Welcome to Silence, Brand!, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This week’s Silence, Brand! Live, the gang opened with a dead mouse, a suspiciously 2020-coded Instagram logo refresh, and the eternal question of whether platforms are giving us features we actually asked for or simply throwing increasingly decorative objects at the wall to keep us from leaving. From there, we got into trend ownership, the flattening of whimsy into sticky gems, why brands cannot appoint themselves tastemakers, the very rapid rise of Chanty Beluga, and Marc Jacobs casually volunteering to dress Luigi Mangione for court. Normal internet Thursday for us. 🦀 Silence, Brand! Live is powered by Ecamm, a live streaming and video production tool that basically turns your laptop into a full-on studio by switching cameras, dropping graphics, sharing screens, and pushing your stream to multiple platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once without everything catching on fire. If you’ve ever wondered how we’re juggling all of this in real time, it’s Ecamm doing the heavy lifting. Get 15% off your first purchase at Ecamm with promo code SILENCEBRAND 🦀 Topics on the table: Instagram changed its logo and apparently we have feelings about it. The new look immediately read as slightly dated, very 2020, and another reminder that the Instagram people keep asking to have back is probably dead. The group wondered whether changing the visual identity is a way of finally separating the platform from the chronological-feed, photo-sharing version everyone still remembers. Instagram continues to give us everything except the thing we asked for. Theme songs may be coming to Instagram chats, which raised an immediate “who asked for this?” followed by the admission that it is kind of cute. It also feels aggressively MySpace, fitting nicely into the broader internet desire for personalization, customization, and anything that makes a platform feel slightly less sterile. “Kind of chic” became a lesson in what virality actually means. A marketer who says she popularized the “it’s kind of chic to…” format called out brands for copying her, which immediately raised a larger question: if you work in social and everyone starts copying your format, isn’t that the dream? A trend spreading is literally what makes it a trend. You cannot trademark every phrase the internet decides to repeat. The conversation expanded into the increasingly common phenomenon of creators trying to claim ownership over phrases or formats that existed before their viral moment. “Kind of chic” joined examples like “Hot Girl Walk” and “Hot Girls Read,” while truly original constructions like “on fleek” were held up as a very different case. If you invented Hawk Tuah, though, congratulations. Keep it.Some cultural artifacts can remain securely with their creators. Whimsymaxxing has entered its sticky-gem era. Brands have increasingly responded to the broader return of maximalism, customization, trinkets, and personal style by gluing gems onto products. It’s cute. It’s harmless. It’s also starting to feel like an incredibly shallow interpretation of something much bigger. Kylie Jenner did not invent putting little gems on things. Fancy Nancy would like a word. The group pushed back against coverage framing Kylie’s birthday party as the beginning of the trend, pointing instead to everything from childhood crafts to Lisa Frank, Fancy Nancy, personal customization culture, and years of brands bedazzling products before anyone decided it needed a trendy new name. Whimsy is not the same thing as rhinestones. Dayna got two minutes on the clock to unpack why the brand interpretation of whimsy maxxing feels so disappointing. The larger cultural shift is about personal curation, individual identity, trinkets, texture, maximalism, and creating an outward expression of who you actually are. Reducing all of that to “buy sticky gems from Amazon and put them on the product” turns individuality into mass-produced individuality. Whimsy is a muscle, not a campaign treatment. The group looked at creators who genuinely live this way. People who create deeply personal artifacts simply because they enjoy it. You do not wake up one morning and decide to “whimsy.” The people who make this work have developed their taste over years. Dejaih connected the conversation to a larger point about taste: brands cannot simply declare themselves cultural authorities. The better move is to find the people who already have credibility, taste, and community within a space and collaborate with them. Enter Chanty Beluga. Roughly two weeks ago, a woman named Chanty Beluga started posting extremely simple skits built around the fundamental joke that someone is named Chanty Beluga. That was apparently enough and the internet has responded with an extremely fast-growing ecosystem of fan accounts, update accounts, impersonations, lore, and increasingly elaborate stories about what Chanty Beluga may or may not be doing. It’s Vine energy with an ARG hiding underneath it. On the surface, the videos are short, absurd anti-comedy. Underneath, the group argued that Chanty Beluga is functioning almost like an alternate reality game powered by improv. Anyone can contribute to the mythology as long as they understand the central premise and “yes, and” whatever ridiculous story came before them. The audience is building the character with her. People invent stories about Chanty getting arrested, buying cryo chambers, or doing increasingly bizarre things, and instead of shutting the jokes down, she participates. That openness has turned the fandom into active collaborators rather than passive viewers. Marc Jacobs said he’d dress Luigi Mangione for court. During a Vanity Fair lie detector video, Marc Jacobs was asked whether he would style Mangione for a courtroom appearance and said yes, calling him a trendsetter. The comment referred partly to the now-famous red sweater Mangione wore to court that subsequently sold out at Nordstrom. “What in the Hunger Games?” basically summed it up. (Sometimes the comment section writes the recap for you.) The brand is not the main character. One of the strongest takeaways of the episode was that good brands understand their supporting role in culture. They can amplify people, support communities, and become memorable secondary characters, but pretending the brand itself originated every cultural behavior usually makes the whole thing feel fake. Taste cannot be reverse-engineered from surface aesthetics. You can copy the phrase, glue on the gems, or mimic the format, but the thing people actually respond to is the point of view underneath it. Culture notices the difference between someone who genuinely lives the bit and someone who arrived after the mood board was approved. Our Lives are available as podcasts on Apple Music and Spotify. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan J DiLazio • Dayna Castillo • Dejaih Smith Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface. In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting. For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: editor@silencebrand.net 🦀 Follow our LinkedIn for updates and occasional shitposts. Get full access to Silence, Brand! at silencebrand.substack.com/subscribe
