by Ber | Apr 15, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
The activation was immersive. It said so right there in the brief: “a fully immersive brand experience that brings our values to life in a tangible, shareable, emotionally resonant moment.” The agency spent three weeks on the concept. Another two on production design. The CEO approved it on slide twelve of a forty-four-slide deck, which she got through in about eleven minutes because there was another call starting.
On the day, the pop-up opened at eleven. The influencers arrived between twelve and two, posted their content, and left. By four o’clock, foot traffic had slowed to what the activation manager described, in her internal report, as “intimate.” The brand’s Instagram got 340 new followers. The experiential budget was €85,000.
That’s €250 per follower, if you’re doing the math. Don’t do the math. It only makes things worse.
The Mythology of “Brand Experience”
At some point in the mid-2010s, the marketing industry collectively decided that advertising wasn’t enough. People didn’t want to be talked at; they wanted to be immersed. They wanted to feel the brand. Touch it. Smell it, ideally, because olfactory memory is apparently the new brand metric nobody can actually measure but everyone claims is deeply important.
This was not entirely wrong. Genuine brand experiences — the kind that create actual memories, that connect people to a product in a way that outlasts the content — do exist. Apple stores are an experience. Nike’s flagship spaces function as something between retail and pilgrimage. The ones that work, work because they’re built around the product and the person, not around what looks good in a pitch deck at slide twelve.
The ones that don’t work are built around what the marketing director saw at Cannes and wanted to replicate on a fraction of the budget in a regional city where the target audience does not typically attend pop-up activations on Tuesday afternoons.
The gap between these two things is where most experiential marketing actually lives.
The Eight Stages of an Experiential Campaign Nobody Attends
Stage one: the brief arrives. It contains phrases like “phygital,” “co-creation space,” and “shareable moments.” Nobody defines any of these. Everyone nods.
Stage two: the agency comes back with a concept. It’s genuinely quite good, and it would work beautifully in a city of eight million people with an engaged consumer culture and an established appetite for brand activations. There’s a brief moment of cognitive dissonance when someone notices the location is a mid-sized city with three competing events that weekend, but this passes.
Stage three: budget negotiations. Everything good gets trimmed. The custom-built installation becomes a rented tent with branded panels. The paid DJ set becomes a Spotify playlist. The “influencer seeding programme” becomes hoping that three accounts the agency already works with show up and post.
Stage four: production. Things go wrong that nobody talks about publicly. The branded signage arrives late. One of the key elements doesn’t work outdoors in April, which is — and this is important — when April weather applies. There are workarounds. The workarounds are also branded.
Stage five: the event. The footfall numbers are not what the brief predicted. They are not close to what the brief predicted. Someone finds a hopeful way to frame this as “quality over quantity” in the moment, and it works because everyone in the room wants it to work.
Stage six: the content. The content is good, actually. The photographer was excellent. The branded moments, when staged carefully with the right light and the right people, look exactly as intended. On Instagram, the event appears to have been a triumph. This is, depending on your relationship with reality, either reassuring or deeply disturbing.
Stage seven: the debrief. The deck focuses on sentiment, share of voice, and earned media. The cost-per-reach figure is presented without a denominator. The word “learnings” appears eleven times. Nobody mentions the €85,000.
Stage eight: the proposal for next year. It has the word “immersive” in it. We begin again.
What Experiential Marketing Actually Requires to Work
The irony is that experiential marketing, when it’s honest with itself, can be genuinely powerful. Humans are wired for experience. Memory encoding is stronger when multiple senses are engaged. Brand associations formed in real, physical moments tend to stick in ways that digital impressions don’t. The neuroscience is real.
What’s also real is the operational complexity of creating experiences worth having. And this is where the category tends to collapse under its own ambition.
A genuine brand experience requires an audience that’s motivated to show up. Not incentivised — motivated. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between a full room and a room full of people who showed up for the free thing and left immediately after getting it. You need a product or idea compelling enough that attending feels like a choice rather than an obligation. You need enough budget to execute the concept properly, not just approximately. And you need to be honest about what “success” means before you start, rather than defining it retroactively based on what actually happened.
If your experiential brief doesn’t have real, pre-agreed KPIs — not vanity metrics, actual business outcomes — you might want to revisit ego KPIs and why they kill campaigns. And if the brief that led to this activation was the problem from the start, there’s a longer conversation to be had about the brief nobody reads and why the process is broken long before the tent goes up.
The Honest Calculus
Here’s the uncomfortable version: most mid-market experiential campaigns would deliver better ROI as targeted digital campaigns, a well-seeded product drop, or a genuinely useful piece of content. Not because experience doesn’t matter, but because experience done poorly is worse than no experience at all.
A forgettable pop-up doesn’t just fail to build brand love; it actively signals to everyone who shows up that the brand doesn’t quite understand them. Forty-three people now have a lived memory of a branded tent that smelled like rain and played a playlist that faded in and out. This is not the emotional resonance the brief described.
The brands that do experiential well treat it as an investment in people who already believe in them — an amplification of an existing relationship rather than an acquisition play. They scale to reality rather than to ambition. They measure what they can actually measure. And they have the discipline to say, sometimes, that the money would do more good elsewhere.
If you’re building a brand that wants to create real experiences — the kind people actually remember — KPI Shark can help you set metrics that make those experiences accountable to something real. Not feelings. Not follows. Actual outcomes. Find it at nobriefsclub.com/shop, along with everything else we make for people done with pretending that a branded tent in the rain counts as brand building.
A Note on the Forty-Three People
Here’s the thing about the forty-three people who actually attended the activation nobody experienced: some of them really liked it. One of them was already a customer and left more committed. One of them was a journalist who didn’t write about it but remembered the brand three months later when writing something unrelated and gave it a kind mention. One of them was twelve years old and ate four free cookies and had a genuinely good afternoon.
Experiences, even imperfect ones, do things we don’t always measure. This doesn’t justify the €85,000. But it does mean that the postmortem shouldn’t only count the columns.
The problem with experiential marketing isn’t that it doesn’t work. The problem is that it’s used to justify decisions that were made before the brief was written, executed against budgets that can’t sustain the concept, and measured against metrics designed to obscure rather than illuminate what actually happened.
The next time someone pitches you an “immersive brand experience,” ask two questions before you approve slide twelve. First: who is coming, and why would they? Second: what does success look like in numbers we haven’t defined yet, and can we agree on them now?
The answers will tell you everything you need to know about whether to build the tent.
by Ber | Apr 13, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
You had six weeks. You briefed strategists, researchers, copywriters, art directors. You ran focus groups. You refined the concept three times, killed two executions that were “almost there,” and finally landed on something that everyone in the room agreed was genuinely great — smart, surprising, emotionally resonant, brand-right. You launched it with a full-funnel media plan and a press release that used the phrase “culture-defining.”
The average person who saw your ad spent 0.8 seconds on it before swiping to a video of a dog failing to catch a frisbee.
Welcome to the attention economy — where your best creative idea competes not just with your category competitors, but with every piece of content produced by every human being on earth, plus a rapidly expanding catalog of AI-generated content that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t have feelings about creative integrity, and doesn’t need a focus group.
The currency here is attention. And you are perpetually broke.
How We Got Here: A Brief History of Shrinking Windows
The attention economy isn’t a new concept — Herbert Simon was writing about “a wealth of information creating a poverty of attention” in 1971 — but the velocity at which it’s accelerating is genuinely new, and genuinely disorienting for anyone who was trained in a world where you could hold a consumer’s gaze for thirty seconds.
Television advertising worked because there was no alternative. You watched what was on, or you watched nothing. The content scarcity created captive audiences, and captive audiences were good for brand building. Then cable fragmented the audience. Then the internet fragmented it further. Then social media turned every consumer into a publisher, which meant the volume of content competing for attention went from finite to effectively infinite. Then mobile put infinite content in everyone’s pocket, at all times, in every context.
The result is what researchers describe as “continuous partial attention” — a state where we’re perpetually half-engaged with multiple stimuli, never fully present with any of them. Microsoft famously reported that average human attention span had dropped to eight seconds in 2015 (shorter than a goldfish), though that specific claim was methodologically contested. What isn’t contested is the behavioral data: scroll speeds are increasing, video completion rates are declining, and the window in which you have to establish relevance before someone moves on is measurable in fractions of a second.
Eight seconds used to be the punch line. Now it’s the aspiration.
The Three-Second Rule (And Why It’s Already Generous)
Most platform data now suggests that effective hook windows for social content run between one and three seconds. Not the full ad. Not the whole message. The hook — the moment that answers the unconscious question every viewer is asking as they scroll: is this for me, and is this worth my time?
If you don’t answer that question in the first three seconds, you’ve lost. They won’t reach your clever mid-point twist. They won’t see your CTA. They won’t encounter the brand logo you placed at the fifteen-second mark following best practices that were already outdated when someone wrote them.
This creates a structural problem for quality creative. The creative choices that make advertising memorable — nuance, narrative development, earned emotional payoff, visual sophistication — require time to work. A thirty-second film that builds to a beautiful conclusion is a masterpiece that most people will never finish watching. A three-second visual punch is something you can survive, but it’s not always something you can build a brand with.
The industry’s response to this has largely been to make content shorter and more immediately stimulating — faster cuts, louder openings, text overlays, captions, pattern interrupts. Which works, in the sense that it stops thumbs. But it creates its own problem: if everyone is using the same techniques to stop thumbs, the techniques stop working. The arms race of attention capture is self-defeating, because the escalating stimulation trains audiences to require even more stimulation, which makes every subsequent piece of content need to escalate further.
It’s a loop. And nobody wins it sustainably.
What the Research Actually Shows About Attention and Memory
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the news is not entirely bad for people who care about quality.
Attention and memory are not the same thing. The cognitive research on advertising (and there’s a lot of it — this field has been studied seriously since the 1960s) consistently shows that emotional engagement drives long-term memory encoding far more effectively than mere exposure does. You can see something for ten seconds and retain it for years if it produces a genuine emotional response. You can see something for thirty seconds a hundred times and retain almost nothing if the emotional engagement is flat.
The attention economy condition — where your three-second window is real and unmovable — doesn’t necessarily mean you need to abandon quality. It means you need to front-load emotional resonance. The question shifts from “how do we tell this story?” to “how do we make someone feel something real in the first second, and then deliver on that promise?”
Brands that are doing this well tend to have one thing in common: they’re not trying to explain themselves to strangers. They’re making work that speaks immediately and specifically to people who already have a relationship with the brand — even a nascent one. They’re not fighting for attention from everyone. They’re being magnetic to someone. The viral content that succeeds almost always has this quality: it feels intensely, specifically made for a certain kind of person, which is exactly why it spreads beyond them.
Reach vs. Resonance: The Trade-Off Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
The attention economy creates an uncomfortable choice that most marketing plans try to avoid making: reach or resonance. You can have wide and shallow, or narrow and deep. Trying to have both — the mass reach of broadcast media with the personal resonance of direct communication — is an expensive fantasy that produces content that’s mediocre at both.
Wide and shallow looks like: a digital media buy that gets you 50 million impressions at a CPM that suggests you’re reaching people who are not paying attention. The kind of advertising that gets reported as “50 million impressions” in the quarterly deck and exists in no one’s memory three weeks later. (See also: ego KPIs.)
Narrow and deep looks like: content made for a specific person, in a specific context, in a voice that feels like it comes from someone who understands them. It doesn’t scale easily. It requires actually knowing your audience rather than having a demographic profile of them. It can’t be optimized toward an algorithm without being corrupted by the process of optimization.
The brands that are building durable relationships in an attention-scarce environment tend to make the narrow-and-deep choice deliberately, even when the optics of smaller reach numbers create internal pressure. They’ve decided that being remembered by someone matters more than being seen by everyone.
Designing for a World That Won’t Give You Three Seconds
The practical question is how you build creative work that functions in this environment without abandoning everything that makes creative work worth doing.
A few things that the evidence actually supports: Distinctive brand assets — specific visual or sonic codes that are immediately recognizable — are worth investing in because they do heavy lifting in the first second without requiring active attention. Byron Sharp’s work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute documents this compellingly. If your first frame contains something your audience has learned to associate with you, they’ve been exposed to your brand at the neural level even if they swipe immediately. System 1 does the work.
Sound-off optimization matters more than most creative teams want to admit. Over 85% of social video is watched without sound in public contexts. If your creative concept depends on audio to make sense, it doesn’t work for most of the people who will see it. Design for silence first, treat audio as enhancement.
And perhaps most importantly: stop trying to win an arms race you cannot win. The brands that obsess over stopping the scroll end up making content that feels designed to stop scrolls, which is a kind of creative that consumers have become expert at identifying and dismissing. Make something that’s genuinely good for the person you’re trying to reach — something that gives them something: a laugh, a truth, a piece of useful information, an emotional moment — and the attention problem becomes slightly less zero-sum.
You probably still won’t get three seconds. But you might get a second look. In the attention economy, that’s the new six-figure campaign idea.
If you’re building creative work for a world that has the attention span of an over-caffeinated hummingbird, Fuck The Brief is the tool that helps you strip your thinking down to what actually matters — so you stop hiding good ideas inside long documents that nobody finishes reading. Because the brief has the same attention problem as your audience. Everything at NoBriefs, for creatives who are tired of wasting time.
For the ideas you will otherwise lose
We make a No Idea Left notebook for the ideas that arrive at the worst possible moment. Paper still beats a notes app at 3am.
by Ber | Apr 13, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Somewhere in a boardroom right now, a CMO is presenting a slide deck. The headline reads: “Q3 Brand Performance.” The first chart shows reach: 4.2 million. The second shows impressions: 18.7 million. The third shows follower growth: up 12%. Everyone nods. Someone says “great work.” The meeting ends. Nobody asks what any of it meant for the business.
This is ego KPI culture in its natural habitat — and it is absolutely thriving.
Ego KPIs are the metrics that feel good to report, sound impressive in presentations, and have roughly the same relationship to business results as a horoscope has to actual astronomy. They’re the numbers you track not because they predict revenue or retention or customer lifetime value, but because they’re big, they’re positive, and nobody in the room is going to push back on 18 million impressions.
The creative and marketing industries are drowning in them. And the reason nobody fixes it is that fixing it would require admitting, out loud, that the last three quarters of reporting didn’t actually prove anything.
A Taxonomy of Metrics That Measure Pride
Let’s be precise about what we’re dealing with. Ego KPIs typically fall into a few categories, and learning to spot them is the first step to professional survival.
Volume metrics: Impressions, reach, total posts published, email volume sent. These measure output, not outcome. A campaign that reaches 10 million people and moves none of them is not ten times better than a campaign that reaches one million and converts at 5%. It’s just louder.
Vanity engagement metrics: Likes, comments (when unanalyzed), shares, follower counts. Social media platforms invented the like button to create behavioral loops, not to give marketers meaningful data. The fact that a post got 3,000 likes tells you that people were willing to tap a button while scrolling at 11pm. It does not tell you they’d buy anything, remember your brand, or recommend you to anyone.
Share of voice without context: We’re mentioned more than our competitors! Great. Are the mentions positive? Are they from people who buy things? Are they converting? Share of voice untethered from sentiment and downstream behavior is just a popularity contest metric with a more respectable name.
Awards and rankings: We won a Cannes Lion! We were named to the Top 50 Most Creative Brands list! These feel extraordinary and sometimes they’re genuinely meaningful — but they measure peer recognition, not customer behavior. The two overlap less often than the industry would like to admit.
Why Smart People Keep Reporting Them
This is the part that requires some intellectual honesty, because the people presenting ego KPIs are not stupid. They’re often very good at what they do. So why do they keep reporting metrics that don’t prove anything?
First: because the alternative is hard. Tying marketing activity to business outcomes requires a measurement infrastructure most companies don’t have. You need attribution models, incrementality testing, cohort analysis, and a CFO willing to accept methodological uncertainty. That’s a much harder sell than “we got 18 million impressions.”
Second: because leadership often rewards the wrong things. If your CMO gets applauded for reach numbers in every QBR, optimizing for reach is a rational career decision, even if it’s a bad business one. Incentive structures shape behavior, and most organizations’ incentive structures were designed by people who didn’t fully understand what they were measuring.
Third: because ego KPIs are safe. Big numbers are hard to argue with in a room full of people who don’t want to have the argument. Reporting that your campaign had 18.7 million impressions is much less vulnerable than reporting that you drove 340 incremental conversions, because incremental conversions invite the question: “Is that good? How do we know that was us?” Impressions don’t invite that question. Impressions just sit there, large and unchallenged.
The Business Cost of Measuring the Wrong Things
The damage isn’t abstract. When teams optimize for metrics that don’t connect to business outcomes, they make systematically bad decisions — and they don’t know they’re doing it.
A social team that’s judged on engagement rate will optimize for content that gets engagement, which often means emotionally reactive content, controversy-adjacent content, or content that’s entertaining but brand-neutral. A content team measured on page views will chase topics with search volume, whether or not those topics attract anyone who might ever buy the product. An advertising team measured on CPM will find the cheapest inventory — which is cheap for reasons, usually because it’s seen by people who are not paying attention.
Meanwhile, the actual content strategy — the one that was supposed to connect brand activity to commercial outcomes — gathers dust in a Google Drive folder because nobody’s KPIs require them to care about it.
The cumulative effect is a marketing function that is permanently busy and perpetually under-resourced for accountability. There’s always more content to produce, more campaigns to run, more reports to file. The question of whether any of it is working gets perpetually deferred to the next quarter’s review, which will also feature impressive-sounding numbers, which will also fail to answer the question.
What Good Measurement Actually Looks Like
Good metrics have a simple property: they change when something important to the business changes, and they don’t change when nothing important has changed. That’s it. That’s the test.
Customer acquisition cost: changes when your marketing efficiency changes. Relevant. Customer lifetime value: changes when your retention and expansion motion improves. Relevant. Conversion rate by channel: changes when your targeting or messaging quality changes. Relevant. Revenue influenced by marketing (with a credible attribution methodology): changes when marketing is working. Relevant and often uncomfortable to measure, which is a good sign you’re on to something.
Contrast with impressions, which can go up or down because of algorithm changes, seasonality, budget fluctuations, or a post that happened to go mildly viral because someone famous accidentally liked it. The metric is noisy relative to signal. You can’t manage what you can’t trust, and you can’t trust a metric that responds to things you don’t control.
None of this means brand metrics are worthless. Brand awareness, consideration, and preference are real things that influence purchase behavior — the research on this is solid, going back decades. But measuring them requires brand tracking studies, not social media dashboards. It requires longitudinal data, not weekly reports. Most organizations don’t have the patience or the budget for real brand measurement, so they substitute reach and impressions and call it the same thing. It isn’t.
How to Start the Conversation Without Getting Fired
If you’re reading this in a state of recognition — if you’ve been presenting ego KPIs and quietly knowing they don’t prove what you claim they prove — the question isn’t whether to change. The question is how to do it without triggering a defensive reaction from everyone whose job security is currently tied to the existing metrics.
Start by adding, not replacing. Don’t walk into the next QBR and announce that impressions are meaningless. Instead, add one business-outcome metric alongside the existing metrics and explain why you’re tracking it. Make the connection explicit: “We’re tracking this because it tells us whether our activity is actually moving purchase intent.” Let the new metric build credibility over time.
Then let the data do the arguing. Over several quarters, if the business-outcome metrics are moving in ways that correlate with marketing activity while the vanity metrics move independently of anything meaningful, that story tells itself. You don’t have to win the argument in a room. You have to outlast the room.
And if the organization genuinely cannot have a conversation about measurement quality — if suggesting that impressions aren’t a business outcome is treated as an attack on the team — that’s important information about where you are. The report that nobody questions is often the organization that nobody’s questioning. Sometimes the metrics are just a symptom.
If you’re tired of reporting numbers that sound impressive and mean nothing, KPI Shark was built for you. It’s the no-bullshit guide to the metrics that actually connect your work to your business — so the next time someone asks if the campaign worked, you can answer with something better than “18.7 million impressions.” Find it and everything else at NoBriefs.
Wearable version
There is a KPI Shark Tee for people who have sat through this one time too many. For people who kill KPIs, not clients.
by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
The “unsubscribe” link is light gray, 8 point, positioned below the fold inside a footer that also contains the legal notices and the recycling policy. Clicking it takes you to a preference center with fourteen toggles, all set to “on,” with a “save changes” button requiring you to scroll. The “save changes” button is teal. The “keep all preferences” button is blue and slightly larger. The copy says “We’d hate to lose you!” in a font trying very hard to seem friendly. This is not an accident. This is a system someone designed, tested, and optimized. Welcome to dark patterns — the discipline where UX talent goes to work against users instead of for them.
What a Dark Pattern Is (And Isn’t)
A dark pattern is a UI design choice that manipulates users into doing something they didn’t intend or wouldn’t have chosen with full information. The term was coined by UX designer Harry Brignull in 2010 and has since been taxonomized into a depressing list of subtypes: roach motel, confirmshaming, trick questions, hidden costs, privacy zuckering, misdirection, and friends spam, among others. Dark patterns are not poor UX. Poor UX is a sign-up flow that’s confusing because nobody tested it. Dark patterns are a sign-up flow that’s confusing because someone tested it and discovered that confusion increases conversions. The distinction is intentionality. Poor UX is incompetence. Dark patterns are competence deployed against the user’s interests in service of a metric. This is why dark patterns survive in organizations that claim to be user-centric: they work. In the narrow, short-term, easily measurable sense that a conversion rate is a number and up is better than down — they work. The long-term effects — brand trust erosion, customer resentment, regulatory attention, churn — are harder to attribute and therefore easier to ignore.
The Conversion Rate That Hides the Real Number
Every dark pattern has a conversion story. The pre-checked marketing newsletter box increases email list size by 23%. The cancellation flow that requires a phone call reduces cancellation rate by 40%. The “confirmshaming” button (“No thanks, I don’t want to save money”) increases click-through by 15%. These numbers are real. What’s not being measured: how many users noticed and resented the pre-checked box? How many people who couldn’t cancel via phone just stopped using the product and never came back? How many people who clicked the confirmshaming copy felt vaguely manipulated and talked about it to someone who then didn’t sign up? The KPI Shark on your desk is watching this. It knows the difference between a metric that measures success and a metric that measures a proxy for success. Conversion rate is a proxy. Lifetime value is closer. Actual trust is what neither fully captures.
The Regulatory Moment
Dark patterns are having a regulatory moment. GDPR, DSA, and FTC guidance have made cookie consent manipulations and pre-selected commercial agreements legally precarious in many jurisdictions. Class action suits over cancellation flows requiring a phone call. Regulatory guidance on deceptive subscription interfaces. The apparatus of law is catching up to the apparatus of conversion optimization, slowly and imperfectly, but catching up. The creative industry is not neutral in this. Agencies and designers build these interfaces when clients commission them. The brief says “optimize the cancellation flow” and someone executes it. The responsibility is distributed across the funnel, which means accountability rarely lands anywhere. Everyone is just doing their job.
The Design Argument Nobody Makes in the Brief
Here’s the argument that should be made in the brief and almost never is: ethical UX converts better in the long run. Not because users are consciously rewarding ethical behavior, but because trust is a prerequisite for the behaviors that generate long-term value — repeat purchase, word of mouth, brand preference in a competitive set. Dark patterns optimize for a transaction at the cost of the relationship. For businesses where the relationship matters (most of them), this is a bad trade. The counterargument is that long-term effects are hard to attribute and short-term metrics are easy to report. That’s also why the creative and design industry exists: to make the argument for what works over time, not just what converts this week. That’s the brief worth writing. The Fuck The Brief poster on your wall agrees. The unsubscribe button is there — it’s just very, very small. Wear something that’s on the right side of the screen: nobriefsclub.com/shop.
by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
It’s 2026 and we can now talk about the metaverse campaigns with the clinical distance of a retrospective. The brand activations in virtual worlds. The NFT-gated experiences. The branded “spaces” in Decentraland and Roblox that cost six figures to build and averaged 200 visitors in the first week, 40 in the second, and 3 on any given Tuesday in perpetuity. The Chief Metaverse Officers hired in 2022 and quietly reclassified as “Head of Digital Experience” by 2024. The press releases celebrating “immersive brand worlds” that nobody visited. This is the post-mortem nobody wrote at the time because writing it at the time would have required admitting something.
What the Brief Said
The brief said: “We want to be present where our audience is going.” It was written in 2022, based on a revenue projection statistic from an analyst with a financial interest in the metaverse. It cited the Facebook rebrand to Meta as evidence that the technology was becoming mainstream — an interesting reading of an event that now looks more like a company rebranding to escape a PR crisis than a signal of cultural tectonic shift. The target audience was 18-34. Research showed that 18-34 year-olds were gaming, which was interpreted to mean they were a metaverse audience, which was interpreted to mean they wanted branded virtual experiences from cosmetics companies and financial services firms. The research was doing more work than research can do.
What the Build Looked Like
The virtual experience had a lobby, because virtual experiences needed lobbies. The lobby had a branded texture on the floor and a logo on the wall and ambient music that felt uncanny in spatial audio. There were three zones: an “exploration” zone (a room with clickable objects), an “experience” zone (a branded video played), and a “community” zone (nobody was ever in it). The UX required users to download a client, create an account, select an avatar, navigate a 3D environment with controls that assumed gaming familiarity, and then find the brand’s space inside a virtual world containing thousands of other empty spaces. The conversion from “person who read press release” to “person who entered the brand space” was approximately 1.2%. This was reported as a success because the absolute number was in the thousands and percentages were not included in the deck. The KPI Shark would have asked about dwell time. Nobody tracked dwell time.
Why It Failed (The Version That’s Actually True)
The metaverse campaign failed for a simple reason: it was a technology solution in search of a behavior that didn’t exist. People were not waiting for brands to create virtual spaces. They were gaming — in dedicated platforms with their own social dynamics, aesthetic conventions, and communities. Grafting a brand experience onto that context requires either deep integration with the native culture of the platform or an experience compelling enough to pull people out of their existing behavior patterns. Nobody did either of those things. They built lobbies. The underlying dynamic was familiar: a technology gets media coverage, the coverage generates executive FOMO, the FOMO generates a brief, the brief generates a campaign, the campaign generates a press release, and the press release generates the next round of coverage. The loop has nothing to do with user behavior. It has everything to do with how the industry manages executive anxiety about missing the next thing.
What We Learned (Or Should Have)
The post-metaverse lesson is not “don’t innovate.” It’s: before you build the space, demonstrate the demand. Before you build the experience, understand the behavior. The brands that did interesting things in gaming-adjacent spaces — not metaverse activations, but actual integrations with gaming culture, with communities that already existed — mostly did them quietly, without press releases, with creative teams who actually played games. They were not announced as metaverse strategies. But they generated actual engagement with actual people, which is the metric the KPI Shark has always cared about. The brief said the metaverse was where the audience was. The audience was somewhere else entirely. Get the merch for people who’ve been there: nobriefsclub.com/shop.
by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
The brief says: “We want this to go viral.” The campaign budget is €40,000. The timeline is three weeks. The approval chain involves seven stakeholders including a regional compliance officer in Düsseldorf.
This campaign will not go viral.
Not because virality is impossible — it’s demonstrably possible — but because the conditions that produce it are structurally incompatible with the conditions described above. Understanding why matters if you’re going to have an honest conversation about social content strategy.
What Virality Actually Is
Viral content is content that generates more shares than it receives — where each person who sees it shares it with enough people that the distribution compounds. It requires an emotional response strong enough to overcome the friction of sharing: surprise, delight, outrage, identification so precise it feels personal.
The emotion must be immediate and intense. Content that makes you think “that’s quite interesting” doesn’t go viral. Content that makes you think “I need to send this to four specific people right now” does.
Why Committees Kill Virality
The content most likely to produce a share-driving emotional response is content that takes a position, expresses a genuine point of view, or does something unexpected. These are precisely the qualities that approval processes systematically remove. By the time seven stakeholders have reviewed a piece of content, the interesting thing about it has usually been replaced with something that offends nobody — which means it also moves nobody.
Tracking this with KPI Shark is its own kind of dark comedy: the engagement rate drops in direct proportion to the number of approval rounds. This is an empirical observation, not a hypothesis.
What You Can Actually Plan For
You can plan for content that is consistently useful, consistently entertaining, or consistently distinctive. These are achievable with process, budget, and a clear point of view. Over time, a brand with consistent useful or entertaining content builds the kind of audience that amplifies its work organically — which looks like virality from the outside but is actually just compounding quality.
You cannot plan for a single piece of content to exceed your distribution by a factor of 100. You can create conditions that make it more likely by building an engaged audience, having a genuine point of view, and having the organizational courage to publish things that are actually interesting.
The rest is luck. Planning for luck is not a content strategy. It’s a wish list.
The full toolkit at nobriefsclub.com/shop.
