Twitter’s new M(m)usk (both owner and scent) is exactly why it’s been well-documented over the last few weeks that we are at a turning point for the experiment of social media, but that conversation isn’t actually new. As I noted back in January, advertisers have likely been producing more content than consumers want for some time, pumping it into social media in the hopes of harnessing some fleeting virality. In that piece, I noted three major barriers to social media for brands looking to make a plan for 2022:

1. Only a quarter of Gen Z and millennials think social media is good for society.

2. Over a third of Gen Z says they spend too much time on social media already.

3. Almost 40% of Gen Z said they spend too much time on their phone in general.

Based on how 2022 has gone, it seems that most advertisers would prefer to acknowledge those barriers by simply making the content shinier and more whimsical, ignoring the role brands play in generating what Ryan Avant calls the “large social costs'' that deserve our moderation. For example, how much hornier can brands get on Twitter in the hope of some tiny blip of earned media recognition versus dealing with the friction that will come from having to try literally anything else? 

All of this effort was being placed on Twitter because it had become a cheat code to brand fame. Even though its users didn’t necessarily reflect every brand’s audience, it had enough of the right types of folks there to drum up some earned media with a well-placed quip or comment. In 2022, many brands copied and pasted that playbook to TikTok with varying degrees of success (most with little to none because they didn’t want to deal with figuring out how to make actually good TikToks - again, we hate friction).

That friction - the “it was easy to stay put and the costs of preparing for the worst is high” energy as Brian Feldman wrote - is entirely of our own making. “At the end of the day, the core of Twitter was a box you could drop stuff into and then the stuff would get flung out to a bunch of other people,” he wrote. “Countless boxes similar to this exist elsewhere on the internet.” 

It should be of no surprise that there are countless boxes we could be showing up in for consumers to be relevant to them, but advertisers don’t like those boxes as much because they don’t have a Fast Pass™ to brand fame. Building a community on Geneva or Discord or even BeReal may help solidify the foundational relationship with a core, engaged audience, but it won’t slingshot you onto the Today Show via a funny screenshot.

So let me Be Real for a second - that era of marketing is over, and for many brands, it never really existed in the first place. Brands writ large set themselves on a mission to build increasingly complex creative narratives, creating theoretical and often whimsical stories that reflected attempts to matter more in the lives of consumers than just your typical product attributes. Most of these brands wasted massive marketing budgets trying to be the next viral sensation, and in 2022 “new shiny syndrome” reached its fevered peak. I know a hype cycle when I see one (I even wrote the formula for them) and it’s over now. 

Quite simply, the novelty of virality is gone. Countless boxes to fling content into means countless communities with their own codes, systems, and definitions of “good.” Consumers are too spread apart to recreate the monocultural fame of early viral brands. But, perhaps more importantly, in times of uncertainty people care more about tangible benefits than relative ones.