Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Good morning.
The Daily Trend Report. Every weekday morning, giovanni gallucci and a rotating cohost (Chloe Dawn on clean label food and beverage, plus Rachel Donovan or Alexis Parker on social media) synthesize the day's cross-LLM trend reports into three operator stories: social media, clean label food and beverage, and content, social, and AI. Tight, specific, no filler. For owners, founders, marketing leads, and operators in clean-label CPG.
.
.
.
| ai-assisted content
alexis parker: Good morning. This is Alexis Parker, sitting in with giovanni gallucci and Chloe Dawn, and this is the Daily Trend Report.
giovanni gallucci: Morning, Alexis.
chloe dawn: Morning. You were out before the sun again.
alexis parker: Hour of good light past the highway. Old habit from shooting shows in Chicago. You sleep when the room clears out.
giovanni gallucci: Chloe was up too.
chloe dawn: Arguing with a jacket. The jacket won.
giovanni gallucci: Today, a platform telling advertisers to quit acting like a billboard, a brand that rebuilt its own active ingredient, and what actually got made this week.
alexis parker: Reddit ran its first US brand campaign this week. It's called People Are the Best, and the whole thing celebrates unpolished human conversation. Same week, their CMO Jim Squires sat down with marketers and told them to behave like citizens of a community instead of billboards, because people will clock the difference and it'll backfire. Eddie had it, Travis had it too.
giovanni gallucci: It's a sales pitch. It's also true, which is a rare combination in a platform interview.
chloe dawn: Selling what, though.
giovanni gallucci: Human credibility. It's the one thing getting scarce right now, and Reddit is the only major surface that still has a pile of it sitting there. So they're monetizing it. Fine. Everybody's got to eat.
alexis parker: The campaign itself is out-of-home and television, which is a funny place to run an ad about internet conversation.
giovanni gallucci: It's not funny, it's deliberate. They put it on billboards and TV because those are the two places their own users aren't. The campaign isn't aimed at the community, it's aimed at every marketer stuck in traffic on the way to a media meeting.
chloe dawn: So the interview and the billboard are the same pitch.
giovanni gallucci: Same pitch, two audiences, one week. That's tidy work. And notice what they didn't do. They didn't lead with reach numbers or an ad product. A platform that advertises its users instead of its inventory is telling you what it thinks its actual inventory is.
alexis parker: The whole marketing internet is going to read that as post more authentically.
giovanni gallucci: And that's the dumb read. He didn't say anything about tone. He said behave. Citizenship is a behavior, not a writing style. You can write the friendliest caption in your category and still be a billboard.
chloe dawn: So what does it look like when you've got a posting quota and a boss?
giovanni gallucci: Keep a ledger. For one quarter, log every single post you make inside somebody else's community and mark it one of two ways. Helped, or sold. If sold gets past one in five, you're not a citizen, you're a guy handing out flyers with better fonts.
alexis parker: That's a real number somebody can check.
giovanni gallucci: It's the only honest one I know. Reach won't tell you. Sentiment won't tell you. That ratio will.
chloe dawn: The brands I actually notice in threads, it's never the brand account. It's a person.
giovanni gallucci: Right, and that's the second piece. Real name, real job title, in the thread. I run product here, ask me the ugly one. An anonymous brand handle in a community is a stranger in a coat. A named human with a title is a source. And a community will forgive a source for selling once in a while. They will never forgive a stranger.
alexis parker: The risk being that person gets roasted.
giovanni gallucci: That's the entry fee. If nobody argues with you, nobody's reading you.
chloe dawn: Does a big company even let somebody do that?
giovanni gallucci: No, and that's the whole opening. A nine-figure brand has to route one comment through legal, brand, and an agency, and by then the thread's dead. You can answer in four minutes with your actual name on it. That gap is worth more than their budget.
giovanni gallucci: Three things you can actually do today.
giovanni gallucci: One. Start a contribution ledger this week. Every post you make in a community you don't own gets marked helped or sold, and sold stays under one in five.
chloe dawn: Two. Put a real name and a real job title on the account that shows up in threads. Not the logo.
alexis parker: Three. Find the thread where your category gets argued about, sort for the strongest disagreement with you, and go engage that one first.
chloe dawn: The hemp-derived THC ban lands in November, and Cann just launched their answer. It's called 0MG. No THC at all, built on magnesium, electrolytes, L-theanine, and passion flower, in blood orange cardamom and lemon lavender. Jayme and Travis both flagged it. And here's the part I like, they're not calling it a compliance response. They're calling it a launch.
giovanni gallucci: Hold that up next to the other ingredient story this month. Mars shipped dye-free candy missing two of its six colors and told everybody it needs until 2028 to finish the other two.
chloe dawn: An incomplete rainbow.
giovanni gallucci: They shipped an incomplete rainbow and asked for three more years. Meanwhile a company a fraction of that size rebuilt its active ingredient in months and gave it a flavor story. That's the honest picture of what scale actually buys you, and it isn't speed.
alexis parker: Does the customer buy the reframe, though? It's still the same can with the good part taken out.
giovanni gallucci: The framing is the entire game here. We had to remove the active ingredient, and we built you a new one, describe the identical product. Cann picked the second one. And the verdict shows up in the comments and the reviews, not in the press release. If the customer stays, the brand was the product. If the customer walks, the compound was.
chloe dawn: The flavor names are doing a lot of work too. Blood orange cardamom is not a compliance sentence.
giovanni gallucci: No it isn't, and that's the smartest thing on the can. A botanical deck you can read out loud is the only asset that survives a rule change. The regulator can take your compound. Nobody can legislate away lemon lavender.
alexis parker: Which is available to a brand of any size.
giovanni gallucci: Any size, any budget, this week. You don't need a lab to name a flavor honestly.
chloe dawn: So what do you actually post.
giovanni gallucci: You ship the swap like a launch. Dated post, here's what we built, here's why, ingredient deck readable on the first frame. And you keep the apology out of the caption, because an apology teaches somebody they lost something before they've decided that for themselves.
alexis parker: That feels like it needs a second move though. Everybody's going to be suspicious.
giovanni gallucci: It does. So platform your critic. Find the loyalist who liked the old version, put her on your channel saying she's not sure about this yet, in her words, unedited. Then answer her in the same video.
chloe dawn: On your own account.
giovanni gallucci: On your own account, at the top of the feed. A brand that publishes its own skeptic gets believed about everything else it says for the next year. That's not a nice gesture, that's a compounding asset.
alexis parker: Nobody does that.
giovanni gallucci: Big food would run it past four attorneys and post a graphic of a leaf.
chloe dawn: [laughs] They really would.
giovanni gallucci: And the last piece is the one everybody gets wrong. Don't delete the old posts. Leave the whole run up. Date the change, say what it was, say what it is now.
chloe dawn: Most brands scrub the grid.
giovanni gallucci: Scrubbing the grid is how you tell people you're ashamed. Leaving it up is a receipt. The receipt is what you'll want two years from now when somebody accuses you of quietly changing the formula.
giovanni gallucci: Here's what to actually do with all of that.
giovanni gallucci: One. If a rule forces you to reformulate, ship it as a launch with a date on it, not a notice. Show what you built, not what you lost.
chloe dawn: Two. Put a real skeptical customer on your own channel, let her say she's unsure, and answer her in the same cut.
alexis parker: Three. Leave the old posts up. Date the change publicly so the timeline is your receipt instead of somebody else's story.
giovanni gallucci: Three things got made this week worth naming. One worked, one won the wrong prize, and one won for a reason nobody's going to copy correctly.
alexis parker: Start with the one that worked.
giovanni gallucci: Skittles. Popped candy started as an organic content trend on TikTok. The platform-native brands commercialized it fast, and then Skittles built a product on a compressed timeline and launched it as a TikTok Shop exclusive, back into the same community that invented the trend. Travis had that one.
chloe dawn: The exclusive part seems like the point.
giovanni gallucci: The exclusive is the whole point. Everybody co-opts a trend. Almost nobody hands it back to the room that made it. Launching it where it started turns a co-opt into a callback, and then the community distributes it for you because it's theirs.
alexis parker: Does that scale down?
giovanni gallucci: It scales down better than it scales up. You don't need a national line. Take the thing your own comment section invented, build it, launch it in the comments, and say out loud that they made it.
chloe dawn: The timeline on that is wild though. A trend to a shipped SKU in what, weeks.
giovanni gallucci: Weeks. And that compression is the actual news underneath it. TikTok says its food category more than doubled, and retailers are now watching platform trends and expecting brands to move on them at that speed. A small operator can run that loop faster than any national brand can schedule the first meeting about it.
alexis parker: Assuming you're reading your own comments.
giovanni gallucci: Assuming you're reading your own comments, which most people have quit doing.
chloe dawn: What's the one that won the wrong prize.
giovanni gallucci: Campbell's. Five protein soups on July fourteenth, twenty grams a can, and every single piece of the communications package led with the number. It got picked up everywhere. The Philadelphia Inquirer framed it as Campbell's joining the protein trend.
alexis parker: Joining. Not leading.
giovanni gallucci: Joining. They spent their launch getting labeled a follower in the soup category, which they've owned for a hundred years. And nothing they published answered the question every reply was obviously going to ask, which is what else is in the can.
chloe dawn: So somebody else answers it.
giovanni gallucci: Somebody else always answers it. Usually a challenger with a shorter panel and a phone. If you know the follow-up question and you don't answer it, you've handed the answer to whoever wants it.
alexis parker: So write the second post first.
giovanni gallucci: Write the second post before the first one ships. It's the reply to the comment you already know is coming, and it's usually the piece that actually travels.
chloe dawn: And the third one.
giovanni gallucci: Patreon. Jack Conte announced they're blocking AI training crawlers at the network layer, kept the discovery crawlers open, and said the crawlers can stay the hell off Patreon. TechCrunch, 404 Media, everybody had it inside four days, and the quote was the headline in most of them.
alexis parker: So the swearing did the work.
giovanni gallucci: The register did the work, and the register only worked because the position costs him something. He's picking a side against companies he might want to do business with. That's expensive. Borrowed edge with nothing at stake is a costume, and people can smell a costume through a screen.
chloe dawn: So the lesson isn't curse more.
giovanni gallucci: The lesson is if your post could've come out of any brand in your category, you didn't take a position, you made a graphic.
giovanni gallucci: Three moves before we get out of here.
giovanni gallucci: One. If your audience invented it, launch it back to them on the platform where they invented it, and credit them in the post.
chloe dawn: Two. Write your second post before the first one ships, and make it the answer to the comment you already know is coming.
alexis parker: Three. Say it in words that cost you something, or don't say it at all.
giovanni gallucci: That's the report. If you listen to this every morning and think your own category needs one, I build these. A daily trend-report podcast for your company, the research pipeline, the scripts, the voices, the whole thing, running before your competitors know it exists. That's gallucciNET. Come find me at gallucci dot net, or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
chloe dawn: Talk tomorrow.
alexis parker: See y'all.