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Future of Social Media


Thriving in the Coconut-Context: Brands Riding the Fast-Fading Waves of Culture and Community

As cultural moments come and go, Leo Burnett's Beth Manning demonstrates that brands can thrive by engaging with niche communities and embracing fleeting trends for genuine connection

By Beth Manning

In 2024 alone we’ve apple-danced our way through Brat Summer, entered (and exited) a very demure and very mindful Autumn, pumpkin spice szn has arrived feebly tempting us all to reach for the syrup and it’s an early call but… willing to bet we’re headed hell-for-leather towards another Christmas of maximalist dreams (not me dusting off the velvet bows and retro tinsel ahem).

So when I say we exist in the coconut-context, what I mean is we’re part of a thriving social ecosystem offering us cultural moments that vanish as fast as they arrive. These days more than half of UK adults say they get their news from social, ad investment across social channels is almost on par with traditional formats, and TikTok is genuinely set to give Google a run for its money as the most used search engine. It’s a landscape that moves fast and slow while spanning far and wide, and an eclectic mix of the times we find ourselves in and the times still to come.

Culture is unfolding at our fingertips. In both good and bad news, it's impossible to keep up with it all, but what’s promising to see in online culture is that maybe you don’t have to. Over the past few years and at an ever-increasing rate, we’re seeing communities in every corner of the web finding their own groove, and clever algorithms helping us find them. Across channels users have never been so savvy and aware, nor have communities ever had access to the shared social languages that they do today. That’s where I think the opportunity starts to get really interesting for brands.

Stakes are higher when you’re tapping into a love that the community built for itself, particularly on a platform like Reddit where generally anything goes except for advertising.

Accounts that parody hyper-local subcultures have hundreds of thousands of followers that share jokes, value systems, and niche opinions on wild garlic season. Some channels broadcast memes to millions and… that’s it. We’ve shifted from a ‘likes’ economy happening on the surface, to a ‘share’ economy where the good stuff happens in DMs (pebbling, anyone?) It’s a wild and wonderful world where the value of human and culture driven insights have never held more power.

Luxury fashion house Loewe is a brilliant example of this on TikTok. They take what makes them them and in a sometimes bizarre, endlessly quirky, and definitely not-for-everyone way, make the opulence of their designer goods feel relevant to the FYP. Take it a step further (or maybe 100 steps further) and you’re looking at the likes of Nutter Butter, where ‘admins’ Aidan and Nadia have turned social into some sort of surrealist art experiment that I literally couldn’t explain in a sentence if I wanted to. Importantly, what we can derive from both these examples is while basically none of it adheres to a formula, it shows up in ways that are genuinely interesting to those in the community and isn’t afraid to alienate those outside of it.

Over the summer at Leo’s we stumbled upon one such community on Reddit, r/CarTalkUK, who were quietly fanatical about our very own Škoda Octavia (or “Lord and Saviour” as they prefer to call it). From infrequent browsers to the community’s official moderators, the car had a place in all their hearts. What made it especially cool was that we had nothing to do with it (other than the Octavia being a really good car) so it felt especially full of potential. Working closely with the platform itself and with a team of brilliant thinkers in the building, we were able to tap into the power of the micro-community to launch our latest model of the car, and even designed the new model spec’d exactly how that community wanted us to.

But like anything special in advertising, it was a delicate balance of showing up when it was right and actively not showing up when it wasn’t. Stakes are higher when you’re tapping into a love that the community built for itself, particularly on a platform like Reddit where generally anything goes except for advertising. It was about adding value where we could, entertaining where we couldn’t and crucially, not overstaying our welcome.

Zooming out from Škoda and Reddit, we’re seeing the value and entertainment narrative play out more and more across our brands and channels on social. It’s not a new or original thought but I can’t emphasise how true it rings throughout best-in-class work: the brands winning in the space are the ones who know who they are and who they’re speaking to, while having the discernment to know what’s for them and what’s not.

As we look to the future of social, I can say with an abundance of confidence that anything could happen. The shape, size and format of creativity has never been more up for grabs and I really believe that insight-driven ideas rooted in human truths will always win – or to put it in the words of Leo Burnett himself, at the end of the day we are just people talking to people.

Beth Manning is a creative director at Leo Burnett

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