This is Contagious

Why is a fashion brand behaving like an entertainment company, a retailer making a talk show for an AI audience, and a video generator covering people in spaghetti?

In this episode, the Contagious team explores why Gap is trying to become a pop-culture brand, how John Lewis is trying to make celebrity chat useful to bots, and why Runway is turning AI video into a game of one-upmanship. Plus, could AI finally get the films that never got funded made or will it just flood the world with crapslop? 

Along the way, we’ll examine:

• Why Gap has hired a chief entertainment officer and partnered with a boy band
• Whether Louis Theroux will solve John Lewis’s agentic retail challenge
• Why shoppers who use AI interact with three times as many touchpoints
• How AI is dividing filmmakers over what counts as creativity
• Why giving an AI agent access to your inbox could expose other people’s emails, too 
• If Aaron Sorkin is right about attitudes towards human creativity

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Five million followers but only 500 likes? The algorithm has (again) changed the rules and brands can’t rely on fans seeing their posts.

Rachel Karten, creator of the Link in Bio newsletter, joins This Is Contagious to unpack why Instagram is increasingly about the meme you send a friend in your DMs, why brands need to tell stories only they can tell, and why the smart move is to focus on tension over attention. We also get into the murky waters of why the people paid to keep us online are increasingly questioning whether that’s good for us and whether they want to be part of it.

We’ll explore:

• Why five million followers no longer guarantee five million views
• Why 44% of social marketers feel their boss doesn't understand their job
• The risks of relying on AI-generated creative and rage bait for attention
• The reason treating Instagram like a mood board no longer cuts it
• What libraries know about social media that brands don’t
• Why Mr Rogers should be an avuncular role model for brands 
• The perfume brand turning wild roadside apples into cinematic social films

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

What does it take to become a brand people actually want to spend time with?

The Contagious Brands Report 2026 brings together 45 brands finding unconventional answers to some of marketing’s biggest challenges - from earning attention and building communities, to making products more desirable, embracing AI and responding to affordability concerns.

This episode reveals some of the standout brands in the report, from sunglasses sold in art-gallery-like spaces to tractors-as-a-service, AI film festivals and a pickle brand turning students into creators. Along the way, they explore what marketers can learn from brands finding new markets, new opportunities and new ways to keep people coming back.

We’ll explore

• Why destination retail overindexes on ROI per square foot
• How brands are designing products to generate stories and attention
• Why some brands are turning employees and students into their marketing department 
• How brands can turn customers into communities, and communities into value 
• Why reframing value can be as powerful as changing the product
• Why the thrill of potentially owning crab-soup sake is attracting Gen Z in Japan

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Becky Owen, CMO at social agency Billion Dollar Boy, joins Contagious to challenge the received wisdom about how brands should work with creators – from the three-second rule to the idea that good content is all that matters.

Drawing on new research, the latest Contagious podcast explores how brands should work with creators, from using emotion and microdramas to build audiences, to deliberately creating imperfection to fight AI slop. We also look at why creator fandom can now come before the streaming deal, and how brands are having to rewire themselves to keep up.

We’ll explain:

• Why the three-second rule may be tanking your campaign performance
• Why creators are deliberately embracing messy bedrooms and mistakes to prove they're human
• How the same emotion can boost performance in one category and tank it in another
• How creators have become data-driven marketers, not just media channels
• Why some brands are exploring equity and longer-term relationships to make creators genuinely invested in their success
• How social creators are using micro-pilots to build fandom before getting picked up by streaming platforms
• Why Argos turned everyday kettles into gallery-worthy objects
   

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Dirty mattresses. Giant hairballs. Bad Bunny. The Pope. This CFO-friendly episode explores how brands can overindex on impact by investing in creativity rather than throwing money at the problem.

The Contagious team analyse some of their favourite low-budget marketing campaigns, unpacking the creative principles behind them and asking how brands can turn tiny budgets into big ideas, big conversations and even bigger earned media.

We’ll explain:

• How to weaponise your audience as a media channel
• Why withholding information can be more powerful than broadcasting it
• How an ick factor can make out-of-sight products impossible to ignore
• Why the WTF factor works so well in outdoor
• How to turn existing infrastructure into emotion and engagement
• How one tiny physical change can become a huge media event 
• How shoplifting can become brilliant PR

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Mary Kish, Head of Community at Twitch, joins Contagious to break down why people are flocking to Twitch – and why brands should care. 

As a streamer herself, Mary doesn’t just work at Twitch, she lives the culture. In this conversation we explore why experiencing things together matters more than ever and how participation kicks the ass of passive viewing when it comes to building engagement. 

We also explain: 

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Tracing a line from Tolkien to Mattel’s toyetics, the Contagious team explores why brands are moving beyond storytelling to create richer, more immersive worlds. 

We look at the rules that make fictional worlds believable and how worldbuilding can help brands escape commoditisation, fuel always-on creativity and give people something to believe in, belong to and buy into.

Along the way, we explore:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Kory Marchisotto, the president of E.l.f. Brands, joins Contagious to unpack how a scrappy startup selling premium cosmetics at affordable prices evolved into a beauty powerhouse. 

This episode explores the ideology, marketing and organisational culture behind E.l.f. Beauty’s explosive growth. We dig into how its biggest innovations were led by its community, how the company encourages healthy conflict and why its mantra is ‘anything is e.l.f-ing possible’.  

We also explain:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

AI companions. Lonely cities. Yakult Ladies. 

In this episode, Contagious investigates the rise of loneliness and why brands as diverse as Heineken and Games Workshop are winning by becoming the new facilitators of human connection. 

Along the way, we explore lonelygenic cities, discover what brands can learn from 19th Century Parisian architecture, asking whether boyfriends are embarrassing and whether we’re trapped in the Me Operating System.

We’ll explain:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

The Contagious team returns from Cannes Lions 2026 to deliver our sunburnt take on the awards, the talks and what it all means for the industry. 

Hot from the Croisette, we find out whether How Brands Grow is a brutally boring read, why the UN needs marketers more than ever, how the industry's best work is turning problems into opportunities, and how creative treasure can be found everywhere - from a dot-matrix printer receipt to a 12-tonne chocolate heist.

Along the way we delve into:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.