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Nick Tran shared thisStella Artois just politely hijacked Häagen-Dazs' OOH. Within days of Häagen-Dazs' "Let's grab a pint" billboard going up in Toronto, Stella booked the panel right beside it to add "Are you asking us out?" It looks like a planned collaboration, but reporting says the two companies didn't coordinate it. I remember when Weetabix posted a photo of baked beans on Weetabix. Heinz replied and it detonated. Over 140 organizations joined in, from brands like Nando's and Ford to the NHS and police forces. Weetabix reported spontaneous brand awareness up 40% YoY and a 15% sales lift over Valentine's weekend, on a campaign reported to have cost under £5,000. The earned media value of “brand banter” it still huge on the most part. The fatigue is usually from marketers, not the consumers. Andrew Tindall also did a good post on this exploring Marketing Myopia.
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Nick Tran shared thisNYT just analyzed 665 million emojis to track how digital communication is shifting. 😭 became the most-used emoji globally in 2025. It dethroned 😂 and 🤣 when Gen Z and Gen Alpha co-opted an intense grief symbol to express uncontrollable laughter. The data on what else is moving right now: → 🤣 Rolling on Floor Laughing (#2) ↳ ~5.8% of share. Holding strong with older demographics but steadily losing ground to 😭. → 😂 Tears of Joy (#3) ↳ Drops from its decade-long reign. Now seen as overly literal and boomer-coded by younger users. → 🗿 Moai Statue (#33) ↳ Rapidly climbed from 482nd place as Gen Alpha picked it up as a deadpan "are you serious?" reaction. → 🥀 Wilting Rose (#93) ↳ +190% in share. Replacing mainstream heartbreak (💔). → 🫰 Finger Heart (#84) ↳ +109% in share. K-Pop fandoms crossing over into global youth culture. → 🇧🇷 Brazilian Flag (#122) ↳ +70% in share. Driven by global gaming communities and localized meme formats. → 💀 briefly passed 😭 among teenagers, then fell off fast. ↳ Shelf life is measured in months. What brands can take from this: 𝗘𝗺𝗼𝗷𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗶𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀. the moment a symbol reaches mass adoption, younger demographics abandon it, subvert it, or migrate to a more obscure alternative. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The dictionary definition of a symbol is irrelevant. What matters is the subcultural context attached to it. 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. The moment an emoji hits mass popularity, its value among subcultures drops to zero. 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴. Different platforms and age cohorts run on completely different visual dialects. Gen X and older millennials value stability in their digital vocabulary, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha treat visual symbols as disposable, high-velocity tools. It's not a one size fits all approach to social copy.
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Nick Tran shared thisIt amazes me how viral this storefront in Seoul is going. Korean outdoor apparel brand tansanmagnesium built a custom indoor bouldering wall straight through the entrance of their flagship store challenging shoppers to physically climb inside. This video alone is doing the job of a media buy. Millions who had never heard of the brand now know the name. Giving up sellable square footage for an experience is turning physical footprint into its own distribution channel. The old retail playbook was more shelves = more products = more sales. Now permanent stores are being redesigned to feel like exciting pop-up events. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴: It replaces passive browsing with active participation. By the time you reach the sales floor, you’ve engaged with the brand’s core product culture, generated earned media for them on your phone, and built a memory. The ROI of physical retail has shifted from transactional efficiency to dwell time. → Experiential store design boosts sales per square foot by up to 15% and pushes conversion rates up 10% to 20%. → 2 in 5 Gen Z consumers now shop primarily in-store, driven by digital fatigue. ↳ 55% express a preference for retail spaces that integrate hospitality, coffee, or community lounge features over standard shelving. Brands spend millions on top-of-funnel ads to drive foot traffic, now the smartest operators design physical stores so compellingly that the real world drives the online algorithm organically. It's a fundamental reframing of what physical retail is now.
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Nick Tran shared thisEvery once in a while, a brand makes a hire that perfectly aligns with its culture and business. This is not one of those times. I was deeply offended to learn that Air hired Eric Toda as CMO, presumably because they wanted the best Marketing Asian available. I’m clearly a much better marketer than Eric Toda. If Air was serious about hiring the best Marketing Asian, the least they could have done was call me first. Hopefully now that Eric is out (after 24 hours), Shane Hegde will take this seriously and reach out to me. 🤣
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Nick Tran shared thisThis is clever hyper-local marketing from Spotify. Their "Playlist It" campaign turns real user-created playlist titles into OOH like "Which one of you has a boat?" over a Miami bridge or "I refuse to take accountability so I blame it on the 405" directly over LA's gridlocked 405 highway. Some of the best localized OOH comes down to whether you can find the hyper-specific thing your audience already jokes about, complains about, or does every day, and match it to physical space. Spotify is one of the best at curating what their users are already saying and doing inside the app and using it as their marketing engine. Much more personal, and they're incentivizing people to personalize their own playlists inside the app. Plenty of brands are sitting on the same raw material in reviews, comments and the subreddit nobody reads, it just never gets treated as creative.
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Nick Tran shared thisI've watched brands shrink their own reach to protect a consistency nobody was checking for. Today’s algorithmic distribution makes traditional brand consistency almost obsolete. In the past, you'd pick a single brand muse and market exclusively to them, but modern distribution changed the rules. Platforms now serve posts based on what a viewer actually watches and interacts with, not who they follow. On TikTok, only about 10% of videos a user engaged with came from accounts they follow. An Instagram account with 100K to 1M followers can reach 0.5% of them with a Story. If you create 9 different pieces of content catered to 9 distinct audiences, the likelihood of one person seeing multiple ones is almost zero. You don't lose brand identity by speaking to multiple niches. You only lose it if you don't have clear brand guardrails. Red Bull looks like Red Bull whether they’re covering Formula 1 or gaming, but the content itself is entirely tailored to that specific community. More people than most brands realize could become not only customers but actual fans of the brand. 𝗠𝘆 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲: → Stop shrinking your reach to fit a single target audience. ↳ Build for distinct subcohorts to turn more casual customers into actual fans. → Stop fearing content fragmentation across algorithmic platforms. ↳ Relevance inside a micro-pocket now beats forced consistency across the board. It's about choosing different stories for different rooms.
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Nick Tran shared thisBrand partnerships are moving from broad awareness to cult relevance. Under Armour is deliberately pivoting its ambassador strategy toward cultural and entertainment figures as part of a brand turnaround amid revenue declines. Stephen Curry and UA separated in November. The Project Rock partnership with Dwayne Johnson ended this month after a 10-year run, who's keeping the trademark and taking it independent. In between, UA named Heated Rivalry star François Arnaud and BOYNEXTDOOR global brand ambassadors. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝘂𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺. A K-pop group like BOYNEXTDOOR carries cultural value through their fandom, a highly engaged, globally distributed community that shows up, buys, shares, and advocates collectively. Fame and mobilization used to travel together. A brand can now buy a name almost everyone knows and mobilize almost nobody, or buy a name most people can't place and sell out inventory in minutes. What has the most depth is the community around the person. → K-pop converts 34% of its listeners into superfans. The US all-genre average is 20%. → For 2026, roughly half of marketers say they're increasing spend on micro and nano creators. ↳ For macro creators, the number planning increases and the number planning cuts are identical. The top of the market isn't collapsing, Curry signed with Li-Ning six months later on a reported 10-year contract, it just stopped growing. And what's getting cut is the middle, the generic macro-celebrity with no ecosystem underneath. Would love to know what others are seeing?
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Nick Tran shared thisOne of the most viral accounts on the internet turned out to be a corporate expense software ad? The Kumar Method turned up on Instagram and TikTok on June 5. It was a moody, cinematic "retired accountant" and self-declared finance GOAT, shot like a thriller trailer, parodying finance bro culture. The debut reel cleared 11 million views in its first days and passed 27 million inside two weeks. Around 200,000 followers in the first 24 hours… and now the account has 1.3 million. Now Ramp's posted this... although speculation is high. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁: → They led with an underdog narrative, a retired dad supported by his wife's comedic cameo, so the audience fell in love with a character. → The account posted multiple episodes before mentioning Ramp anywhere, so curiosity could build before anyone knew to be skeptical. → They launched a creator distribution campaign via clipping platforms offering a $6,000 budget paying creators $1 per 1,000 views to slice, repost, and react to Kumar clips across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. ↳ By seeding payout incentives to hundreds of secondary clipper accounts simultaneously, they forced the algorithm to recognize "Kumar" as a trending sound/format, flooding feeds overnight. → Ramp only stepped forward once the account had peaked, dropping the reveal and pointing an audience of over a million at enterprise finance software. They built a character people wanted to follow, then handed them a product at the moment they were most invested in it. The watch out for other brands is to make sure you don’t lose the momentum or became something people would reversely react to once finding out it was a brand. Curious what people think about this?
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Nick Tran shared thisSocial media feeds our need for connection and starves the activities that deliver it. For most of human history, connection came bundled with activity. You couldn't get the social part without doing something. You can now get the feeling of a social life without leaving your room, and for a growing group of young people, that's what's happening. → On an average day in 2023, one in ten Americans aged 23 to 29 spent zero minutes interacting face to face with another person. → The most socially connected young people have bounced back from the pandemic. ↳ They spent 87% of their day around others before COVID, 78% during, and 83% now. → The most isolated young people went from a 1/3 of their day around others to essentially zero. ↳ In the UK, 1 in 20 young people now say they have no close friends at all, up from 1 in 100 in 2015. → In western Europe, the share of young adults not in work or education who meet up with friends or family less than once a month doubled from 7% before the pandemic to 14% in 2021, and it has stayed elevated. Connection is recovering at the top and collapsing at the bottom. The FT calls it socializing inequality. I see the commercial side of this in my world every day. Most people drink alcohol for what happens around it. Gen Z participation is actually recovering, 74% report drinking in the past six months per IWSR, up from 66% three years ago. The pool of occasions is what's shrinking. Almost every category (drinks, dining, live entertainment, sports, dating) monetizes the activity layer of social life, and the activity layer is what the feed is thinning out. The big opportunity for brands right now is to create the occasion itself. Source: Jefferies, NIQ
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Ryan Stone That was good!
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Nick Tran liked thisNick Tran liked this𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲. UTMB is putting trail running at the absolute epicenter of culture 👀 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc happens every August in Chamonix. It turns Chamonix into a massive week-long festival, running across France, Italy, and Switzerland. It used to just be the most gruelling 171km ultramarathon on the planet. Now it’s more like Fashion Week for the outdoor world. Trail running is currently an $8.8 billion market and there’s a massive shift happening. During COVID, when the legacy sports giants cut back their factory orders, they created a supply chain anomaly. For the first time in decades, high-spec, specialised shoe factories had open capacity. Challenger brands like Mount to Coast and R.A.D jumped straight into those top-tier facilities, scaled up production, and started pulling real market share. You’ve also got a massive wave of new Chinese brands showing up at UTMB, bringing tech specs and design details that are forcing other outdoor brands to up their game. Brands that turned the valley into a cultural hotbed: → 𝗦𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗳𝘆 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘅 𝗴𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 to set up a brand HQ where they dropped small-batch gear and introduced a natural mud-dyeing initiative. → 𝗛𝗢𝗞𝗔 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗙𝗹𝘆𝗟𝗮𝗯 𝗽𝗼𝗽-𝘂𝗽, running a 24/7 radio broadcast live from the centre of town streaming live athlete interviews, podcasts, and DJ sets all week long. → 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝗹-𝗳𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘄 to document the race, premiering their documentary Incredibly Close in Chamonix. → 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝘆, bringing in artists to hand-print custom apparel on-site using live serigraphy with pigments extracted from real alpine flowers. → 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗮 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗱 𝘂𝗽 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗗𝗶𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗺𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝘀𝘂𝗹𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘅, designing lightweight alpine gear specifically built to pass UTMB’s strict mandatory race gear checks. 👇 Trail running is going through the same cultural shift skate and streetwear went through a decade ago. It started as an uncompromising, niche subculture for insiders. Now, the tastemakers have arrived, the supply chain shifted, and challenger brands with better taste are building the future of the industry. ✌️ 💚 (Images from IG: HOKA, Satisfy, Salomon ( @snackfarmer), The North Face)
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Nick Tran liked thisNick Tran liked thisRealizing, much less embracing my identity as Asian-American, was a journey and process over years—decades, even. But it, and my upbringing, have shaped me in so many ways, consciously and unconsciously, and it was so therapeutic to talk about it with Dave Lu on his Hyphen Nation podcast. Loved the opportunity to chat about everything from growing up in Fort Worth, Texas to my motley collection of jobs to serving today on the board of Apex for Youth and of course, my current position at Mercedes-Benz USA. Thank you, Dave! 💌 🎧 Listen here, if you dare: —Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eSfKRFJW —Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/exewBaz9
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Nick Tran liked thisNick Tran liked thisMore than 20 years ago, during my days at CEB and before business school, I wrote about wanting to build my own advisory practice. Today, I’m doing it: I’m launching Ohm Advisory. Late last year, I left Starbucks and took the first real break of my career. I left a company I loved, where I spent more than 12 years honing my craft and building lasting relationships with so many partners I’m grateful to call friends. I’ll always be thankful to Starbucks, my leaders, and my teams for the constant opportunity to be “in the ring” on a wide range of complex, highly visible challenges. My sabbatical has been one of the best professional decisions I’ve made. It gave me room to step back, reassess my personal compass, my values, my energy, and where I wanted to invest myself next. It also gave me time for long conversations with people I admire. Through this period of discernment, I realized I wanted to build around the work I most love doing and the strengths I most want to use: helping leaders frame the real question, see patterns in complexity, bring people to common ground, open new possibilities, and turn unclear ambitions into forward momentum. Ohm Advisory brings together so many threads of my career, and building it has truly been a labor of love. I’m excited to invest deeply in helping leaders and organizations get unstuck, make sense of messy situations, and move important aspirations forward. If that’s where you are, or you’re sitting next to someone who is, I’d love to hear from you. ohmadvisory.com
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Nick Tran liked thisNick Tran liked thisCompanies spend 2026 bragging about automating and using AI to scale content, youth culture is actively pushing back. The latest digital outlooks show consumers are hyper-aware of "AI Produced Content" and are actively punishing brands that use synthetic content to fake authenticity. The most valuable asset in a synthetic world is un-fakeable humanity. While others automate, we are doubling down on real personalities, with specialized expertise, that consumers can trust and real-world physical summits like ComplexCon, Family Style, Complex Market and Compled Pop Ups. Human credibility is the ultimate competitive advantage right now. There is a growing consumer backlash against synthetic media. You cannot automate cultural relevance. The only way to build trust with this generation is to put real, unscripted human voices at the front of your campaigns. Complex's talent incubator and IRL events are proof that physical, human connection scales better than any algorithm.
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Nick Tran liked thisNick Tran liked thisThey built a $500M+ annual revenue brand around grooming a man’s 🥜🥜 😂 But MANSCAPED is no joke! The company scaled rapidly to $300 million in revenue within its first three years by leaning into pun-based humor, digital channels (mostly podcasts & YouTube), and strategic sponsorships with major sports leagues like the UFC and F1. It even appeared on Shark Tank! And right before Covid hit, Founder & CEO Paul Tran made a fortuitous ask of Marcelo Kertesz to design a new logo for the brand. But Marcelo didn’t just redesign a logo; he saw this as an opportunity to reinvent the entire brand! Soon after, and for 6+ years, Marcelo has been leading the marketing charge at MANSCAPED. Fast-forward to 2026, the brand debuted its first-ever Big Game spot, “Hair Ballad,” during Super Bowl LX, to demonstrate that MANSCAPED has expanded from intimate trimmers to a vast array of men's hygiene and self-care items. And that’s Marcelo’s new challenge: Rapid expansion 📈 In this week’s episode of Best Brands on Earth, from The Clios, Hayley and I sit down with Marcelo to discuss: → Covid as an opportunity to be bold → The powerful combination of humor + premium positioning → MANSCAPED’s many iconic campaigns → Winning elections & writing books about his parents love story And much, much more. Marcelo truly is one of the most interesting men in the world (you’ll have to trust us on this!) Episode 009 is LIVE wherever you get your podcasts, so tap in & have a listen! As always, drop a comment to let us know what you think 👇
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