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.
Sport has stopped being just a sponsorship channel and has slowly but surely become the operating system for culture. Leagues, brands and athletes can all win if they treat every fan touchpoint as part of an always‑on, integrated experience, rather than a row of logos on shirts or around a pitch.
Alex Zeevalkink
Hannah Bowler dives into Mattel’s slow, deliberate shift from selling toys to building franchises – and asks its head of licensing and partnerships, Ruth Henriquez, about the decision of betting on fans, fast collabs and decades of nostalgia to make the model stick.
Hannah Bowler
After two decades of growth, Pinterest is stepping into the cultural spotlight – doubling down on experiential activations, product differentiation, and moments where the platform has a legitimate role to play, on and offline.
Hannah Bowler
Elf Cosmetics is rebuilding its innovation pipeline around social media. The beauty brand treats fans as co-creators and has made the traditional lengthy path from feedback to product disappear, turning that speed into its real competitive edge.
Hannah Bowler
Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Music Watch on YouTube Welcome back, it's week three of the Brandmakers podcast, and Hannah is joined this week by Louise Foley, who is director of marketing, Europe at Pinterest. Louise and Hannah got stuck into the subject of trends and signals, and what marketers need to do to stay on the right side of cultural relevance. She also detailed her own marketing strategy and her push into fun and meaningful experiential events. Disclaimer: we recorded thi
Hannah Bowler
