone that this was technically illegal and could result in a slap on the wrist from the ASA.

As Twitter, then Facebook, then all the other platforms moved communications away from blogs, astroturfing became less of a fixture in my life. Those same enthusiastic commenters could now leave their cheesy responses, but as long as they were signed in and declared their affiliation, it didn’t matter. And most people followed the rules, because they wanted to show their enthusiasm to the client.

I still see slightly sad examples of this today. When reviewing a client’s brand channels last week, I saw a few posts with one comment - and the comment came from someone working at the brand’s agency. Nice to support yourself, I suppose.

But all trends are cyclical, and apparently going back to 2008 is all the rage. So alongside the return of Myspace, we also have the return of astroturfing.

Example one: we have the constructed trends I wrote about last week. ICYMI, budding entrepreneurs utilise our atomised trends landscape to over-inflate examples into trending topics, before cashing in on the resulting write-ups.

On top of this, we have our second example. More literal examples of astroturfing have come to light, as highlighted in this guest essay by Kate Lindsay in (which I came across via Matt Muir and his ever-excellent Web Curios).

Those examples come from a burgeoning industry of what one participant euphemistically describes as “UGC creators”. Essentially creators for hire, who create relatable skits in exchange for either direct reward or affiliate commissions from tech startups desperate for growth (Granola, Sprout, SummaryAI).

@.wfhgirlNo way my interviewer accused me of using AI. The only thing I’m using is this note taker so I don’t miss any key details @Summary App #interview #jobinterview #corporatetiktok #wfhlife #fypシ゚viral

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The creators behind the videos never label them with #ad or disclose any relationship with the products they’re promoting. Some of the creator profiles highlighted in the piece have now been taken down; others, like @wfhgirl (linked above), are still live and don’t mention that the person behind the videos gets a commission from related sales.

Lindsay also highlights that the creators in question aren’t just about the videos; the comment section is just as important for improving their content’s virality.

Even though the situations highlighted in the videos are all fake, the creators meticulously reply to comments from users offering advice or tips - all in the hope of driving algorithmic visibility and then (presumably) financial reward through affiliate sales.

2026 represents a tipping point where, as plenty of people have pointed out (including me), the lines between “real” and “fake” online have collapsed entirely.

These marketing videos masquerading as real content are a perfect case in point. The videos are indisputably real. They’re shot by real people and generate real engagement. But the experiences and situations they describe are not. It’s essentially scripted algorithmic entertainment, with the brand acting as both writer and producer.

This is not fake news in the bombastic, Trumpian sense. It’s definitely not disinformation. It’s not even really misinformation. The videos are misleading, encouraging viewers to believe an experience is true to drive sales of a product that offers a solution to a problem dramatised in the video. It’s a long way from antivax.

But it is undoubtedly a problem. Both the ASA and Ofcom have found that a high percentage of people can’t tell the difference between organic and paid posts. These believable videos that have not been labelled as advertising will likely be taken at face value by most audiences.

But does anyone care enough to do something about it? I’m not expert enough on US regulation to know whether this would be a priority for the FTC. ChatGPT tells me there’s an open case from December looking into “fake reviews” (astroturfing). But there’s nothing specific about fake UGC.

In the UK, the ASA loves to name and shame brands and creators when announcing its judgements. But in this world of AI startups and micro-influencers, is there enough juice to generate the big Drum splash the ASA tends to shoot for?

It can also be a challenge for brands and businesses. Working with creators and influencers can be a genuinely effective campaigning tactic. The PM is all in on it, following on from the successes of government departments such as DCMS.

But the world of influencer marketing also carries a strong stench of murkiness, with creators as charlatans out to make as much money as possible, never questioning their clients or briefs (see the creators paid by Russia during the last US election).

Such chicanery casts a shadow over the whole practice, leading some clients and stakeholders to question the whole approach. These kinds of headlines can make CFOS, CADs and CMOs think twice about investing their budgets in creator-led activities.

The trick, as ever, is to be robust in your approach. Be clear on the role of influencers in your campaign. Vet them carefully. Work with them to co-create campaign materials. Make the whole thing feel like it was grown naturally, rather than it’s a hastily laid, artificially manufactured plan.

That much is, and always has been, true, whether you’re marketing on MySpace in 2008 or partnering with TikTokers in 2026.

In case you were wondering what my favourite album from 2008 was, it was Foals’ debut, Antidotes. Still a great album:

For shorter journeys, we normally just let Ivy choose. And it’s always a treat when she picks the Matilda musical soundtrack. There’s plenty of bangers on there (Revolting Children is my standout, if you’re asking).

The stage show premiered in late 2010, an era when social media was prevalent but not the societal force it is today. But one song from the Matilda soundtrack accurately predicts the direction of societal and political discourse for much of the 2010s.

Loud is sung by Matilda’s parents, crystallising the Wormwoods’ disdain for anything to do with learning or academia. But Mrs Wormwood’s lyrics also include:

Content has never been less important. So you have got to be…LOUD.

A little less fact, a lot more feel.

The less you have to sell, the harder you sell it!

The less you have to say, the louder you yell it!

Matilda creator Tim Minchin joined Twitter in January 2009, according to his current profile. So he could definitely have been prescient enough to see how 140 characters and a bunch of followers could dilute public conversation.

But I doubt that Tim or anyone would have predicted just how much the ethos of loud would apply to the discourse throughout the 2010s. 2016 obviously stands out as the apogee of loudness (less fact, more feel), but its echoes reverberate through our landscape even today.

Whisper it though: those echoes feel like they’re beginning to fade out.

Much of the power of being the loudest voice came from a concentration of channels. Twitter provided much of the main character energy in the 2010s, and its symbiotic relationship with mainstream media titles meant that loudness could be easily amplified across channels.

Facebook was also much more media-centric during this period, as traditional and digital titles basked in their free reach and attempted to cash in on one of the platform’s earliest pivots to video.

Because of that concentration of activity, saying something loudly (and saying it with a bit of clout, to quote Loud again) could generate relatively significant attention.

You could end up being Twitter’s main character of the day, and generate discourse and media coverage. You could, in extreme circumstances, take the Milo Yiannopoulos route of going from being a tech journalist no-one liked pitching to becoming a figure of some notoriety. And your loudness on social media would be the catalyst to this transformation.

The loudness route to fame and notoriety isn’t as clear-cut in the mid-2020s. X doesn’t carry the same cultural clout it did when it was Twitter. Many media titles still use it to source stories, but it’s no longer the centre of gravity for the internet.

The media landscape is a shadow of the VC-cash-fuelled bonanza that powered much of the activity in the 2010s. Facebook is just Marketplace, local groups and AI slop these days.

There are, of course, still exceptions to this trend. Saying ridiculous shit on your social platforms can still generate attention and notoriety. LinkedIn has plenty of people using any news hook to publish their “Ten lessons I learned about B2B SaaS” hot-takes, or using a wedding/funeral as an opportunity to show just how the grind never stops.

But these exceptions stand out because they are exceptional. They’re fewer and further between, unlike the daily characters of Twitter’s heyday.

The platforms that provided a central discourse and narrative to much of social media have atomised into smaller spaces.

Instead of a bunch of notable digital publications, we have an ecosystem of newsletter writers across Substack and Beehiiv.

Instead of YouTube’s trending tab, we have the endless rabbitholes of algorithmic vertical video, where you’ll encounter both AI-generated and AI-edited slop.

Instead of Twitter’s dominance, we have the sad wastelands of X and the tiny, slightly pointless bubble that is Bluesky.

This atomisation of platforms means that it’s harder than ever to identify what’s actually trending on any of them. Something might be hugely popular in your corner of the internet, but actually meaningless to anyone else. 50,000 likes on Reels? Is that good? I don’t know any more.

As NYU’s Professor Ruby Thelot put it (a quote I discovered via Garbage Day recently):

“[Assessing virality] is one of the hardest things to do on the internet. I like to say, is this a real thing, or is this three TikToks in a trench coat. Because oftentimes what feels like a trend, what feels like a novel social behavior, can just be super micro, super small.”

Is this a real thing, or three TikToks in a trench coat? Look out for me quoting this in many meetings over the coming weeks. Call it the Vincent Adultman theory of the internet.

It takes time and effort to understand the provenance of a meme or trending topic in the 2020s. And time and effort are in short supply at most mainstream media titles. They don’t have time to look under the trending trench coat to see what’s inside. They need more content for the machine, more grist to whichever mill is on their radar that day.

And so we end up in a world with headlines about the rising “trend” of Gen Z “demanding” that their dates send an Uber to pick them up.

Garbage Day (one of the few outlets doing the digging into these atomised trends) has a great write-up on the origins of this alleged Gen Z behaviour. The headlines are that it’s not a new thing, with conversation about it dating back to 2023.

Much of the X chat comes from engagement-farming accounts that don’t care about authenticity. And, most importantly, the majority of the recent discourse comes directly from “creators and influencers that are monetizing both the attention it generates and, more often than not, their own businesses.”

All the creators quoted in the media articles about Gen Z “demanding” Ubers for their dates are dating coaches, or variations thereof. They have a vested interest in the world at large seeing the dating pool as a mess of confusion and contradiction.

But the titles writing about this trend (including Yahoo! Life and The Times) have neither the time nor the inclination to spot the artifice behind the trends. The TikToks remain safely ensconced within the trench coat.

All this indicates that the rules for generating mass attention online have shifted. It’s no longer about being loud or attention-grabbing through controversy in the way it was before.

Instead of there being more opportunities for the loudest voices on social platforms, it’s arguably the savviest voices that game the system to generate attention. And that attention prioritises monetisation, rather than clout. Fortune is more important than fame in these examples.

As Ryan Broderick puts it at the end of his piece, it’s an internet:

“Populated almost entirely by human beings who are also businesses that don’t want us to immediately clock that they’re businesses. And they definitely don’t want us to notice that all of our infighting on social media is just free marketing for them.”

It’s not dead internet theory, it’s artificial internet theory.

It’s not that everything is fake - I’m sure some people do ask their dates to send an Uber to pick them up, just as some Polymarket/Kalshi users can make a living from their predictions.

The artifice lies in the fact that we’re led to believe these examples are more prevalent than they are. There’s a kernel of truth at the heart of the artifice, but that truth gets hidden by the trending trench coat.

Just as this new world is tricky for media to navigate, so it is for brands and businesses. Most obviously from a crisis and issues management standpoint.

In this world, the ability to discern the true trending topics from the three TikToks in a trench coat becomes of paramount importance. One of our principles for understanding an issue that originated on social media is motivation. Why is this person making this point? What are they looking for, what’s their endgame? Understanding that motivation is crucial when deciding the severity of an issue or an enquiry.

Equally, there may well be opportunities for brands and businesses to capitalise on a world where savviness matters more than loudness in generating attention.

It can be a challenge to get a CEO or spokesperson to take a stance on any issue, let alone one that might have some spice or interest attached. A playbook that helps you spot small pockets of burgeoning behaviour, whether on social or among your customer base, could be much easier to navigate.

It’s essentially another version of consumer polling/audience research, except you’re taking liberties with an audience’s ability to judge the statistical significance of your sample size. There’s always room for insight, just that your insight can be a bit smaller. One of my jokey go-to sayings has always been “If there are three examples of something, it’s a trend”. In 2026, there’s less jokiness attached. With the right positioning and examples, you probably could convince people that three examples equal a trend. It’s not an approach without risk, as a journalist or follower may well take the time to call you out on your lack of robust evidence. But with the right opportunity and the right business, it could be worth exploring.

Loudness hasn’t gone away, either, as I mentioned earlier. It’s just not as foundational to success anymore, whether that’s online or in encouraging a more egalitarian approach to music choices in the car.

I could easily take the “loud” route when it’s my turn to pick a song (I’m loving the Fcukers album at the moment). But that’s guaranteed to make Ivy reject the whole premise of egalitarian music choices. Instead I go with the savvy option, and try to pick songs that we all like (recent popular choices include Shiny from the Moana soundtrack and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’). It tends to keep most people happy, most of the time.

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But of course, the concepts soured in the face of Facebook (proud authors of the first phrase) breaking way more things than software, while the hustle and the side hustle morphed into unsustainable (and sometimes performative) workaholism.

Everything came to a head during the pandemic, as huge swathes of the West re-evaluated their relationship with work and became more aware than ever that moving fast and breaking algorithms used by billions of people around the world probably isn’t a great idea.

The souring of moving fast and hustling your way through life may not seem like something to mourn in retrospect.

But I do think the energy and enthusiasm of those early-2010s concepts could be reclaimed in our AI-forward world. There’s nothing inherently wrong with moving ideas and projects along swiftly, trying things out in real-time instead of letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

We just need to be more conscious of breaking things, and what we might break. And sometimes you might need to combine moving fast with hustling projects along - pushing, pulling, persuading to make things happen inside a system. Again, done consciously (and without the enormous scale Facebook/Meta operates at), moving fast and hustling your way can pay dividends.

Perhaps though that 2010s way of thinking didn’t actually go away. Maybe it’s simply been on the back burner, hiding in plain sight all along.

Plenty of consumer studies highlight the rise in prominence of “thrift” culture in the UK. Thrift culture refers to the practice of using platforms like Vinted and Facebook Marketplace (you can’t escape Facebook) to sell old or unwanted items to boost your income. It became “a thing” when the cost of living crisis first kicked in, but it’s now a permanent fixture of many people’s lives, either through choice or necessity. It’s a softer, more accessible form of side hustle (although perhaps not if you’re endlessly fighting off scammers on Marketplace).

Ad agency VCCP also recently highlighted the return of the “hustler” in a piece of research on UK consumer behaviour. The study that “hustler”-style respondents were simultaneously “pessimistic and pro-active” about the state of the world.

It’s an attitude best paraphrased as “since I can’t rely on the police/government/NHS/trusted media/affordable expertise anymore, I’ll do it myself.” VCCP claim that these “hustlers” (predominantly early 20s to mid 40s) “represent 26% of the nation”. That number feels high, but the concept rings true.

Generative AI has lowered the bar and democratised access to many things that might have previously felt out of reach for some people. If you can put the prompt together, you can probably do it yourself.

We’ve heard from several clients that inbound customer complaints and queries have increased exponentially over the past 18 months. Consumers increasingly use ChatGPT to help draft those complaints and queries, elevating their responses with pseudo-legal language in an attempt to have greater impact and generate the outcome they’re looking for.

VCCP highlight the demand for solar panels hitting “record levels” (two sets of my neighbours had them installed recently), “partly on the promise of becoming our own electricity generators, able to sell our surplus produce BACK to the hated utilities”.

The most notable example of hustling highlighted by VCCP in their report was:

A 40 year old woman called Angela, from London, when asked why she wouldn’t bother contacting the police in the event of a burglary explained:

“I do know that calling the police would probably be a complete waste of time. However I do have faith… that if I did my own investigations. I would have to knock on my neighbours’ doors, and ask if they’ve got Ring camera footage. So I’d probably do half of their job for them before actually calling [the police]”

Now there’s obviously a thin line between hustling the system into action, and the “internet sleuths” who often plague major news stories by getting all the facts wrong and spreading misinformation. But it’s a sign of how certain sections of society feel: simultaneously frustrated by broken systems but also excited about what genAI can help them achieve within those same systems.

Clearly this “hustler” approach to life isn’t for everyone - and we need to be careful of falling into the “Gen Z hates everything trap” that stems from overstating the importance of a small number of quantitative examples. But the vibe of “experimentation within systems” feels right. And it applies to both people and to businesses.

Last week the ONS released some fresh data on the adoption of AI by UK businesses. Among the headline stats of 35% of companies using some form of AI, a few of the findings particularly stood out.

While larger businesses (over 250 employees) were more likely to have adopted AI, their use was more limited than that of small businesses. Only 9% of employees at big companies use AI “extensively”, compared to 17% for businesses with 0 to 9 employees.

There’s also a gap between how businesses think their employees use AI vs self-reported usage: people use the likes of ChatGPT more than their bosses think:

It’s a model that aligns with the “hustle fast” culture VCCP describes in their report. Successful use of generative AI comes from experimentation, from exploring the boundaries of capability and seeing what comes back.

We’ve seen the fruits of this approach first-hand at Headland, as we rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to all staff and encouraged them to “let a thousand flowers bloom across the agency”. We provided the guardrails, but gave people the freedom to experiment and try things out within our governance framework.

The fruits of the experimentation then become case studies and examples we share across the agency, encouraging people to try them out themselves and further deepen adoption.

But, as the ONS data indicates, there are limitations to this approach. Experimentation isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t want to tinker with systems; they quite reasonably would rather see systems that work well for everyone.

Which is why the big AI players continue to work hard on integrating genAI into your existing software, trying to make the familiar systems of Microsoft Office and Gmail better.

(Highly recommend the ChatGPT plugins for PowerPoint and Excel on this note; genuine time savers on formatting-related tasks).

It’s impossible to accurately predict where our adoption of AI broadly, and generative AI more specifically, will end up. We can probably discount the extreme ends of the argument. Even if we’re in a bubble, and that bubble bursts, we’re not putting the genAI genie back in the box. And at the other end of the spectrum, genAI is unlikely to be the panacea for everything.

But what we can say for certain is that genAI has democratised access to the kind of skills and tasks that would previously have required budget and/or years of expertise.

Yes, the outputs won’t match up to those produced by a skilled artisan. But my daughter’s school doesn’t have the budget to hire a designer, so actually a ChatGPT poster for the end-of-term dance will do just fine.

And that democratisation of access has the potential to spark even more DIY, homespun ideas into life - which does feel exciting, bringing with it those 2010 vibes of moving fast and hustling new projects into existence.

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The question will be all around impact. Not enough people saw the negative impact of the brave new world of the 2010s until it was too late. We’re more aware of the potential ills of technology these days - but can we move fast enough to save things before they break?

The Wire is not only one of my favourite TV shows of all time; it’s also one of the most quoted.

I use plenty of these Wire quotes at work. So here's a collection of my favourites and where I think they apply to agency life (for any non-agency readers, hopefully, you can lift and shift the scenarios to suit).

"The game is out there, and it's either play, or get played".

Now, of course, working in an advertising/PR agency is not at all like selling drugs. But it has its structures, its codes and various rules (both written and unwritten). And you need to be aware of all those factors; otherwise, as the show's antihero Omar says, you’ll end up "getting played".

That includes knowing that any pitch process involving a high number of agencies is either a lottery or a done deal. Knowing that sometimes you'll put blood, sweat and tears into campaigns that never see the light of day. That, sometimes, relationships at the very top of a business hold more sway in the agency selection process than any work you deliver. It's "all in the game", as Omar would say (RIP Michael K Williams).

"All the pieces matter".

I've put this into at least one deck, probably more. Particularly when you're in planning mode, you need the whole picture. All the details - no matter how small or irrelevant they might seem at first glance, save them down somewhere for future reference.

Planning and strategy are primarily processes of refining research and thinking to get to the simplest possible articulation of the job to be done. Don't miss a critical ingredient that might benefit the outcome.

"Follow the money, and you don't know where it's gonna take you".

Reading about a company's finances shouldn't be limited to those working in financial comms. Everyone should have a degree of financial literacy, and anyone wanting to understand a new or potential client should start by reading their annual reports, earnings reports, letters to shareholders or investor communications.

That doesn't mean ignoring your other research avenues (see the previous point), but you can always find planning-based gold in how a business communicates its financial position. Follow the money and see where it goes.

"Look the part, be the part".

This is easily The Wire quote I use most often in day-to-day life (sometimes with the expletive, mostly without). It's also been the cornerstone of my promotion pushes over the past few years. You want to make the next step up the ladder - show you deserve it by looking the part and doing what's expected of that role. You want to be seen as more creative, or more strategic, or with more gravitas - identify what you need to do and do it. Don't wait for permission; start the process and see where it takes you.

I also like this quote because I'm always the person who asks, "What clothing vibe are we going for?" ahead of a pitch or new business meeting.

"A good churchman is always up in everybody's [business]".

Replace "churchman" with "agency worker", and this quote rings true. Working with a long-term client, particularly if multiple client teams are involved in your work, means keeping your ear to the ground for any helpful information.

Asking the pertinent questions, but most importantly - actively listening and paying attention to what's happening in a business. What people are up to, which way the wind is blowing, how the company is performing, who else has been in to see your clients - it's all potentially vital information. Remember (again) that all the pieces matter.

"You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it's about the work, it'll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, then that's the game they'll play."

In the final episode of season one, Lieutenant Daniels gives a powerful speech to his new sergeant, who happened to get promoted as a direct result of providing information up the food chain.

He talks about leadership and how your actions as leaders set the tone for your team's behaviour. I've worked in agencies for over 20 years and have seen firsthand how this works. Behaviour filters downwards, and one of the most challenging lessons to learn when you move into a leadership role is that you need to model the behaviour you want to see. If you work late and send emails in the evening, your teams will follow your lead. If you set boundaries around work/life balance, your teams will feel more empowered to do the same. As James Whatley said the other week, "Good leaders are defined by the leaders they leave behind them".

"This is me, yo, right here".

Sums me up from a work perspective: I'm an agency guy through and through. It’ll be 25 years of agency life next year (six in the music industry, 19 doing social and digital). In a pleasing piece of synchronicity, season one of The Wire also aired the year I got my first salaried job (2002).

Like me starting my career, The Wire struggled to find its feet initially. But it built on the critical acclaim to become one of the most influential shows of the era of “prestige drama”. I can’t claim to have had the same impact! But I’ve enjoyed the ride all the same.

Confession time: I haven’t actually read every single book he’s ever written. King has been very open about his various addiction battles in the past. Fans and critics see some of his work during the darkest moments of addiction as not being up to King’s high standards. That meant I actively chose to avoid books like The Tommyknockers, which are incredibly long and apparently not much cop.

Also, as King has developed in his career, he has moved beyond just writing spooky horror stories. He has a sideline in crime writing. That’s not really what I read King's books for. But I applaud him for pushing his own boundaries and not just staying in his lane, and giving his “constant reader” (the depiction of his audience) what he knows they want.

King’s predicament is a common quandary when you’re in a long-term relationship with an audience.

When people discover your work and your ideas, they’re fresh and exciting precisely because they’re new.

But over time, the freshness fades, and you face a difficult decision (either as an artist or as an agency/in-house comms team). Give people more of what they want, but risk becoming boring, or embrace a new direction and take the associated risk of losing the fundamental aspects of your original appeal.

It’s one of the trickiest balances to get right, and it’s the reason why any artist who can successfully pull it off (Bowie, Blur, Bjork, others who don’t begin with B) or any long-term agency-client relationship gets their rightful glut of plaudits.

Giving people what they want is, of course, the easiest of the two options to lean into. It’s low-effort. It makes people feel good, at least initially. The Smashing Pumpkins have given up on experimentation, and rejoice, they’re going back to their Siamese Dream sound. Hooray!

Except that, after the initial thrill, you listen, and you realise the rehash isn’t as good as the original Siamese Dream, so you just listen to that instead (or you reuse an old idea from an old campaign).

In his post The Decline of Deviance 2, highlights a study by a pair of Russian artists in the 1990s, where they asked “audiences around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:

The obvious point here is the similarity of the paintings. When you ask people what they want, as Mastroianni highlights, you tend to end up with the lowest common denominator.

It’s like deciding on a creative concept through a committee. You never end up with the most effective option; it’s always the least-worst route that wins out, because it’s the one that offends the least people.

Adam highlights that “no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it”.

Which means that if you’re looking for variety in a creative relationship, whether in a creative pursuit or in a client-agency situation, you’ve got to be prepared to try some things that might not work. An idea might fail. You might love something at first, but then sleep on it and decide that actually it’s not great after all. It’s trial and error. But the trial and error are a crucial part of getting the creative alchemy right.

But it’s not just the alchemy of “playing the hits” and “experimentation” that’s incredibly tricky. You’ve also got a whole range of competing interests at play, with what your audiences and clients want. Plus, also some jeopardy: get it wrong, and you might lose an audience or set an agency-client relationship down the wrong path.

Perhaps, though, it might pay off to ignore those competing interests and focus on being a bit selfish. Reassert the primacy of creator intent: write what you want to read, make the music you enjoy, develop a campaign that you would enjoy executing.

That’s some of the advice that esteemed author Ursula K Le Guin gives in her book on creativity (advice I sourced via the excellent Marginalian newsletter). Le Guin’s suggestion is that you shouldn’t “think about your audience when you write.” She goes on:

While planning a work, the writer may and often must think about readers: particularly if it’s something like a story for children, where you need to know whether your reader is likely to be a five-year-old or a ten-year old.* Considerations of who will or might read the piece are appropriate and sometimes actively useful in planning it, thinking about it, thinking it out, inviting images. But once you start writing, it is fatal to think about anything but the writing. True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; it takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.

Le Guin continues by considering how writing (and by extension, any creative endeavour) is a collaboration between the creator and their audience. It’s not a one-way street, with one side giving the other what they want, or a creator completely ignoring their audience.

The alchemy aspect, the careful balance, comes from an intrinsic understanding of what audiences might want. My interpretation of Ursula K Le Guin’s advice is that you should treat your audience research like any other preparatory work you do.

Do all the reading and discussing you need to do before attempting to come up with ideas.

Then put all of that to the side. Let it sit in the unconscious parts of your mind, and focus on the ideas and what YOU think great creative looks like.

Bring those ideas into the world with all the care and attention they need to flourish; don’t interrogate them through the “what will everyone think” lens too early.

Let them take a form. Then go back to the beginning and, to use a Headland favourite phrase, kick the tyres on your thinking.

Ask yourself if it’s fresh or stale. Challenging or completely missing the mark. Spinal Tap’s new direction or Radiohead’s Kid A.

It’s not an exact science, but as Ursula K Le Guin and Adam Mastroianni both highlight in their writing, it’s a process that you can get comfortable with through practice and repetition. Through reading widely and listening with open ears.

Sure, you’ll come across a few duds and potentially waste some time on a series that initially showed promise. But your creative palette will feel fresh and renewed. And there’s nothing like discovering something new and exciting that unlocks the energies of your creative impulses. You just have to get out and look for it.

When I feel like a warmed-up corpse, Apple Health will proudly announce that I scored a 96 (out of 100, if you’re not into quantifying your sleep). And when I bounce out of bed (I never bounce out of bed; I have a perennially stiff back in the mornings), refreshed and recharged, it’ll be an 80 and a mild admonishment to go to bed on time next time.

I could, of course, optimise my life around my sleep, which some researchers suggest is one of the best things you can do, but I’m also in possession of a job, a young child, and a desire to practise my regular hobbies. So something has to give.

And most often that is sacrificing a little sleep for a little more guitar, reading or a World Cup penalty shoot-out. I actually wear my Apple Watch to bed as a silent alarm; the sleep score is mildly interesting, but it's not a target I necessarily strive to hit on a regular basis.

It’s not just sleep you can track and potentially optimise to improve your life. We live in an age where it’s possible to quantify many aspects of yourself, with the associated potential for self-improvement that the quantified self brings.

For a long time, the “quantified self” was a phrase you’d read in the annual slew of New Year’s Trend Decks, with wearables and life-trackers pitched as the hot new thing that would change society/marketing/the world.

Like plenty of tech trends, the reality hasn’t lived up to the hype, but wearables have proved resilient. One that may no longer be exciting, but is simply part of the fabric of daily life for many people. Partly that is down to the ease of access to the technology.

But you could also argue that the tech reflects one of society’s most resilient meta-trends - namely the modern desire for continuous optimisation.

As Phil Tinline outlines in his exhaustive piece on the topic, titled “The Cult of Optimization” (spoiler alert: he’s not a fan), the concept of optimisation really took off in the immediate aftermath of WW2.

George Dantzig, working with the US Air Force, developed an algorithm that could be applied to solve real-world problems. From that kernel of an idea, the past 80 years have seen optimisation become a cultural ideal.

Greater access to technology and the proliferation of data mean optimisation can be seen and felt everywhere. Optimisation is no longer just about solving a specific set of problems; it’s shifted into a general ethos of continual improvement and efficiency.

When I asked ChatGPT (a tool born of optimisation, if ever there was one) to unpack the etymology of optimisation for me, the answer highlighted a crucial difference between “improvement” and “optimisation”.

When you optimise, you optimise for something. There’s a defined objective in mind. You optimise your social media posts for engagement. You optimise your website for LLM discoverability. You optimise your CEO’s results speech for soundbites that will land with investors.

Improvement, on the other hand, tends to be more about the long, slow, steady quest to make something better. And in the 2020s, it continually feels as though optimisation rules everything around us, with the general sense of improvement a dim and distant second place.

As Phil Tinline highlights:

“Optimization has refocused the media around the measurable preferences of the individual, as tallied in clicks, page views, unique browses, and similar metrics.”

We see something similar with the endlessly optimised content-sharing algorithms, optimised for individual preferences, making it easier than ever to fall into your rabbit hole of choice (Thick of It iconic quotes for me yesterday).

Some in Silicon Valley take it even further, “optimizing for a few grand objectives at all costs, in pursuit of an ever more perfect world.” Such notions lead to less palatable ideas, such as “private, corporate-controlled cities” and Marc Andressen’s vision of an AI-powered society that maximises abundance “to the point of infinity”.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the overarching concept of optimisation. There are undoubtedly many inefficiencies in the world, many of which you may encounter and despair over on a daily basis. Fixing those and reducing complexity where appropriate are eminently sensible.

The challenge with the “cult of optimisation”, with optimisation as a ubiquitous ethos, is twofold in my book.

Firstly, the quest for endless optimisation increases the risk of running afoul of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

The most pertinent example in the world of comms is the danger of optimising all your LinkedIn output to focus solely on engagement. If engagement is your only goal, you would optimise for it by adopting all of LinkedIn’s worst habits.

Starting your posts with “I had to fire all my employees today” and other clickbait headlines.

“Comment-gating” your thought leadership reports. If you’ve not seen this one, you increase your comment count by highlighting something interesting you’ve published, then prompt people to comment with a relevant word to access the document. It’s the LinkedIn equivalent of “like and comment” competitions on Instagram.

There’s also always the tried-and-tested “10 things B2B SaaS companies can learn from…” approach, applied to anything in the news.

These are great strategies for driving engagement on LinkedIn, but at what cost to your reputation (and your dignity)?

You should definitely optimise for engagement, but don’t forget the other, more fundamental metrics that underpin social media success.

The second challenge with the relentless pursuit of optimisation is another meta-trend of our modern times. I’m, of course, talking about vibes.

Vibes are important. As Phil Tinline highlights, “Not every worthwhile objective can be measured.” Data on its own is not a substitute for good judgment. If our sole focus is on relentless optimisation, we risk ignoring some of the softer, more important measures.

We definitely want to improve our reputation with the audiences that matter most to us. But doing that rarely comes from purely getting the most engagement or the most media coverage. It requires careful judgement: selecting the right territories, understanding the appropriate channel mix, and choosing stories that will resonate and stick in your audience's heads.

Anyone can pay Business Insider a few hundred quid to get an article published (no seriously, anyone. I had a LinkedIn DM about just this week). But that placement won’t contribute to the vibes.

Vibes come from well-placed coverage and smart LinkedIn targeting of thought leader ads. It’s great to get a highly efficient CPM; it’s arguably even better to hear a SpAd tell a client, “Oh, I saw this on LinkedIn”, knowing that it came from your paid activity.

I should reiterate here that I’m not suggesting all optimisation is bad. More that it can become all-encompassing and jeopardise those all-important vibes.

Sure, I could go to bed at 8pm every night to give myself the best chance of scoring a 100 on my Apple Health sleep score. But it would be at the cost of watching horror movies with my wife. And that’s not a vibe I’m willing to sacrifice in the name of optimisation.

(If you’re interested, this week we’ve rewatched The Descent and premiered Obsession. Highly recommend both).

2026’s version of DJ Shadow’s provocation is more likely to be “Why content sucks in 2026”, but for many people, the answer remains the same. It’s still the money.

And like DJ Shadow’s suggestion in 1996, there’s truth and logic to the notion that it’s the money which makes content suck in 2026. You can trace a clear line from revenue sharing and “creator funds” to our feeds feeling like they’re increasingly full of endless variations on highly repetitive themes.

That’s because the path to revenue-sharing is, on paper, incredibly simple. Identify trending topics across major content-sharing platforms. Utilise a genAI video creation tool to make a bunch of videos on some of these trending topics. Pump the videos out and wait for the money to roll in.

Of course, the reality is that this approach has only slightly better odds of paying out than the lottery. But the playbook has been adopted by creators both budding and established, leading to feeds that feel more identikit. There’s more money to be made by chasing algorithmic gold than by ploughing a lone artistic furrow (to return to the 1996 references, attempting to become the next Spice Girls is more profitable than being DJ Shadow).

But the money isn’t the only thing. Revenue sharing has been available on most major platforms since the mid-2010s, and most require a minimum follower threshold. It’s only X where the requirements are ludicrously low - 500 verified followers and 5 million views over three months ( and X’s view count is still generous, to say the least, meaning this number is highly achievable).

So, if it works so infrequently, why is the playbook popular enough to become something that online grifters can sell at £1,000 a go?

Well, clearly AI has a role to play here. It’s easier than ever to create content for feeds or to spin up low-effort websites that have the potential to carry display advertising.

We’ve also got to factor in the rise of cryptocurrency and the associated gold rushes they’ve generated over the past six years. NFTs might be a joke now, but there were a lucky few who made money out of them. Similarly with memecoins and other bizarre crypto crazes - there’s a definite sense online that there’s money to be made if you can get on board with something at the right time.

It’s no coincidence that many of those crypto-related rushes happened during or immediately after the pandemic. One of the biggest lingering side effects of that “unprecedented” 18-month period that turned billions of lives upside down is the way it changed our relationship with work. The great resignation may be over, but many people continue to re-evaluate their options, with plenty feeling that the traditional 9-5 isn’t for them.

The Wall Street Journal recently explored this topic in a piece that claims “Passive income is the new American dream”. With the obvious caveats that a) America is not the world and b) the qualitative case studies are a vanishingly small sample, it provides a snapshot into the motivations and tactics some people have explored in their efforts to either supplement their main income or replace it entirely.

There are dropshippers, people selling AI-written PDFs on Etsy, people cloning their voice using ElevenLabs and licensing it for use in audiobooks and videos, and, most bizarrely of all, people selling Amazon products on eBay for markup (they even send the products in Amazon packaging).

But as the piece itself suggests in its conclusion, there’s actually not much that’s passive about most of these strategies. While they might not require the regular hours or travel of a “normal” job, the ways of generating income are highly transitory.

Everyone is always on the lookout for the next big thing, with a looming thought that stays consistently front of mind: “We don’t know how long this is gonna last, but we’re just gonna make as much money as we can”.

And while there are undoubtedly some people making decent money from their side hustles and their passive income schemes, it’s not as easy to be successful as it may seem.

As one interviewee puts it in the WSJ piece, she “sometimes feels like the only one failing because she sees so many success stories on social media.” The grifters and the influencers selling the $1,000 get-rich-quick guides make it seem easy. And their stories are convincing: they come with screenshots, examples, and everything you need to get on the same path.

But making ideas feel convincing is easier than ever online in the 2020s; it’s arguably a defining feature of our age. Consequently, it’s harder than ever to separate the real from the fake. Even defining those terms is no simple task - the lines are blurry.

So who can blame people for becoming convinced by the potential to get rich from passive income, when even the hottest businesses intentionally overstate the odds to fuel their growth and keep the hype bubbles from popping?

I’ve become fascinated by the rise of “prediction markets” in the US over the past few months. Kalshi and Polymarket are the biggest names with the largest budgets, but others are popping up everywhere. Even Meta has allegedly launched an internal working group to get on this particular gold rush (which should make everyone extremely worried for a whole host of reasons).

The rise of prediction markets fits neatly into the narrative of the growing desire for passive income and the pervasive sense that systems exist for users to game. Democratising the tactics of the HNW individual. The likes of Kalshi and Polymarket actively help fuel this narrative, with a range of videos doing strong numbers that show users cashing in on a range of bets.

The problem is, as the Wall Street Journal (again) found, plenty of these winning bets were completely fake. 70% of the 1,105 videos the Journal analysed contained fake bets, using outdated footage, fake headlines, or dummy versions of the Polymarket website. The bets shown in the “winning” videos would actually have resulted in losses of more than $160,000 for the users involved.

While some of the creators reacted to the investigation by scrubbing their histories and removing any evidence of brand partnerships, others were more bullish. One creator likened the videos to highly polished food imagery in advertising: “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said. “You’re still going to buy the burger.”

Which is true, up to a point. But the difference between a Big Mac not looking like a polished picture and Polymarket actively encouraging creators to lie about their winnings is stark. Eventually, Kalshi and Polymarket may be censured and fined by US authorities, and new regulations may even be introduced to impose greater controls on prediction markets.

But the passive-income, get-rich-quick, or lol-trying culture is bigger than any one platform. It’s reached the point where it’s embedded in much of what we see every day. Nothing is real; everything is potential revenue.

And for comms people, this culture adds a whole new layer to issues and potential crises. We have playbooks on how to deal with customer service issues that have got out of hand (take it offline, defuse the situation, show you’ve fixed the problem). We have playbooks for dealing with swarms of activists (ensure strong internal comms, measure the true impact of attacks, don’t respond directly on social).

Most businesses are less prepared to deal with someone attempting to kick up a fuss and create an issue for the clout and the potential revenue it brings. We had a situation two years ago where a high street brand found itself the subject of a TikTok in which the creator dug up a ten-year-old story and presented it as a fresh issue. It caused a swarm of comments and eventually spawned another round of media coverage on the issue.

The challenge for us and the comms team was that we had to assume the creator’s motivation was a personal one, that they did care about the issue - and as such had to prepare for further attacks if we couldn’t adequately resolve it. But we also secretly suspected they didn’t really care, and had essentially got lucky with an algorithmic payoff, and so were determined to cash in while they could.

To help inform the response, you need all the classic crisis preparedness in place: clear chain of command, swift internal approvals and access to the your vital levers. In the age of “get rich or lol trying”, you also need swift access to a creator’s history, so you can understand where they sit on the scale between activism and opportunism. And you need the credibility with senior leaders to explain the psychology behind 2020s posting.

You may well end up taking a the pithy DJ Shadow approach in this scenario, telling a CEO that it’s not about them, it’s the money. But the chances are you’ll need plenty more samples in your argument to bulk the whole thing out and make people listen. You’ll need to land your point succinctly, otherwise the risk of getting embroiled in a non-issue issue will grow exponentially.

ChatGPT suggests an ideal LinkedIn ad view frequency of 3-7 per user, but if you’re aiming to reach key decision makers, this number can probably be higher. , in his excellent but now sadly on hiatus Substack, The A to Z of Media Planning, goes in depth on the topic in his entry for “F”. Worth a read if you’re planning to invest more in paid media in the future.

In PR and comms agency world, we sometimes underestimate the power of frequency. Partly this is because we operate on the in-built understanding that our audiences want to consume news coverage. That means a piece of earned media is more likely to stick in the mind than a piece of display advertising.

But that same principle doesn’t apply to your social media activity. Some companies think that when posting about their results, for example, one hero video will do the trick. You’ve filmed your CEO in front a glass walled backdrop, he didn’t wave his hands too unnaturally - job done.

In the world of publishing results on social media, it’s not job done. The gold standard is to have a suite of content to support your results, with a paid plan to ensure your posts reach your investors, employees or potential investors. Your C-Suite should be involved, and have bespoke assets and viewpoints to share (or you could take advantage of LinkedIn’s forthcoming collab posts feature).

In the world of internal comms, one-and-done is never enough. My friend Dave ran a big internal comms project at his agency a while back, and he gave some advice regarding the frequency of internal comms. “If people come and tell you they’re sick of hearing your message, that’s when you know you’ve cut through”. He was being facetious, but only slightly.

In most of the agencies I’ve worked at, we’ve presumed that one big internal announcement is enough to get a message across. You speak at the weekly agency all-hands. You send a follow-up email. Job done. In truth, you’ve barely scratched the surface. “Oh, I must have missed that” is a highly common phrase in agency world (and beyond). Your colleagues have a lot on their minds; you need to be more Dave and keep hammering the point home until you’re thoroughly sick of it.

But therein lies the challenge of frequency in the world of agencies. We often get sick of our messages and campaigns before our audiences do. We’re hardwired to think like hipsters, to be constantly searching for the new thing: new ideas, new trends, new ways to make our clients and customers feel loved.

Repeating the same messages for six weeks sounds, frankly, like a slog. But while it may feel boring for you, it’s what your audiences want.

In our brains, we’re also hardwired to enjoy repetition. One of the things I’ve learnt in my nearly five years of parenting is this: never entertain your child with a trick, game or joke that you aren’t prepared to repeat one hundred times over. An early word all kids learn is “more”. They’ll then move up to “again”. You will hear these words a lot, as you endlessly tip them upside down or do that silly voice you invented to stop them crying, but actually makes your throat hurt quite a lot.

explores the topic of repetition through the lens of data on her Substack, offering plenty of tips for comms people to aid storytelling. Parrou highlights, in charts, ways to make your data more understandable by repeating certain factors. Perfect if your reports or audit work tend to generate more questions than they do discussion. She also has a neat line on identifying redundancy to help inform your work further.

Parrou also highlights some rhetorical flourishes you could adopt to make your writing and work more memorable. One such flourish is “anaphora”, where “the beginning of a sentence is repeated multiple times. It’s been used by writers and speakers since Ancient Greece”.

You may prefer the idea of “epistrophe”, where you repeat a word at the end of successive clauses: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Or try an alternative, epanalepsis, where you begin and end a sentence with the same word: “The king is dead, long live the king.”

In agency world, we tend to rely on alliteration, of course. If your three-word process, model, or framework doesn’t alliterate, you’ve not done it right.

Repetition often gets a bad rep from humans. It conjures images of boring piano lessons in stuffy rooms, going up and down scales. Or going round the same exercises endlessly in the same boring spot.

The key to repetition is getting the balance right. Have a range of exercises that you cycle through in a routine to keep the whole thing feeling fresh and challenging. Build your stretches into your daily routine, focusing on doing what you can, as often as you can, when you can. Have a practise schedule when you’re trying to improve on an instrument, mixing in the repetitive exercises with playing your favourite songs before challenging yourself with something harder.

Songwriting also provides plenty of great examples of getting that balance between repetition and memorability, particularly in pop songs. Catchy songs, by their nature, sound simple and effortless. But often they’re blending just the right amount of repetition with moments that surprise and jolt you out of the patterns they’ve established.

In agency world, perhaps we need to think more like songwriters when we’re developing campaigns, pitches and presentations. We need a memorable chorus, the simple key message that’s going to stick in our audiences’ heads when we’re not around.

We need to cater to some portion of our audience’s expectations. We need to answer the brief; we need to deliver what people want (experimental music probably won’t work). But we also need to defy those expectations. To, in the words of agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address, “Give people what they want, in a way they’re not expecting.” You can still freshen up your messaging, even as you repeat the chorus for the sixth time.

If you’re in the market for examples of extremely popular songs that also defy expectations in some way, I highly recommend this piece by Ethan Hein in Music Radar. It’s made me wonder, “What is the chorus of ‘Single Ladies’?” ever since I read it.

If you’re in the market for ideas on making your work more catchy and memorable, you could think about jumping straight into things, like Outkast on ‘Hey Ya’.

Don’t waste a slide on “Your brief, in brief”. Jump straight in; let’s do this!

Don’t waste six seconds of your video with a logo and scene-setting exterior shot. Hit people between the eyes.

Or you could be more Prince and chuck everything you need into the mix as a starting point, then remove elements to see how the product improves (Prince took all the bass out of “When Doves Cry”). Less is often more - fewer slides in your deck, a few seconds chopped off your video, some shorter copy for your LinkedIn post.

To find success in the world of comms, you have to complete the ultimate act of bravery and share your work with someone else and have them help you judge its memorability, or decide how much repetition is too much. But if you can increase your frequency of sharing, and you have constructive colleagues, the whole process gets easier as you repeat it over and over and over and over again.

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This week I had my traditional minor panic that my “New Albums 2026” playlist, from which I compile the final ten, was looking a little sparse.

There’s already some automatic picks for that end-of-year list (spoiler alert), some of which I’ve mentioned in past newsletters. Angine de Poitrine, Nine Inch Noize, Joshua Idehen. I’m also really into the latest Nothing album, and Courtney Barnett rarely puts a foot wrong in my experience.

But there’s not much bubbling under that top five. Dead Dads Club is cool; James Blake suffers from being fine, but more of the same.

These days, you don’t need to wait until the end of the year to get your best of lists fix. Many publications use the halfway point of the year to publish their albums of the year - so far. Rough Trade’s blog is always a good source of recommendations (i.e. they recommend music that appeals to my taste). The Guardian’s list is always refreshingly diverse, but honestly, is too much.

30 albums, of which I’ve only listened to one (Angine de Poitrine, naturally).

Also, unlike your classic end-of-year list, the albums aren’t ranked. I find it a struggle to know where to start - in the end I went with the Dry Cleaning album (great name for a band), as I’d heard a single on 6 Music the other day.

(My review: it was OK, but I struggle with the current trend of vocalists who speak rather than really sing (see also Yard Act). The Rough Trade blog was more fruitful - I enjoyed Deary’s shoegaze vibes very much).

I would suggest that the 30-album unstructured listicle is a highly representative slice of modern music criticism, in that it contains little actual criticism. It’s unlikely that one of the music magazines of the past (old man alert), like NME or Select, would have run such a piece.

Partly, that’s down to the format - in print, you had space restrictions, necessitating tougher critical choices about who’s in, and who’s out. Online provides the room to be more reflective of broader culture. Great news for artists who would otherwise lack mainstream media coverage. But a challenge for the noble, and now arguably defunct art, of traditional music criticism.

Now you may subscribe to the classic cliche that “rock critics are just failed musicians”. Others don’t feel that way, and have published excellent pieces lamenting the demise of the music critic and the role they may normally have played in curating such a list as the one in The Guardian.

Last Autumn, we saw The New Yorker publish an entertaining long read titled “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”. Then, last week, the always-illuminating and entertaining wrote a piece exploring similar territory.

Drawing on W. David Marx’s book Blank Space, Mastroianni highlights how “poptimism” replaced “rockism” as the dominant form of cultural criticism after the nineties.

Mastroianni, however, takes it further than Marx. He highlights just how comfortable we are having completely destroyed the line between art and advertising. And while we shouldn’t forget the fact that artists need to make money from their endeavours, we should at least scrutinise their choices more than we do.

For Mastroianni, it’s about redrawing “the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.” Essentially bringing back some shame into our culture by calling out musicians and other creative types for taking money from absolutely anyone.

Previously, we would have drawn the line around, for example, footballers tweeting cryptocurrency promotions; these days, it would be Timothée Chalamet partnering with Kalshi (to be fair, he’s copped some flak for this). It’s a line that we underpin with our “desire for seriousness among our cultural elite”.

But that’s going to be hard to do. For many creators, brand deals are the point. They’re the only escape from the randomness of the algorithmic payola on many platforms. The average amount of money a signed artist earns from streaming is in the region of £2,000 a year.

The playbook is to get as popular as you can, then cash in on the brand deals as quickly as you can, before it all dries up. It’s a speedrun of being a series one or two contestant on Big Brother.

The concern many people feel about this playbook is that it has further, more wide-ranging consequences on culture. I’ve written many times about the feeling you find expressed in certain corners of the internet that culture is “stuck”.

The latest missive I read in this lineage is a deep dive into dance music in the 2020s. While I can’t pretend to know any of the artists, clubs or trends that Gabriel Szatan mentions in his piece, I can identify with the overriding sentiment. Namely, the difficulty of accurately categorising current musical trends.

Part of this, of course, comes from a lack of physical and critical distance we have from our current milieu. It’s only been over the last few years that I really feel we’ve reached a point where we can comfortably categorise the noughties, for example.

I’m not sure a piece like this excellent timeline of “Hipster Music” would have worked so effectively had it been published ten years ago. It would have been impossible to publish in 2006, if it had mirrored Szatan’s piece on the sound of the 2020s.

But there’s also potentially a structural building block missing from our current milieu that may go some way to explaining the lack of our “Sound of the 2020s”. In his piece, Gabriel Szatan discusses the absence of “micro genres” as a factor in our lack of a 2020s sound. But perhaps it’s not that the genres themselves don’t exist; it’s that we lack the critics to coin the names.

I’m reading Miranda Sawyer’s “Uncommon People” at the moment, the story of the 90s through 20 songs.

Sawyer talks about the birth of the phrase “Britpop” and how music writers used to sit around inventing stupid genre names for fun. Some worked, like grunge and Britpop. Others were less successful - NAM, or the New Acoustic Movement (Travis, Coldplay mk 1, etc) didn’t stand the test of time.

Bands and artists lumped into these genres invariably hated the labels; music fans loved them, as it helped catalogue our eras and give us a sense of what was going on. It’s essentially another version of a great insight - identifying the hidden obvious that links together previously disparate and unconnected factors. When you get it right, it feels accurate, topical and memorable.

It’s not hard to see a clear line from the demise of the critic, through the lack of regular cataloguing, into the current malaise some people feel around our culture: a stuck, shapeless morass of flatness.

And if even we hadn’t killed of the traditional critic, there’s no guarantee things would be any different. Cataloguing culture is harder than ever. The speed and scale of our modern media apparatus means the sheer volume of material in the world is impossible to keep up with.

But just because cataloguing culture is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Perhaps we need to upweight our sophistication and make more effective use of both LLMs and the data we have available to tell more credible stories about culture.

Perhaps the future of cataloguing and cultural criticism just hasn’t been imagined yet. We’ve tried to bring back curation, and it didn’t stick. We find the repetitiveness of algorithmic recommendations (like our Daylists) limiting.

Perhaps someone’s out there rinsing their company’s enterprise token allocation, building a discovery engine that can generate that uncanny balance of finding something that’s familiar enough to pique your interest, but also fresh enough to keep you hooked.

It’s tricky alchemy, but it’s surely not impossible. And the rewards for everyone will be plain to see.

Central London in particular reminded many people of the iconic opening scenes of 28 Days Later, when Cillian Murphy wanders around the West End as Godspeed You! Black Emperor play moodily over the top.

And although these were some of the darkest moments of the pandemic, I still couldn’t help but counterintuitively think that it would be quite fun to explore that completely empty version of my hometown.

There’s something about the eerieness, the unexpectedness of experiencing a space in a state that’s the polar opposite of what it was designed for.

It completely changes your view of the situation. Images of such emptiness are transformed thanks to the absence of people. You notice different details and reassess those images in completely different ways.

We tend to describe such spaces, and the accompanying images, as “liminal”. They’re so named after the definition of liminal as “relating to, or being in an intermediate state, phase or condition”.

If you’ve ever been in the office on a weekend, you’ll know the kind of vibe I’m describing here. Everything is familiar, but also not quite right. The whole space is waiting for people to bring it to life. While it waits, it’s in an in-between, liminal state.

The idea of “liminalism” (as described by Ed Simon in this space in Hyperallergic) is front of mind at the moment thanks to the new A24 horror movie “Backrooms”. I’ve not seen the film, but I do know it was a) directed by a YouTuber and b) it’s based on a 4chan collaborative short story that stemmed from an image of an empty room, which users imagined as a spooky liminal space.

To Simon, the popularity of liminalism and photography of liminal spaces speaks to where we are as a society. It’s:

The other factor Simon pulls out of the popularity of liminal photography is the complete lack of humans on show. Unlike 28 Days Later, where we experience London’s emptiness through Cillian Murphy’s experience, liminal photography focuses on the details we can see thanks to the complete lack of humans on show.

It’s an “intentionally alienating experience - a personal loneliness that’s borderline apocalyptic” (to further deepen those 28 Days Later/COVID-era comparisons). Perhaps the popularity of liminalism comes as much from these depictions of loneliness as it does from its reflection on our perilous socio-economic-political status as a society.

Loneliness is back on the media agenda, as the past few weeks have seen the rise of “loneliness influencers” in our feeds and across media publications.

The creators in question (there don’t seem to be that many - both The Cut and The Atlantic featured Lana Isa heavily) “give followers a peek into mundane solo moments” (as per The Atlantic).

They celebrate and glamorise spending time alone, taking the kind of activity that may previously have been the butt of the joke (think Dinner Date delivering a microwave meal to those not chosen) and reframing it positively.

“It’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed”, as one of the video taglines says.

As someone who isn’t afraid of eating out or going to the cinema alone (unless you count a book as company), I can empathise with this line of thinking. But there’s an obvious duality at play here with solitude influencers: they’re documenting their solitude precisely for others to enjoy.

And while Lana Isa may point out that she turns off notifications, she’s still getting significant feedback and engagement in the comments on her videos. The solitude comes across as genuine, but sharing your experience significantly changes the dynamic from the other forms of social isolation people experience.

Atlantic author Faith Hill highlights a further duality in the comments on influencers’ posts about loneliness. There are those who are “on a ‘journey of being alone’, who appreciate Isa’s guidance and validation”. And there are also those who “pine for more solitude than they’re getting”, who see a life of solitude as a form of escapism: starring in your own version of 28 Days Later, with the infected threatening to turn you into a monster.

That desire is something I can honestly identify with. On a standard weekday, you feel as though there aren’t enough hours to get things done. Not enough time for work. Not enough time to be an active, present parent. Not enough time to relax. Not enough time for hobbies and interests (although there’s often crossover here with relaxation). You spend your time wishing you had more time.

But there’s a counterintuitive duality at play here. When I do have free time to myself, which I had tranches of last week, I find inertia takes hold of me, and I end up doing not very much at all. The concerns of “there’s not enough time!” disappear from view as I agonise about what to watch on TV and what to play on guitar, before inevitably doing nothing with the extra free time.

It seems to me that the possibility of solitude, of endless spare time, of creative freedom is much more appealing than the reality of it. Which would explain the appeal of the “loneliness influencer”: we love the idea of that life; but the thousands of people watching, liking and commenting aren’t planning to go solo. They’re in love with the possibility of the idea.

To me, that’s also what’s so appealing and entrancing about liminal spaces and the images that define liminalism. It’s less about loneliness, and more about possibility. Being like Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later affords you the chance to view some of the capital’s most recognisable locations and landmarks through a completely different lens, to appreciate them through a different lens.

Alexi Gunner, in an issue of his excellent , explored this idea in a 2021 issue on liminal spaces. He looked at liminal spaces through the lens of Lost In Translation (still a great film, and what a soundtrack by the way).

Bob and Charlotte are lost and lonely in Tokyo, but in connecting with each other and the liminal spaces around them, they open up new experiences and explore their surroundings in a different light.

That’s why for Gunner, liminal spaces are not doom-laden, but full of creative possibilities:

Moments in such spaces, just like moments of solitude and loneliness we experience, are an opportunity to break from our routine, allowing us to see ourselves, our ideas and our problems in a different light. We’re not completely breaking up with our routines and the rush of day-to-day life; we’re deliberately stepping outside the maelstrom to discover an alternative perspective.

And I think there’s something in that those of us working in comms can take inspiration from when we feel stuck in a rut. That could be a creative rut, or even a relationship rut with a client, agency, or project that could do with some fresh impetus and a minor reset.

Take a step outside the day-to-day and visit somewhere else to break out of your bubble.

Use my former colleague Nick Hearne’s trick of taking a walk in the opposite direction or to a spot you don’t normally visit.

It’ll be harder to find a liminal space without booking some kind of experience, but you could try visiting the supermarket early in the morning or late at night, or travelling outside rush hour.

If you’re struggling with a listless relationship, run a planning session or workshop somewhere unfamiliar to you all.

Bring in some new voices.

Encourage some quiet-storming (generating ideas on your own in silence) to encourage different voices to share their ideas.

Anything you can do to freshen things up and capture some of those pleasantly uncomfortable feelings will go a long way to providing a jolt of freshness into a situation. You’ll rarely need to go to the extremes of 28 Days Later and shut down Piccadilly Circus - even some minor jolts can hit hard in all the right places.

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You might have got frustrated with your agency telling you that your announcement of your new ad campaign, for example, isn’t “newsy” enough. Or you might struggle, agency-side, to come up with an angle that makes your client’s latest weekly product drop feel vaguely relevant to the current unhinged news agenda.

With apologies to both sides, I’m sorry to say that I don’t have a magic bullet to help you define exactly what isn’t or isn’t a news story.

The dictionary isn’t much help either.

Cambridge goes with the highly generic “information or reports about recent events”.

Merriam-Webster has a “previously unknown information” definition, which would be helpful in those client-agency conversations, but hedges with the alternative “report of recent events” definition.

The concept of news, like the concepts of content, campaigns, and influence, is broad and diffuse and therefore always worth unpacking.

We know that more people globally actively avoid the news than ever before - but that’s focused primarily on current affairs (politics, conflict, the economy). Audiences still want to consume information related to sports and entertainment - it’s specifically the unremitting bleakness of war and perma-crisis that they’re choosing to step away from.

And, to use a Benedict Evans phrase, the unbundling of news media as it’s moved from purely print and broadcast to online and social means that it’s easier than ever for audiences to make more of an active decision in the news they consume.

When news was purely bundled into print and broadcast, we couldn’t necessarily see audiences’ preferences. I know that when I used to buy The Observer on a Sunday, I would instantly flip to the sports section, before moving on to the culture review and then the magazine. I would vary rarely read a paper from the front - even in the less unremittingly bleak period of the early 2010s.

The great unbundling of news media means there’s much more choice available to us now - we can do our own unconscious unpacking of the concept of news, and focus in on the “information or reports about recent events” we’re most interested in. And we can do that via podcasts, vodcasts, newsletters, UGC…whatever takes our fancy.

Or we can be even more unconscious in unpacking the concept of news and our preferences by outsourcing the whole process to a selection of algorithms of our choice. Whether it’s via TikTok, Spotify, YouTube or X, you can indicate to the machines what you’d like more of, and lo and behold, that’s what you’ll receive.

It’s obviously not foolproof, and it’s not quite a rebundling of news into some form of a digital newspaper, but there’s a degree of agency involved in the process. Users can obviously dial that agency up or down, depending on their technical savviness, but most platforms want to keep their users engaged, so it’s in their interest to serve them content (and potentially news) that they want.

The big challenge for legacy news organisations is that many users prefer to get their news from more relatable, creator-led voices. The most popular news creator in the UK, according to the Reuters Institute last year, is Joe Rogan:

The news creator trend is particularly true for younger people, as a more recent Reuters Institute study of “Young News Audiences” (lots to unpack there) found. Their data shows that 18-24 year olds “pay more attention to individual news creators (51%) than to traditional news brands (39%)”. The Reuters data also showed that younger people consume more podcasts, but fewer “news” (i.e. current affairs) podcasts than older people (over-55s).

As well as presenting a channel challenge, the changing nature of how we define news presents a formatting challenge for legacy news organisations. The biggest names built their reputations on print and broadcast credentials, before moving these packages online. They cover a vast array of beats, covering “news” in its broadest sense.

In 2026, these organisations increasingly compete with individuals and smaller entities who don’t have legacy pressures to cover everything. They pick and choose their topics, whether that’s Joe Rogan cherry-picking guests or the Black Belt Barrister (number nine on that news influencer list) carving a niche by combining legal/financial advice with martial arts.

And it’s this focus that enables news creators to secure far greater algorithmic reach than traditional organisations. Most of the big entertainment and content-sharing platforms reward consistency. When a creator finds a stream of content that does the numbers, they double down on it til the stream is exhausted. Most legacy media outlets would never consider narrowing down their focus so much.

Case in point: we conducted a large-scale audit of a range of YouTube channels for a client earlier this year. Our analysis found that despite having 19 million subscribers on YouTube, the BBC News channel’s average video views (across feed and Shorts) were just over 134,000. The FT, with a fraction of the subscribers, had nearly double the average views.

But the broad media outlets were dwarfed by Wired, which averaged 862,000 views per video. Wired drives this high performance by adopting a creator playbook for its YouTube content, rather than trying to force broad broadcast principles onto the platform.

In particular, Wired’s Tech Support series consistently delivered six-figure view counts:

We know that repeatable formats like that (I also love “What’s in my bag” on YouTube) work extremely well. Matt Brittin clearly has his work cut out as the new Director General when trying to pivot the BBC towards newer media formats.

Embracing these approaches arguably requires something of a structural reset, rather than making cosmetic changes or spending more time on a channel. You can definitely argue that the same applies for much of the world of corporate social at the moment.

At Headland, we conduct many audits of companies’ social channels, and the most common issue we identify is that businesses don’t spend enough time optimising assets and stories for the intended channels.

I’ve sat through so many LinkedIn videos made for a web audience that just don’t fly in-feed. They start with five seconds of a beautiful logo, then an establishing shot of a venue, and it’s 15 seconds before anything of any interest has appeared on screen. You’ve lost your potential viewer by that point - especially if they’re watching on a phone and you’ve uploaded your video in landscape orientation.

When I was at We Are Social in the 2010s, we spent a fair amount of time telling clients to think and act like publishers. I don’t think that’s the case in the 2020s. These days, we need to think and act more like creators, because they hold the key to unlocking greater reach and awareness.

And when we say think like a creator, we don’t mean setting up a TikTok channel and commissioning a series of “get ready with me” videos. We mean analysing and understanding the delivery methods different creators use to gain visibility. It could be the focused output from YouTube, or the enticing first sentence of a LinkedIn post - it’s about stealing with pride from those who successfully share online, and applying that thinking to your own output.

It’s ultimately about identifying the most newsworthy aspect of what you’re trying to say, and bringing it front and centre of your post. Don’t bury it in the middle of the copy or your video. Hit people over the head with it. “This is our previously unknown information! Read all about it here!”

We also strive for simplicity in our execution. One clear message brought to life simply and compellingly. If it's simple, your audience is more likely to remember it. It's not always easy, but the evidence shows (particularly if you look at political campaigns of recent years) that simplicity has more impact.

But we don't always go with the simple. Sometimes it's just not what the brief or the client demands. We're a trends-led industry, and often there's a need to add a layer of glitz and glamour with the latest thing. You usually need those trends if you've worked with a client over a long period - you need to keep everything fresh, and sometimes a new and flashy tactic is the way to go.

New, flashy trend-led tactics aren't always complicated - but they can be the antithesis of one of the many definitions of the word "simple". We use “simple” to describe something that is "without decoration or plain" or "ordinary and traditional". "Simple food", "simple tastes", that kind of thing.

These definitions come from the word's roots - derived from the Latin, simple breaks down literally as "one fold". In French, one of its meanings is "one way". Un billet simple is a one-way ticket, for example. And this definition is an excellent bridge to why we strive for simplicity in our work. Simple also means "easy to understand" and describing "one simple fact or truth". In other words, you can only take this one way; it can’t be misconstrued.

When your brief has many critical messages, each seen as a priority by different stakeholders, you must find a simple way to bring them all together. A singular description that is easy to understand but doesn't fall into being plain or ordinary. It's a tough ask, but with some clever wordplay (and the judicious use of multiple assets and a messaging hierarchy), you can get there.

Whenever we take on this challenge of distilling a complex brief down to its essence, the temptation is to remove a complicating factor to make the job easier. Ignore one aspect, or disregard one part of the brief to make your task, well, simpler.

While this sometimes makes sense and is the appropriate course of action, you risk stepping over the line and moving from "simple" to "simplistic". Whereas simple focuses on making something easier to understand, becoming simplistic means "making something complicated seem simple by ignoring important parts of it" (emphasis mine).

It's a subtle difference but an important one. Simple communications aim to explain a lot in one simple phrase - they paint a picture in the mind. Simplistic communications assume your audience won't understand certain things or won't notice that you've ignored some key factor. Simplistic communications, at their worst, come across as ill-informed or deliberately misleading.

Slogans and straplines probably provide the best examples of the thin line between simple and simplistic. And how you fall on that line can sometimes be a highly subjective decision.

Some that spring to mind: Just Do It. Get Brexit Done. Strong and stable leadership. Make America Great Again.

For me, Get Brexit Done is the archetype of a great, simple piece of messaging. It implies action; it implies strong decision-making. For a process that had rumbled on for nearly three years, it spoke to a desire for closure. Some might say it's simplistic because it deliberately ignores the complexity of competing factors involved in securing a Brexit deal.

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That may be the case, but that didn't dampen its effectiveness. The public bought into the vision of strength, decisiveness and singular focus and swept Boris Johnson to power. Contrast "Get Brexit Done" with Theresa May's "Strong and stable leadership". A similar attempt to project an image of control, it quickly became an object of ridicule. The media and the public saw through its simplistic nature - projecting the image of stability during a period of seismic change completely ignored the nation's mood. You only needed to see the reaction to the "Another one?!?"-election of 2017 to read one of the most prevalent moods across the nation. "Strong and stable" became a note of ridicule, and Theresa May's premiership never recovered.

The line between simple and effective, and simplistic, is a thin one. Both Conservative Party slogans aimed to project similar messages. One translated and was easily understood, and the other presented a veneer of simplicity that was easy to see through. But in a parallel world, it's not hard to imagine the roles reversing and the opposite results coming to bear.

I'm being deliberately simplistic in my reading of these two campaigns. The success of Theresa May's perceived failure and Boris Johnson's election success wasn’t down to a single slogan. Any campaign, whether political or business-led, needs substance sitting behind it. The slogan, the strapline, and the clever name draw people's attention. Once you've earned that attention, you can start adding more layers of depth - revealing more of the detail behind the idea. That doesn't mean adding complexity - the goal is always understanding, "making information accessible", as Adrian Raudaschl puts it in his article "The Simple Life of Humans" (which inspired this piece).

The challenge with every campaign is to get that initial cut-through; whichever audience you're aiming to reach through whichever medium, you need to earn their attention quickly, or they'll move on to the next thing. No matter how smart, clever or creative your idea is, if it's not simple and easy to understand, it won't land. But equally, it can't be so simple that it ends up feeling simplistic - and out of touch with reality. It's an act of alchemy to get it right - it takes time, effort and patience. But businesses face the same challenges that Prime Ministers and Chancellors do: becoming known for a wrong decision or an ill-informed campaign, and that reputation can be tough to shake.

(I’m on holiday this week, so this post is from my archive)

For context: I went to a state school that didn’t play cricket regularly. When a group of teachers set up some matches, my desire to participate disappeared after an emotionally scarring game that involved a dropped catch and being forced to open the batting.

Anyway, I do like to watch cricket, despite not playing it actively, so I’m excited by the forthcoming English Test summer.

Part of the appeal comes from the fact that cricket is ostensibly a team sport (like football and rugby) but with a heavy focus on individual match-ups (a la tennis and darts).

A batter has a partner out on the field, but when they face a bowler, they’re essentially on their own. And while the team score is the main metric, individual scores are even more exalted than in other sports. Footballers can go through a lean spell, but still be important to the team. Cricketers, especially batters, end up dropped for a poor average or a run without a big score.

I think one of the most impressive feats in cricket is the epic long-stand by a batter. Out in the middle for hours on end, facing ball after ball after ball. Slowly building a narrative around a performance, while also being forced to face each individual delivery on its merits, knowing one mistake can end it all in an instant.

It’s a masterclass in physical but especially mental capability. The effort of concentration must be immense. I definitely couldn’t do it - my brain feels fried after one pitch or big meeting in a day. Such long stands are particularly anachronistic in a modern age of short-form cricket, fast-paced highlight reels and the prevalence of clippable moments.

The narrative tells us that our modern brains can’t sustain attention for long, and that we’ll be overcome by distraction in no time. But if that’s the case, how can batters still spend hours at the crease? Or why are podcasts so popular? And why do movies and prestige TV still meaningfully capture attention for long periods?

The simple answer, of course, is that batters don’t have their phones with them in the middle, regularly buzzing in their pockets and ruining their ability to watch the ball.

But more seriously, we are a society gripped by the narrative that our attention spans have shrunk and that modern technological distractions continue to rewire our brains in ways that aren’t good for us. It just feels accurate, relevant, and of our time.

Trouble is, that narrative is built on extremely flimsy evidence. One of the go-to sources for the “shrinking attention span” myth is a Microsoft Canada report. But no one ever links to the actual report, which, according to this piece in Scientific American, was all about switching focus rather than our “cognitive limits”. The Microsoft report also apparently suggested that “people were becoming more efficient at processing information”.

(According to the same Scientific American piece, goldfish are “unfairly maligned” as a benchmark for attention, with some studies showing “they retain some information for months”).

The challenge with measuring attention is that it involves three different processes in our brain (again, per Scientific American):

• Sustained attention: the ability to stay engaged with a task over time

• Selective attention: the ability to prioritise some information and ignore the rest

• Executive control: the ability to steer attention in line with a goal rather than whatever happens to be more tempting

We’re also hardwired to respond to distraction. Our ancestors wouldn’t have survived if their sustained attention was too good - they needed to be aware of potential threats and danger on the periphery of their attention.

Distraction also has other benefits. I tend to write this newsletter on the train; I find there’s something about the environment that’s conducive to getting my brain in the right state. But writing on the train also involves a lot of staring out of the window, trying to find the right word, or joining up two concepts, or working out exactly how I’m going to end a piece.

The distraction is part of the creative process. But the difference is how conscious I am of this particular distraction. If you’ve ever done any meditation, you’ll be aware that part of the exercise often involves focusing on your breath and letting all other thoughts flow out of your mind. If at any point you notice your mind wandering, you’re encouraged to “come back to the breath” (at least that’s why my guy Andy on Headspace does).

Such distraction is very different to all those times I open LinkedIn to see how a client’s paid campaign is doing, get distracted by a notification, watch a Rob Mayhew video, before closing the tab and thinking to myself, “what was I doing before I got lost on LinkedIn?” The mindfulness factor is hugely important.

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The Scientific American also suggests that we “pay attention according to our goals” - in other words, we’re more likely to get distracted when we undertake a task we don’t care about or have an aversion to. The apocryphal example of this is the prolonged procrastination of legions of students who suddenly find they absolutely have to have a clean house or workspace before they can possibly begin any revision.

So perhaps in the late 2020s, generative AI offers some respite from the distraction caused by boring tasks. If the number of conversations I’ve had with teams about automating monitoring is anything to go by, there’s a strong desire to outsource those tasks we care less for to the machine.

That, in theory, leaves you with more time to focus on the tasks you do enjoy, or to enjoy many moments of blissful, guilt-free distraction.

But based on the limited data we have available, increased use of generative AI makes our brains more frazzled, not less. That’s apparently due to the superhuman feeling genAI tools give us. We feel we can accomplish so much more, so we take on more - but it intensifies our cognitive load, leaving us feeling burnt out.

I can’t say that I feel burnt out by using genAI more in my work, but I definitely identify with the tendency to take on more requests at the same time. If I’m using a mixture of data scraping and first-pass ChatGPT analysis on something, I feel I can get through a piece of research much quicker. That’s on top of the fact that human nature means we tend to underestimate how long projects take.

There’s also some purposeful distraction built into this workflow. While ChatGPT or Codex is doing its thing, I’ll often switch to something else - answering an email, setting up a new scrape, tweaking a deck.

I feel more efficient, but I don’t know what a psychological analysis or study of my brain would show. And I worry that what it showed wouldn’t be good. But it does make you feel more productive, which given the vibes of our age tend towards feeling overwhelmed and distracted, is generally a good thing.

At some point, you’d reasonably expect the productivity vibes to convert into actual tangible productivity gains. So far, genAI hasn’t produced significant, demonstrable productivity gains - despite what the many businesses using AI as a smokescreen for redundancies would have you believe.

But as more and more companies progress from “give everyone ChatGPT” to “bespoke agents built for specific workflows”, we should start seeing tangible differences. That could be a time-saving, but could just as easily be an increase in outputs or an upgrade in quality and rigour (or indeed both).

We talk about attention and work more broadly as single, monolithic entities. The truth is that these are catch-all terms for highly varied, multifaceted concepts.

And these concepts change over time, responding to broader societal shifts and technological advances. Work, just like test cricket, is unrecognisable from its form one hundred years ago, even if the rules of the game are broadly the same (you get paid for your time and/or your outputs).

And among those changes, being able to command your attention remains an important skill. It’s also a skill that you can work on, training your attention and shaping your habits to put you more in control of your flow and your ability. It’s something elite-level batters can work on - and so can you.

I often link back to previous articles I’ve written, and take the time to read the full piece. Sometimes I’m quietly impressed with how the thinking stands up. Other times, it’s a cringey, painful experience.

It’s worth remembering that any cringing you do is a net positive. It shows that you’ve grown and developed, because you’re not always satisfied with what came before. If you cling to your past glories as the best you’ve ever done, you’re in danger of not progressing (I wrote about this a few years ago, in fact!)

But the mechanics of the world, particularly the mechanics that exist around creativity, don’t always reward constant progress and iteration. Daniel at consistently shows that Hollywood prefers franchises and repeatable formats, because they’re more likely to guarantee a movie will make money.

Musicians have a hit record and often find that it becomes a giant drag on creativity. They’re expected to produce more hits, but then end up walking the impossible tightrope between sticking with the winning formula (and being called a one-trick wonder) or changing the formula up (and risking losing their hard-won audience).

It’s a dynamic you can also see writ large in the creator economy.

There are more and more opportunities than ever for creative types to make money from their output, whether that’s writing, music, comedy or lifestyle “content”. But it takes time to build up an audience, and even if you manage to do that, the financial rewards can be decidedly uneven - particularly if you attempt to win the algorithmic lottery payouts some of the big platforms offer.

And while those algorithmic fruit machines do pay out and reward genuine creativity and originality on content-sharing platforms, your chances are slim, particularly when you’re starting out. It can take time for the rewards to come rolling in - and not everyone has the patience or the financial resources to wait.

One of the tried-and-tested ways to game the algorithmic payout machines, particularly on Meta and X, is outrage farming. In this scenario, you don’t care about the quality of your creations. The job is to get involved in the hot-button topics of the day in as fast and intense a way as possible. Even if it means the content you post essentially goes against your core beliefs.

That was the story shared in The Bureau of Investigative Journalism last week, as they spoke to a devout Muslim in Pakistan who was responsible for sharing a range of AI-generated Islamophobic hate speech on Facebook.

The posts, which include deepfake videos of Keir Starmer (screenshots above), racked up thousands of engagements on Facebook and generated “around $1,500 a month from [one] page alone”.

The creator claimed not to know anything about what he was sharing. He followed the advice of those “get rich quick” content advice guys and created AI-generated posts on trending topics across platforms, paying zero attention to their substance or political leanings.

It is, as ever in our online world, about speed and scale. Get as much as you can out onto the platforms as quickly as possible, cashing in before the firehose gets turned off or turns in a different direction.

Another way creators have been cashing in of late is via clipping at scale.

In case you’ve not read about it, agencies like Clipping (seriously, that’s the name) act on behalf of long-form video producers - podcasts, YouTubers, etc. They pay an army of creators money to clip the long-form videos into snippets for the likes of TikTok and Reels. The creators get paid based on how many views the clips generate; the original content producer then (presumably - this bit isn’t often reported) gets additional views and subscribers to their shows.

The concept of clipping has caught fire of late, so much so that we’ve even been mentioning it to clients. Our client workflow doesn’t involve shady third-party agencies; instead, it focuses on manually identifying the most interesting segments from event videos and other longer-form pieces to maximise the value of production.

Clipping for third parties doesn’t pay megabucks - this piece in The Verge suggests “clippers” get $3,000 per month from Clipping (the agency and the actual practice of clipping).

But it doesn’t look like there’s much of a shelf life for it: Adam Mosseri did one of his videos last week, announcing that accounts which “aggregate” other people’s content would be deprioritised by Instagram’s algorithms. X is also reportedly deprioritising engagement-farming clips (Garbage Day has loads more on this, if you want a deeper dive).

These two stories of outrage farming and clipping perfectly demonstrate the real economics of the creator landscape. The top 1% make enough money to get by, augmenting the platform payouts with brand deals, affiliate marketing and other forms of sponsorship.

For everyone else, it’s a choice between your creative pursuits being something of a side hustle and accepting it’s unlikely to pay the bills, and doing anything and everything you can to chase the algorithmic payouts.

You’re still technically creating, but there’s a questionable amount of creativity involved. It’s mechanical more than anything: crank out the content, as much as you can, as quickly as you can, and hope to cash in.

It’s a deeply unreliable, uneven system. But it’s also a system that pays out just enough for the operation to remain attractive - especially if you can access genAI tools that allow you to produce posts at scale for minimal time investment. You could strike viral gold. You’re more likely to strike viral gold than you are to win the lottery. So the game keeps players coming back, whether they’re new or returning.

But are there indications that the pathways are becoming less attractive? Perhaps.

This Yahoo Life survey (disclaimer: I couldn’t find the raw survey results, so I have no idea about the sample size) found that the celebrity “young people” most aspire to be like is Zendaya.

Respondents chose the actress over arguably more famous names like Mr Beast, Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift. Although personally, I think the most interesting stat is that the majority of respondents (36%) didn’t aspire to be like any of the shortlisted names on offer.

The poll also found that only 5% of respondents want to be “digital creators or influencers”. The top career aspirations were “successful but non-famous tech entrepreneur” and “respected intellectual or professor”.

Again, keeping in mind the likely non-representative nature of the Yahoo survey, this perhaps indicates a shift in priorities away from a reality-TV-style world of “fame and virality over everything” to a mindset where credibility and authority matter more.

That’s certainly what this excellent piece on “Leisure as a Dream Job” suggests. Using the lens of Dua Lipa’s newsletter (I did NOT know Dua Lipa had a newsletter before reading this), author highlights a burgeoning desire to step off the high-performance treadmill in favour of living a creatively fulfilling life. Dua embodies being “truly equal parts work and play” and the value of “promoting cultural and literary fluency, not likely for any large monetary profit”.

Huizinga goes on to highlight that imitating Dua Lipa’s lifestyle would necessitate a lottery win for most people - but there certainly is something in “a world in which we don’t feel the urge to wring profit out of every facet of our lives.”

That world is nothing like the pre-social-media internet some people long for or the so-called golden age of Twitter. It will have to be something different. But as the mechanics of the creator economy continue to creak and clank and change abruptly, I have to agree with Ryan Broderick that there is certainly a feel of “endgame” around online sharing at the moment.

What comes next, I can’t predict. But the lessons for brands and businesses are pretty clear. Firstly, algorithmic reach remains variable, even for the most successful companies with proven vehicles and high-calibre guests. Andreessen Horowitz can see six-figure views when they feature Sam Altman, but also limp to 2,000 views when talking about HR. There are no guarantees - unless you’re using paid spend to ensure your posts reach the audiences that matter to you.

Secondly, there’s always the option to pull the same levers as the creators looking to game the system. For brands and businesses, this is less rage-baiting and more “like and comment” competitions or attempting to “brandjack” (urgh) every single meme and trend they see. But the short-term rewards of engagement are unlikely to add up to a meaningful net positive for either your reputation or your sales funnel.

The argument is arguably to be more Dua Lipa and develop a core set of content pillars that have enough breadth to give your storytelling space, but also enough focus to make it distinctively you.

You can also be aware of what’s working well on social platforms without shamelessly chasing them. For example, LinkedIn appears to be all about “invisible engagement” at the moment, with clicks and saves acting as performance indicators.

Such factors would indicate prioritising longer, richer, more additive posts over disposable hot takes. But always make sure you’re testing, tracking and learning to understand what works for you and your audiences.

That approach helps you avoid feeling ike you need to jump straight to your version of “New Rules” or Service95 (Dua’s “recommendation and culture” newsletter) to be “more Dua Lipa” straight away. Long-term success is more likely be found from building a base where your messaging and stories are strong, and experimenting and iterating around the edges to push your creative boundaries. It takes time, but ultimately its more consistently rewarding.

These days, it’s not as easy to apply the political campaigning playbook to comms. There were some embers from Labour’s 2024 election-winning strategy, with an emphasis on creative freedom and federating responsibility to candidates (rather than centrally controlling all the details).

But these were tweaks around the edges, as opposed to wholesale changes to the campaigning playbook.

And arguably, a big reason we see political campaigns having less impact on comms and marketing is that there’s no such thing as a playbook or rulebook in that world anymore.

The vibe is “anything goes”. Say what you want, how you want - the more unhinged the better. The singular aim is to set the agenda. You either want people reacting to you, or for your reactions to others’ activity to cause its own cycle of reactions.

To put it in marketing terms, it’s a salience-over-substance world. Be front of mind at all costs.

Often, the only way a brand or a business can achieve such prominence is via a crisis - and that’s not the kind of attention anyone wants.

Or is it?

Perhaps, in the febrile world of the 2020s, it depends on the crisis.

One of the biggest stories on LinkedIn this year is the KitKat heist. 12 tonnes of chocolate got stolen just before April Fool’s Day, and the event kicked off all kinds of memes, theories and hot takes. For a couple of weeks, you couldn’t move for KitKat-related content.

And thanks to this piece in Creative Salon, which compiles LinkedIn posts from those involved, we can get a sense of the machinery that sat behind the idea. The speed of response, the desire to spread the story, rather than to bury it.

Also, the almost gleeful stoking of people’s theories, by making the statement feel more “brand” than “corporate comms”:

It’s an approach that feels completely in keeping with our current socio-political environment. Essentially: vibes first, facts second.

The KitKat approach quite clearly isn’t for everyone. Many crises have genuine danger and peril at their heart. I’m not for one minute suggesting anyone turns those into a creative comms stunt.

But there is an important factor at play here. Namely, that the truth and the internet have always made for uncomfortable bedfellows. As the old adage goes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Modern discourse tends to overlook this truism of the internet. I enjoyed this piece in Protein (not the first time this year I’ve linked to their excellent Seeds series) that characterised our modern internet culture as “the fog”.

A murky world where “circulation comes first, validation follows. Context becomes secondary – we see, we like, maybe we certify.” The fog signifies a lack of distinction between what’s real and fake, what’s true and untrue. Did someone really steal 12 tonnes of KitKats? Let me get my LinkedIn hot take out first, and then I’ll worry about whether it’s true.

The thing is, this fog isn’t a new feature of internet communication. It’s thicker than ever, thanks to the speed and scale of our online world.

But even in the early days of widespread connectivity, we had a strong desire to see, like and share before we checked out the facts.

One of the early Twitter trends was for the widespread sharing of fake celebrity death reports. I remember seeing RIP Morgan Freeman doing the rounds, alongside the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy allegedly passing away.

Or remember those “Facebook is going to start charging you to use the platform” posts? The answer was to post on Facebook and say, “I do not give Facebook permission to…”

These examples feel quaint now, but they highlight the internet’s propensity to engage you first, before engaging your critical brain second. Scammers, trolls and banter merchants have enjoyed tapping into this propensity for the longest time.

The challenge now is that we have politicians who actively court the fog, who want to make it as thick and murky as possible, so they can take advantage of the bad vibes it creates.

In the LRB, William Davis dives into part of this foggy world, which he describes as “Faragist” videos: “Clips of men and women addressing their phones while sitting in cars or out walking, lamenting the state of ‘Starmer’s Britain’. The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value.”

There are specific complaints, which you’d recognise from their racist tropes. But there’s equally just a sense of “gloom”, of a world where everything is a scam and nothing even vaguely associated with the establishment.

And while the popularity of endless algorithmic video feeds has certainly contributed to the thickness of the fog, it’s just as much due to the bigger societal trends we continue to grapple with. The ongoing, post-COVID cost-of-living crisis. The post-Brexit malaise that stalks the UK. The depressing nature of the news that's causing people to actively disengage.

In Protein, author Jon Jacobsen proposes a series of ideas brands can adopt to cut through the fog. These include doing fewer, bigger, better campaigns and having “high-resolution strategies” built on raw data that cut through.

I’d agree with Jacobsen that the fog is unlikely to clear any time soon. But I would personally go for embracing the fog.

In the age of fog, your fog lights become more important than ever. Shine the brightest light you can on your sources of truth and your work to cut through the murk for your audiences.

And then potentially look for opportunities to embrace the murkiness. To let stories that fall into the small box marked “untrue, but not unhelpful” percolate away.

The KitKat heist will likely prove to be sui generis, an unrepeatable event. But like Brexit and “getting Brexit Done”, there’s potentially still plenty to be learned from such unrepeatable events.

The project was unveiled at this year’s Coachella, receiving rave reviews from critics, even though it wasn’t as meme-worthy as Justin Bieber’s performances:

Coachella itself wasn’t exactly basking in rave reviews this year. The narrative across the various newsletters I read summed it up as even more soulless than usual, with the sense that everyone there was either an influencer, a creator, or aspired to be one of the two.

I wasn’t there, and have never been, so I can’t personally comment on the vibe. My takeaway from watching some of the Nine Inch Noize performances on YouTube was “wow, if everyone at Coachella is an influencer, that is one hell of a lot of influencers”.

But then maybe the idea that “everyone is an influencer” isn’t too far from the truth. The term itself it’s so ubiquitous as to be essentially meaningless, applied equally to the Kardashians and a niche Substack writer.

It hasn’t always been this way of course. When I first started doing influencer marketing back in the summer of 2008, we hadn’t yet started calling them “influencers”.

We called them the “slash/slash generation”: kids of on MySpace (really) with portfolio careers. They were a “DJ/model/fashionista” or “film-maker/photographer/musician” (hence the slash/slash moniker).

Then influencer caught on at some point in the early 2010s as YouTube took off. Then we added micro-influencers to the equation when the original cohort of influencers essentially became celebrities. And then when the micro-influencers got big, we moved on to nano-influencers.

Platforms like Instagram also decided that “influencer” was a dirty word, bringing with it connotations of hawking crypto and weight-loss gummies with zero shame. So now we have “creators” in the mix as well, even though plenty of people use the term interchangeably.

Recent years have also seen the rise of the “work-fluencer”: essentially, someone who creates content about their work life, most commonly day-in-the-life videos on TikTok and Reels.

The latest industry to see a rise in such internal influencers is finance, as detailed in this New York Times piece. But as the New York Times piece points out, there’s a tension inherent in the work-fluencer model - it takes time and effort to ensure your videos get algorithmic views on TikTok and Reels.

Devoting time to being an influencer means potentially giving up time from your work day - or at least giving the impression that’s what you’re doing. Particularly in an industry like finance, where the all hours grind is a badge of honour, these signals can jar with company culture.

So companies looking to harness the influence of their employees (and senior leaders) ideally want them to be successful enough to help achieve comms and marketing goals, but not so successful that the content detracts from their day job (or means they can leave their day job to be a creator full-time).

Just as we saw with the loss of vibes at Coachella this year, there are downsides to everyone being an influencer.

And if everyone is an influencer, in a world where anyone can hit the algorithmic jackpot and rack up millions of views, and millions of views may not mean anything any more, how can we identify true influence?

One new buzzy firm thinks it has the answer: Figures represents “public thinkers and tastemakers” that they describe as “alternatively influential”. Instead of playing the scale game and working with tens of thousands of influencers (as Gap and Unilever do), Figures focuses on identifying podcasters, Substack writers (putting it out there - I am available for brand partnerships) and YouTubers with a more specific niche.

The WSJ piece on Figures then goes on to mention some of the people Figures represents, including Dwarkesh Patel (who had Jensen Huang on his podcast) and After School author Casey Lewis. Not exactly figures I would call niche or alternatively influential.

It seems we are once again in the market for reinventing how we define “influencer”, because certain brands and businesses have decided that “being an influencer” is no longer cool.

So instead, we go back to “tastemakers,” “curators,” and “alternatively influential” (which I do like; I would definitely describe myself as “alternatively influential,” lol).

But the basic premise remains the same: as a brand or business, we either need reach or credibility. So we partner with influential figures that can easily provide us with whichever of those we need, in exchange for something we can offer.

That’s most often money, but could also be access to people or events, or payment in kind via products. The fundamental building blocks remain the same, whether you deal with creators, work-fluencers, tastemakers or simply good old-fashioned influencers.

Just like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, the worlds of comms and marketing love a remix. But the principles of what makes good songs and good work remain the same.

Know your audience, have a clear idea of the channels you can activate to reach them. And have a great idea to capture their attention - either something you come up with yourselves, or in partnership with your creator/influencer/tastemaker.

The process is simple; the reality isn’t. But it’s important to focus on the basics and avoid getting distracted by the new, shiny thing to maximise your chances of success. You want to end up with more Nine Inch Noize vibes and be less Coachella 2026.

Fast forward 13 years, and the heft of YouTube is now unarguable. The BBC has hired Google’s former EMEA boss in an attempt to become more digitally savvy and reassert its primacy. The appointment feels like a direct response to last year’s data that showed many people now choose YouTube first, over the BBC and various other sVOD options.

We’re also unlikely to reach another notable BIG NUMBER milestone any time soon. Baby Shark reigns supreme as the most popular YouTube video ever, with 16 billion views. Hitting 20 billion or 50 billion just doesn’t have the same ring - and ChatGPT reckons it will be at least 2627 before Baby Shark hits one trillion views. That’s assuming views continue to accumulate at their current rate (among other assumptions about our world 600 years from now).

The distance between Gangnam Style and now, when the biggest YouTube creators have nearly half a billion subscribers, feels vast. And this distance has a distorting effect for me when I’m reading articles about the latest trends. 190,000 results on TikTok for a phrase? That’s a lot of results. But it’s also not a lot at the same time. Especially compared to Gangnam Style, Baby Shark, or MrBeast.

Perhaps we need to, as Padraig Belton said on X the other day, only measure things the way British newspapers do. How does it compare to the size of Wales? How many swimming pools or football pitches would it be?

I jest, but we do lack comparators. We also lack reliable central hubs of trending topics - you knew where you stood with Twitter’s trending topics. A fixed set of trends you could rely on. YouTube’s trending videos tab was a little more opaque in its make-up, but was still a reliable source of what is happening on the platform (and a great place for creative inspiration. RIP).

We still have Google Trends, which will give you an accurate breakdown of what the world has been searching for, and is a decent proxy for interest. Reddit has a central leaderboard, but, as Garbage Day often points out in their monthly data round-ups, it’s often just the same posts popping up on different subs.

Trending topics must fulfil a dual role: they need to give us a sense of what’s happening beyond our world, and they need to refresh consistently. And there needs to be a balance between the two factors.

The weekly UK singles chart managed it effectively for decades, only occasionally getting stuck when a song defied the odds and outstayed its welcome - looking at “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” in particular here.

As the single began losing its cultural clout, and record companies tried to game the system with 5-6 different formats to push their artists up the charts, the weekly snapshot fluctuated too much. We couldn’t get a sense of what people listened to, because the songs didn’t stick around in the top ten for long enough. Spotify can just about manage the balance, but the vastness of the platform means we’re unlikely to end up with a song like “Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter” at number one any time soon.

In 2026, we still have a decent steer on the biggest trends and memes that define the cultural zeitgeist. Brat Summer was the inarguable proof of that. And this year, for a while, if you added “-maxxing” as a suffix to anything, you could be reasonably sure most people would know what you meant.

And from a ground-level, emerging subculture point of view, there’s more to explore than ever if you have the time or inclination. TikTok has a long tail of weird and wonderful creativity. YouTube, Reddit, Discord servers: there are more places than ever for people to share their art online. You may need to spend most of your time sifting through these destinations to discover the gems, but there are gems certainly out there.

It’s the middle that sees the squeeze. The “up and coming” trends. The “next Brat Summer”. The content and ideas that have picked up some momentum but haven’t yet been the subject of a Guardian thinkpiece. These are the trends that are harder than ever to spot - and arguably these are the most useful to brands and businesses.

And so we rely on human curation to identify these up-and-coming, burgeoning trends. The kind of things that have enough appeal to not cause blank looks when you mention them in Slack or in a meeting (Angine de Poitrine was a great example of this a few weeks ago). But equally, they’re not the kind of trends that brands have already jumped on and flogged to the point of irrelevance.

When I need such “up and coming” inspiration, I invariably turn to the likes of , ’s ever-excellent and the peerless Garbage Day. I’m sure there are plenty of other subreddits, WhatsApp groups and hashtags where you can track what’s bubbling up online.

But while this style of curation does a fantastic job of keeping your pipeline of ideas brimming, you still need to stand up any creative concepts or campaigns that those ideas inspire. So you might be struck by this article in Protein from a few weeks’ ago, arguing that “Corporate is content now”, building on the long-standing concept of “work-fluencers”. But you need the numbers and the real-life examples from your space to back it up.

Or you might love the concept of “cassette futurism”, AKA the return of the analogue and physical buttons. This piece pushes all my buttons, with its references to the Alien franchise and strong 2001: A Space Odyssey vibes. But again, does the fetishisation of nostalgic technology extend beyond my interests and my corners of Substack and the newsletter-verse?

And then, of course, if we spend too long thinking about whether these trends are right for us and our ideas, we may miss potential windows of opportunity.

That’s why I would tend to agree with this piece in Contagious, which argues that brands and businesses should stop trying “move at the speed of culture” (yuck), in favour of doing “fewer things at high quality”. To which I would also add that I’m not sure anyone has a sense of how fast culture is moving at the moment. And even if we did have that sense, we’re probably measuring a whole bunch of different cultures, rather than any kind of collective mainstream.

Ultimately, trend spotting and cultural analysis are an inexact science. If it were as easy to make a band go viral as that Wired piece about Geese from last week claimed, everyone would be doing it. The truth is, you need to trust your gut and test your thinking to get a sense of whether the vibes feel right. Then you can probably find a number or a chart that supports your thinking. That number might not be as much of a landmark as “1 billion views!”, but most ideas don’t need that much heft to land.