It’s official. We’ve gone inward, like a 22 year old white girl on her first ayahuasca retreat.
Marketing is no longer about simply selling you something. It's not even about "authenticity" anymore. Which I’m rather happy about. Because if I have to read one more brand guideline with that word in it, you may have to restrain me from throwing my laptop into the ocean and saying sayonara to the whole industry.
For now, we've entered a new phase: meta marketing. Here, the spectacle of the campaign matters more than the product it's supposedly advertising.
You may have seen this creeping into the fashion space already, like Jacquemus putting a giant Nike swoosh onto the side of a literal snowy mountain. Or Moschino's iron-shaped handbag. Or EgonLab’s scarf jeans - obvious rage bait that became iconic anyway. David's cod eye patches that don't actually exist as a purchasable product.
These aren't ads. They're cultural moments designed to make you feel smarter, cooler, or more plugged-in for having simply seen them.
The game has changed. People don't want to be marketed to anymore. Actually, everyone's had it up to their fkn ears being sold to. Instead, they want to be transformed by the encounter itself, to screenshot it, send it to their group chat, and say "can you believe this?"
This is why it's meta. The marketing has become the product.
What's happening in fashion is spreading everywhere. Behind-the-scenes content now routinely outperforms the polished campaign it was meant to support.
Raw, absurdist moments trump expensive production values.
The brands making waves in 2026 aren't the ones with the best ads; they're the ones building mythology and surrealism into their DNA. Look at Liquid Death. They sell water. Canned water. But they've built an entire universe of death metal aesthetics, absurd stunts, and cultural commentary that makes buying their product feel like joining a movement.
The spectacle came first; the sales followed.
This represents a fundamental inversion. Traditional marketing asks: "How do we make people want our product?" Meta marketing asks: "How do we make our brand a thing people want to have an opinion about?"
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for traditional marketers, because how do you actually measure the ROI of a Nike swoosh on a mountain?
How many cod eye patches do you need to “metaphorically sell” to justify the campaign for a product that doesn't exist? The honest answer is that legacy metrics are breaking down.
Click-through rates and conversion funnels feel quaint when your campaign's primary goal is to occupy mindshare and generate cultural conversation. Brands are chasing something more elusive: becoming a reference point, a meme, a shared cultural artifact.
So of course, the new metrics look different:
Share-of-conversation in spaces brands don't control
Remix culture - how many people are riffing on your idea?
Cultural relevance scores (vague, yes, but real)
Earned attention versus bought attention
Whether your brand becomes shorthand for something bigger than itself
These are harder to put in a quarterly report for obvious reasons. But they're what actually builds lasting brand equity in an attention economy where people have infinite scroll and zero patience for being sold to.
So how do you systematically create cultural spectacle?
This is the challenge facing brands in 2026. It's not about bigger budgets or flashier production - some of the most viral moments can cost almost nothing to create.
The key is understanding that you can't "try to go viral" - that's the kiss of death, immediately obvious and cringe-inducing. Instead, successful meta marketing requires:
Embracing absurdism over message control: The brands that win are comfortable releasing things into the world without a clear takeaway or call-to-action. The confusion and conversation are the point.
Creating inherently shareable moments: Not "please share this," but rather things so surprising or delightful or confounding that sharing them is the natural response. The spectacle must be its own reward.
Calculated spontaneity: The most effective spectacles are the ones that feel utterly spontaneous even when they're meticulously planned. The effort must be invisible.
Hiring for cultural intuition: Traditional marketing training doesn't prepare people for this. You need team members who understand internet culture, can spot a moment before it happens, and aren't afraid to break every rule they learned in business school.
Meta marketing isn't replacing traditional marketing.
Before y’all get your panties in a twist, that’s NOT what I’m saying. Plenty of brands will continue to succeed with straightforward product-focused campaigns. But for brands trying to break through the noise, especially in categories like fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, the spectacle is becoming mandatory.
Brands that understand how to create cultural moments that make people feel changed just for witnessing them, and build desire not through features and benefits, but through mythology and surrealism, are the ones doing it right.
Stop asking "How do we sell this?" and start asking "How do we make this worth talking about?" The conversation is the conversion, darling.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
Not going viral yet?
We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.