In an era of endless hot takes and shrinking attention spans, two podcasters have managed to stand out in a crowded landscape by embracing depth and positivity.

At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Tefi Pessoa, creator and host of podcast Tefi Talks, sat down with Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, hosts of podcast Good Noticings, to discuss navigating internet culture and the business of podcasting.

Here are three takeaways from their conversation to inspire marketers and media professionals making their own content. 

Depth beats hot takes

Parker and Hamilton started Good Noticings to cover pop culture news in a way that goes deeper than the hot takes flooding social media.

“There are these headlines that go viral, and then by the time they’ve gotten to you, you’re not even reading the news story. You’re reading the tweet response to the tweet response to the tweet response that got posted on Instagram, and now there’s a talking head in front of it on TikTok,” Parker said. “What if somebody read the whole article, and then a couple other articles?”

They aim to do more research on topics to offer “more holistic” analysis, she added: “We don’t have to be the first, but we can be the most 360, the most in-depth.”

Enthusiasm beats toxicity 

Parker and Hamilton have hosted previous podcasts, including Celebrity Memoir Book Club and We’re in a Fight With Claire and Ashley. The latter show was about their friendship and allowed listeners to eavesdrop on their real fights, but the pair quickly realized “people don’t want two fighters in their ears,” Parker said.

That unlock pushed them towards Good Noticings, which has a more positive tone to stand apart from the toxic content on social media. The show offers recommendations that “elevate the artists we love,” Parker said.

“We really did not want to be the people known for our takedowns anymore,” Parker said. “We’re trying to be the positivity on the internet.” 

Experimentation beats early success

Their first show about Britney Spears had a very small audience, the pair recalled.

But that period “when no one was looking” allowed them space to experiment and learn, Parker said. She now sees those early episodes as critical practice that taught them how to create stronger shows for the future.

“Without that experience of truly podcasting into the void, we never would have been good enough for when a good idea came,” Parker said. “It’s such an iterative experience podcasting, and in order to get better at it, you have to have these reps.”

This post was created in partnership with Inmar Media

Creator-led social content can add authenticity and reduce friction to keep audiences engaged, but it works best when there’s brand collaboration. 

A Social Media Week session co-hosted with Inmar Media put that notion to the test in front of a live audience. The unique interactive session featured a user-generated content (UGC) creator with two special guests working in real time to capture and edit the perfect social image based on an impromptu creative brief.

The creator economy, live onstage

The session began with Heather Riccobono, senior manager, social solution engineer with Inmar Media, making the case for creator-led branded content.

“We know that most content in the social space is creator-led,” she said. “When it feels like it’s from a creator, your attention shifts innately, authentically. It’s not something that you have to pause and recognize.”

Riccobono then shared findings from a client case study in which the sales lift metric doubled when creator-led content was added.

“It’s not one or the other. They’re both equally valid. They’re both equally important,” Riccobono shared.

To test that hypothesis, Riccobono brought Hannah Lorsch, creator and photographer, to the stage and worked with the audience to put together a UGC brief. The plan: Have Lorsch plan, shoot, and edit the content, followed by a debrief, all in 25 minutes. The subject: A dog’s tug toy.

Behind every successful asset is a smart content brief

With audience input, Riccobono and Lorsch prepped a creative brief with the following guidelines:

• The image needed to convey that the product was fun and safe.
• It should project a friendly and relatable tone.
• The content style would be a lifestyle shoot.

Riccobono also set some basic guardrails, including that the image couldn’t make unverified claims, feature any competitor brands, or contain offensive imagery.

The perfect pose through a brand lens

And what better way to do a photoshoot for a puppy tug toy than to bring out an adorable puppy—and a special guest tug partner, Elias Weiss Friedman, creator and founder of The Dogist? Lorsch led the shoot, trying to set up a realistic-looking tug-of-war session between the pup and Elias while keeping the content brief’s guidance in mind.

To capture the fun and relatable vibe the brand asked for, Elias worked to get the pup playfully tugging on the toy, while Lorsch coached Elias on where to look and how to achieve a realistic smile.

“If you fake laugh, it changes the facial structure, looks more authentic, and translates better,” Lorsch explained.

Once Lorsch had a few images to work with, the audience helped her choose the best of the bunch. She then had nine minutes left in the session to edit the photo to meet the project specifications. After a few touch-ups, the audience was presented with the finished product.

That’s a wrap

Riccobono reminded the audience that although the live demonstration was a condensed example of how the creative process works, it was the best way to answer the question of whether brand- or creator-led content is best.

“The real answer is it’s not either/or,” said Riccobono. “Brand content builds control, and creator content is what builds that trust and authenticity. So, the brands that win are the ones that really know how to do both together to drive performance.”

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.

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.

This post was created in partnership with Viral Nation

Data is at the center of social media marketing’s shift to AI. As social media generates an unprecedented volume of signals, brands need the right tools to build the intelligence infrastructure to turn that data into decisions and those decisions into measurable commercial growth.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Viral Nation, Joe Gagliese, founder and CEO of the social media marketing and creator agency, shared real-world examples of what’s possible for social media data using AI.

AI tools for large social media data sets

Viral Nation has 11 years of social media data. It’s ingested 1.4 million hours of social video, processed 34 million posts, and used multimodal intelligence and filtering to capture attributes.

Gagliese shared that Viral Nation now has one of the largest data sets in the world and uses it to run and build AI tools.

“AI is not a concept. AI is in full delivery, meaning large organizations like Viral Nation and others are already in market with large tools and big data sets,” he said. “That’s exciting, but the data is the most important piece to how you start to unlock the signals and social necessary to help you to win.”

Gagliese shared three of Viral Nation’s AI tools that help its customers leverage social media data.

Creator discovery intelligence

Gagliese explained that creator discovery is still largely manual today, relying on keyword and hashtag searches across millions of creators.

Viral Nation created a database of over 100 million creators globally. A campaign brief is uploaded, and the system qualifies creators using filtering and data points to find the right ones for a specific campaign.

Gagliese shared that since sourcing talent is a hard task, using AI to place creators for campaigns is a massive milestone.

Community management intelligence

Gagliese explained that  AI works by turning community management into intelligence, intelligence into signals, and signals into sales.

“Viral Nation is now starting to hit momentum where we’re creating more revenue for our customers in community management than they’re paying us to do it. Because community management is where the people are. It’s where the customers are,” he said.

Its community management tool analyzes the comments sections across thousands of conversations to identify intent in real time. Every comment is assigned an urgency level and a recommended action.

AI to measure and increase ROI

Gagliese shared that the reality is social works, but marketers just didn’t know how to show that it was working.

So, Viral Nation developed a tool that measures creative variables and how a product is demonstrated directly against sales. It’s found that user-generated content is 46% more efficient than cinematic content at driving sales. Data proves awareness is converting more efficiently than anything else.

“So, now imagine how empowering it is for me to walk into a room with a CMO of a Fortune 500 company and be able to literally show them that they’re making more money from awareness creator campaigns than from creator campaigns that are meant for sales,” said Gagliese.

This post was created in partnership with Dash Social

As the algorithm that permeates social media evolves to prioritize more personalized content and user engagement, foundational metrics like follower count are now less important for brands. But what has replaced them?

Industry leaders discussed the evolving landscape of social media marketing during a Social Media Week panel co-hosted with Dash Social, and offered advice on new ways to consider what constitutes a successful social media campaign.

Follower count has been dethroned

Ryan Sasaki, chief product officer at Dash Social, kicked things off by discussing the original social media metrics: followers. This metric, he said, has lost some of its importance, especially for brands.

“It’s not out of the ordinary for more established brands to actually see followers going down,” Sasaki said. “In the old days of social, a consumer had to follow a brand in order to see their content. Of course, with the algorithms, that has all changed.”

People are still engaging with brand content, but they are discovering it through features like TikTok’s “For You” page, he said. And on Instagram, he’s seen a 2X increase in non-follower views across the board. For Addie Hearn, senior social media manager at Free People, the metrics to watch are views and shares.

“That’s the biggest point of excitement for us. Views and shares mean that we’re getting eyes. Engagement is harder to come by. It’s harder to get someone to ‘like’ something than to just get their eyes on it,” Hearn explained.

As new metrics overtake old ones, Dash Social developed a metric called Total Social Impact (TSI). According to Sasaki, it’s a way to “evaluate your social media footprint holistically across earned and paid efforts.”

Hearn shared that she loves the idea of TSI because it allows her to see where she and her team need to balance out their efforts. While TikTok and Instagram account for a majority of Free People’s social media efforts, TSI points to where they could grow.

“This number really explains that social isn’t just about this one post or this one week or this one day. It’s a whole different ball game,” she said.

A cohesive social media marketing structure

If there’s a secret to Free People’s triple-digit social media growth this past year, it might be because its organic and paid social media teams work together, rather than being siloed like most social media teams.

Hearn leads the organic side, while Coleen O’Hara, senior social media marketing manager of Free People, leads paid. And they work together closely.

O’Hara explained that Hearn and her team are the “creative and content pros,” choosing content that’s more community-led or engagement-driven. Then O’Hara’s team reviews that content to determine how they can balance it out on the paid side.

“When we come to the end of a campaign, and we’re looking at a recap, it’s not just what organic saw, but what organic and paid saw together,” O’Hara explained. “There’s a ton of learnings we then share back across our two teams, and that’s been really helpful.”

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and subsequent win for New York City mayor last year has become a case study in how politicians can use social media.

At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, a trio of people behind Mamdani’s social videos—including the creative duo of creative and production agency Melted Solids and Donald Borenstein, director of video at the Zohran for NYC campaign—broke down what made the mayor’s videos break out. Melted Solids is made up of co-founders and executive producers Anthony DiMieri and Debbie Saslaw.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani stuck to his social video strategy instead of treating it as a one-off, said Borenstein. The strategy was to “model and self-advocate things people actually watch, things that reach people on social media but without bending too far from what you want the message to be or how we want to create a message.”

Don’t overthink the message

A core part of Melted Solids’ work with Mamdani during the mayoral race was letting the politician riff a bit in front of the camera, and then later developing content based on what happened while shooting.

“Don’t go in stuck on the deliverables you thought you were going to do—maybe something appears during the day that is its own video,” DiMieri said.

Mamdani was also open to shooting videos in unconventional locations, such as food trucks, to drive home messaging about his campaign. For example, one video focused on “halal-flation” and the rising costs that street vendors have to pay for the permits needed to sell food.

“This felt like it evolved and boiled up out of the culture itself,” said DiMieri.

The video follows a formula Melted Solids has made core to its work: asking people on the street about how policies impact them and letting what they say steer the direction of the final video.

Another campaign video filmed in a bodega focused on Mamdani’s proposed plans to help small businesses navigate rising costs like rent and food.

While the video was posted on Instagram’s vertical-oriented Reels, it was not filmed vertically, Borenstein said. By filming it horizontally, the team hoped to better establish a sense of place in a local store. The video also leans into the harsh overhead light in the bodega. Mamdani’s face is also centered so that he is making eye contact with the viewer—a crucial step that most brands mess up, Borenstein said.

“These are conversations—they’re one-sided conversations, but that conversation is still happening on the other end,” Borenstein said.

Learning charm

Going forward, Melted Solids is hoping more political candidates will lean into authentic social video. Part of the reason Mamdani’s content resonated is because of his own charisma, which is a trait that can be learned, argued Borenstein.

“A lot of it comes down to both practice and coaching, but also understanding who you’re talking to while you’re making these videos—thinking about the actual audience,” Borenstein said.

Even with charisma, every politician needs to be steered a little, Saslaw said.

“Because we are all filmmakers, directors, and have professional experience in and out of the ad world, we know that even the most charismatic politician has to be directed, even just where you’re standing for focus,” Saslaw said. “That’s what we’ve tried to bring to the table and will continue doing. Some of the political media coming out that is trying to copy what Donald pioneered is lackluster.”