And who makes that all happen fast enough to give you whiplash? Marketers. Trends move at the speed of light, so we act as cultural translators. Telling people what they want before they know they want it. The catch? We have to actually understand culture (not just pretend to). Because, if a campaign isn’t culturally relevant, no amount of money thrown at it will make it land. In other words, relevance isn’t something you can buy [but here’s what you can do instead].

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Meanwhile other brands are going viral every week. Their secret? They're not working harder. They're using a system (and you need one, too).

At this workshop, Stanley Henry (1.4M followers, 1B+ views/year) teaches you that exact system live in just 90 minutes.

You'll learn:

✅The 1 thing you need to never run out of content ideas
✅How the biggest brands go viral on IG (plus what NOT to do)
✅How to create a repeatable content system (that doesn't take hours every day OR a creative team)

26 March | 11am NZDT | 9am AEDT | $79 NZD

Find out exactly how the biggest accounts are blowing up on IG (and how your brand can become one of them) 👇

My millennial brain takes 2 business days to actually realise things like this. So when I read Social Media Today’s post about it this morning, I clicked. Like oh yeah, they did. That’s that thing that’s been annoying me for the whole week. It sounds like the smallest quality-of-life update but is actually a huge admission that the platform knows its content is f*cking exhausting.

For years, Instagram has been optimising for endless scroll, making it harder to stop, harder to step away, harder to do anything except keep watching. Now they're giving you a pause button. Which either means they're listening to user feedback, or they've realised that people are so burnt out they're leaving the app entirely.

Anyway, on today’s episode of hell tf no: Tinder is planning to let AI scan your camera roll to help build your dating profile. Which sounds like a massive privacy nightmare waiting to happen. The feature would use AI to analyse your photos and suggest the best ones for your profile based on what performs well algorithmically. The implications are wild. What happens to the photos it doesn't select? Are they analysed and stored? What data is being extracted beyond just "this is a good dating photo"? Oh, and WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH MY NUDES?

Tinder has a history of being careless with user data. And now they want permission to scan one of the most personal things on your phone. Major pass.

Ok, now this is pretty cool. When Allison Yang moved to the US from China two years ago, she noticed that immigrants often talked about their visa status like they were playing cards: talking in terminologies like playing a Queen, Knight, or Ace. Everyone introduced themselves by words like H-1B, OPT, L-1, O-1, NIW—names of legal immigration categories in the US.

So she made a literal game that turns the H-1B visa system into a surreal simulation. She puts the user in the role of someone navigating the U.S. immigration system, dealing with arbitrary rules, endless paperwork, visa lottery uncertainty, and the constant threat of deportation if you lose your job. It's designed to show how broken and dehumanising the process is, turning bureaucratic nightmare into playable experience. And apparently it works. People who've never thought about the H-1B system are playing it and realising how absurd and cruel it is. I love creative humans. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

“That blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of 'stuff.'”

You see, fashion creates culture.

Culture is shaped by marketing.

And marketing sells belonging.

It's a feedback loop where nobody's really sure what came first.

Brands figured out they're not in the business of selling products. They're selling identity, aspiration. And it's working so well that we've all become willing participants in our own commodification.

What's cool, what's cringe, what signals your part of the in-group - all of that gets decided culturally. Fashion then becomes the physical manifestation of it.

There are some brands that build entire identities around shared cultural references. It’s at the point where the actual products almost don't matter, but instead, the recognition - this brand understands me, my community, speaks my language. When a brand uses your slang, references your inside jokes, understands your specific experience, it stops feeling like a transaction and starts feeling like belonging.

A brand that doesn't respond to the current music, memes, political moment, social shifts, is basically dead in the water.

Doesn't matter how good the quality is if nobody culturally cares anymore.

Marketing is the translation layer. It takes abstract cultural moments and turns them into visual stories, brand identities, shareable content that makes you want to participate. You're not buying a jacket - you're buying into an aesthetic, a vibe, a version of yourself you've been sold through Instagram grids and TikTok trends.

Brands build entire worlds you can inhabit digitally before you ever buy anything physically. The marketing becomes entertainment, aspiration, community.

And somewhere in there you click checkout.

The smart brands figured out that people trust their friends more than they trust ads, so they turned their customers into the marketing. Influencers, sure. But also just regular people posting their outfits, tagging brands, creating content that spreads way further than paid campaigns generally do.

User-generated content doesn't feel like advertising even though that's exactly what it is.

The actual physical items you wear become social indicators. They communicate your personality, your status, which communities you belong to and what you value.

Trends move so fast now that by the time a traditional marketing campaign launches, the cultural moment has already passed. This is why brands try to move at the speed of culture but often fall flat on their face in the pursuit. Responding to memes in real-time, adopting emerging aesthetics while they're still underground, just for it to change again in a weeks’ time.

Sustainability is no longer optional for a lot of consumers - it's a baseline expectation. Same with size inclusivity, ethical production, fair labour. These aren't just nice little brand values, they're cultural requirements. If your brand doesn't address them, whole segments of your potential audience will reject you on principle.

What makes this particularly insane is how fast the loop moves now.

A meme becomes an aesthetic becomes a product line becomes mainstream culture in weeks. Something that used to take years to trickle down from runway to mall now happens before the runway show even ends.

By the time they've had meetings about whether to participate in a trend, the trend is over and everyone's moved on. The brands winning are the ones identifying cultural shifts early and responding authentically before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Culture moves fast. And the marketing that wins is the marketing that moves with it without feeling forced or calculated.

You can't buy your way into cultural relevance.

Throwing money at advertising doesn't work when people can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. You have to actually understand the culture you're trying to reach, respect it enough to represent it honestly, and move fast enough to participate in cultural moments while they're happening.

Brands that feel like they're part of culture rather than trying to sell to it are the ones people actually want to wear and talk about. That requires genuinely caring about the communities you serve instead of just seeing them as target demographics. It requires letting culture lead instead of trying to force your brand narrative onto people who are already three steps ahead of you.

The brands that have done this for decades – Calvin Klein, Loewe, Balenciaga, MSCHF, are the ones that remain dominant in the space.

Most brands still don't get this. They're still operating like fashion is about the clothes. Like marketing is about the message. Like culture is something to extract value from rather than something to participate in authentically.

The product is just the physical artifact of cultural participation. What you're really selling is the feeling of belonging to something that matters.

Once you see the loop, you realise nobody's really in control of it. Culture shapes fashion shapes marketing shapes culture.

We're all just riding it, hoping we don't get left behind when the next turn happens.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

😲WTF: Slang is for everyone
❤How wholesome: There is still good in this world
🎧Soooo tingly: Now this will fix your attention span
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: 5 minute dinner options, easy.

Hey Kirsten,

I definitely would not collab every post, because if you're doing that, there's really no point having two accounts. Instead, think about the job you want each account to do. Then, only collab when the content genuinely makes sense to live on both. I know it's tempting to just cross-post everything. But doing that usually ends up diluting both channels. So only collab posts when there's genuine overlap in audience or message.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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.