A brief overview of what is currently trending on X in news, culture, and/or trending hashtags and formats.
Mahria the Scientist: Young Thug proposed to the singer during a live performance.
Robert E. Lee: Statue of the Confederate general is being replaced by civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns at the U.S. Capitol.
BBC: The British broadcaster is the subject of a $10 billion defamation lawsuit in U.S. federal court.
HOT RESOLUTIONS FOR ‘26 & OLD HABITS TO LEAVE IN ‘25
A snapshot of where social marketing is headed, informed by our cross-discipline teams working with dozens of brands across categories.
🥶 OUT: TREND JACKING. Jumping into fleeting internet moments has become performative and empty. Contribute a unique perspective with a clear reason to engage or move on.
🔥 IN: COLLABORATIVE BRAND WORLDS. Maintain relevance by co-building a voice, vibe, and cast of characters based on shared passions of your most valuable audiences.
🥶 OUT: CAMPAIGN THINKING. Calendarized reach may please the marketing models in the short-term but relegating creativity to asset delivery is a race to mediocrity.
🔥 IN: STORY SYSTEMS. Outcome based narratives originating from deep audience insights. Activity and investment will be held in order to match the opportunity in the moment rather.
🥶 OUT: SOCIAL AS JUST POSTS. Content calendars have become prisons of our own design. Ditch the publisher mentality. Get off the content creation hamster wheel.
🔥 IN: SOCIAL AS SOCIALIZING. Increase time within community engagement by participating with comments, forums, and group chats.
🥶 OUT: VIRALITY. Platforms are increasingly hiding public facing engagements but continue to use touchpoints as backend signals to advance the power of their own algorithm. Thus virality is no longer an end-state where content either makes the metaphorical leaderboard or not.
🔥 IN: DISCOVERABILITY. As agentic search and conversational commerce becomes a default, predominance won’t only favor in-platform interactions. Remaining visible will require optimizing for authority rooted in deep citations rather than surface-level engagements.
🥶 OUT: INFLUENCER GIFTING. The internet continues to democratize sources of attention and opportunity. Yet brands are still clamoring to earn the endorsement of the most common influential personalities. Continually gifting these “haves” reinforces a transactional relationship that lacks authenticity and risks disenfranchising the “have nots”.
🔥 IN: IRL EXPERIENCES. A universal human need in connection; to transcend the virtual and plug into the physical. Brands that take online passions and facilitate physical connections will win in relationship building regardless of presumed status.
🥶 OUT: CUTDOWNS. The most attention to creativity in advertising has always been given to original ideation and corresponding production. Final specs and placement realities are brushed off and relegated to a versioning exercise that is someone else’s responsibility.
🔥 IN: REMIXING. The most creative endeavors will not be making net-new. Creativity will thrive in iterations. Gaining more mileage, stories, and emotion out of original work, and remixing content from various sources will become an ongoing pursuit of creative craftsmanship.
🥶 OUT: GENERATIVE AI. Starting from zero with every prompt, attempting emulation within existing systems.
🔥 IN: ITERATIVE AI. New starting points where foundational knowledge is understood in order to arrive at solutions that rewire the system itself.