Fragrance check. Moonwalk Sea Cocoa — pineapple upside-down cake meets coconut, passion fruit, Italian mandarin, Sicilian frozen lemon. Ryan gives it a 10/10 for summer.

World Cup is a month out and… condoms? Toronto’s handing them out, fan-zone funding still hasn’t been dispersed in a bunch of cities, Houston traffic is already cooked, and LA looks unprepared from the inside. Meanwhile Mercedes-Benz Stadium is covering its logos for sponsor reasons — except the one on the roof, because skylight. Hello, “Edlina Stadium.”

Spotify’s “Party of the Year” — first song ever played:

* Ryan: We Can’t Stop by Miley Cyrus (2013, fresh off Groove Shark getting busted)

* Janine: Settled Down by No Doubt (Aug 2012)

* Benton: Paris in the Rain by Lauv (Dec 2017 — “sad and gay, 13 was not it”)

* Deja: Un Beso by Aventura (2015, recovering iTunes loyalist)

Instagram is in its flop era. Nobody posts publicly anymore and Meta did it to themselves with the finsta push. Lizzo went on TikTok Live to yell about the algorithm and honestly, fair. Public likes and reposts are pushing people back toward privacy — though the Scrub Daddy × Jeopardy comment-section crossover did go off. New “Instance” feature looks like Lapse, or Airbuds, or those old Messenger chat heads floating around your screen. Meta’s whole thing is copying competitors after the competitor has its meltdown — Stories, Threads, now this.

Threads is testing an ad-free subscription. Twitter Blue walked so this could… also walk, probably. Nobody at the table is paying.

AP x Swatch. People camped out for days based on AI-generated mockups that turned out to be nothing like the real thing, which is a pocket watch you can’t even wear. Bigger conversation: AI hype isn’t tanking brands, but it’s not moving the needle either. Everyone’s just kind of fine being mid.

PSA on mic setups. If you’ve got a branded mic stand, don’t let your DJI mic stick out the top. We see it.

New acronym just dropped: SPAM. Social, PR, Advertising, Marketing. Filed neatly under the Omnicom/IPG merger. Women in SPAM, rise up. Crab spam musubi is the official snack, pending recipe.

Brought to you by Ecamm

Multi-stream to Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram from one app, different aspect ratios, and recording saved automatically. Worked great today, when used correctly. ecamm.com/silencebrand - that’s two Ms, Ryan.

Met Gala 2026: Pale Blue Dots, Piss Bottles, and a Cheesestick

Ryan, Benton, Janine, and Dejaih break down the 2026 Met Gala — the looks that landed, the ones that didn't, the brand plays worth watching, and the chaos around it. Plus a Lady Gaga 2019 detour, Bezos discourse, and a new virus we're absolutely not doing again.

(00:00) Cold open — mic checks, backgrounds, getting started

(00:44) The theme problem — most attendees forgot it existed; "technically on theme" became the bar

(01:16) Alyssa Lu in Louis Vuitton — strong concept, prom execution

(02:11) Sarah Paulson — eye mask saved it

(02:33) Hudson — archival look, but the morning-after walk of shame stole the show

(03:59) Sam Smith — fine fit, complicated feelings

(04:31) Kylie Jenner & Kendall in Schiaparelli — a sculptural defense

(05:01) Heidi Klum — Halloween energy, worm-face callback

(05:51) Anne Hathaway — drawing on a dress, Devil Wears Prada 2 promo read

(06:31) Detour: Lady Gaga, Met Gala 2019 — the four-look performance, telephone era, pink wagon

(09:23) The Bezos-sponsored era — YouTube livestream Met Gala vs. the old spectacle

(10:51) TGI Fridays Cheesestick — winning the "I don't give a f**k" war, used the current stairs

(13:01) KFC caviar box — branding-first, mother-of-pearl spoon respect

(15:06) Cécred — Beyoncé activation, influencer styling, real campaign energy

(18:10) Amazon piss-bottle protest — "Temu Lex Luthor" enters the lexicon

(20:34) Lauren Sanchez, Madame X strap theory & DWP2 parody speculation

(22:38) Rachel Sennott's pale blue dot — and the jammed shoe

(25:03) Red-heels publicity-agent girl — directing traffic, Tory Burch sign her

(26:33) Hantavirus check-in — cruise ship PR disaster, please no branded tweets

(29:44) Sponsor: Ecamm — ecam.com/silencebrand

(30:57) Outro — thumbnail attempts, Dayna's in Tokyo, we did it

Welcome to Silence, Brand!, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang ricocheted from Drake’s icy comeback stunt to influencer cruise ship mess to the extremely cursed phrase “cloud bob,” before ending up in the surprising chaos of Tomodachi Life.

Between Drake trying to rebrand himself in a post-Kendrick world, Virgin Voyages turning Black creator drama into content gravity, and Vogue apparently trying to gentrify Tracee Ellis Ross’s afro in real time, the through line was clear: brands, platforms, and media outlets keep chasing “the moment,” but the moments that actually land are the ones that feel specific, human, and a little less desperate.

🦀 Silence, Brand! Live is powered by Ecamm, a live streaming and video production tool that basically turns your laptop into a full-on studio by switching cameras, dropping graphics, sharing screens, and pushing your stream to multiple platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once without everything catching on fire (most of the time).

If you’ve ever wondered how we’re juggling all of this in real time, it’s Ecamm doing the heavy lifting.

Get 15% off your first purchase at Ecamm with promo code SILENCEBRAND 🦀

Topics on the table:

Drake’s Iceman rollout and the return of big dumb spectacle. The crew unpacked Drake’s new album stunt, which involved a giant ice installation, hidden release date clues, a streamer winning $50,000 for finding the release date hidden in the ice, and at least one fire department appearance. The general consensus was that yes, it’s technically working, but it also feels like a very 2016 kind of chaos, not necessarily a 2026 one.

Iceman is a weird title right now, actually. One of the first questions raised was whether naming your album Iceman in the current political climate is maybe not the cleanest SEO move, given that ICE already has a pretty strong brand association and it’s not exactly one anyone wants extra of. Drake, famously, does not always meet the moment.

Spectacle fatigue is real, but apparently we’re still escalating. The conversation widened into whether these increasingly dangerous, oversized outdoor activations are just the next phase of flash mobs, lookalike contests, and pull-up culture. The vibe was very much, “Have we reached the point where no one will leave the house unless there is some kind of content-driven spectacle involved?”

Virgin Voyages, TikTok, and influencer marketing. Then came the creator cruise, which the crew described less like a dream trip and more like a three-day petri dish with content capture built in.

There are tons of rumors and viral moments coming off the trip, from a cheating scandal that allegedly ended in a shaved head to Beyoncé’s former dance captain getting kicked off stage for dancing too hard. The question wasn’t whether there was drama … it was whether the drama was organic, encouraged, or just inevitable once you put a thousand people with ring lights on a floating content farm.

Threads as the new rant speakeasy. One especially interesting thread in the conversation was that some of the loudest creator complaints about the Virgin Voyages trip were happening on Threads, not Twitter. That led to a broader observation that Threads is starting to feel like a more private, less performative place to pop off, which may be exactly why people are using it that way.

Live threads and Meta maybe cooking? Threads is rolling out live conversation features around sports, which feels like one of the first moments where the platform wasn’t just copying a format but actually trying to own one. They might have cooked a little.

Tim Apple and the presidential Wattpad era. The episode took a hard left into Trump’s extremely weird Truth Social post about Tim Cook, which read less like a normal statement and more like a bitter little fanfic about helping Apple “where he could.” Everyone agreed it was backhanded, self-centered, and impossible to read without hearing “Tim Apple” echo in the distance.

The pickup artist to Trump pipeline, spiritually. From there, the crew found themselves staring at a 2000s-era VH1 pickup artist and realizing that the language of backhanded compliments, weird masculine posturing, and public negging never actually died. It just got older, richer, and somehow more annoying.

Cloud bob, or the gentrification of the afro. One of the most immediate crashouts of the episode came from Vogue referring to Tracee Ellis Ross’s hair as a “cloud bob,” which the crew correctly identified as a deeply cursed attempt to rename a Black hairstyle into something more digestible for white fashion language. It’s the soft-focus editorial repackaging of something that never needed rebranding in the first place.

Tomodachi Life and the chaos of unrestricted customization. Tomodachi Life, the new Nintendo release has everyone making absurd characters, cursed scenarios, and custom items with alarming freedom. It’s part nostalgia hit, part chaos generator, and part evidence that the internet will always turn a wholesome sandbox into a deeply specific joke machine within minutes.

The game is unhinged, but also weirdly wholesome. For every raunchy custom item and wildly inappropriate dialogue prompt, there was also genuine excitement around the game’s inclusive features, including nonbinary gender options, pronouns, and a genuinely impressive range of textured Black hairstyles. The point was not that the game is pure. It’s that it’s broad enough to hold both chaos and care, which is more than can be said for most platforms right now.

Our Lives are now available as podcasts on Apple Music and Spotify.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap.

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀

Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

Welcome to Silence, Brand!, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang drifted from retro weather feeds to appointment television to moon joy with the kind of whiplash only the internet can provide.

What started as a cozy little nostalgia check-in about The Weather Channel quickly turned into a much bigger conversation about broadcast culture, passive consumption, brand participation, and why everyone suddenly seems desperate to be told what to watch again.

Between Tubi truthers, YouTube appointment viewing, the linguistics behind “you the birthday,” and brands trying their luck with moon content, the through line was clear: people are tired of digging through platforms for meaning, and they’re starting to crave formats, language, and cultural moments that feel a little more guided, a little more communal, and a lot less algorithmically lonely.

🦀 Silence, Brand! Live is powered by Ecamm, a live streaming and video production tool that basically turns your laptop into a full-on studio by switching cameras, dropping graphics, sharing screens, and pushing your stream to multiple platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once without everything catching on fire (most of the time).

If you’ve ever wondered how we’re juggling all of this in real time, it’s Ecamm doing the heavy lifting.

Get 15% off your first purchase at Ecamm with promo code SILENCEBRAND 🦀

Topics on the table:

The retro Weather Channel revival. The crew opened with a loving tribute to the return of The Weather Channel’s old-school “local on the eights” aesthetic, complete with soothing graphics, Wii-adjacent visuals, and the kind of gentle information delivery that makes you wonder if cable nostalgia has officially crossed into comfort object territory.

Do we miss cable TV? Apparently, yes. What followed was a broader conversation about analog-to-digital transition memories, old broadcast rituals, and the realization that the lo-fi ambient function people now assign to YouTube streams used to just be… the weather.

Appointment TV is back, kind of. The observation here was simple but important: we may have spent years chasing on-demand freedom just to realize we kind of miss structure and routine.

“You the birthday” and why language content rules. The gang then shifted into the “you the birthday” trend, breaking down why it works, how it spread, and how Black language keeps shaping internet culture in real time.

Space, big feels, and the moon as a marketing opportunity. Then came the moon. The crew got into the emotional gravity of the recent space mission, the dark side of the moon footage, the astronauts’ communications blackout, the wake-up songs, and the genuinely touching human moments coming out of the mission.

There was crying.There was reverence.There was a crater named after an astronaut’s late wife.It was a lot.

Nutella had the best accidental ad in space. Of all the brands that got pulled into the mission chatter, Nutella was the clean winner. Their product just happened to look incredible on camera, and the result felt like one of those perfect, unrepeatable little moments of visual brand luck that nobody could have planned, which is exactly why it worked.

Honest Beauty had the product moment, but not quite the post. Honest also had a real space-adjacent win when Jessica Alba’s lotion showed up during astronaut communications, but the group felt the social execution didn’t quite land. The actual moment was cool. The celeb founder-reaction content around it just raised more questions than it answered.

Not all moon content is created equal. The gang also got into the brands that jumped into moon discourse just because there was a moon, and not because they had anything interesting to say about it. The distinction they kept coming back to was whether a brand found a clever way in or just slapped a product next to a celestial body and called it a day.

Moonposting worked better than the Kit Kat heist and Hannah Montana pile-ons. Dayna made a strong case that moon content, while not immune to laziness, was still better than recent copy-paste trend participation because it actually forced brands to think a little. When it worked, it worked because there was at least some narrative, product truth, or creative stretch involved.

Our Lives are now available as podcasts on Apple Music and Spotify.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap.

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

CRAB?!?!… crabril fools……

Welcome to Silence, Brand!, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang took a machete to Q1 and asked the only questions that matter: what actually felt good, what felt dead on arrival, and why are so many brands still confusing participation with relevance?

Between Druski’s whiteface, Facebook’s possible renaissance, and a Hannah Montana anniversary pile-on that should be studied in a lab, the conversation kept circling the same truth: people still want fun, but they want the kind that feels alive, not the kind that looks like it was generated to satisfy a quarterly content box.

Our Lives are now available as podcasts on Apple Music and Spotify.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap.

Topics on the table:

Whimsy won Q1. From IHOP’s Mr. Fantasy moment to Apple’s weirdly charming organic posts, the crew kept coming back to the same word: whimsical. Not polished for the sake of polished, not over-engineered spectacle, just playful, specific, slightly silly brand behavior that made people actually want to engage.

Text is back, baby. The group dug into the growing sense that text-based platforms are fun again, and maybe video was never supposed to be the answer to everything. Between Threads, Twitter, Facebook, and the general exhaustion around high-lift short-form content, the vibe was very much, “what if a post could just be a post again?”

Facebook, weirdly, might be cooking. After years of being the place where polished brand content went to die, Facebook is suddenly looking like a weird little sandbox again. Burger King UK posting “Pringles” for no reason and getting hundreds of reactions became a perfect example of the low-stakes, lottery-ticket style of posting that doesn’t have to sell a Whopper to still be worthwhile.

Luxury, but make it unserious and a little gay. The bigger read on Mugler was that it worked because it stopped pretending luxury has to be stiff, exclusive, and self-important. Instead, it used a fully formed persona to make the brand feel more inclusive, more accessible, and frankly more interesting than another slow pan over a handbag ever could.

The Hannah Montana 20th anniversary brand pile-on was bleak. Then came the crashout. We broke down how brands collectively responded to the Hannah Montana anniversary by posting nearly identical product-with-wig graphics, “best of both worlds” copy, and empty nostalgia references that proved they understood neither Hannah Montana nor comedy. Not every cultural moment needs your product in a blond wig.

Druski remains the king of saturation. In rapid-fire mode, the group also touched on his strange but effective omnipresence, from T-Mobile to The Voice to Buffalo Wild Wings to his own increasingly chaos-coded comedy universe. The bigger question wasn’t whether he’s everywhere. It was whether brands still know what “brand safe” even means anymore. We’re in a weirder place now, where some brands are more willing to flirt with discomfort, controversy, or outright chaos if it means relevance.

Hand-drawn campaigns are hitting because people are hungry for human texture. To end on a more hopeful note, the crew shouted out the growing wave of hand-drawn, childlike, craft-forward campaign work, including Touchland’s fan-art-driven visuals and the broader return to paper, scans, doodles, and visible human touch. In a sea of synthetic sameness, the messy and handmade suddenly feels premium again.

Hollister’s graduation rollout with Gigi Perez got a nod too. The team also flagged Hollister’s graduation campaign as a thoughtful move, especially in how it extended beyond Instagram and into Substack storytelling. It felt timely, emotionally legible, and actually in conversation with the audience it was trying to reach, which, in this economy, counts for a lot. Shout out PEOPLE BRANDS AND THINGS.

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

Get 7 day free trial

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

This week’s Silence, Brand! Live had everything: AI fruit cheating scandals, a gummy burger from France, Pinterest spring trend forecasting, Oscar carpet dumpster lore, trade show thirst traps, and Afroman reminding America what freedom is supposed to look like.

Between butthole discourse, microplastic burgers, and reluctant admiration for slop with plot, the underlying question emerged: if this is what’s capturing attention, what does that say about where culture and content are headed?

In todays live:

AI fruit soap operas, the rise of “slop with plot,” and hooks so good they override your dignity. What looks like pure algorithmic nonsense is actually structured like a telenovela, complete with infidelity arcs, cliffhangers, and multi-part storytelling. There’s stuff to be learned here (unfortunately). Yes, this is rock bottom, but also, we’re watching it along with everyone else.

Benton’s burger cameo turned into an accidental symbol for the entire conversation. We know it’s bad. Yet we still consume it anyway. A silly reminder that novelty alone is not the same as delight.

Pinterest Spring Trends and the continuing conversations about personalization. From “my room, my rules” to dark cottagecore kitchens and grandma-core interiors, the conversation turned toward personalization as a reaction to years of all-white sameness. The broader mood shift was toward self-expression, manageable joy, and small aesthetic choices that make life feel worth living.

Nature is back, indoors and out. The Pinterest report also sparked a wider conversation from Benton about nature-coded design, from Jonathan Anderson’s garden-inflected Dior work to home spaces that feel more rooted, warmer, and alive. Green was everywhere, and the vibe was less pristine minimalism, more earthy refuge.

Brooch boom and the Oscars maximalism pivot. Dejaih clocked a real saturation of brooches and bold embellishment on the red carpet, with flowers, sparkle, and gaudy detailing everyone from Michael B. Jordan to Pedro Pascal. Coleman Domingo was correctly named as being ahead of his time with years worth of red carpet brooch bling.

The woman who dumpster-dived the Oscars red carpet. A creator hauling discarded carpet rolls into her apartment became an instant folk hero moment, especially after the story snowballed into local news coverage with Oscar winners asking if they could get a piece. The bigger realization: people love proximity to glamour, and if institutions don’t monetize their own trash, someone else will.

What happens when The Academy realizes they could sell scraps, partner with resale platforms, or turn discarded carpet into consolation prizes for nominees”Congratulations, you didn’t win. Please enjoy some rug.”

Expo West and the loss of audience awareness. Circling back to our Expo West piece from earlier this week, we got brutally honest about brands posting from an industry-only CPG trade show as if regular consumers are desperate to see closed-door snack networking content. Just because something happened in your work life does not mean it belongs on the brand grid.

We discussed why voyeurism isn’t a social strategy after we spotted brands filming unsuspecting attendees (including men they thought were hot) and posting them from official brand handles without consent. It’s weird, it cheapens the brand, and if the genders were reversed, everyone would immediately understand the problem.

One theory is that this kind of content comes from people using brand accounts as a side door into influencer culture, treating a slightly cool startup as their launchpad into a more visible internet persona. Which, honestly, explains a lot.

Afroman, Lemon Pound Cake, and a huge win for free speech. The episode closed on the genuinely incredible news that Afroman won the defamation case brought against him after he turned footage from a no-knock raid on his house into an album and a series of songs mocking the officers involved.

The law enforcement officers said they were harmed by being portrayed accurately and insulted poetically, and the case got thrown out. If you haven’t seen Afroman’s triumphant flag-suited victory lap, this whole saga landed as absurd, righteous, and deeply American. [Not clickbait.]

God bless America Afroman.

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang gathered in the glowing aftermath of a trinket swap to do what we do best: turn cultural noise into meaning, and meaning into a semi-coherent group chat dissertation.

We opened with a Glossier mirror phone accessory (the rare object that is both useless and immediately essential), survived a brief spider-based horror vignette, and then wandered into the big questions of the week: what counts as community, what counts as taste, and what counts as a “contest” when it’s secretly just a job posting wearing a party hat?

In today’s live:

Snowpocalypse content machine and the accidental brilliance of serialized civic lore. New York’s snow cleanup became a feel-good algorithm event, complete with morale-boost videos, local “I know that guy” sightings, and a public figure who (allegedly) discovered the power of wearing a hat the second time around.

The take: when public service becomes watchable, it becomes shareable, and suddenly “community” stops being a brand buzzword and starts being something people can actually participate in.

Women’s sports as a real-time test of who’s showing up vs. who’s cosplaying allyship. Flavor Flavs celebration of the women’s olympic hockey moment hit that sweet spot of cultural momentum plus brand participation that didn’t feel like a hijack.

The key distinction: showing up to the party and asking what you can bring, versus grabbing the aux and forcing everyone to listen to your phonk mix.

Hot ice cream, Tyra Banks, and the pop-up industrial complex. We entered the uncanny valley of … hot custard pretending to be ice cream. The group unpacked the aesthetic signals of temporary concepts (paint it black, call it innovation, refuse to explain anything) and the deep consumer fear that every storefront is one ring light away from alleged money laundering.

Physical media and the return of the tastemaker. We got sincere about DVDs, video store clerks, record store recs, Letterboxd, Criterion Closet culture, and the quiet thrill of holding your taste in your hands. Algorithms can recommend, but they can’t know you, and people are craving the human middleman again.

Smiling Friends ending, burnout boundaries, and why planned endings feel like respect. The creators of Adult Swim’s Smiling Friends are calling it before it got dragged into a Walking Dead-style eternity landed as surprisingly healthy. A rare cultural moment where “we’re stopping because we don’t want to hate this” is framed as maturity, not failure.

And then: Fender’s “contest,” aka a job application in a trench coat. Dayna’s timed rant detonated the core critique: Fender positioned an influencer/content correspondent role as a “contest,” but the entry requirements were basically a full freelance pitch deck. The energy was: if you’re hiring a creator, hire a creator. Don’t dress labor up as a sweepstakes and call it community building.

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams •

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang tried to do a normal post–Super Bowl debrief and immediately got dragged into the flaming group chat of reality: politics on main, an attention economy in crisis, and brands still acting shocked when the numbers dip during a literal news apocalypse.

We’re big on “snow day in hell” social reporting and Bad Bunny’s halftime show turning into a community spotlight. Whimsy is not optional right now.

In today’s live:

* Your graph did not “go down because of the algorithm.” Social teams got a gentle (and needed) pep talk: attention is fragmented across massive events and nonstop news cycles, so stop gaslighting yourself with platform blame.Sometimes the KPI killer is “everyone is reading the worst headline of their life rn”

* “Snow day in hell” etiquette. We’re all stuck online together, so be kind to your neighbors and don’t jam your brand down anyone’s throat while the world is actively on fire. Making your audience laugh a little will usually result in a W.

* Levi’s is ass. They earned real points for the “Levi’s is for everyone” message, delivered via an extremely democratic parade of butts (including Woody, construction worker workwear realism, and Doechii) in their Super Bowl ad.

* Good ad. Wrong brand. The Backstreet Boys sing-along premise worked so well people thought it was Target or T-Mobile, then the Coinbase logo hit and the room collectively booed. A masterclass in attention with a side of trust collapse.

* DoorDash choosing social over a TV spot. This was the “more of this, please” moment: a big player putting budget into second-screen behavior, building narrative across pre-game to post-game, and actually acting like a campaign is a campaign.

* Kraft Mac and Cheese war room energy. The take: it felt like brands talking to brands, chasing a reheated “dunk in the dark” fantasy with repetitive templates and unclear audience payoff. The numbers looked big, but the engagement told a different story, plus the platform choice did them zero favors.

* Bad Bunny’s halftime show as real community marketing. Dejaih clocked the smartest “ad space” as the field itself: local LA staples (tacos + nail techs), creatives getting real shine, and set constraints turning into iconic choices (hello, grass ppl in my phone).

* Meta’s “post from beyond the grave” patent. We ended in the existential pit (as you do) with the feeling that a new AI top layer is forming and humans are hiding in the back rooms of the remaining real places. Find this in tomorrows issue under the “hey so that’s bad” header.

🦀 Calling all Atlanta crabs! 🦀

We’re hosting a low-pressure hang with people who work in brand, culture, media, and the internet -- this time in Atlanta!BYOT [the T stands for trinkets]RSVP » https://www.handstamp.com/e/SB-IRL-ATL

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams •

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.

In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang did what we do best … tried to have a normal pop culture conversation but then got jump-scared by politics, weird AI sludge, and brands doing the absolute most in the least charming way.

Between Super Bowl ad discourse, Bad Bunny Spanish TikTok, and two separate creator economy faceplants (hi Bauer, hi Fly By Jing)

So i guess the take away is “stop treating audiences like they’re dumb, stop giving people homework, and maybe DONT threaten your biggest fans with legalese”

In this live:

* Heritage Foundation Super Bowl interruption. The scroll got hijacked by a Heritage Foundation ad to remind us that yes, anyone with enough money can buy the moment, and that’s… not comforting

* Super Bowl ads, but make it gatekeepy. Do early ad teasers kill the magic? The answer was YUUUPPPP. Let’s keep some mystery alive. Lore and world-building are good (like the CeraVe x Michael Cera style slow drip). Weekly three-second teaser crumbs with a “big things coming” energy are not a social campaign.

* Chipotle’s AI commercial and the rise of homework marketing. Chipotle is teasing a deliberately synthetic AI-generated ad, then asking viewers to “spot it” for rewards, sparked a collective why-are-we-doing-this again. The bigger gripe: brands keep explaining the experience before it happens, stripping out surprise, and turning fun into instructions.

* Bad Bunny Sunday. We talked Bad Bunny, his hat (important), and the genuinely sweet pocket of TikTok where people are teaching each other Spanish lyrics so they can sing along. But don’t forget about the tension of a major halftime moment feeling politically loaded, and we hope he stays safe while the internet does what it does.

* Pavvy the Goalie vs Bauer Hockey aka how to speedrun a PR disaster. We broke down the saga of a hockey brand fumbling the easiest possible goodwill moment and alienating a true fan.

* Fly By Jing hot pot bomb backlash. We dug into the rollout where a product got framed as “the first of its kind,” and the comments immediately called out the obvious (people can buy versions of this at H Mart and its been around for A MINUTE.) The critique is on the optics, the creator choice, and the apology feeling like an afterthought tucked into captions or edits instead of a real moment of accountability. Someone compared it to the Momofuku “chili crisp” trademark mess, which is basically the internet’s bat signal for “you are about to learn a lesson the hard way.” This is a product with deep AAPI cultural roots, so why is it being rolled out by a white guy?

Hang tight crabby crew …We’ll be back on the other side of the Super Bowl to talk about what actually happened, not what brands told us was coming.

Thank you cleb (actually fun marketer), Cheyenne, and many others for tuning into our live video!

We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀

Ryan Benson • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith • Benton Williams •

Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface.In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting.

For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: [email protected] 🦀Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts.