All Caught Up: BRAT, military fancams, Pocket Blush

Sympathy is a knife

Very long newsletter this week! And I promise I’m finally working on that brand universe strategy study guide.

This week's picks include Jhenetics, Scandi girl summer and normcore.

Christina’s weekly scroll – 

1. Jhené Aiko wants you to "nourish your nature" with her new self-care brand, Jhenetics.

2. Did anyone else attend the Spotify BRAT Listening Party? It was pretty disappointing. Spotify needs to work out a few things with tech support if it wants to compete with Stationhead…

3. Rhode expands its color cosmetics line by launching Pocket Blush.

4. Another summer-ready collab from Melissa and Marc Jacobs has landed.

5. Loving the BIMBA Y LOLA social rollout for their new stores at Aventura/Dadeland Mall. As our resident Florida expert, I can confirm that some of the content was filmed in Hollywood (which is so cool)!

6. People (see: me) are confused about the Kid Laroi x Erewhon smoothie. It's a chocolate smoothie named after his new song "Girls" and the girls aren't loving it! However, I wish this BRAT drink was real. 

7. Currently obsessed with Poster Girl's Love Factory rollout. It's giving early 2000s VH1 in the best way possible. 

8. Scandi girl summer loading... Matilda Djerf and Francesca Aiello teamed up on a Djerf Avenue x Frankies Bikinis collab that is full of vintage ~vibes~ with organic cotton and fun stripes.

9. Adderall and Ozempic have become so hard to find that a startup called Insito Medfinder offers a service where you pay $50 for workers in the Philippines to call pharmacies until they locate one with your medications in stock…

10. "I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say: Bananas have to ripen in a certain way!" The certain way? Death squads in Colombia. In a US court ruling, Chiquita was found liable for funding paramilitary groups and has been fined $38.3 million.

11. Employees/shareholders allege Apple matched workers' donations to the IDF.

Nikita’s weekly scroll – 

1. Remember normcore? It’s been a decade since the K-HOLE report broke the internet, and

   Delia Cai
   interviewed the creators on SSENSE. Interview also did an oral history on Normcore. Everything is a core now, and I wonder if normcore would have had the lasting cultural impact it did (and does!) when there’s a new core every Tuesday. I enjoyed this quote:

   “True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right moment.”

2. Facebook has a strategy to win over Gen Z. It might be working (the strategy's focus is to invest in Marketplace, Groups and Dating!) because I got served a TikTok the other night (with over 3M views) and the comments are calling Facebook a peaceful digital respite…

   

3. Am I hot enough for a good life? This essay #hit considering the current dieting culture and the early 2000s vibe going on right now. Influencers are even glowing down. Uglies was a prophecy.

4. A few nights ago, I was served a TikTok that was… a military fancam set to a Franz Ferdinand track. This is the genesis of these fan cams.
   
   When I clicked on the sound, it was flooded with edits for the Air Force, US Army, etc as well as pro-enlistment messages from young, active members of the armed forces (see 1, 2, 3 – one even touts that death is guaranteed… a very nihilist Gen Z message!)
   
   While the US government largely has an antagonistic view of TikTok as an entity, maybe they read this take on using TikTok to recruit Gen Z?
   
   The comments on the edits are telling – ranging from comments on loneliness and wanting to join the military to combat loneliness, to feeling very bald eagle noise about it all. My tin foil hat impulse is that this feels like an influencer campaign, or at the very least a campaign to make the US’s image…more positive with the #youths.
   
   My friend

   kianamoods
   worked at a media agency that serviced several US Defense-related accounts, so of course I tapped her for her take:

   “I can't say 100%, because I'm not directly involved (and wasn't in my time at a previous agency that worked on US Gov/Army-related accounts). But from what I can see under that sound, this appears to be just that. A quiet influencer campaign – the upload of an original audio and the original video under the sound makes it obvious. Using a Franz Ferdinand sound is wild. With everything going on in the world, I feel like war is also just marketing now (and you could go so far as to call it cyberwarfare.) Seeing how media is so prevalent, I see a lot of subtle propaganda - if your favorite meme account is suddenly pro something (and that thing is a government entity)… question it.
   
   Also worth noting is that I worked at a media agency when I saw this piece of agency business. This is important because it means the money passed through this agency directly to the media platform (aka TikTok or the quiet influencers).”

5. I went to Future Commerce’s Visions summits this week, where

   Kyle Chayka
   spoke extensively about his concept of “Filterworld.” One of his ways of exiting the algorithm was relying on closed content communities and human curation. The last 3 or so months have been Substack mania, curators to help us see through the #content, so is recommendation culture making us crazy?

6. Hinge is giving a total of $1M to forty different groups in Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles that are helping Gen Z connect IRL.

7. Everything is a newsletter. Vice just relaunched on Beehiiv, lol. h/t

   Casey Lewis
   for the scoop.

8. It’s Charli’s world, we’re just living in it.
   
   The BRAT brand identity is genius because (1) it leans into owning a color, so the entire world is bratified. I cannot unsee this shade of puke green as anything else. (2) she also rolled out a BRAT generator so that everyone could use the visual language of BRAT. (3) it’s inherently lo-fi and that makes it feel anti-commercial and anti-establishment, staying true to every alt-girl’s favorite alt-girl roots.
   
   In the era of brand universes and multi-player brands, this co-creative, symbiotic relationship is a must - and other artists play into this too (think: Taylor Swift and her endless lore). BRAT is unfussy, it’s confident.
   
   Special Offer Inc. is behind the BRAT brand identity, in collaboration with Creative Director Imogene Strauss. It would appear that Charli herself briefed in a text-only cover, and I think that shows an intrinsic understanding of her fan base. They’ve been ride or die for her for so long, and every mass movement starts with a cult-like set of early adopters - and hers just happens to be the very online Bushwick set.
   
   I reached out to the good folks at Special Offer for their take on why this design language works and why it’s gone so far:

It’s all Charli, she’s a genius.

Inside jokes are deeply core to the internet's vernacular and — more specifically — the internet's Superfan vernacular. Superfans built the social internet via fan forums way before more official channels existed.

In another overlapping and extremely visual online sector (Instagram), our grids and posts are treated so preciously. They are meant to feel simultaneously effortless and perfectly merchandised at the same time... two goals that negate each other's existence. (Enter iPhone-dump aesthetics prioritizing breezy over fussy).

For Charli to use language (both visual and verbal) that is so ephemeral/disposable, so easily repeatable, everyone immediately understands the Inside Joke of it all and – from a visual standpoint — can riff on that joke themselves in the comedy Olympics of internet meme culture.

Also worth noting is the timing of this rollout. When I teased that this would be a part of today’s newsletter, Tony Wang (a brilliant strategist) noted that this album kicked off the Pride season:

“One key aspect of this marketing rollout is its strategic timing to Pride. The BRAT marketing rollout underscores a keen understanding of the keystone role that queer and trans people play in the acceleration and adoption of pop culture. It’s the Padam Padam of 2024 Pride but it’s more than an anthem for the season, it’s a vibe to kick us into the summer.

It’s why Padam Padam doesn’t make a good Erewhon smoothie but BRAT does. And more cynically, it underscores the complete dearth of actual meaningful cultural marketing during Pride. Instead, we get that JP Morgan Pride pin saying “my pronouns are ____.

We’re staving for actual cultural engagement during Pride beyond soulless queer washing and endless partying for the month, happy for anything to come drive queer/trans (or adjacent) culture forward. The gays are hungry and we’ll make sure there are no crumbs left. This is not to discredit the rest of BRAT’s marketing. But in the polyphony of levers needed to culturally disseminate and amplify a new album, the LGBTQIA+ fandom and Pride angle is an important point. And even bigger is the opportunity for culture makers to more strategically understand how to leverage pride into their rollout planning.”

Internet culture + cultural moment + consumer understanding = magical execution.

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˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚Little Treat Corner ˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Christina’s weekly report:

READING:

Jake Bell

’s interview with Tom Allison, the Head of Facebook.

EATING: Lay's Salt & Vinegar chips.

PLAYING: NOTHING UNTIL MY PC IS FIXED… HELP?

OBSESSING: Kinneret. I love her.

RECOMMENDING: Flood insurance.

TREATING: Embarrassed to admit I placed another Moon Juice order.

Nikita’s weekly report:

READING: Anything and everything I can find about monoculture.

EATING: This really incredible reginetti I made with a dairy-free mushroom cream sauce 🙂

PLAYING: BRAT, lol.

OBSESSING: Over New York! It’s peak the-rent-is-worth-it weather.

RECOMMENDING: I have, unfortunately, joined the Armra train. Maybe it's a placebo but my skin is clearer!

TREATING: Haribo Happy Cola.

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