This post was created in partnership with Collectively Brands that can capitalize on cultural moments will find new ways to engage consumers, but how can they keep up while also […] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/how-brands-can-keep-up-with-the-speed-of-culture/
This post was created in partnership with Viral Nation While social media is constantly evolving, human nature hasn’t changed in millions of years. During a Brandweek 2026 session co-hosted by […] https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/viewing-social-media-as-an-extension-of-human-instinct/
Kim Gravel made a career out of selling products on live TV. Now she’s building her own platform to empower other sellers to do the same.
At ADWEEK’s Brandweek event, the longtime QVC host spoke about her career as a founder and TV personality and her ability to sell fashion, home, and beauty products to a live audience.
Gravel got her start selling after being inspired by Joan Rivers, another longtime QVC host who sold bee pins that were similar to a pin given to Rivers by her husband. Gravel approached QVC with two products—a knit, denim-like fabric called Flexibelle and a plumping lip gloss—and asked for the chance to sell them.
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https://www.adweek.com/commerce/kim-gravel-wants-to-make-live-selling-the-new-appointment-tv/
As co-founder and CEO of the AAPI advocacy and cultural platform Gold House, Bing Chen knows about the power of niche communities—and how brands can speak to them in ways that they’ll listen.
In a Brandweek conversation with ADWEEK editor in chief Ryan Joe, Chen explored ways for brands to show up in culture authentically.
For Chen, sometimes less is more: Rather than comment on everything, brands should identify their core values and build conversations around those tenets.
“The product is the customer,” he said. “And not only is the product the individual customer, the product is the community of customers that they’ve been able to stoke through individual nodes and networks that then take off themselves.”
Brands should identify these niche communities that, with the investment of attention and time, can “evangelize” on their behalf. As monoculture has splintered along with the fragmented media landscape, culture is now comprised of hundreds if not thousands of niches Chen calls “polyculture.”
But it’s a fine line between authenticity and parachuting into a niche community only to announce a new product release, he said. Too many brands choose the latter route and consider the community as “inventory.”
“You have to give before you receive,” Chen said.
He outlined four pillars of what superfans crave: access to the brand, exclusive content, status designation, and experiences money cannot buy. And once a brand has identified its target niche, it must go one step further and understand adjacent niches.
He gave an example: If someone is eager to purchase the new Zelda video game on Nintendo Switch, it’s likely they may also be interested in “Dunesday” and comic books.
With the rise of niches, Chen said that brands need to look beyond global influencers like MrBeast to microinfluencers with expertise in a specific area.
“They’re too dilutive,” Chen said of large-scale content creators. “We’re moving to the expert economy now. No longer can you be a random charlatan pontificating on love or whatever. You have to be a credentialed leader within the niche, and those are the people that are going to be followed.”
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/monoculture-dead-niche-communities-bing-chen-gold-house/
Crocs chief brand officer Terence Reilly demonstrated the brand’s ‘audacious’ social strategy live at Brandweek. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/how-crocs-became-one-of-tiktok-shops-top-sellers/
Michael Law and Shivram Vaideeswaran on the ingredients to combine for staying relevant. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/how-brands-can-win-attention-in-a-fragmented-world-with-papa-johns-and-carat/
Plus, the role of creativity as AI and other technologies evolve. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/snaps-grace-kao-on-conversational-marketing-and-the-future-of-brand-engagement/
The intention economy, visual search, and a focus on user wellbeing are shaping digital discovery. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/offline-by-design-how-pinterest-turned-disconnection-into-earned-media/
We are living through a historical paradox when it comes to human connection. Right now we are connected to more people than any humans who have ever lived. At the same time, many of us report having never felt more alone.
Social media sits at the center of that paradox. It has transformed how we meet the world, reshaping commerce, culture and human connection.
My mom sees that paradox from the other side of the screen. She is the director of trauma training at McLean Hospital just outside of Boston and, as all moms do, gives me a wiser perspective. Every day, she sees adolescents come in seeking help, witnessing firsthand how technologies built to connect us have the potential to instead deepen loneliness.
To understand why this is happening and the adaptive approaches marketers can take to help change the social media experience, we need look no further than our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed something simple: Primates spend much of their day tending one another’s fur. Across primate species, time spent on the ritual rose with group size. Primates, he argued, build community through physical touch.
Researchers on Berkeley neurobiologist Doris Tsao’s team showed macaques various images while scanning their brains, and found six small areas that lit up far more for faces than any other images. This research led to the insight that we are not creatures who happen to like faces—our brains have specific regions just for processing them. Every face on a thumbnail image taps hardware that evolved millions of years before the iPhone.
Emory University researchers Sarah Brosnan and the late Frans de Waal asked capuchins to exchange tokens for food. A monkey given a cucumber after seeing another receive a tastier, preferred grape sometimes threw the cucumber back.
Now think about your social feed. We call it a feed for a reason: Too often, it fuels the part of us that keeps score. Every viral takedown, every “you deserve this” campaign trades on an ancient ache for that which we do not have. For all our sophistication, we are still marketing to capuchins with credit cards.
The pull of connection, the obsession with faces, the sting of comparison—these studies show traits that live inside all of us, embedded more deeply than we realize.
But there is one more study that my mom and I keep returning to. A study that gives us hope. The same researcher, Frans de Waal—who was one of my professors at Emory—documented what happens after a chimpanzee conflict. Sometimes, an uninvolved chimp approaches and embraces the loser and offers comfort through physical touch. Vulnerability was the permission structure for connection.
Each of these primate truths shows up in our work as marketers. They offer a choice about which human instincts our work rewards.
Dunbar’s work suggests that connection does not scale automatically; it costs attention. Our industry measures reach. The troop measured touch. A million impressions cannot replace what combing gave the troop: small, consistent, intimate moments of recognition and bonding.
Our sensitivity to faces explains why a creator with a face often beats a brand with a logo, and why the faces in our work can matter more than their production value.
The capuchin study shows how comparison and outrage are among the easiest engagement mechanisms to engineer. But that also makes them the costliest, driving numbers while eroding the relationship. And they do it by activating resentment—not the right foundation for building a brand anyone loves.
Vulnerability turns out to be the playbook for the marketing work I am most proud of. The campaigns that actually move people, the ones that build community rather than impressions, all have a version of consolation, of naked vulnerability within them. And through that leap, they access a deeper form of human connection.
The marketing industry has an important role to play. Our work reaches billions of humans every day, across sight, sound, and motion. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understand their audience on the deepest level, knowing not only to whom they speak, but how those audiences evolved to be human in the first place.
Written with contributions from Dr. Cynthia Kaplan, director of trauma training and consultation at McLean Hospital, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, and, most importantly, his mom.
https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/what-primates-can-teach-us-about-social-media-marketing/
Three months ago, I wrote about the Reddit earnings story most marketers missed.
That first-quarter call wasn’t the financial story I expected, but looking back, it was Reddit putting the pieces of its future on the record: participation had become too difficult, community creation needed work, human conversation was becoming more valuable, and Reddit Answers could bring more of the search journey inside Reddit.
The second-quarter call made the larger strategy much easier to see: Reddit doesn’t want to remain only the site people reach after searching Google or the source an LLM summarizes before answering somewhere else. It wants to become the place people intentionally open, search, participate in, and return to every day.
Steve Huffman said it directly:
“We’re not building for drive-by traffic. We’re building a daily destination.”
The strategy is clear, but it creates a contradiction Reddit will have to solve: The company wants the world to come to Reddit, while moderators, community rules, automated detection, and platform-level enforcement are all designed to keep low-quality behavior out.
Those protections are necessary, but they can also remove content, ban people from individual communities, or suspend accounts before legitimate new people understand what they did wrong. As Reddit moves closer to becoming a daily destination, helping more people participate without lowering the quality of its conversations may become the most important factor in its long-term success.
Reddit reported revenue of $805 million, up 61% year over year, with 130.3 million global daily active uniques and 514.6 million weekly active uniques.
For marketers, the more useful number is 197.2 million U.S. weekly active uniques because Reddit already has enormous U.S. reach, and its challenge is getting more of those people to use Reddit directly and return more frequently.
That is why the app came up so often: Huffman said direct and app users are worth multiples more than search-referral traffic, and during a CNBC interview, he described direct app usage as where Reddit’s business lives.
Reddit also said new app-user retention improved 50% year over year on a relative basis, though it came from a small base and Huffman acknowledged absolute retention still has room to improve. Search has already given Reddit massive reach, so the next step is getting more of those people to open Reddit directly and come back.
Reddit is working to turn discovery into direct, repeat use, so marketers need to move beyond driving visits and build a consistent, valuable presence that helps them understand people’s challenges, participate in their validation journey, and create a connection that lasts.
Huffman called the home feed Reddit’s primary app surface and one of the primary drivers of subreddit discovery. The important point isn’t simply that people can find new subreddits there. It’s that the feed now recommends conversations from communities a logged-in user never chose to follow.
For years, logged-out users could see popular content from across Reddit, while a logged-in user’s home feed mainly reflected the communities they had subscribed to. That has changed. Reddit is now using what it knows about someone’s interests and activity to recommend content from outside those subscriptions.
That broader reach is central to the work we do at OGS Media, where we look at how useful conversations reach people through Reddit’s home feed, Reddit Answers, search results, and LLM outputs.
Huffman also explained how much room the recommendation system has to improve. Its models currently incorporate 10% of user activity, update in days rather than hours or minutes, and select from posts published during the previous week.
That seven-day limit may be the more important signal. Reddit has 26 billion posts and comments, including advice, reviews, and conversations that remain valuable long after they were originally posted.
If Reddit expands that window, older conversations could return to the home feed whenever they become relevant to someone’s interests or current problem.
Reddit’s home feed can now carry a useful conversation beyond the people who already follow that subreddit. But that doesn’t mean marketers should treat the feed like another distribution channel.
People go to Reddit because they want something different from blog content, search results, ads, or public reviews. Reposting the same marketing content misses the opportunity to become part of their validation journey.
Create conversations that fit the community, solve real problems, and earn engagement. Those are the conversations Reddit can recommend today and may be able to resurface for much longer in the future.
Reddit’s push to become a daily destination is especially clear in search, where the search bar is now universal in the app and both searchers and searches grew during the quarter.
Huffman said that, for a lot of the queries he runs, Reddit is now the best place to search Reddit. I agree with him based on how often I’ve been using Reddit Answers and how useful I find it for locating the conversations and perspectives I need. In a lot of cases, it gives me a better experience than searching Reddit through Google or asking an LLM.
That matters because, as Huffman told CNBC, “a summarization of Reddit isn’t Reddit.” People look for Reddit because they want different experiences, opinions, perspectives, and the conversation itself, not just a compressed answer taken from it.
Search results sent people into those conversations, while AI Overviews and LLMs can use Reddit content without sending people to Reddit or giving them the opportunity to participate, which is why Reddit wants more of that search experience to happen inside its own platform.
If you’re figuring out how to improve content for search and LLMs, compare what Reddit Answers surfaces with Google search results and LLM answers for the queries that matter to you. I would make showing up there for the right questions a higher priority, which means creating conversations that directly solve what people are searching for.
Reddit is also expanding the ways people can consume its conversations, with video in comments already accounting for more than 10% of Reddit’s video posts and Reddit expecting to test spoken or background-listening experiences later in 2026.
People often tell me Reddit doesn’t like video, but that has never been true. Written conversation is still its foundation, but credit goes to Rasha K. and Reddit’s APAC team for showing through their AMAs how video could add authenticity by making it clear the person answering was actually involved.
These formats give more people a way to use the conversations already there, including people who may never read a long thread. That broader access matters if Reddit is serious about its ambition to eventually reach one billion daily users.
Video and audio won’t fit every community. If you experiment with either format, start with what the community wants and keep it connected to the conversations that make Reddit valuable.
As video begins appearing in communities related to your industry, pay attention to how people respond and which formats perform best so you can understand how your own community wants video used and presented.
Reddit is trying to make participation easier through new posting tools, better community recommendations, and LLM-assisted moderation that could replace some of the blunt account-age restrictions keeping legitimate new people out. Huffman acknowledged the problem directly when he said the account-age approach “has not aged well.”
That tension also came through in Reddit’s post-earnings AMA, where Huffman said its proactive systems prevent up to 23 million spam views and revoke nearly 2 million inauthentic votes every day.
Reddit clearly needs those protections, but working through this problem with Reddit and companies trying to participate responsibly has shown me how often legitimate people get caught between its growth goals and the systems designed to protect community quality.
Reddit has invested in Mod World and other moderator programs, but growth only works if its tools help moderators reduce spam, abuse, workload, and false positives enough to loosen blunt account-age restrictions safely.
Brands and new Reddit users face a lot of scrutiny over whether they’ll be a quality addition to the site. A removed post or comment, a subreddit ban, and a sitewide account suspension have different consequences, but none should be treated as a minor setback.
Reddit is trying to become more open, but that doesn’t lower the standard for participation. Follow the rules, respect each community, and build a clear history of useful participation.
If automated enforcement, a moderator decision, or a sitewide suspension catches you unfairly, a credible participation history and careful documentation give you more context for an appeal. They don’t guarantee a reversal, but they give you a clearer case to present.
“Reddit has become the validation phase of the customer journey because people trust it.”
Bartosz Goralewicz, Co-Founder of OGS Media
Q1 showed that Reddit understood the barriers keeping people from participating. Q2 showed why removing them matters. Reddit doesn’t want to remain a source that Google and AI tools summarize before people move on. It wants to become the place people go to understand a problem, hear different perspectives, and decide what they trust.
Reddit isn’t a place to be summarized because its value isn’t a single answer. It’s the depth of the conversation, the disagreement, the lived experience, and the emotional validation people get from hearing others work through the same problem.
For marketers, the opportunity is to understand those conversations, help solve the problems inside them, and earn a place in the validation journey. That’s how a brand becomes part of the decision instead of another message people learn to ignore.
If Reddit can bring more people into that process without losing the quality of its human voices, it can move beyond being the source behind search and AI and become the destination people choose when they need to decide what to trust.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Brent Csutoras/Search Engine Journal
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/reddit-wants-to-be-the-destination-not-just-the-source-behind-search-ai/584586/
