This post was created in partnership with MNTN

Producing a TV ad has always been an expensive, time-consuming process, making it challenging to jump on real-time trends and viral moments. But with the rise of CTV and social ads, the need for speed is real, and brands are finding new ways to capitalize.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with MNTN, Fraser Woollard, head of business development, detailed how AI has unlocked the ability for small brands to compete in this new age.

Fastvertising has taken flight

Woollard began his presentation with a quick definition of “fastvertising,” which is exactly what it sounds like—an opportunity to create brand awareness by capitalizing on a “lightning in a bottle” type of cultural moment.

“It captures something to do with culture, something to do with the news cycle, or something to do with the social conversation,” Woollard explained.

An excellent example of this concept in action literally floated across screens earlier this month during the Artemis II space mission. “I actually saw that clip when the Nutella in zero gravity is flying through, and I thought, ‘Nutella’s got to do an ad!’” said Woollard. Within minutes, the brand went all in on the happy accident with some lighthearted social content.

While there have been similar real-time brand wins on social media (like Oreo’s famous “dunk in the dark” tweet during the 2013 Big Game power outage), creating a TV ad at that same speed hasn’t traditionally been feasible due to the high costs and longer production times. Until now, that is.

Beyond slop, AI is fueling fastvertising potential

Though the term “slop” comes up time and again when discussing AI’s creative pursuits, Woollard believes AI can unlock opportunities for more brands.

AI can also help brands create multiple versions of an ad, he explained, with different scenes based on locality, or targeted to specific audiences. And when you put those AI tools in front of a creator who actually understands how to make a compelling ad? That’s where brands can achieve amazing results.

Targeted, real-time ads powered by AI

While Woollard acknowledged that the biggest impact on an ad’s success is the message itself, where an ad runs matters as well. With AI’s ability to help brands create more variants customized to target markets or to the show the ad is running on, the “when and where” can become even more significant.

 “I think this truly is the future of fast advertising—the ability to very quickly generate ads that actually match the show that you’re in,” Woollard said.

This post was created in partnership with Sam’s Club

The creator economy is moving past the passive follower era and into the participation economy, where brands can build ecosystems with creators and communities to co-create their stories.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Sam’s Club, panelists came together to talk about how brands can foster genuine community by rewriting the rules of social engagement.

More learning and listening

The conversation began by discussing what brands can learn from creators.

Charlotte Tansill, president of social, creator, and earned at Publicis Creative U.S., explained that creators experiment, know their audience inside out, and bring realness and personality.

“Brands understand their audience through personas, through dashboards. They’re thinking about how to target their audience, not how to engage their community,” she explained.

Catherine Ebs, lifestyle creator, added that  brands should do more listening when trying to be more community-focused, “especially in the comment section, where people say exactly what they want.”

Creators and the participation economy

MacKenzie McCarver, head of social and influencers at Sam’s Club, said as a membership-based model company, she views community as a participation economy, not a broadcast one.

“At Sam’s Club, we’ve grown our community 600% this year, and we’re focused on making a community of creators for creators by creators by a brand that really loves them deeply,” McCarver shared. “We believe creators are small businesses, and that’s what our brand was founded to support.”

Ebs added that as part of the participation-based community, she has focused closely on staying true to her morals and values, something that brands should build on.

“Companies also have, normally, pillars, which I consider their morals and their values. And if you’re sticking to those, it resonates really well,” Ebs said. “If brands just continue to do that and, again, keep their focus on what their goals are—not what all these other brands are doing—it’ll work.”

Alignment with brand plans and objectives

Tansill described what makes a good brand partnership with a creator: thinking about the full system and adapting work streams to the right creators.

“We’re partnering with creators against any and all business objectives,” Tansill explained. “Whether it’s becoming more culturally relevant as a brand or driving conversation or product consideration or conversion and commerce, influencers play a central role—a very powerful role—in driving any of those objectives.”

Ebs agreed and advised creators to talk with a brand about its objectives before accepting a partnership.

“What is the goal? Is it conversion? Is it just eyes? Is it views?” Ebs asked. “Because sometimes that’s what the brand wants. They don’t even care about the conversions. They just want to be on your page.”

As the session came to a close, an audience member asked what happens if a brand has multiple objectives during the Q&A. Tansill took the question, leaving the audience with a helpful tip: Depending on the budget, prioritize within the four C’s of culture, conversation, consideration, and conversion.

Nobody does a drop like K-Pop. It took less than 24 hours for Beats‘ special-edition Ruby-themed headphones to sell out across Apple’s online stores last year. The collab was with global superstar Jennie: BLACKPINK member, solo artist, and one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2026.

The Apple-owned audio brand and Jennie are back with a special-edition onyx-black pair of headphones, promoting the drop with an ad that includes a special treat for fans: an exclusive, unreleased track. With over a year having passed since the pop star released her debut studio album, Ruby, this will be music to fans’ ears.

Designed to match Jennie’s unique aesthetic, the headphones feature two attachable black bows, ear pads decorated with symbols inspired by her music, and a color-matched carrying case. They go on sale April 24.

The accompanying film incorporates a signature ribbon design that mesmerizes as it weaves around the headphones. True to K-pop’s reputation for high-quality music production, the backing track is exquisitely produced, with crisp beats and a punchy bassline. 

The campaign also includes a customized Apple Music playlist curated by Jennie.

For fans based in South Korea, Beats is hosting a pop-up experience in Seongsu where attendees can immerse themselves in the collaboration, demo the special-edition headphones, and leave with a custom bag charm as a memento of the drop.

Jennie’s partnership with Beats began in 2024, when she fronted the launch of the Beats Solo Buds, which subsequently exploded online. The sleek film, which shows Jennie showcasing the headphones against a minimal background, has nearly two million views and counting. 

That campaign was followed in 2025 by the debut drop: a special-edition headphone in her signature red, a nod to her Ruby album, which also featured attachable bows. The spot similarly incorporated key visuals from the collab, playing around with Jennie’s aesthetic alongside vivid, poppy imagery.

“We always knew my first drop with Beats was just the beginning of the story,” Jennie said in a statement. “This second chapter truly represents my personal evolution and self-discovery. I wanted to create something that felt both powerful and personal, and I’m so excited for everyone to experience this new chapter with me through these sleek headphones.”

This post was created in partnership with Sprout Social

Brands have more data than ever, but most of it remains untapped. What’s missing isn’t more data. It’s the signal that tells teams what to do.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Sprout Social, the idea of turning social intelligence noise into action was explored. Sabrina Barekzai, director of social media strategy at Slack, joined Brittany Hennessy, VP of social intelligence evangelism at Sprout Social, to discuss how teams can identify meaningful signals, act on them quickly, and connect social insights to business impact.

Defining social intelligence

Hennessy started by defining social intelligence as “getting all the data you have, getting it out of the content spreadsheet, and into insights that your business can actually use.”

She outlined a clear system for turning data into action. It starts with conversation—what audiences say, react to, and engage with across platforms, trends, and culture. Then comes detection, where teams filter noise and identify what matters. Interpretation follows, translating signals into meaning. Activation turns insight into action, and outcome measures the impact on the business.

While the framework appears linear, Hennessy explained that it’s a loop. “Once you have that outcome, you’re going to take that data, and you’re going to bring it back to the conversation,” she said. “The more effectively you can move through this, the quicker you can respond.”

Treating social like a coworker

Barekzai expanded on Hennessy’s commentary by explaining how Slack approaches social interaction.

“We want to be intuitive, we want to be human, we want to be participatory, and we want to be pleasant,” she shared. [4.04] Slack treats social media like a coworker—someone you tag in a joke or pull into a conversation.

“I like to say comments are the new currency,” Barekzai added. That means showing up proactively and participating in conversations and cultural moments.

This method has driven strong performance, with 485 LinkedIn posts over the past year and a 6.2% engagement rate, while the industry average is about 2%, she said.

Spotting signals and acting on them

The real test of social intelligence is how quickly teams act on signals.

One example came from Slack’s “Seasonal Delight” campaign, which included holiday and seasonal-themed status updates. The campaign was originally launched as a one-time feature for Halloween, but the team quickly saw demand.

“We immediately saw the signal,” Barekzai shared. “We went to our product team and said, ‘Hey, we think there’s something here. The comments on social are amazing. How can we take this and make it a product commitment?’”

What started as a limited release turned into a product opportunity. The team used social feedback to push for expansion into more holidays and other moments.

Listening is the strategy

The conversation closed with Barekzai suggesting a mindset shift. Instead of asking what to publish next, teams should focus on what audiences are already saying.

“When we stopped asking, ‘What should we post?’ and started asking, ‘What are people saying back to us?’ That led to creating that social intelligence loop, collaborating with other teams, and coming up with really fun ideas,” Barekzai said.

This post was created in partnership with Brandwatch

Marketing data exploded when traditional search engines took over the internet, providing brands with fresh insights into consumer interests and habits. But times have changed, and another kind of search is becoming more powerful for brands: social media.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Brandwatch, Eric deLima Rubb, VP of customer success and insights, discussed how social search provides more detail into consumer decision-making and how brands can leverage this information to better understand purchasing trends.

The gap between traditional and social search

Rubb began by defining how consumers use traditional search engines to find facts about upcoming purchases. He gave an example of buying a car and how a buyer might search, “Is a Honda CR-V an all-wheel drive car?” The search engine will simply return a fact as an answer: Yes.

According to Rubb, 82% of traditional search results are people looking for facts like specs, prices, features, and dimensions.

Social search, however, provides a more robust picture of the same car buyer because the buyer is using social media to ask their community for advice about specific questions. Using the car example, he highlighted a social media post of someone who went shopping for a car and how the dealer tried to convince them to buy the 2025 model instead of waiting for the  2026 redesign. In their post, the buyer was asking the community if the dealer could be trusted, which therefore gave a deeper picture of what the buyer was really thinking.

“Search shows you questions that people can answer with a fact,” Rubb explained. “Social search shows you questions that other people need help answering.”

Rubb calls this the “critical gap” for brands and agencies.

“If you’re not designing engagement messaging and strategy to address this kind of comparative shopping, then you’re missing an opportunity to engage with the community voice,” he shared. “The gap is not volume. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the psychological and emotional drivers into how people make decisions.”

A new way to describe the consumer’s journey

Rubb and his team came up with a new phrase to describe the consumer’s journey along social search: visible evaluation journeys through community interaction.

“We call it visible because you can see it—it’s in public. We call it evaluation because, yes, it’s opinion seeking, but it’s also decisions. They are journeys because you can track them like a story. And it’s community because it’s people with people. It’s not someone alone in a search bar somewhere,” he explained.

He also emphasized the importance of community in social search, saying that communities are visible but, more importantly, they are contagious. An individual is making purchases, but decisions are being made with information from communities centered in social media.

“Social search is where people are making decisions,” he said. “Social search is where people are evaluating who they want to be based on what they learn from others.”

This post was created in partnership with Respondology

AI is changing how brands interact on social media. Increasingly, the real action is happening in the comments—where conversations unfold, and brand perception takes shape in real time. And AI tools can help manage those interactions

During a Social Media Week panel co-hosted with Respondology, industry leaders explored how AI is helping teams manage scale and engage more meaningfully—without losing the human touch.

Where AI is improving social teams

Danica Calderhead, SVP of revenue at Respondology, opened by framing the challenge. “Teams are incredibly stretched, very, very thin. There’s only so much you all can do,” she said. To manage that pressure, teams are rethinking how the work gets done—and where AI fits in.

Cameron Curtis, VP of multi-platform strategy and digital media at Warner Bros. Discovery, said her company uses AI as a comment moderation tool.

“If we’re able to suppress a lot of the content that is not super conducive to those conversations, our fans feel like they can interact with each other and engage with the content in a more efficient way,” Curtis shared. 

Kate Kenner Archibald, founder and fractional CMO working across beauty and CPG, described a different application. For her, AI is most valuable in identifying where brands should show up in the first place.

“We have used AI for a discoverability standpoint,” Archibald said. “There’s a really great, authentic way in which brands can get engaged while leveraging AI to discover where they should be and what conversations they should be a part of.”

Maintaining connection as communities grow

The conversation shifted to how brands maintain a sense of belonging as their communities grow.

Archibald pointed to direct engagement as an effective way to build that connection. She shared the example of a founder spending a month responding to community questions, as well as an example of an influencer who hosted a small karaoke night with followers, creating an offline connection.

Archibald also noted that many brands now aim to respond to comments and DMs within 24 hours, which can create a new challenge. As volume grows, maintaining that level of responsiveness becomes difficult to sustain manually.

This is where AI can help. Tools can help draft responses and manage volume, allowing teams to stay active without losing their voice.

Authenticity and creativity are still the differentiators

As the panel wrapped, the conversation turned to what comes next. Archibald emphasized that authenticity and creativity are more important now than ever, especially since AI is not coming up with core creative ideas.

Curtis echoed that point, saying AI can help ideate, but audiences can quickly spot content that feels artificial. “Your brand and your POV and how you talk to your consumer is very specific,” she explained. “Audiences are smarter than we give them credit for.”

AI can help teams move faster. It can surface insights, draft responses, and reduce manual work. But the core of social engagement—how a brand shows up, responds, and builds trust—still depends on human judgment.