Going Viral Isn’t Cool Anymore. How Should Brands Show Up?
Third spaces . Community . Anti-slop . Intention economy. Intellectual influencers . Subreddits . A return to long-form . Going offline . No followers . Craft . Questioning the way Big Tech monetizes our attention was once the reserve of tech columnists and fringe campaigners against online harm. But two decades into social media’s existence, the backlash against it has entered the cultural mainstream. In 2026, appearing to transcend the algorithm is the ultimate virtue, for brands and consumers alike. “We all fell for the same origin story that social media was a tool for connection, but 20 years in, we’re collectively realizing that is very much not true,” says Adele Walton, online safety campaigner and co-founder of The Logging Off Club, a Gen Z-focused collective for phone-free events. “Whether it’s extreme scenarios like people losing loved ones as a result of what they’ve engaged with, or experiencing depression, loneliness and anxiety in our own lives from spending too much online, we’ve now reached an inflection point: Big Tech’s intention is not to connect, it’s to profit from making us feel like individuals and not a community.” Walton points to the front and center presence of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech CEOs — including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichai — at Trump’s inauguration last year as the moment that shifted the cultural conversation for good. “That photo did more for public consciousness than the hundreds of lawsuits, articles, and investigations that journalists and activists have been sharing for years,” Walton says. “That image was what the world needed to realize how deeply connected these companies are to the seats of power, and realize these are products like any other that shouldn’t be bound by this impunity they’ve had for so long.” (From left) Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend Trump’s inauguration in Washington. Photo: Shawn Thew/ Getty Images In 2026, this realization has begun to enter policy. Australia enforced the world’s first social media ban in January for under-16s , the UK prohibited smartphone use across schools in England as of last month, and a landmark US legal case recently found Meta and Google liable for the addictive design of algorithms on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. But these aren’t isolated policy moments — they’re symptoms of a structural trust collapse that strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory recently dubbed “the defining tension of this media era”. A lot of the concern is concentrated around the vulnerability of fashion’s next target consumers, Gen Z and Alpha, who have grown up with these platforms since day one. Two-thirds of people believe that social media is negative for children, per consumer insights platform GW1, and Gen Zs themselves feel like they’re constantly being sold to online . The consumer backlash against social media from a moral standpoint has been accelerated by AI, which is evidenced by the widespread disapproval of the tech on these platforms, especially in forms such as AI slop. Recent examples of luxury brands — from Prada to Gucci to Valentino — experimenting with AI for creative campaigns have met with fierce criticism online, even when involving prominent contemporary artists, like Jordan Wolfson in Prada’s case. All of this presents brands with a genuine strategic tension for how they market to consumers on social media. How do you show up on social media to sell products, while distancing yourself from its darker sides? Redefining media value Social media platforms are so baked into the infrastructure of advertising that they remain a massive part of the purchase journey. Globally, 42% of people still find the products they buy through social media, per GWI’s research. This means brand consultants, analysts, and even online safety campaigners don’t forecast a total mass exodus from these platforms anytime soon. “The ‘say-do’ gap is a common pattern in consumer research, where values and behavior don’t always align,” says Chris Beer, senior data journalist at GWI. “For example, consumers have historically expressed fatigue with climate change coverage, while wanting brands to be eco-friendly.” Social media could be the next example of this moral mismatch. Where trust in social platforms is at an all-time low, but they remain the infrastructure of consumer attention, the onus is falling more on brands to build trust through signaling values that transcend them. “All of this is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with how we define media value,” says Rose Coffey, senior foresight analyst at The Future Laboratory. “We’re not quantifying it by reach anymore, we’re quantifying it by trust,” she says, adding that for brands, the question is no longer how loud they are on social media, but how credibly they show up. “Bottega Veneta’s Instagram-free strategy won’t become universal, but it signals something important: silence can be a positioning tool.” Digital restraint In a saturated world of social content, thoughtful restraint now communicates clear brand values, which are becoming the new conduit for trust. This has The Logging Off Club’s Walton anticipating a split information ecosystem where polluted, AI-driven social feeds will coexist with a renewed turn toward trusted institutions, long-form content, and offline archives. Access to this information — from books to photographs to academic texts — beyond the echo chamber of social feeds will become a luxury and therefore socioeconomically defined. “Consumers now can smell algorithm addiction instantly. Constant posting, constant trend-jumping, constant attempts to sound culturally fluent. Most brands online currently feel like someone trying too hard at a party,” says Shaun Singh, CEO and founder of trend forecaster Death to Stock. “The brands cutting through right now feel slightly unavailable. Slightly detached from the machine. Like they’re using the internet instead of begging the internet for validation.” Most consumers have developed near-instant ad blindness for paid media that feels over-targeted or algorithmically assembled. “Most paid campaigns now disappear from memory before the nervous system even decides whether it cares,” Singh says. Where meme culture and three-second video “hooks” were once a fast track for social media virality, consumers are now well aware of how easily this blueprint can be replicated by AI bots. Even TikTok and Instagram’s own algorithms have shifted their weighting to watch time and completion rate on video content. This has some brands refocusing their marketing spend on less but longer form content , which allows for brand storytelling that draws on lived credibility to create meaning — the last thing AI cannot replicate. Some are focusing on personal histories: Simon Porte Jacquemus cast Charlotte LeBon to play his late mother, Valérie, in a campaign for his eponymous brand’s Le Valérie bag, while Coach’s Explore Your Story campaign consisted of emotive, long-form YouTube videos that lean into Gen Z’s interest in the written word. “We shifted from retention to relevance, focusing on becoming meaningful to the next generation,” says Coach CMO Joon Silverstein of the brand’s shift to fewer, more intentional videos. “That’s the core shift with Gen Z. They want to see themselves reflected in the brand, not just marketed to. For this audience, meaning isn’t a layer on top of the product, it’s the reason they choose something at all.” Miu Miu’s 2026 Literary Club in Milan, themed“Politics of Desire”. Photo: Courtesy of Miu Miu Other brands build meaning and trust through consistently behaving in a way that’s impossible to predict or automate. Miu Miu has become one of fashion’s clearest examples of a brand that transcends algorithmic trends through highly referential, recurring aesthetics of awkward intellectualism and bourgeois nostalgia, drawing on school uniforms, librarian-coded dressing, and Virgin Suicides -style femininity. Miu Miu’s Literary Club events in Milan and Shanghai encourage offline discussion and ideas sharing. Collaborations like its Spring/Summer 2025 campaign with French brand Petit Bateau feel “unexpected” yet fitting for the Miu Miu aesthetic, and are rooted in a nostalgic reference that holds meaning for its consumer. Moves like these feel somewhat distant from the algorithm and impossible to conjure with AI. “Taking the purity of a childhood wardrobe as its starting point, the focus for the collection is on precision and simplicity: a moment of truth and clarity, of respite from the complexities of modern life, and the layered nature of an adult existence,” Miu Miu wrote about the collaboration at the time, referencing the collection as “a potent symbol of infancy and innocence, resonant of a time before vanity and artifice play a part.” It then justified the tie-up by reflecting on Petit Bateau as a brand “known for its sense of charmed naivety and evocative of cherished memories”. “You only become immune to the volatility of algorithms when your brand is grounded in something real,” says Sara McAlpine, journalist, creative strategist, and co-founder of brand and marketing studio Bikini. “In an era where most brands are desperate to be liked by everyone, having the confidence to say, ‘This isn’t for you’ is a powerful move, and signals the kind of exclusivity that often drives desire.” Elsewhere, Kiko Kostadinov’s decision to give conceptual artist Ryan Trecartin full creative control over a surreal, chaotic visual campaign to promote his new shoe collaboration with Asics was similarly unexpected and well-received on social media. “As a brand with over 70 years of heritage, we believe in the power of thoughtfulness and attention to detail — values that extend beyond product into how we collaborate,” says Alvaro Moreno de la Cruz, global head of marketing for Asics SportStyle. “We’re not interested in moments designed for algorithms, but in creating work that rewards genuine attention. That’s what happens when craft meets creativity — it resonates because it’s been truly considered.” The campaign for Kiko Kostadinov’s Tabi Asics launch. Photo: Ryan Trecartin, courtesy of Kiko Kostadinov. Both of these paid media moments generated subsequent earned media value: creating meaning that proliferates online beyond the initial social platform that houses them. Paradoxically, this is also the kind of social media behavior that is rewarded by AI: when consumers use AI search for a brand, the bots that underpin the main AI models are more likely to surface organic content like subreddit discussions around brand campaigns and brand fans’ pinterest reposts , creating ongoing cultural engagement and compounding meaning, for free. “Earned media now behaves more like internet folklore than traditional PR — the strongest campaigns today don’t just get viewed, they get stolen, referenced, re-edited, memed, uploaded to Pinterest without attribution,” says Death to Stock’s Singh. “That’s when you know something actually entered culture. Rather than produce content for metrics dashboards, smarter brands are now producing imagery designed to haunt the internet slightly. That’s a completely different creative brief.” Offline for online A big part of the social media renunciation is consumers’ growing desire to move offline, giving rise to a whole cottage industry of hardware and software devices designed to introduce friction and curtail time spent online. These include physical NFC-chipped and magnetic devices like the Unpluq Tag, the Bloom Card, and Locked, which consumers can attach to the back of their phones to block access to certain apps at certain times of day; software plugins for smartphones like Opal, Freedom, and ScreenZen also do the same. Consumer hardware company Nothing has built a “Digital Wellbeing” dashboard within its smartphones, so that users can monitor their daily and hourly screen time and app usage on custom-made graphs. “None of my friends have fully quit social media, but all of us have our own techniques for regulating our screen time,” says Walton, who is a Gen Z. “I think a lot of people are in this conflicting position of wanting to give social media up in an ideal world. But at this point in time, they will still miss out on things, whether that’s seeing cultural moments, event announcements, or markers of professional success.” Walton welcomes the growing trend of brands creating community around offline activities, which functions as a parallel opportunity to build identity and meaning around a brand. Unplugging from social media and forging IRL connection is now synonymous with luxury, as experts say it’s another way for brands to build deeper engagement that remains consistent over time. Spaces to disconnect from phones are increasingly becoming a part of cult fashion brands’ store designs, from Paloma Wool’s gallery and bookstore within its Barcelona flagship, to premium sportswear brand District Vision’s meditation space at its new LA store. The meditation space in District Vision’s LA flagship store. Photo: Courtesy of District Vision. Running culture and book clubs feel like some of the last human corners of the internet — you can’t get an AI robot to run for you, or engineer a three-way literary debate with AI. “Consumers are gravitating toward environments that feel physically earned instead of digitally manufactured,” says Singh. “Honestly, a blurry iPhone photo from the right brand run club now carries more cultural energy than half of the luxury campaigns online.” These, in turn, generate smaller scale media documentation and amplification cycles that build more trust with a more relevant audience. “The online-offline continuum is part of the new media funnel — it’s almost like ‘artisanal social media’ via curated, local events targeted to specific, high-value consumers,” says Tony Wang, founder of creative strategy consultancy Office of Applied Strategy (OAS), who references Hermès as a brand that’s built offline trust through exclusive, small-scale programming such as private client events. It’s also why fashion brands are increasingly aligning themselves with inherently offline parts of “high culture” like the art world, film, and design. Nowhere was this more evident than fashion’s infiltration of Milan’s Salone del Mobile last month, where more than 30 fashion brands appeared on this year’s schedule with official activations, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Prada, Gucci, and Jil Sander. It’s what Wang calls a shift toward “culturally generative” marketing that represents the antithesis of the “lowest” parts of social media. “This will register as an increased interest in IRL and experiential events, as more of culture moves offline and away from the overreach of algorithmic flattening,” he says. Although many of these activations were design
Source: VOGUE