With an increasingly visual-first internet, brands still obsessed with text-based social listening risk missing the real signals hiding in images, videos, and the emotions they capture.
The notion of visual listening – tracking and analyzing what people share visually – is no longer experimental. It’s slowly becoming its own discipline, cultural trends expert Franziska Gregor tells me.
With today’s social habits, images and video can carry deeper signals of brand sentiment and emerging trends than text. Yet the social listening industry until recently has been about tracking words, not visuals.
If you care about how brands show up around big cultural moments, this summer’s World Cup is going to be a stress test. Not just for creative work, but for how well we understand what football actually provides people with in 2026.
Rich Hewes
Bad Bunny didn’t switch languages or adapt to the mainstream – and he still ended up owning the Grammys, the Super Bowl and the charts in China. For brands, his rise is a reminder that you can’t buy your way into culture for a quarter and call it a strategy, you need to stay authentic.
Roger Gehrmann
For many AI chatbots feel closer to confidants than simple search tools. As they start recommending products and slotting in sponsored answers, the real question isn’t only whether we trust what they’re saying, it’s whether we’re willing to pay to keep that sales pitch out of the conversation.
Hannah Bowler
As Millennials’ “cringe” era loops back into cool, brands face a harder question: not how to stay young forever, but how to stay culturally legit while their fans grow up – and a new generation wants nothing to do with them.
James Kirkham
