Welcome to The Weekly Feed.

This report is packed with the latest social platform news, pop culture moments, and brand wins you need to know. Go ahead and get click-happy, send it to your work bestie, and use these trends to inspire your brand's next move.

Discourse & Discussion

Disrupting B2B marketing through broad cultural content.

Ramp recently launched a new mini social series featuring a high-profile talent lineup built around a surprisingly bold premise.

As a financial operations and spend management platform competing against brands like Brex, BILL Spend & Expense, Rippling, Expensify, and SAP Concur, Ramp has chosen to differentiate itself by dramatically broadening its audience. Rather than adhering to conventional B2B SaaS playbooks, their marketing strategy reflects a core belief: business-to-business marketing doesn't have to be dull.

While overall financial impact remains internal, Ramp’s creative approach has driven a 90% YoY increase in social engagement and an 80% YoY increase in Google search traffic.

Tips for brands:
  • Beyond hyper-targeted data: Relying solely on narrow target-audience data often leads to standard product comparisons. Broad, creative-first plays generate earned reach through shares, reposts, news coverage, and word-of-mouth viral momentum that ultimately filters back down to decision-makers.
  • Competing for feed attention, not category attention: Content does not exist in a vacuum alongside competitors; it competes directly with breaking news, creator drama, movie trailers, and viral entertainment. Intentional, broad disruption (such as leveraging talent like Tony Hawk in a creative play on "Ramps") cuts through cluttered feeds far more effectively than standard performance-driven messaging. Brands should consider where broad, feed-level disruption can replace conventional category advertising.

    Disney’s multi-day influencer scavenger hunt highlights content fragmenting.

    To launch the themes for their newest cruise ship (The Believe), Disney hosted a group of travel and lifestyle influencers aboard The Wish for an interactive multi-day scavenger hunt and reveal campaign.

    While the strategy succeeded in generating broad conversation and platform-wide coverage, the campaign structure highlighted key challenges in modern fragmented feeds:

    Tips for brands:
    • Information loss across algorithms: Because users receive content out of order based on algorithmic distribution, core campaign details and specifics were easily lost across individual video posts. Multi-part announcements distributed across multiple creators require tight cohesion. Streamlining reveals into cohesive, single-video recaps or establishing explicit visual and thematic links between posts ensures the primary messaging lands cleanly without confusing the audience.

      Trends

      Viral Vids

      Platform News

      Music / Movies / TV

      Sports & Gaming

      Celebrity

      Influencer

      Brands

      Upcoming

      • NYC Comic Con started last week! I anticipate more and more big movie and show announcements from panels throughout the weekend
      • The first episodes of Love Is Blind Boston drop on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see if there's as much drama from exes in the feed!
      • The highly anticipated VisionQuest drops on Disney+ on Wednesday too. 
      • This weekend You Can See Everything opens and I expect that to be the most talked about movie this fall
      • Sense and Sensibility and Street Fighter also open this weekend which could draw some buzz.
      • The NBA season tips off on 10/20.
      • The much-debated The New Stanford Prison Experiment show drops on Netflix this Wednesday, and I expect a bunch of chatter around the ethics of it all to continue.
      • Nobody Wants This returns on Thursday.
      • And the MLB playoffs continue until the first game of the World Series on 10/23!

      That's all from this week's feed! Until next time.

      Xoxo,

      __

      Turn internet culture into your brand’s biggest advantage. Contact our Chief Marketing & Growth Officer, Brandon Cooke, at brandon@barkleyokrp.com to start the conversation.