Going Viral Isn’t Cool Anymore. How Should Brands Show Up?
Everyone loves to hate social media right now, as feeds have become “polluted” with addictive, short-form content and AI slop. The strongest brands are finding ways to detach themselves from the algorithm.
Reported by Vogue.
Something shifted when Silicon Valley's most powerful men lined up at a presidential inauguration and the whole world took a screenshot. According to Vogue, that single image — Bezos, Zuckerberg, Cook, Pichai front-row at Trump's swearing-in — did more for public distrust of Big Tech than years of lawsuits and investigative journalism combined. "That photo was what the world needed to realize how deeply connected these companies are to the seats of power," says Adele Walton, online safety campaigner and co-founder of Gen Z phone-free collective The Logging Off Club. Two decades into the social media experiment, the disillusionment has gone fully mainstream — and fashion brands are caught directly in the crossfire.
The policy response is accelerating fast. Australia banned social media for under-16s in January, the UK pulled smartphones from schools, and a landmark US case recently held Meta and Google liable for addictive algorithmic design. But legislation is just one symptom. Strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory calls this structural trust collapse "the defining tension of this media era." And yet — brands can't just log off. Globally, 42% of consumers still discover products through social platforms, per consumer insights firm GWI. A full exodus isn't coming. What's coming instead is a reckoning about how you show up.
The Algorithm Is the Enemy of Cool
The brands cutting through right now aren't the ones optimizing hardest — they're the ones that look like they couldn't care less. "Consumers can smell algorithm addiction instantly," says Shaun Singh, CEO of trend forecaster Death to Stock. "Most brands online currently feel like someone trying too hard at a party." The AI slop backlash has only sharpened this instinct; when Prada, Gucci, and Valentino experimented with AI-generated creative, the criticism was swift and fierce, even when serious artists were involved. Meanwhile, TikTok and Instagram's own algorithms have quietly shifted their weighting toward watch time and completion rates, rewarding depth over dopamine hits. Fewer posts, longer stories, actual substance — that's the new architecture of relevance.
The brands getting this right are building meaning that's structurally impossible to replicate with a prompt. Jacquemus cast Charlotte LeBon to play his late mother in a campaign for the Le Valérie bag — grief and memory as brand identity. Coach CMO Joon Silverstein describes the brand's pivot to long-form YouTube storytelling as a move "from retention to relevance," noting that for Gen Z, "meaning isn't a layer on top of the product, it's the reason they choose something at all." Miu Miu goes further: its Literary Club events in Milan and Shanghai, its hyper-referential collaboration with Petit Bateau, its recurring aesthetic of awkward intellectualism and bourgeois nostalgia — none of it can be automated, and all of it feels like a brand that exists somewhere more interesting than your For You page. "Silence can be a positioning tool," notes Rose Coffey, senior foresight analyst at The Future Laboratory. "We're no longer quantifying media value by reach — we're quantifying it by trust."
The brands that will survive this shift aren't the ones who game the feed best — they're the ones with something real enough that the algorithm becomes irrelevant to their identity.
Read the original at Vogue.
