por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
“We want this to go viral.” It’s said at briefings with the same casual confidence with which one might say “we want the event to be successful” or “we want the product to sell well” — as if virality were a predictable outcome that results from the correct combination of effort, cleverness, and intent. As if there were a recipe. As if the agencies and brands that spent the most on “viral” content and got the least viral return had simply not tried hard enough, or hadn’t had the right insight, or had executed the wrong format. As if any of this were as controllable as a media buy.
The viral brief is perhaps the purest expression of magical thinking in the marketing industry. It asks for an outcome — massive organic distribution, cultural relevance, millions of unpaid impressions — that is by definition outside the control of anyone who briefs or produces it, then frames the request as a creative objective rather than as the statistical anomaly it actually is. And the creative or agency on the receiving end of this brief is put in an impossible position: explain the reality (which sounds like defeatism) or accept the brief as stated (which commits them to delivering something they cannot reliably deliver).
What Virality Actually Is
Viral content is content that spreads faster than it’s seeded — where the organic sharing multiplies the initial distribution beyond what the original publisher created or paid for. By this definition, virality is a measurement, not a quality. Content that goes viral has the quality of spreadability: something about it motivates people who encounter it to share it with others. That motivation can come from many sources — humor, outrage, utility, beauty, novelty, emotional resonance, social currency (sharing it makes me look good) — but it is always a property that the audience confers, not one that the creator installs.
This distinction — between the qualities that make content more or less spreadable and the act of spreading itself — is the gap that the viral brief ignores. You can study the characteristics of content that has spread widely. You can try to create content that has those characteristics. You can optimize distribution so that more people have the opportunity to encounter it. None of this guarantees virality, because virality is an emergent phenomenon that depends on cultural moment, competitive noise, platform algorithm behavior, and a degree of luck that no brief can eliminate.
The Virality Graveyard
For every piece of content that went unexpectedly viral, there are thousands of pieces of content that were explicitly designed to go viral and didn’t. Large budgets. Famous talent. Professional production. High-quality creative execution. Strategically launched on the right platform at the right time. And then: a few thousand views, a polite press release, and quiet disappointment. The virality graveyard is enormous and mostly invisible, because the postmortems of failed viral campaigns don’t get written up in trade publications the way the success stories do.
This survivorship bias is one reason the viral brief persists despite all available evidence that it’s based on a flawed model of how content spreads. The campaigns that went viral are visible and celebrated. The campaigns that were designed to go viral and didn’t are invisible. The client watching the successes believes that virality is achievable with the right creative thinking. The agency that produced the successes knows, usually, that a significant element of luck was involved — but rarely says so, because “we got lucky” is not a compelling creative credentials story.
What to Say When the Brief Says “Go Viral”
The honest response to the viral brief is to reframe the objective. Not to dismiss the ambition — large-scale organic distribution is a legitimate and valuable marketing outcome — but to translate it into something that can actually be designed for. Instead of “go viral,” the objective becomes “create content that maximizes shareability for our specific audience in our specific channel context.” That objective can be researched, designed toward, and measured against. Virality cannot.
This reframe also requires an honest conversation about what “viral” would actually look like for this brand in this context. A B2B software company and a consumer snack brand have different definitions of “massive organic distribution.” The B2B campaign that generates 50,000 organic views from decision-makers in the right industry is more valuable than the consumer campaign that generates 5 million views from people who will never buy the product. Virality without audience specificity is not a marketing strategy; it’s a vanity metric with extra steps.
And as we’ve argued repeatedly — from the results report to the awards paradox — the gap between impressive-looking numbers and actual business impact is where most marketing failures hide. A viral video that doesn’t move product isn’t a marketing success. It’s an entertaining footnote. The brief that recognizes this distinction produces better work than the one that chases the metric.
The One Thing That Actually Increases Shareability
If there’s one consistent finding across the research on organic content spread, it’s this: people share content that they feel reflects well on them, or that they believe their specific audience will genuinely value. Not content that is clever in the abstract, or well-produced in the generic sense, or funny to the average person. Content that speaks to a specific community, in a language that community recognizes, about something that community genuinely cares about.
This is the opposite of content designed to appeal to everyone. Content designed to appeal to everyone appeals, reliably, to nobody enough to share. Content designed for a specific someone — a real community with real characteristics and real interests — gets shared within that community with an intensity that broad-appeal content never achieves. The audience that says “this is exactly for people like us” is the audience that shares. That’s not a viral strategy. It’s an honesty strategy. Which turns out to be more effective, and considerably less magical.
Just received a brief that says “we want this to go viral”? Visit our shop before responding. Some purchases require a deep breath first.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a distinction that gets collapsed so frequently in marketing practice that most people operating in the industry don’t realize it’s been collapsed. Content strategy and content calendar are treated as interchangeable terms — or, worse, as sequential stages of the same process, where strategy is the thinking and the calendar is its output. This conflation produces one of the most common and most quietly damaging failures in digital marketing: organizations that produce a great deal of content, on schedule, with considerable effort, and to minimal effect.
The content calendar is a tool. It answers the questions of when things will be published, in what format, on which channel, and who is responsible for producing them. These are important operational questions, and having a system for answering them is genuinely useful. The content calendar is not a strategy. It does not answer the questions of why you’re publishing, what you’re trying to accomplish, what change you’re trying to create in the audience’s mind or behavior, or whether the content you’re producing is the right content for the objectives you’ve set. Those are strategic questions, and the content calendar — no matter how beautifully color-coded — cannot answer them.
The Calendar as a Trap
The content calendar becomes a trap the moment it’s treated as sufficient. Once a calendar exists, the implicit objective shifts from “produce content that achieves our communication goals” to “fill the calendar.” The team spends its energy ensuring that the slots are populated, the formats are varied, the visual assets are ready, and the posting times are optimized. All of this effort is in service of the calendar rather than in service of the audience. And the audience — who is the actual point of any content activity — never agreed to being served a consistent posting cadence. They agreed to be interested. Which is a different thing entirely.
The fill-the-calendar mentality produces a specific and recognizable type of content failure: work that is technically correct and strategically inert. The post that is well-designed, grammatically impeccable, on-brand, published at the optimal time on a Tuesday morning, and received by the audience with complete indifference. Not because it was bad, but because it wasn’t relevant, wasn’t interesting, wasn’t saying anything the audience needed to hear at the moment they encountered it. It was filling a slot. Slot-filling content is the most efficient possible way to produce content that doesn’t work.
What an Actual Content Strategy Looks Like
A genuine content strategy starts with audience insight that goes deeper than demographic profiles. It asks: what does this specific audience already believe about this category? What are the questions they’re actively trying to answer? What are the tensions, anxieties, or aspirations that this brand’s content could address with genuine relevance? These questions take time to answer honestly and require real research rather than assumptions dressed as personas.
From that audience insight, a content strategy defines what the brand’s point of view is — not its “brand values,” which are typically so generic as to be useless for content development, but its specific, defensible perspective on topics that the audience cares about. The brand that has a genuine point of view on something has infinite content. The brand that is trying to appear to have a point of view without actually having one produces content that reads like it was generated by someone who was told to sound like they have a point of view. Which is, increasingly, indistinguishable from content that was literally generated that way, as we explored in our piece on AI and creativity.
The Frequency Myth
One of the most persistent myths in content marketing is that consistency of frequency is what drives growth. Post every day. Stay top of mind. Maintain cadence. This advice — dispensed freely across the content marketing industry — is based on a misreading of what actually drives content performance. The accounts that grew through consistent posting grew because their content was consistently good, not because they posted consistently. Consistently posting consistently mediocre content does not produce the same result.
The brands that post twice a week with content worth reading outperform the brands that post twice a day with content that exists to fill a calendar. This is not a controversial claim in the research literature on content marketing effectiveness; it’s a fairly well-established finding. It is, however, a commercially inconvenient finding for the agencies and consultants who bill by volume of content produced, which may explain why it doesn’t travel as widely as it should.
As we’ve argued about advertising effectiveness more broadly, the metrics that matter and the metrics that are easiest to report are rarely the same. Content volume is easy to report. Content impact is hard to measure and harder to attribute. So organizations optimize for what they can report, and what they can report is how many posts went out on schedule. The calendar is full. The strategy is absent. The audience is elsewhere.
Rebuilding From Strategy to Calendar (In That Order)
The right sequence — obvious in principle, rare in practice — is to determine what you’re trying to achieve before determining what you’re going to produce. What does the audience need to think, feel, or do differently after experiencing this content? What content could create that change? How frequently does that content need to appear to be effective? What channels are the right ones for this audience and this content type?
The answers to those questions produce a content direction. That direction, operationalized with realistic production capacity and organizational resources, produces a calendar. The calendar serves the strategy; the strategy is not derived from the calendar’s requirements. This sequence feels slow at the front end. It’s faster everywhere else, because the team isn’t producing content that doesn’t work and wondering why the metrics aren’t improving.
Managing a content calendar that’s full and a strategy that’s empty? Our shop is for people who want to make content worth making. The calendar can wait.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
Every few years, a company emerges from a period of internal difficulty — falling sales, reputational damage, strategic confusion, leadership transition, or simply the creeping feeling that things aren’t quite working — and announces a rebrand. New logo. New color palette. Sometimes a new name. Always a press release explaining that this represents “an exciting new chapter” and “a return to our core values” and “a renewed commitment to our customers.” The rebrand is announced with the energy of a fresh start and received by the market with varying degrees of interest, skepticism, and outright derision. And then, usually, nothing changes. Because the logo was never the problem.
The rebrand as corporate ritual is one of the most revealing behaviors in the marketing industry. Not because rebranding is inherently wrong — genuine rebrands that reflect real organizational transformation can be powerful and necessary — but because the way rebranding is typically commissioned, executed, and deployed reveals a persistent confusion between symbol and substance that costs companies significant money and solves approximately nothing.
What Rebranding Is Actually For
Genuine rebranding serves a genuine purpose in specific circumstances. When a company has genuinely changed — its business model, its target audience, its product category, its organizational identity — the visual and verbal identity that represented the old version may no longer accurately represent the new one. Changing the brand in that context is an act of honest communication: we are different now, and we want the way we present ourselves to reflect that difference.
This is not what most rebrands are. Most rebrands are initiated not because the company has changed but because the company wants to feel like it has changed — or wants external audiences to believe it has changed — without doing the organizational work that actual change requires. The new logo is a signal to the market that something is different. It’s just not a signal that anything important is actually different, because the important things — the culture, the strategy, the leadership behavior, the product — haven’t been addressed.
The Logo Fallacy
There is a persistent belief in some corners of marketing that brand perception is primarily determined by visual identity — that if you get the logo right, you get the brand right. This belief is wrong, and it’s been wrong for a long time, and the evidence against it is readily available in the form of every rebrand that failed to change brand perception despite producing excellent new visual work.
Brand perception is determined by experience. What people think and feel about a company is almost entirely determined by their actual interactions with it: the product quality, the customer service, the price-value relationship, the behavior of the company in moments that matter. The visual identity is a trigger that activates whatever associations already exist. If those associations are positive, the logo calls them forward. If they’re negative, the logo calls them forward. Changing the logo doesn’t change the associations — it just gives them a new trigger.
This is why the companies that rebrand most conspicuously — the ones with the most dramatic logo changes and the most extensive brand guidelines — are often the companies with the most serious underlying problems. The rebrand is a kind of organizational displacement activity: energy directed at something visible and controllable (the brand identity) to avoid directing it at something necessary and difficult (the actual organizational problem). As we’ve argued in our analysis of process as product, when the visible activity becomes the goal rather than the means, real change becomes impossible.
The Rebranding Process and Its Discontents
The process by which most rebrands happen is itself a diagnostic. It typically begins with a brief to a branding agency — often a brief that is as vague as we’ve described in our posts on brief-writing and corporate fiction — requesting a new identity that feels “fresh,” “modern,” “bold,” and “true to our values.” The agency presents several directions. A committee reviews them. Stakeholders have opinions. The process takes six to eighteen months and costs between six figures and seven figures depending on the agency and the company’s size. The new identity is launched with a brand film and a manifesto about purpose. And then the company continues to do business exactly as before.
The exceptions — the rebrands that actually accompany real change — are instructive precisely because they’re exceptions. They tend to happen in companies where the leadership change and the brand change happen simultaneously, where the new visual identity is a genuine expression of a new organizational direction that’s already been determined, and where the brand launch is accompanied by product or service changes that give the new identity something real to represent. Those rebrands work. They’re also, notably, not the rebrands that get the most attention, because they’re not trying to use the rebrand to do the organizational work. They’re just trying to communicate change that has already happened.
When to Actually Rebrand (And When Not To)
The question “should we rebrand?” deserves a prior question: what has actually changed? If the honest answer is “not much” or “we want things to change but haven’t changed them yet,” the rebrand is premature at best and dishonest at worst. Change the organization first. Then change the brand to reflect the organization. That sequence is less exciting than the alternative, but it’s the one that actually produces lasting results.
The rebrand as a leading indicator of change rather than a lagging one is almost always a mistake — not because visual identity can’t inspire internal culture (it occasionally can) but because the message sent to employees, customers, and the market by a new logo without new substance is the worst possible: we know we need to change, and our response is to change our logo. That’s not a rebrand. That’s an admission.
Currently working on a rebrand for a company whose actual problem is not its visual identity? Our shop is here for you. No new logo required.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a literary genre that goes largely unrecognized as such, produced in enormous quantities by HR departments and marketing managers across the creative industry, read by millions and believed by almost nobody: the creative job description. A document that manages, simultaneously, to demand everything, promise nothing specific, and describe a person who does not exist in nature. Understanding the creative job description — what it says, what it means, and what it reveals about the organizations that produce them — is an education in the gap between how companies talk about creative work and how they actually think about it.
The standard creative job description has a structure as recognizable as a sonnet. It opens with three to five sentences of brand mythology: “We are a dynamic, innovative company at the intersection of creativity and technology, disrupting the [industry] space with bold ideas and human-centered design.” This section serves no informational purpose whatsoever. It exists to signal that the company has a marketing department and that the marketing department has a brand voice guide. Skip it entirely.
The Responsibilities Section: A Complete Person
The responsibilities section is where the creative job description reveals its essential nature: an attempt to hire one person to do the work of several. The typical creative role description asks for someone who can develop strategy and execute production, who thinks conceptually and delivers technically, who leads creative direction and also handles the day-to-day asset production, who manages client relationships and also manages the internal team, who is a visionary and also a detail-oriented production manager. In what universe does this person exist? In the universe where the company has decided it can afford one senior person instead of the three or four people whose combined work they’re describing.
The unicorn job description — as this specimen is known in recruiting circles — is almost always a symptom of budget constraints being managed through scope inflation. The company cannot or will not pay for the right number of people, so they describe one person with the capabilities of several and hope that someone desperate enough, junior enough, or unaware enough will accept the position without calculating what they’re agreeing to. Some do. Those people typically last eighteen months before leaving for a more reasonably scoped role, at which point the description goes up again, unchanged.
The Requirements Section: The Paradox of Experience
The requirements section introduces a classic paradox that anyone who has applied for creative jobs will recognize immediately. “2-3 years of experience required” attached to a role description that clearly describes the work of someone with eight to ten years of experience. Or the inverse: “10+ years required” for a role with a salary that reflects three. The experience requirements in creative job descriptions are almost never calculated from what the role actually requires. They’re either aspirational (we’d love a very experienced person at this price) or defensive (we want to filter out genuinely junior candidates, though we haven’t thought about what level we actually need).
The software requirements list in creative job descriptions has its own particular pathology. “Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, After Effects, Cinema 4D, and working knowledge of HTML/CSS” for a role that, in practice, will use Figma and Canva and occasionally Photoshop. The exhaustive software list is often copied from a previous job description, which was copied from another previous job description, and has accumulated tools over time the way a drawer accumulates cables — without anyone ever examining whether they’re still needed or connected to anything.
What the Job Description Doesn’t Say
The most revealing thing about any creative job description is what it omits. It almost never says what the team structure actually looks like — whether the hire will have peers, support, or be the sole creative in the department. It almost never says what the creative process looks like — whether there’s a real brief process, what the revision cycle is, how feedback is structured. It almost never says what happened to the previous person in this role — whether they were promoted, left voluntarily, or departed in circumstances the hiring manager prefers not to discuss.
These omissions are not accidental. They are the information that would most help a candidate decide whether the role is right for them — and they’re also the information that would most likely cause a qualified candidate to decline. So they’re left out, and the job description presents a carefully curated version of the opportunity that emphasizes the exciting and omits the structural.
As we’ve noted in our analysis of creative burnout, many of the structural conditions that produce burnout — unclear scope, insufficient support, perpetual urgency — are visible in job descriptions to the experienced reader. “Fast-paced environment” means urgency is the default. “Wearing many hats” means understaffed. “Self-starter” means unsupported. “Passionate about [our industry]” means we pay below market and are hoping intrinsic motivation compensates. These translations are not cynical inventions — they’re empirically derived from the patterns that show up consistently in organizations that use this language.
How to Read a Job Description Like a Professional
The candidate who reads a creative job description literally is the candidate who is most likely to be disappointed. The candidate who reads it as a document revealing the organization’s assumptions, constraints, and blind spots is the candidate who can make an informed decision about whether to apply — and what questions to ask if they do.
The questions worth asking before accepting any creative role: Who does this person report to, and what does that person’s calendar look like? What does a typical week look like, in terms of meeting time versus making time? What was the previous person’s experience in this role? What’s the process when the creative brief changes significantly mid-project?
The answers to these questions tell you more about whether a job will be good for your career and your sanity than anything in the job description itself. The job description is the cover of the book. These questions are the actual story. And as we’ve argued consistently in this journal — from briefs to corporate fiction — the document is rarely the truth. The conversation is.
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por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a special category of professional suffering that doesn’t appear in occupational health literature but is immediately recognized by anyone who has spent more than three months working in a marketing or creative organization. It manifests as a faint but persistent feeling of wasted existence, triggered specifically by being in a meeting that should not be happening. Not a meeting that could be shorter. Not a meeting that could be better run. A meeting that should not exist at all, and which exists anyway, because calling a meeting is the default response to any situation where a decision needs to be made, information needs to be shared, or anyone needs to feel like they’re doing something.
The email-that-became-a-meeting is its purest expression. Someone needed to share information. Instead of writing it down and sending it — a process that would have taken fifteen minutes and produced a permanent, searchable record — they scheduled a thirty-minute slot in eight people’s calendars, consumed four hours of collective time, and produced no documentation whatsoever. The information was shared verbally, understood differently by each of the eight people present, and will need to be re-shared in some form within the next two weeks. This is not productivity. This is the appearance of productivity, which is its more expensive cousin.
Why We Keep Scheduling Meetings We Don’t Need
Understanding the persistence of the unnecessary meeting requires understanding what meetings actually provide beyond their stated purpose. Meetings are social. They create the feeling of collaboration, of collective effort, of shared mission. They are also, in many organizational cultures, proof of work — the calendar full of meetings signals a person who is important, in demand, involved in decisions. The inbox that generates meeting invitations is the inbox of someone who matters.
This means that reducing meetings is not simply a question of efficiency. It’s a question of organizational identity and status signaling. The senior leader who sends an email instead of calling a meeting may be communicating, inadvertently, that the matter isn’t important enough for their time. The manager who cancels a standing weekly team meeting may be perceived as disengaged rather than efficient. These cultural dynamics are real and they’re worth naming, because efficiency arguments alone rarely change meeting cultures. Culture change requires addressing what the meetings are actually doing for the people who call them.
The Taxonomy of Meetings That Shouldn’t Exist
Not all unnecessary meetings are created equal. They cluster into recognizable types that experienced professionals learn to identify, with varying degrees of ability to avoid them.
The Information Transmission Meeting. Someone has information. Instead of writing it down, they gather people to hear them say it. This is the most straightforwardly unnecessary of all meeting types. Information that can be written down should be written down. Writing is faster, searchable, asynchronous, and produces a record. Saying things in a meeting is none of those things. The only argument for the information-transmission meeting is that people don’t read their emails — which, if true in your organization, is a separate and more serious problem that calling more meetings will not solve.
The Alignment Meeting. This is the meeting called when a decision has already been made but needs to be felt to be collective. The alignment meeting is not about making a decision — that happened, usually by one or two people, before the meeting was scheduled. It’s about enrolling everyone else in the decision that’s already been made, while maintaining the fiction that the meeting is where decisions happen. These meetings are politically necessary in many organizations. They are never efficient, and the gap between their stated purpose and their actual purpose is a constant source of low-grade professional dissonance.
The Recurring Meeting That No Longer Has a Reason to Recur. This meeting existed for a reason once. That reason may have changed or disappeared entirely, but the meeting remains on the calendar because nobody has explicitly canceled it and doing so feels like killing something. These meetings accumulate in organizations the way unused subscriptions accumulate in bank accounts — quietly, regularly, draining resources for services no longer needed.
As we’ve argued in our analysis of Agile’s meeting culture problem, the standup that made sense in one context gets copy-pasted into contexts where it makes no sense at all. The ritual outlives its rationale because the rationale was never really the point.
The Real Cost in Creative Work
For creative professionals specifically, meetings carry a cost that doesn’t show up in any calendar calculation: the destruction of deep work time. As we noted in our piece on creative burnout, genuinely original thinking requires extended periods of uninterrupted concentration. A ninety-minute block of focused creative work produces qualitatively different output than three thirty-minute fragments separated by interruptions. A day with four meetings doesn’t have four hours of meeting time and four hours of work time. It has four hours of meeting time and four severely fragmented hours of partial attention.
The creative whose day is full of meetings isn’t working in meetings and working between meetings. They’re attending meetings and recovering from meetings. The net creative output is a fraction of what it would be with the same hours protected. This is not a personal productivity failure — it’s an environmental one, and it’s entirely preventable with organizational decisions that most organizations haven’t made.
What Actually Replaces the Meeting
The anti-meeting case is sometimes misread as an argument for isolation or asynchronous-only work. It isn’t. Real creative collaboration requires real-time interaction — the kind where ideas build on each other rapidly, where questions and answers happen in sequence, where the energy of a room (physical or virtual) creates conditions for thinking that don’t exist in a document or a thread. That kind of meeting is worth protecting precisely because it’s rare and valuable.
What replaces the unnecessary meeting is discipline about purpose. Before scheduling anything, a single question: what will exist after this meeting that doesn’t exist before it? If the answer is “people will have heard some information,” write the information down and send it. If the answer is “we will have reached a decision,” check whether that decision actually requires synchronous discussion or whether it requires one person to make a call and communicate it. If there’s no clear answer, the meeting probably shouldn’t happen.
The organizations that have genuinely reduced their meeting load — and there are some, though they’re not the majority — have almost universally reported the same result: people feel more productive, creative output improves, and the meetings that do happen are better because they’re the meetings that actually needed to happen. That’s not a coincidence. It’s just what happens when you remove the noise and let the signal through.
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