of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
The algorithm has finally flattened authority–obliterated it. And legacy brands that are slow-moving, fundamentally conservative, and always willing to rest on the laurels of generational brand awareness, will be hardest hit.
Last week, Chris Kempczinski (the CEO of McDonald’s) went viral for a taste-test video that failed to show sufficient enthusiasm or “authenticity”.
What internet commenters didn’t realize is that he had been posting these videos for years. What viewers wrote off as a corporate, robotic on-camera presence was actually… someone’s genuine personality.
In a world where smashing your face with a hammer to appear more photogenic is viewed as a valid strategy to achieve viral reach, the median scroller doesn’t know what true authenticity looks like anymore. Mass culture is on life support. Short-form video is winning an increasing portion of consumers’ waking hours.
Yes, “social media thought leaders” have been beating this drum for years. But this time, it really is different, because the technology fueling distribution has evolved. And brands that build their marketing strategies on old assumptions will soon find themselves irrelevant.
What Changed? Enter The Yapper
If you don’t work in the direct response digital marketing world, or if you don’t spend a ton of time on apps like TikTok or Instagram, then the distinction I am about to highlight is going to feel meaningless. I promise, it’s not.
Americans spend almost seven hours per day consuming internet-connected media. More than half of that time is spent consuming digital video, and much of that time is spent using two screens at once (i.e., TV + phone). Outside of work, this is where people are investing their time and attention.
The model of authenticity on video-focused apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has evolved. And if you’re about to argue that Instagram is a photo-sharing app, you’re proving that this shift has passed you by.
The “old model” of authenticity was a professional influencer providing a product recommendation alongside his or (usually) her other content. In this scenario, 2018-era Instagram algo was pushing all of the influencer’s content to at least 30% of her followers, so she wasn’t thinking about engagement or content quality all that much.
And this content was part of her "personal brand" that lived on her grid, so she was perfectly made up and styled, sitting in her professionally decorated kitchen or bathroom. The influencer got paid regardless of how the sponsored post performed. The brand viewed the sponsorship as analogous to a magazine ad.
Neither party was thinking about the project in the context of driving direct sales, but that was often the result because followers viewed the content as an authentic recommendation. Then, smaller, scrappier brands that couldn’t afford to pay a big influencer $25,000 for a single post began creating their own “influencer” product review content at a much lower cost. They hired no-name “creators” with negligible followings to copy the format, then pushed out these videos via paid social channels.
The result looks like this video. This is obviously an ad, touched by the hands of a marketer, even if it was shot on an iPhone’s front camera. We’re about five years into the mass adoption of this advertising format, and the median scroller has caught on. This no longer reads as authentic.
But a new content format has emerged to take its place: the yapper. Here is an example of a yapper video.
You’ll notice a few key differences:
- The setting is not studied at all. You can see the glare of recessed can lighting in the background, the hallmark of a builder-grade McMansion, as well as the "nipple lamp" familiar to every renter of sub-$2,000 apartment units.
- You can see the creator step back from the camera. This video hasn't been edited because this guy clearly has no idea what CapCut is.
- The delivery feels similarly authentic. There are slight pauses, and he’s using language a real person would use.
- You can hear background noise from a TV or another source.
This video feels like it was never touched by a marketer's hand, but the creator is still entertaining and charismatic. When it shows up on the median scroller’s feed, it blends in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks like a friend could have made it; today, a person’s IRL social network is almost irrelevant to what shows up in their feed.
The McDonald’s CEO taste test was a corporate yapper. The lighting is far from warm and flattering. The food isn’t “styled” as it would be for a photo shoot. The settings feel real. And the delivery, while wooden, is authentic to the creator.
How Did This Happen?
Social media thought leaders have been talking about “authenticity” and “the power of influencers” for more than a decade. This is the same dialogue that yielded the deluge of influencer marketing that consumers are now ignoring.
There is one critical difference in 2026: the way that social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts match content with users has changed. The new model was pioneered by TikTok, which forced the other platforms' hands when it crossed the 100 million US user mark in 2022.
Before TikTok, the content in your feed was based on who you followed and who your friends followed. But TikTok changed the game: following was irrelevant, and engagement signals (watch time, likes, shares, and comments) became the primary indicator of whether a piece of content was “good.”
We have already forgotten how revolutionary this was, but on TikTok, for the first time ever, a user's "following" list had minimal bearing on what appeared on that user's "for you" page, aka the main feed.
This immediately "de-ranked" creators with large followings who were not masters of dopamine manipulation. And it immediately boosted creators who could capture attention in the first three seconds of a video and hold it through the video’s duration.
The TikTok model has worked really well for keeping users on the app. It lowered the barriers to entry for content discovery and kept users on a drip feed of dopamine. Meta and YouTube saw this, and they copied it.
In this environment, a complete nobody could hop on TikTok and go viral on day one, only to fade into obscurity by the end of day two. This decentered the parasocial relationship between user and creator in favor of a melee for the user's attention. The McDonald’s CEO’s viral post is the perfect model of this new content ecosystem. He had been posting for years and went viral almost by accident. If he wasn’t the head of a national brand, he probably would have faded into obscurity by now.
Yappers are basically the evolution of "ads that don't look/feel like ads."
In a feed that is populated based on engagement signals, traditional user-generated content (UGC) looks and feels like an ad. No one is going viral organically by producing that type of content because it was never that entertaining to begin with. The “pay an influencer to post” strategy was always modeled after traditional advertising: content that a brand forced a user to consume.
How to Navigate Authority Collapse
Short-form video algorithms are the infrastructure that powers consumer attention capture. And when it comes to capturing attention in these environments, there are no bonus points for historical awareness or real-world authority.
Consumers have decided that short-form video platforms are fantasy spaces. They know that most of the content they consume on these platforms is either biased or outright fabricated, and…they don’t mind all that much. Entertainment value is what matters, whether that is delivered by an AI-generated monk, an actor dressed up in a doctor’s white coat, or a real person with real credentials and knowledge. If you are willing to reflect and take accountability, the advertising/media industrial complex brought this state of affairs upon themselves.
Mass media has always been used to distribute partial truths and shape public perception. The mass adoption of television created an environment where aesthetics and charisma trumped substance or expertise. Now, TikTok-style algorithms have removed that power from the hands of a few and distributed it to everyone. Brands can still achieve the same outcomes (awareness, affinity, and sales), but they have to compete against everyone, using a different set of rules.
Lean In Or Lean Out
This is the first decision every brand must make: do we lean into this new algorithmic model and build our content strategy around it, or do we back away from social platforms entirely?
The third way, attempting to use social media as a marketing vehicle but playing by the old rules, leads to wasted resources at best, and public embarrassment at worst.
The social strategies of three luxury brands illustrate this point:
Loewe has more than two million followers on TikTok and regularly posts videos that exceed a million views, a sign that their content has viral reach. The brand leans in to platform-native content conventions, such as cat videos, street interviews, and ASMR, but every piece of content shares a visual language, so this doesn’t feel “off brand.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram account and other social media back in 2021. Rather than investing resources in a social strategy that isn’t brand-aligned and doesn’t leverage the team’s existing talents, the brand is relying on existing creators to tell its story on its behalf.
This is the ultimate luxury move: having enough self-confidence in the brand’s reputation and codes to avoid social media entirely, and let others do the talking.
Gucci is a cautionary tale for brands that attempt to take the middle path.
Gucci consistently uses social media to push brand messaging from a position of authority. It’s about what Gucci wants to say, not what the people want to hear. The brand’s social activations are also grid-oriented, an outdated mental model of how the median scroller behaves.
The recent Gucci AI slop controversy is one example. Gucci posted dozens of images to its X and Instagram pages as part of a “digital mood board” in advance of its FW26 show. Five of those images were AI-generated, and labeled as such.
Five images from a 40-image mood board isn’t a big deal. But that’s not how most users experienced the activation. Instead, they saw one or two of the AI images that created the most controversy. Those posts got the most engagement (mostly negative comments), so they were pushed to the most feeds. Many users who saw the AI images didn’t realize that they were part of a larger mood board, because that context could only be found on the brand’s grid. And the reality is very few people consume content like that anymore.
If You Choose to Lean In, Everyone Must Start Posting
Brands that decide to lean in to the new algorithm need to develop a deep understanding of how it works and get a feel for the tastes and preferences of the median scroller. The best way to do that is to just start posting.
Everyone who touches organic and paid social content, from the CMO to the brand’s in-house counsel and even the junior media buyer, should create a TikTok account and see who can get 100 followers the fastest.
This year, I took on this exact challenge. As a consumer, I have always preferred written content to video content. And as a marketer, my static ads and copywriting always outperformed my video. So I decided to fix that.
I realized a few things pretty quickly:
- Content that speaks to experts flops consistently. The total addressable market is too small. Your highly produced video on product technology, or your expert interview about product differentiators, is not going to find an audience.
- Each piece of content needs to deliver obvious, tangible value to a broad audience, and do so in an original way. “Our product tastes good” is going to flop. “Our product helps you lose weight” will also flop, unless it's delivered in the form of a charismatic, authentic testimonial. But “this sneaky ingredient found in most ‘healthy’ packaged foods is sabotaging your weight loss” is a hook that has legs.
- It can be really hard to develop a content strategy that is broad and entertaining enough to go viral, yet focused enough to resonate with a qualified audience. This is especially challenging for B2B companies because they’re already speaking to a niche audience.
We’ve reached a tipping point in consumers’ content consumption habits where ignoring short-form video platforms is no longer an option. That is, unless you make the decision to “exit” a conscious part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
The authority collapse represents a loss of status, and that can feel painful. But “doing what we’ve always done” and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure.
The algorithm has finally flattened authority–obliterated it. And legacy brands that are slow-moving, fundamentally conservative, and always willing to rest on the laurels of generational brand awareness, will be hardest hit.
Last week, Chris Kempczinski (the CEO of McDonald’s) went viral for a taste-test video that failed to show sufficient enthusiasm or “authenticity”.
What internet commenters didn’t realize is that he had been posting these videos for years. What viewers wrote off as a corporate, robotic on-camera presence was actually… someone’s genuine personality.
In a world where smashing your face with a hammer to appear more photogenic is viewed as a valid strategy to achieve viral reach, the median scroller doesn’t know what true authenticity looks like anymore. Mass culture is on life support. Short-form video is winning an increasing portion of consumers’ waking hours.
Yes, “social media thought leaders” have been beating this drum for years. But this time, it really is different, because the technology fueling distribution has evolved. And brands that build their marketing strategies on old assumptions will soon find themselves irrelevant.
What Changed? Enter The Yapper
If you don’t work in the direct response digital marketing world, or if you don’t spend a ton of time on apps like TikTok or Instagram, then the distinction I am about to highlight is going to feel meaningless. I promise, it’s not.
Americans spend almost seven hours per day consuming internet-connected media. More than half of that time is spent consuming digital video, and much of that time is spent using two screens at once (i.e., TV + phone). Outside of work, this is where people are investing their time and attention.
The model of authenticity on video-focused apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has evolved. And if you’re about to argue that Instagram is a photo-sharing app, you’re proving that this shift has passed you by.
The “old model” of authenticity was a professional influencer providing a product recommendation alongside his or (usually) her other content. In this scenario, 2018-era Instagram algo was pushing all of the influencer’s content to at least 30% of her followers, so she wasn’t thinking about engagement or content quality all that much.
And this content was part of her "personal brand" that lived on her grid, so she was perfectly made up and styled, sitting in her professionally decorated kitchen or bathroom. The influencer got paid regardless of how the sponsored post performed. The brand viewed the sponsorship as analogous to a magazine ad.
Neither party was thinking about the project in the context of driving direct sales, but that was often the result because followers viewed the content as an authentic recommendation. Then, smaller, scrappier brands that couldn’t afford to pay a big influencer $25,000 for a single post began creating their own “influencer” product review content at a much lower cost. They hired no-name “creators” with negligible followings to copy the format, then pushed out these videos via paid social channels.
The result looks like this video. This is obviously an ad, touched by the hands of a marketer, even if it was shot on an iPhone’s front camera. We’re about five years into the mass adoption of this advertising format, and the median scroller has caught on. This no longer reads as authentic.
But a new content format has emerged to take its place: the yapper. Here is an example of a yapper video.
You’ll notice a few key differences:
- The setting is not studied at all. You can see the glare of recessed can lighting in the background, the hallmark of a builder-grade McMansion, as well as the "nipple lamp" familiar to every renter of sub-$2,000 apartment units.
- You can see the creator step back from the camera. This video hasn't been edited because this guy clearly has no idea what CapCut is.
- The delivery feels similarly authentic. There are slight pauses, and he’s using language a real person would use.
- You can hear background noise from a TV or another source.
This video feels like it was never touched by a marketer's hand, but the creator is still entertaining and charismatic. When it shows up on the median scroller’s feed, it blends in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks like a friend could have made it; today, a person’s IRL social network is almost irrelevant to what shows up in their feed.
The McDonald’s CEO taste test was a corporate yapper. The lighting is far from warm and flattering. The food isn’t “styled” as it would be for a photo shoot. The settings feel real. And the delivery, while wooden, is authentic to the creator.
How Did This Happen?
Social media thought leaders have been talking about “authenticity” and “the power of influencers” for more than a decade. This is the same dialogue that yielded the deluge of influencer marketing that consumers are now ignoring.
There is one critical difference in 2026: the way that social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts match content with users has changed. The new model was pioneered by TikTok, which forced the other platforms' hands when it crossed the 100 million US user mark in 2022.
Before TikTok, the content in your feed was based on who you followed and who your friends followed. But TikTok changed the game: following was irrelevant, and engagement signals (watch time, likes, shares, and comments) became the primary indicator of whether a piece of content was “good.”
We have already forgotten how revolutionary this was, but on TikTok, for the first time ever, a user's "following" list had minimal bearing on what appeared on that user's "for you" page, aka the main feed.
This immediately "de-ranked" creators with large followings who were not masters of dopamine manipulation. And it immediately boosted creators who could capture attention in the first three seconds of a video and hold it through the video’s duration.
The TikTok model has worked really well for keeping users on the app. It lowered the barriers to entry for content discovery and kept users on a drip feed of dopamine. Meta and YouTube saw this, and they copied it.
In this environment, a complete nobody could hop on TikTok and go viral on day one, only to fade into obscurity by the end of day two. This decentered the parasocial relationship between user and creator in favor of a melee for the user's attention. The McDonald’s CEO’s viral post is the perfect model of this new content ecosystem. He had been posting for years and went viral almost by accident. If he wasn’t the head of a national brand, he probably would have faded into obscurity by now.
Yappers are basically the evolution of "ads that don't look/feel like ads."
In a feed that is populated based on engagement signals, traditional user-generated content (UGC) looks and feels like an ad. No one is going viral organically by producing that type of content because it was never that entertaining to begin with. The “pay an influencer to post” strategy was always modeled after traditional advertising: content that a brand forced a user to consume.
How to Navigate Authority Collapse
Short-form video algorithms are the infrastructure that powers consumer attention capture. And when it comes to capturing attention in these environments, there are no bonus points for historical awareness or real-world authority.
Consumers have decided that short-form video platforms are fantasy spaces. They know that most of the content they consume on these platforms is either biased or outright fabricated, and…they don’t mind all that much. Entertainment value is what matters, whether that is delivered by an AI-generated monk, an actor dressed up in a doctor’s white coat, or a real person with real credentials and knowledge. If you are willing to reflect and take accountability, the advertising/media industrial complex brought this state of affairs upon themselves.
Mass media has always been used to distribute partial truths and shape public perception. The mass adoption of television created an environment where aesthetics and charisma trumped substance or expertise. Now, TikTok-style algorithms have removed that power from the hands of a few and distributed it to everyone. Brands can still achieve the same outcomes (awareness, affinity, and sales), but they have to compete against everyone, using a different set of rules.
Lean In Or Lean Out
This is the first decision every brand must make: do we lean into this new algorithmic model and build our content strategy around it, or do we back away from social platforms entirely?
The third way, attempting to use social media as a marketing vehicle but playing by the old rules, leads to wasted resources at best, and public embarrassment at worst.
The social strategies of three luxury brands illustrate this point:
Loewe has more than two million followers on TikTok and regularly posts videos that exceed a million views, a sign that their content has viral reach. The brand leans in to platform-native content conventions, such as cat videos, street interviews, and ASMR, but every piece of content shares a visual language, so this doesn’t feel “off brand.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram account and other social media back in 2021. Rather than investing resources in a social strategy that isn’t brand-aligned and doesn’t leverage the team’s existing talents, the brand is relying on existing creators to tell its story on its behalf.
This is the ultimate luxury move: having enough self-confidence in the brand’s reputation and codes to avoid social media entirely, and let others do the talking.
Gucci is a cautionary tale for brands that attempt to take the middle path.
Gucci consistently uses social media to push brand messaging from a position of authority. It’s about what Gucci wants to say, not what the people want to hear. The brand’s social activations are also grid-oriented, an outdated mental model of how the median scroller behaves.
The recent Gucci AI slop controversy is one example. Gucci posted dozens of images to its X and Instagram pages as part of a “digital mood board” in advance of its FW26 show. Five of those images were AI-generated, and labeled as such.
Five images from a 40-image mood board isn’t a big deal. But that’s not how most users experienced the activation. Instead, they saw one or two of the AI images that created the most controversy. Those posts got the most engagement (mostly negative comments), so they were pushed to the most feeds. Many users who saw the AI images didn’t realize that they were part of a larger mood board, because that context could only be found on the brand’s grid. And the reality is very few people consume content like that anymore.
If You Choose to Lean In, Everyone Must Start Posting
Brands that decide to lean in to the new algorithm need to develop a deep understanding of how it works and get a feel for the tastes and preferences of the median scroller. The best way to do that is to just start posting.
Everyone who touches organic and paid social content, from the CMO to the brand’s in-house counsel and even the junior media buyer, should create a TikTok account and see who can get 100 followers the fastest.
This year, I took on this exact challenge. As a consumer, I have always preferred written content to video content. And as a marketer, my static ads and copywriting always outperformed my video. So I decided to fix that.
I realized a few things pretty quickly:
- Content that speaks to experts flops consistently. The total addressable market is too small. Your highly produced video on product technology, or your expert interview about product differentiators, is not going to find an audience.
- Each piece of content needs to deliver obvious, tangible value to a broad audience, and do so in an original way. “Our product tastes good” is going to flop. “Our product helps you lose weight” will also flop, unless it's delivered in the form of a charismatic, authentic testimonial. But “this sneaky ingredient found in most ‘healthy’ packaged foods is sabotaging your weight loss” is a hook that has legs.
- It can be really hard to develop a content strategy that is broad and entertaining enough to go viral, yet focused enough to resonate with a qualified audience. This is especially challenging for B2B companies because they’re already speaking to a niche audience.
We’ve reached a tipping point in consumers’ content consumption habits where ignoring short-form video platforms is no longer an option. That is, unless you make the decision to “exit” a conscious part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
The authority collapse represents a loss of status, and that can feel painful. But “doing what we’ve always done” and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure.
The algorithm has finally flattened authority–obliterated it. And legacy brands that are slow-moving, fundamentally conservative, and always willing to rest on the laurels of generational brand awareness, will be hardest hit.
Last week, Chris Kempczinski (the CEO of McDonald’s) went viral for a taste-test video that failed to show sufficient enthusiasm or “authenticity”.
What internet commenters didn’t realize is that he had been posting these videos for years. What viewers wrote off as a corporate, robotic on-camera presence was actually… someone’s genuine personality.
In a world where smashing your face with a hammer to appear more photogenic is viewed as a valid strategy to achieve viral reach, the median scroller doesn’t know what true authenticity looks like anymore. Mass culture is on life support. Short-form video is winning an increasing portion of consumers’ waking hours.
Yes, “social media thought leaders” have been beating this drum for years. But this time, it really is different, because the technology fueling distribution has evolved. And brands that build their marketing strategies on old assumptions will soon find themselves irrelevant.
What Changed? Enter The Yapper
If you don’t work in the direct response digital marketing world, or if you don’t spend a ton of time on apps like TikTok or Instagram, then the distinction I am about to highlight is going to feel meaningless. I promise, it’s not.
Americans spend almost seven hours per day consuming internet-connected media. More than half of that time is spent consuming digital video, and much of that time is spent using two screens at once (i.e., TV + phone). Outside of work, this is where people are investing their time and attention.
The model of authenticity on video-focused apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has evolved. And if you’re about to argue that Instagram is a photo-sharing app, you’re proving that this shift has passed you by.
The “old model” of authenticity was a professional influencer providing a product recommendation alongside his or (usually) her other content. In this scenario, 2018-era Instagram algo was pushing all of the influencer’s content to at least 30% of her followers, so she wasn’t thinking about engagement or content quality all that much.
And this content was part of her "personal brand" that lived on her grid, so she was perfectly made up and styled, sitting in her professionally decorated kitchen or bathroom. The influencer got paid regardless of how the sponsored post performed. The brand viewed the sponsorship as analogous to a magazine ad.
Neither party was thinking about the project in the context of driving direct sales, but that was often the result because followers viewed the content as an authentic recommendation. Then, smaller, scrappier brands that couldn’t afford to pay a big influencer $25,000 for a single post began creating their own “influencer” product review content at a much lower cost. They hired no-name “creators” with negligible followings to copy the format, then pushed out these videos via paid social channels.
The result looks like this video. This is obviously an ad, touched by the hands of a marketer, even if it was shot on an iPhone’s front camera. We’re about five years into the mass adoption of this advertising format, and the median scroller has caught on. This no longer reads as authentic.
But a new content format has emerged to take its place: the yapper. Here is an example of a yapper video.
You’ll notice a few key differences:
- The setting is not studied at all. You can see the glare of recessed can lighting in the background, the hallmark of a builder-grade McMansion, as well as the "nipple lamp" familiar to every renter of sub-$2,000 apartment units.
- You can see the creator step back from the camera. This video hasn't been edited because this guy clearly has no idea what CapCut is.
- The delivery feels similarly authentic. There are slight pauses, and he’s using language a real person would use.
- You can hear background noise from a TV or another source.
This video feels like it was never touched by a marketer's hand, but the creator is still entertaining and charismatic. When it shows up on the median scroller’s feed, it blends in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks like a friend could have made it; today, a person’s IRL social network is almost irrelevant to what shows up in their feed.
The McDonald’s CEO taste test was a corporate yapper. The lighting is far from warm and flattering. The food isn’t “styled” as it would be for a photo shoot. The settings feel real. And the delivery, while wooden, is authentic to the creator.
How Did This Happen?
Social media thought leaders have been talking about “authenticity” and “the power of influencers” for more than a decade. This is the same dialogue that yielded the deluge of influencer marketing that consumers are now ignoring.
There is one critical difference in 2026: the way that social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts match content with users has changed. The new model was pioneered by TikTok, which forced the other platforms' hands when it crossed the 100 million US user mark in 2022.
Before TikTok, the content in your feed was based on who you followed and who your friends followed. But TikTok changed the game: following was irrelevant, and engagement signals (watch time, likes, shares, and comments) became the primary indicator of whether a piece of content was “good.”
We have already forgotten how revolutionary this was, but on TikTok, for the first time ever, a user's "following" list had minimal bearing on what appeared on that user's "for you" page, aka the main feed.
This immediately "de-ranked" creators with large followings who were not masters of dopamine manipulation. And it immediately boosted creators who could capture attention in the first three seconds of a video and hold it through the video’s duration.
The TikTok model has worked really well for keeping users on the app. It lowered the barriers to entry for content discovery and kept users on a drip feed of dopamine. Meta and YouTube saw this, and they copied it.
In this environment, a complete nobody could hop on TikTok and go viral on day one, only to fade into obscurity by the end of day two. This decentered the parasocial relationship between user and creator in favor of a melee for the user's attention. The McDonald’s CEO’s viral post is the perfect model of this new content ecosystem. He had been posting for years and went viral almost by accident. If he wasn’t the head of a national brand, he probably would have faded into obscurity by now.
Yappers are basically the evolution of "ads that don't look/feel like ads."
In a feed that is populated based on engagement signals, traditional user-generated content (UGC) looks and feels like an ad. No one is going viral organically by producing that type of content because it was never that entertaining to begin with. The “pay an influencer to post” strategy was always modeled after traditional advertising: content that a brand forced a user to consume.
How to Navigate Authority Collapse
Short-form video algorithms are the infrastructure that powers consumer attention capture. And when it comes to capturing attention in these environments, there are no bonus points for historical awareness or real-world authority.
Consumers have decided that short-form video platforms are fantasy spaces. They know that most of the content they consume on these platforms is either biased or outright fabricated, and…they don’t mind all that much. Entertainment value is what matters, whether that is delivered by an AI-generated monk, an actor dressed up in a doctor’s white coat, or a real person with real credentials and knowledge. If you are willing to reflect and take accountability, the advertising/media industrial complex brought this state of affairs upon themselves.
Mass media has always been used to distribute partial truths and shape public perception. The mass adoption of television created an environment where aesthetics and charisma trumped substance or expertise. Now, TikTok-style algorithms have removed that power from the hands of a few and distributed it to everyone. Brands can still achieve the same outcomes (awareness, affinity, and sales), but they have to compete against everyone, using a different set of rules.
Lean In Or Lean Out
This is the first decision every brand must make: do we lean into this new algorithmic model and build our content strategy around it, or do we back away from social platforms entirely?
The third way, attempting to use social media as a marketing vehicle but playing by the old rules, leads to wasted resources at best, and public embarrassment at worst.
The social strategies of three luxury brands illustrate this point:
Loewe has more than two million followers on TikTok and regularly posts videos that exceed a million views, a sign that their content has viral reach. The brand leans in to platform-native content conventions, such as cat videos, street interviews, and ASMR, but every piece of content shares a visual language, so this doesn’t feel “off brand.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram account and other social media back in 2021. Rather than investing resources in a social strategy that isn’t brand-aligned and doesn’t leverage the team’s existing talents, the brand is relying on existing creators to tell its story on its behalf.
This is the ultimate luxury move: having enough self-confidence in the brand’s reputation and codes to avoid social media entirely, and let others do the talking.
Gucci is a cautionary tale for brands that attempt to take the middle path.
Gucci consistently uses social media to push brand messaging from a position of authority. It’s about what Gucci wants to say, not what the people want to hear. The brand’s social activations are also grid-oriented, an outdated mental model of how the median scroller behaves.
The recent Gucci AI slop controversy is one example. Gucci posted dozens of images to its X and Instagram pages as part of a “digital mood board” in advance of its FW26 show. Five of those images were AI-generated, and labeled as such.
Five images from a 40-image mood board isn’t a big deal. But that’s not how most users experienced the activation. Instead, they saw one or two of the AI images that created the most controversy. Those posts got the most engagement (mostly negative comments), so they were pushed to the most feeds. Many users who saw the AI images didn’t realize that they were part of a larger mood board, because that context could only be found on the brand’s grid. And the reality is very few people consume content like that anymore.
If You Choose to Lean In, Everyone Must Start Posting
Brands that decide to lean in to the new algorithm need to develop a deep understanding of how it works and get a feel for the tastes and preferences of the median scroller. The best way to do that is to just start posting.
Everyone who touches organic and paid social content, from the CMO to the brand’s in-house counsel and even the junior media buyer, should create a TikTok account and see who can get 100 followers the fastest.
This year, I took on this exact challenge. As a consumer, I have always preferred written content to video content. And as a marketer, my static ads and copywriting always outperformed my video. So I decided to fix that.
I realized a few things pretty quickly:
- Content that speaks to experts flops consistently. The total addressable market is too small. Your highly produced video on product technology, or your expert interview about product differentiators, is not going to find an audience.
- Each piece of content needs to deliver obvious, tangible value to a broad audience, and do so in an original way. “Our product tastes good” is going to flop. “Our product helps you lose weight” will also flop, unless it's delivered in the form of a charismatic, authentic testimonial. But “this sneaky ingredient found in most ‘healthy’ packaged foods is sabotaging your weight loss” is a hook that has legs.
- It can be really hard to develop a content strategy that is broad and entertaining enough to go viral, yet focused enough to resonate with a qualified audience. This is especially challenging for B2B companies because they’re already speaking to a niche audience.
We’ve reached a tipping point in consumers’ content consumption habits where ignoring short-form video platforms is no longer an option. That is, unless you make the decision to “exit” a conscious part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
The authority collapse represents a loss of status, and that can feel painful. But “doing what we’ve always done” and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure.
The algorithm has finally flattened authority–obliterated it. And legacy brands that are slow-moving, fundamentally conservative, and always willing to rest on the laurels of generational brand awareness, will be hardest hit.
Last week, Chris Kempczinski (the CEO of McDonald’s) went viral for a taste-test video that failed to show sufficient enthusiasm or “authenticity”.
What internet commenters didn’t realize is that he had been posting these videos for years. What viewers wrote off as a corporate, robotic on-camera presence was actually… someone’s genuine personality.
In a world where smashing your face with a hammer to appear more photogenic is viewed as a valid strategy to achieve viral reach, the median scroller doesn’t know what true authenticity looks like anymore. Mass culture is on life support. Short-form video is winning an increasing portion of consumers’ waking hours.
Yes, “social media thought leaders” have been beating this drum for years. But this time, it really is different, because the technology fueling distribution has evolved. And brands that build their marketing strategies on old assumptions will soon find themselves irrelevant.
What Changed? Enter The Yapper
If you don’t work in the direct response digital marketing world, or if you don’t spend a ton of time on apps like TikTok or Instagram, then the distinction I am about to highlight is going to feel meaningless. I promise, it’s not.
Americans spend almost seven hours per day consuming internet-connected media. More than half of that time is spent consuming digital video, and much of that time is spent using two screens at once (i.e., TV + phone). Outside of work, this is where people are investing their time and attention.
The model of authenticity on video-focused apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has evolved. And if you’re about to argue that Instagram is a photo-sharing app, you’re proving that this shift has passed you by.
The “old model” of authenticity was a professional influencer providing a product recommendation alongside his or (usually) her other content. In this scenario, 2018-era Instagram algo was pushing all of the influencer’s content to at least 30% of her followers, so she wasn’t thinking about engagement or content quality all that much.
And this content was part of her "personal brand" that lived on her grid, so she was perfectly made up and styled, sitting in her professionally decorated kitchen or bathroom. The influencer got paid regardless of how the sponsored post performed. The brand viewed the sponsorship as analogous to a magazine ad.
Neither party was thinking about the project in the context of driving direct sales, but that was often the result because followers viewed the content as an authentic recommendation. Then, smaller, scrappier brands that couldn’t afford to pay a big influencer $25,000 for a single post began creating their own “influencer” product review content at a much lower cost. They hired no-name “creators” with negligible followings to copy the format, then pushed out these videos via paid social channels.
The result looks like this video. This is obviously an ad, touched by the hands of a marketer, even if it was shot on an iPhone’s front camera. We’re about five years into the mass adoption of this advertising format, and the median scroller has caught on. This no longer reads as authentic.
But a new content format has emerged to take its place: the yapper. Here is an example of a yapper video.
You’ll notice a few key differences:
- The setting is not studied at all. You can see the glare of recessed can lighting in the background, the hallmark of a builder-grade McMansion, as well as the "nipple lamp" familiar to every renter of sub-$2,000 apartment units.
- You can see the creator step back from the camera. This video hasn't been edited because this guy clearly has no idea what CapCut is.
- The delivery feels similarly authentic. There are slight pauses, and he’s using language a real person would use.
- You can hear background noise from a TV or another source.
This video feels like it was never touched by a marketer's hand, but the creator is still entertaining and charismatic. When it shows up on the median scroller’s feed, it blends in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks like a friend could have made it; today, a person’s IRL social network is almost irrelevant to what shows up in their feed.
The McDonald’s CEO taste test was a corporate yapper. The lighting is far from warm and flattering. The food isn’t “styled” as it would be for a photo shoot. The settings feel real. And the delivery, while wooden, is authentic to the creator.
How Did This Happen?
Social media thought leaders have been talking about “authenticity” and “the power of influencers” for more than a decade. This is the same dialogue that yielded the deluge of influencer marketing that consumers are now ignoring.
There is one critical difference in 2026: the way that social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts match content with users has changed. The new model was pioneered by TikTok, which forced the other platforms' hands when it crossed the 100 million US user mark in 2022.
Before TikTok, the content in your feed was based on who you followed and who your friends followed. But TikTok changed the game: following was irrelevant, and engagement signals (watch time, likes, shares, and comments) became the primary indicator of whether a piece of content was “good.”
We have already forgotten how revolutionary this was, but on TikTok, for the first time ever, a user's "following" list had minimal bearing on what appeared on that user's "for you" page, aka the main feed.
This immediately "de-ranked" creators with large followings who were not masters of dopamine manipulation. And it immediately boosted creators who could capture attention in the first three seconds of a video and hold it through the video’s duration.
The TikTok model has worked really well for keeping users on the app. It lowered the barriers to entry for content discovery and kept users on a drip feed of dopamine. Meta and YouTube saw this, and they copied it.
In this environment, a complete nobody could hop on TikTok and go viral on day one, only to fade into obscurity by the end of day two. This decentered the parasocial relationship between user and creator in favor of a melee for the user's attention. The McDonald’s CEO’s viral post is the perfect model of this new content ecosystem. He had been posting for years and went viral almost by accident. If he wasn’t the head of a national brand, he probably would have faded into obscurity by now.
Yappers are basically the evolution of "ads that don't look/feel like ads."
In a feed that is populated based on engagement signals, traditional user-generated content (UGC) looks and feels like an ad. No one is going viral organically by producing that type of content because it was never that entertaining to begin with. The “pay an influencer to post” strategy was always modeled after traditional advertising: content that a brand forced a user to consume.
How to Navigate Authority Collapse
Short-form video algorithms are the infrastructure that powers consumer attention capture. And when it comes to capturing attention in these environments, there are no bonus points for historical awareness or real-world authority.
Consumers have decided that short-form video platforms are fantasy spaces. They know that most of the content they consume on these platforms is either biased or outright fabricated, and…they don’t mind all that much. Entertainment value is what matters, whether that is delivered by an AI-generated monk, an actor dressed up in a doctor’s white coat, or a real person with real credentials and knowledge. If you are willing to reflect and take accountability, the advertising/media industrial complex brought this state of affairs upon themselves.
Mass media has always been used to distribute partial truths and shape public perception. The mass adoption of television created an environment where aesthetics and charisma trumped substance or expertise. Now, TikTok-style algorithms have removed that power from the hands of a few and distributed it to everyone. Brands can still achieve the same outcomes (awareness, affinity, and sales), but they have to compete against everyone, using a different set of rules.
Lean In Or Lean Out
This is the first decision every brand must make: do we lean into this new algorithmic model and build our content strategy around it, or do we back away from social platforms entirely?
The third way, attempting to use social media as a marketing vehicle but playing by the old rules, leads to wasted resources at best, and public embarrassment at worst.
The social strategies of three luxury brands illustrate this point:
Loewe has more than two million followers on TikTok and regularly posts videos that exceed a million views, a sign that their content has viral reach. The brand leans in to platform-native content conventions, such as cat videos, street interviews, and ASMR, but every piece of content shares a visual language, so this doesn’t feel “off brand.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram account and other social media back in 2021. Rather than investing resources in a social strategy that isn’t brand-aligned and doesn’t leverage the team’s existing talents, the brand is relying on existing creators to tell its story on its behalf.
This is the ultimate luxury move: having enough self-confidence in the brand’s reputation and codes to avoid social media entirely, and let others do the talking.
Gucci is a cautionary tale for brands that attempt to take the middle path.
Gucci consistently uses social media to push brand messaging from a position of authority. It’s about what Gucci wants to say, not what the people want to hear. The brand’s social activations are also grid-oriented, an outdated mental model of how the median scroller behaves.
The recent Gucci AI slop controversy is one example. Gucci posted dozens of images to its X and Instagram pages as part of a “digital mood board” in advance of its FW26 show. Five of those images were AI-generated, and labeled as such.
Five images from a 40-image mood board isn’t a big deal. But that’s not how most users experienced the activation. Instead, they saw one or two of the AI images that created the most controversy. Those posts got the most engagement (mostly negative comments), so they were pushed to the most feeds. Many users who saw the AI images didn’t realize that they were part of a larger mood board, because that context could only be found on the brand’s grid. And the reality is very few people consume content like that anymore.
If You Choose to Lean In, Everyone Must Start Posting
Brands that decide to lean in to the new algorithm need to develop a deep understanding of how it works and get a feel for the tastes and preferences of the median scroller. The best way to do that is to just start posting.
Everyone who touches organic and paid social content, from the CMO to the brand’s in-house counsel and even the junior media buyer, should create a TikTok account and see who can get 100 followers the fastest.
This year, I took on this exact challenge. As a consumer, I have always preferred written content to video content. And as a marketer, my static ads and copywriting always outperformed my video. So I decided to fix that.
I realized a few things pretty quickly:
- Content that speaks to experts flops consistently. The total addressable market is too small. Your highly produced video on product technology, or your expert interview about product differentiators, is not going to find an audience.
- Each piece of content needs to deliver obvious, tangible value to a broad audience, and do so in an original way. “Our product tastes good” is going to flop. “Our product helps you lose weight” will also flop, unless it's delivered in the form of a charismatic, authentic testimonial. But “this sneaky ingredient found in most ‘healthy’ packaged foods is sabotaging your weight loss” is a hook that has legs.
- It can be really hard to develop a content strategy that is broad and entertaining enough to go viral, yet focused enough to resonate with a qualified audience. This is especially challenging for B2B companies because they’re already speaking to a niche audience.
We’ve reached a tipping point in consumers’ content consumption habits where ignoring short-form video platforms is no longer an option. That is, unless you make the decision to “exit” a conscious part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
The authority collapse represents a loss of status, and that can feel painful. But “doing what we’ve always done” and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure.
The algorithm has finally flattened authority–obliterated it. And legacy brands that are slow-moving, fundamentally conservative, and always willing to rest on the laurels of generational brand awareness, will be hardest hit.
Last week, Chris Kempczinski (the CEO of McDonald’s) went viral for a taste-test video that failed to show sufficient enthusiasm or “authenticity”.
What internet commenters didn’t realize is that he had been posting these videos for years. What viewers wrote off as a corporate, robotic on-camera presence was actually… someone’s genuine personality.
In a world where smashing your face with a hammer to appear more photogenic is viewed as a valid strategy to achieve viral reach, the median scroller doesn’t know what true authenticity looks like anymore. Mass culture is on life support. Short-form video is winning an increasing portion of consumers’ waking hours.
Yes, “social media thought leaders” have been beating this drum for years. But this time, it really is different, because the technology fueling distribution has evolved. And brands that build their marketing strategies on old assumptions will soon find themselves irrelevant.
What Changed? Enter The Yapper
If you don’t work in the direct response digital marketing world, or if you don’t spend a ton of time on apps like TikTok or Instagram, then the distinction I am about to highlight is going to feel meaningless. I promise, it’s not.
Americans spend almost seven hours per day consuming internet-connected media. More than half of that time is spent consuming digital video, and much of that time is spent using two screens at once (i.e., TV + phone). Outside of work, this is where people are investing their time and attention.
The model of authenticity on video-focused apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has evolved. And if you’re about to argue that Instagram is a photo-sharing app, you’re proving that this shift has passed you by.
The “old model” of authenticity was a professional influencer providing a product recommendation alongside his or (usually) her other content. In this scenario, 2018-era Instagram algo was pushing all of the influencer’s content to at least 30% of her followers, so she wasn’t thinking about engagement or content quality all that much.
And this content was part of her "personal brand" that lived on her grid, so she was perfectly made up and styled, sitting in her professionally decorated kitchen or bathroom. The influencer got paid regardless of how the sponsored post performed. The brand viewed the sponsorship as analogous to a magazine ad.
Neither party was thinking about the project in the context of driving direct sales, but that was often the result because followers viewed the content as an authentic recommendation. Then, smaller, scrappier brands that couldn’t afford to pay a big influencer $25,000 for a single post began creating their own “influencer” product review content at a much lower cost. They hired no-name “creators” with negligible followings to copy the format, then pushed out these videos via paid social channels.
The result looks like this video. This is obviously an ad, touched by the hands of a marketer, even if it was shot on an iPhone’s front camera. We’re about five years into the mass adoption of this advertising format, and the median scroller has caught on. This no longer reads as authentic.
But a new content format has emerged to take its place: the yapper. Here is an example of a yapper video.
You’ll notice a few key differences:
- The setting is not studied at all. You can see the glare of recessed can lighting in the background, the hallmark of a builder-grade McMansion, as well as the "nipple lamp" familiar to every renter of sub-$2,000 apartment units.
- You can see the creator step back from the camera. This video hasn't been edited because this guy clearly has no idea what CapCut is.
- The delivery feels similarly authentic. There are slight pauses, and he’s using language a real person would use.
- You can hear background noise from a TV or another source.
This video feels like it was never touched by a marketer's hand, but the creator is still entertaining and charismatic. When it shows up on the median scroller’s feed, it blends in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks like a friend could have made it; today, a person’s IRL social network is almost irrelevant to what shows up in their feed.
The McDonald’s CEO taste test was a corporate yapper. The lighting is far from warm and flattering. The food isn’t “styled” as it would be for a photo shoot. The settings feel real. And the delivery, while wooden, is authentic to the creator.
How Did This Happen?
Social media thought leaders have been talking about “authenticity” and “the power of influencers” for more than a decade. This is the same dialogue that yielded the deluge of influencer marketing that consumers are now ignoring.
There is one critical difference in 2026: the way that social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts match content with users has changed. The new model was pioneered by TikTok, which forced the other platforms' hands when it crossed the 100 million US user mark in 2022.
Before TikTok, the content in your feed was based on who you followed and who your friends followed. But TikTok changed the game: following was irrelevant, and engagement signals (watch time, likes, shares, and comments) became the primary indicator of whether a piece of content was “good.”
We have already forgotten how revolutionary this was, but on TikTok, for the first time ever, a user's "following" list had minimal bearing on what appeared on that user's "for you" page, aka the main feed.
This immediately "de-ranked" creators with large followings who were not masters of dopamine manipulation. And it immediately boosted creators who could capture attention in the first three seconds of a video and hold it through the video’s duration.
The TikTok model has worked really well for keeping users on the app. It lowered the barriers to entry for content discovery and kept users on a drip feed of dopamine. Meta and YouTube saw this, and they copied it.
In this environment, a complete nobody could hop on TikTok and go viral on day one, only to fade into obscurity by the end of day two. This decentered the parasocial relationship between user and creator in favor of a melee for the user's attention. The McDonald’s CEO’s viral post is the perfect model of this new content ecosystem. He had been posting for years and went viral almost by accident. If he wasn’t the head of a national brand, he probably would have faded into obscurity by now.
Yappers are basically the evolution of "ads that don't look/feel like ads."
In a feed that is populated based on engagement signals, traditional user-generated content (UGC) looks and feels like an ad. No one is going viral organically by producing that type of content because it was never that entertaining to begin with. The “pay an influencer to post” strategy was always modeled after traditional advertising: content that a brand forced a user to consume.
How to Navigate Authority Collapse
Short-form video algorithms are the infrastructure that powers consumer attention capture. And when it comes to capturing attention in these environments, there are no bonus points for historical awareness or real-world authority.
Consumers have decided that short-form video platforms are fantasy spaces. They know that most of the content they consume on these platforms is either biased or outright fabricated, and…they don’t mind all that much. Entertainment value is what matters, whether that is delivered by an AI-generated monk, an actor dressed up in a doctor’s white coat, or a real person with real credentials and knowledge. If you are willing to reflect and take accountability, the advertising/media industrial complex brought this state of affairs upon themselves.
Mass media has always been used to distribute partial truths and shape public perception. The mass adoption of television created an environment where aesthetics and charisma trumped substance or expertise. Now, TikTok-style algorithms have removed that power from the hands of a few and distributed it to everyone. Brands can still achieve the same outcomes (awareness, affinity, and sales), but they have to compete against everyone, using a different set of rules.
Lean In Or Lean Out
This is the first decision every brand must make: do we lean into this new algorithmic model and build our content strategy around it, or do we back away from social platforms entirely?
The third way, attempting to use social media as a marketing vehicle but playing by the old rules, leads to wasted resources at best, and public embarrassment at worst.
The social strategies of three luxury brands illustrate this point:
Loewe has more than two million followers on TikTok and regularly posts videos that exceed a million views, a sign that their content has viral reach. The brand leans in to platform-native content conventions, such as cat videos, street interviews, and ASMR, but every piece of content shares a visual language, so this doesn’t feel “off brand.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram account and other social media back in 2021. Rather than investing resources in a social strategy that isn’t brand-aligned and doesn’t leverage the team’s existing talents, the brand is relying on existing creators to tell its story on its behalf.
This is the ultimate luxury move: having enough self-confidence in the brand’s reputation and codes to avoid social media entirely, and let others do the talking.
Gucci is a cautionary tale for brands that attempt to take the middle path.
Gucci consistently uses social media to push brand messaging from a position of authority. It’s about what Gucci wants to say, not what the people want to hear. The brand’s social activations are also grid-oriented, an outdated mental model of how the median scroller behaves.
The recent Gucci AI slop controversy is one example. Gucci posted dozens of images to its X and Instagram pages as part of a “digital mood board” in advance of its FW26 show. Five of those images were AI-generated, and labeled as such.
Five images from a 40-image mood board isn’t a big deal. But that’s not how most users experienced the activation. Instead, they saw one or two of the AI images that created the most controversy. Those posts got the most engagement (mostly negative comments), so they were pushed to the most feeds. Many users who saw the AI images didn’t realize that they were part of a larger mood board, because that context could only be found on the brand’s grid. And the reality is very few people consume content like that anymore.
If You Choose to Lean In, Everyone Must Start Posting
Brands that decide to lean in to the new algorithm need to develop a deep understanding of how it works and get a feel for the tastes and preferences of the median scroller. The best way to do that is to just start posting.
Everyone who touches organic and paid social content, from the CMO to the brand’s in-house counsel and even the junior media buyer, should create a TikTok account and see who can get 100 followers the fastest.
This year, I took on this exact challenge. As a consumer, I have always preferred written content to video content. And as a marketer, my static ads and copywriting always outperformed my video. So I decided to fix that.
I realized a few things pretty quickly:
- Content that speaks to experts flops consistently. The total addressable market is too small. Your highly produced video on product technology, or your expert interview about product differentiators, is not going to find an audience.
- Each piece of content needs to deliver obvious, tangible value to a broad audience, and do so in an original way. “Our product tastes good” is going to flop. “Our product helps you lose weight” will also flop, unless it's delivered in the form of a charismatic, authentic testimonial. But “this sneaky ingredient found in most ‘healthy’ packaged foods is sabotaging your weight loss” is a hook that has legs.
- It can be really hard to develop a content strategy that is broad and entertaining enough to go viral, yet focused enough to resonate with a qualified audience. This is especially challenging for B2B companies because they’re already speaking to a niche audience.
We’ve reached a tipping point in consumers’ content consumption habits where ignoring short-form video platforms is no longer an option. That is, unless you make the decision to “exit” a conscious part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
The authority collapse represents a loss of status, and that can feel painful. But “doing what we’ve always done” and hoping for the best is a recipe for failure.
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