Silence, Brand! LIVE
Welcome to Silence, Brand! [https://silencebrand.substack.com/], a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber [https://silencebrand.substack.com/subscribe]. In this week’s Silence, Brand! Live [https://silencebrand.substack.com/s/silence-brand-live], the gang opened from Paris (sort of), debated whether everyone outside Los Angeles should just say they’re from Los Angeles if anybody asks. Then we wandered through the culture awards, creator-led television, hockey forgiveness arcs, FIFA censorship, and Instagram’s ongoing quest to convince people to pay for things they previously got for free. 🦀 Silence, Brand! Live [https://silencebrand.substack.com/s/silence-brand-live] is powered by Ecamm [https://www.ecamm.com/silencebrand/], a live streaming and video production tool that basically turns your laptop into a full-on studio by switching cameras, dropping graphics, sharing screens, and pushing your stream to multiple platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once without everything catching on fire. If you’ve ever wondered how we’re juggling all of this in real time, it’s Ecamm doing the heavy lifting. Get 15% off your first purchase at Ecamm with promo code SILENCEBRAND [https://www.ecamm.com/silencebrand/] 🦀 Topics on the table: The Las Culturistas Culture Awards remain one of the internet’s greatest inventions. [https://deadline.com/2026/06/las-culturistas-culture-awards-2026-winners-bravo-1236958830/] https://deadline.com/2026/06/las-culturistas-culture-awards-2026-winners-bravo-1236958830/The crew unpacked the second televised Las Culturistas Culture Awards, hosted by Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. While traditional award shows continue to struggle for relevance, Las Culturistas thrives by creating delightfully absurd categories like the “Eva Longoria Award for Tiny Woman Huge Impact” and “Tokyo Disneysea Land of Great Beauty Award”, proving that culture coverage is often better when it’s a little unhinged. The creator-to-TV pipeline is accelerating. [https://blog.youtube/creator-and-artist-stories/julian-shapiro-barnum-outside-tonight-youtube-premiere/] The group discussed the premiere of Julian Shapiro-Barnum’s new late-night style show, Outside Tonight, and what it means for the future of entertainment. Alongside the success of the Las Culturistas awards, it felt like another example of internet-native creators rebuilding traditional television formats from the ground up. Rather than networks creating culture and clipping it for social later, creators are building audiences online first and then expanding into larger formats. The conversation explored how late night may be experiencing a revival by borrowing the pacing, personality, and audience expectations of the internet. Older late-night formats often succeeded because they brought together people who wouldn’t normally share space, and how Julian’s work feels positioned to revive some of that energy. Traditional distinctions between television, YouTube, podcasts, and social content are becoming increasingly meaningless as creators move fluidly between formats. The Pavvy the Goalie redemption arc. We revisited the hockey creator saga Silence, Brand! covered earlier this year [https://silencebrand.substack.com/p/niche-tiktok-discourse-bauer-vs-pavvy?r=qhxdz&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true]. After Bauer Hockey famously sent Pavvy a cease-and-desist over publicly discussing products from a catalog distributed to creators, she has now announced that she’ll once again include Bauer products in future reviews. People immediately began speculating whether there was a sponsorship deal, a secret agreement, or some hidden motivation behind the decision. The idea that someone might simply move on and forgive a brand felt suspiciously foreign in today’s internet environment. Online culture has become so conditioned to outrage cycles and rage bait content that genuine forgiveness now feels unusual. The internet may have reached a point where kindness itself looks suspicious. Levi’s found a World Cup loophole. [https://www.fastcompany.com/91559785/levis-logo-coverup-fifa-world-cup-stadium-brand-win] One of the biggest brand wins of the week came from Levi’s, whose stadium signage became partially covered due to FIFA’s strict sponsorship rules. Rather than treating it as a limitation, Levi’s transformed the censorship into a campaign, demonstrating just how recognizable the brand remains even without its full logo or name visible. The crew praised Levi’s for understanding its own brand equity [https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZr9uZCsEPn/]. Between covered stadium logos, blank signage, and creative social content, the campaign effectively turned “nothing to see here” [https://www.tiktok.com/@floadvertising/video/7651823296547179790?_r=1&_t=ZT-97JwbTkBrji] into something everyone wanted to talk about. Gillette [https://www.instagram.com/p/DZsenMUkh5w/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D] earned points for a playful execution that imagined shaving cream covering part of its stadium logo, cleverly riffing on the same censorship conversation while finding a low-stakes way to participate in the cultural moment. Instagram keeps adding features. [https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-instagram-plus] https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-instagram-plusThe crew dug into several recent Instagram updates, including the ability to add individual captions to slides within a carousel [https://www.instagram.com/p/DZu7Q-gm3Ms/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&img_index=1]. While the functionality has interesting storytelling potential, the group questioned whether average users will even realize it exists. Does every image in a photo dump need its own caption defeats the entire purpose of a photo dump? Sometimes mystery is the point. While opinions were mixed on some updates, the ability to rearrange posts on a profile grid [https://www.fastcompany.com/91555742/instagram-is-finally-letting-you-rearrange-your-profile-grid-heres-how-to-do-it]received genuine praise. For the small but passionate community that still cares deeply about Instagram aesthetics, this one felt useful. Instagram Plus enters the villa. The group reviewed Instagram’s growing subscription offering, including features like story rewatch metrics, profile customization, and story prioritization. Perhaps the most debated feature was the ability to see how many times stories have been rewatched. While Instagram isn’t revealing who rewatched them, the crew questioned whether surfacing this information simply encourages more obsessive and anxiety-inducing behavior. What would actually make people pay for Instagram? The team brainstormed features that might justify a subscription. Chronological feeds, follower management tools, and the return of square grids all emerged as more compelling possibilities than animated hearts and extended stories. That’s the episode: culture awards, creator television, hockey forgiveness, FIFA censorship, Instagram subscriptions, and a healthy amount of skepticism about features designed to make us care even more about who watched our stories. Our Lives are now available as podcasts on Apple Music [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/silence-brand-live/id1886769042] and Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/3dFjVla0Frvhqp9I9UEcmM?si=b5c440beb61b4cc9].¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like and subscribe if you don’t want to look at us while we yap. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan Benson [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-benson/] • Dayna Castillo [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynabeck/] • Dejaih Smith [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dejaih-smith/] • Benton Williams [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bntn/] • Janine Davis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/qwnjanine/] Our team of award-winning brand marketers and culture experts trawls the depths of the social internet, catching trends as they bubble up, so you’re prepared when they surface. In addition to our newsletter, we offer bespoke cultural intelligence services for agencies and in-house teams, providing brand-tailored reports and insights to equip partners with the tools (and taste) to stay culturally fluent in a world that never stops posting. For all media pitches, service inquiries, story pitches and anything related to this here newsletter, hit us up at: editor@silencebrand.net [editor@silencebrand.net] 🦀 Follow our LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/silencebrand] for updates and occasional shitposts. Get full access to Silence, Brand! at silencebrand.substack.com/subscribe [https://silencebrand.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
21 episodios
Comentarios
0Sé la primera persona en comentar
¡Regístrate ahora y únete a la comunidad de Silence, Brand! LIVE!