How Brands Can Flex To Avoid the Cringe

Social can be mindboggling for many brands. The speed of culture is moving at a crazy pace. Just this year we’ve already had the Glasgow Wonka Experience, Chick-Fil-A Sauce girl,
The Traitors, Cowboy Carter, Barbaras Rhabarberbar, Brat Summer, demure girl and Moo Deng. The hardest part? Most of the things here will have barely any cultural relevance in a few months’ time. Sorry to the fans of Moo Deng.

Being design director at a social-first creative agency That Lot [part of The Weber Shandwick Collective], I’ve got the delicate task of balancing brand and culture. Things get even trickier when trying to fit in (and stand out) visually. Do unbranded posts get more traction than a post stuffed with brand assets? Is it true that long-form copy never works on social? Should you hire an influencer and show face to cut through the noise of yet another weekly trend? The only possible honest answer to these questions is... it depends. Only by understanding your brand, defining your social character and truly knowing your audience you’ll be able to figure out the best social strategy for you.

Cookie-cut solutions on social are now obsolete and only by being intimately connected to online culture you'll be able to successfully speak to your audience. After all, brands with high cultural relevance tend to grow six times more than brands with low levels – so keeping up is imperative to social success.

With this in mind, we’ve created Unskippable: It’s a Flex. A mobile-first introduction guide to help brands navigate the social wilderness. From tackling online culture to embracing AI or following social guidelines, we explore some of the hottest discussion points on social content creation - and offer advice on avoiding the dreaded cringe abyss.

Social content requires visual flexibility

The last couple of years have been quite the rollercoaster for social media creators and designers. From Gen-Z trends to 90’s aesthetics and anti-design, no stone was left unturned in the chase for online virality. Some brands even retired most of their premium designed content in favour of more authentic-looking reels shot on an iPhone. What we know for sure is that too much self-promotion is a major turn-off in how consumers perceive brands on social. So how do you make sure your content is recognisably you and still win the battle for online relevance? We like to summarise our process into four pillars: Strip it down, be in beta, broaden your brand’s sandbox and find your Icon.

Great social isn’t born from brands, it’s born from people

The democratisation of creativity through platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube has made way for a pantheon of creators. Great social isn’t often created by a brand looking to sell their products or services, but it’s born from ordinary people living their best (and worst) lives. Culture has fragmented into pockets of communities and subcultures that thrive in their own little corners of the internet. From TikTok, to Reddit, to Pinterest, social trends are born from these pockets and make their way around the internet. The best way to reach your audience(s) is understanding which of these corners you have a right to play in, to drive authentic connections and be part of their conversation.

If you can go native, go native

You’ll have probably found yourself ready to share a video on Instagram Reels, and wondered whether the captions should use the brand font and colour, or the holding shapes should resemble the logo. Our advice for social content stays the same: if you can go native, do it. Embracing social UI that users are familiar with will prevent your content from feeling overproduced and ill-fitting to the social landscape. There’s fun to be had in reimaging your brands social content through a native lens, it can create a whole new aesthetic whilst still feeling authentic.

AI can supercharge your creative, but you shouldn’t depend on it

The impressive tech advancements made on AI swiftly turned it from an unusual commodity to an ever-present part of the creative process. Adobe’s Generative Fill has become an essential part of the design vernacular and Firefly opened the gates of creativity to a slew of new impressive tools and outputs. There are countless examples of terrible AI art, but also some incredible uses of it, which we highlight in our white paper. We believe in using AI to our advantage, without letting it detract from our craft. We wouldn’t sell an asset that’s fully made by AI, but it can help us generating ideas for our most ambitious concepts.

Avoid the cringe abyss at all costs

Online trends are ephemeral, and the time limit for a brand to successfully react to it is even shorter. On top of that, not all trends are right for all brands to jump on. Ryanair or Duolingo are classic examples of successful online culture stories. They heavily invest on their social presence and know their profile (and audience) extremely well. This allows them to precisely choose which memes to use, which TikTok audio to repost, which creator to imitate. On the other hand, jumping on a trend too late with no real reason or rhyme to do so will inevitably be called out on social, and the brand responsible will fall from creative bravery to the cringe abyss, a lion’s den of Internet fails.

You can read the full report here

This piece was compiled by design director Andrea Piludu and James Perrett, art director for That Lot; as well as Klein Borrill, UK head of design at Weber Shandwick.