Sexy Water and Successful Brands

Author

Izzy White
March 22, 2024

Hi!!! Welcome!! This is the a newsletters that has taken the IRL weekly trends briefing, and been transformed into the written word. All this information is a weekly digest of current news, trendy soundbites and sharp insights so that you can quit reading and still sound smart. Gathered from articles, newsletters, reports, and TikTok: It's like Blinkist for culture.

Algorithm References

Great piece of advertising (ew), but it is! Definitely worth the watch and hopefully it’s being spoken about enough to make a slight impact!

Great piece of advertising (ew), but it is! Definitely worth the watch and hopefully it’s being spoken about enough to make a slight impact!

Any trend that shows two+ versions of an individual is nice. People are able to show such an insight into their personalities and at least come across as more authentic in doing so.

Bose’s new earphones have caused a bit of a discussion around how earphones have the potential to double as jewerly pieces - which makes sense when we think of the role that headphones such as Airpods Pros, played in the fashion and aesthetic world online.

A TikToker has coined the term ‘sexy water’, meaning water that has been fortified or is 'a ‘functional’ beverage and the base is water. Good for her at least.

Articles

Brands Doing Something Right

Instead of going through each of these articles, I thought it’d be best to summarise a few examples of brands (apparently) doing things a bit differently, and it working in their favour. 

  • Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario’s interview about how he saw a gap in the market, where he believed that water could look just as cool as beer - and it paid off. 

  • Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media published a case study on branded gaming experience on Roblox - apparently it got as much buzz as a $60 million ad campaign would have gotten 

  • Mr Beast now has a show with Amazon Prime and there are many articles talking about how he’s changed entertainment for forever. This is kinda true but also giving him too much credit.

  • A podcast (that I haven’t listened to) from the people at MSCHF talking about being in the business of HYPE

  • And more generally, there’s been a lot of discussion on Skim’s new partnership 

One Big Reason Gen Z Is Still on Facebook: To Save Money

This article is more of a look into two specific people who use Facebook Marketplace to save money and furnish their homes, but it is still a good way to understand how platforms are used other than their intended purpose. While there are many alternatives to marketplace, the idea that buyers and sellers have profiles with ratings and other identification aspects means they are more trustworthy and communication is easy because most people are already familiar with Facebook. With the cost of living and the desire to be sustainable through secondhand items and thrifting, there is more reason for brands to create opportunities for customers to recreate these behaviours with them. 

Another article about Facebook trying to be cool - Facebook is trying to make ‘poking’ cool again

Speed round of articles which I found interesting this past week - How E.l.f. Cosmetics drove a 125% increase in monthly active app users, Facebook’s Algorithm Is Boosting AI Spam That Links to AI-Generated, Ad-Laden Click Farms, Olivia Rodrigo shares a snippet of unreleased song via her fan hotline, and finally one that might not be true beyond 1 school in America but still is interesting given how Wrestling has been showing up recently and that is Girls are falling in love with wrestling.

Weekly Question

Thank you for getting this far. I look forward to hanging out with you all next week!

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