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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.
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| ai-assisted content
[INTRO]
[HOST] Good morning. This is giovanni gallucci, this is the Weekend Trend Report, the Saturday episode of the Daily Trend Report feed, and Rachel Donovan is with me.
[GUEST:happy] Morning, Gio.
[HOST] Four trends this week. The behind-the-scenes post is beating the campaign it was shot for. The smartest beer brand in the world is doing less with creators while a soap company signs half a million of them. Canned cocktails stopped pretending, and the ones with real liquor inside are taking the cooler. And Big Food is selling the indie playbook back to the shoppers who paid for it the first time. Let's go.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 1: The Making-Of Is The Ad]
[GUEST] Travis brought this one, and he had a pile of it. Rachel Karten, who writes the Link in Bio newsletter, put out a piece on Wednesday called Context is king.
[HOST] Karten is one of the few people writing about social who has actually run a brand account, so I read her when she says something moved.
[GUEST] She started out writing about what she calls proof of reality posts. Behind-the-scenes stuff. How the shoot happened, who built the set, the outtakes.
[HOST] And her original read was defensive. Keep the receipts, so if somebody accuses you of faking it, you can show your work.
[GUEST:surprised] And then the receipts started winning.
[HOST] The making-of posts started outperforming the campaigns they documented. That's her observation, across brands like Rare Beauty, Microsoft and Birkenstock. So now she's arguing you should plan the campaign around those side stories from day one. She calls them context loops.
[GUEST] Okay, give me a food version, because Rare Beauty is not my lane.
[HOST] Hold that, because the clearest example this week came out of skincare, and you'll see why it travels. Pamela Anderson's brand, Sonsie, put out its first holiday film. Eighty-three seconds of stop-motion. She's inside a papier-mâché version of her own garden. Twenty-three creators. Eight months. Made by hand. Her son, Dylan Jagger Lee, is the chief brand officer, and he came up with it and produced it.
[GUEST:curious] And the press wrote about the eight months more than the ad?
[HOST] That's what got the coverage. Nobody writes a story about a brand dropping a holiday spot. They write a story about twenty-three people gluing a garden together for most of a year. The process was the headline.
[GUEST] So the ad is kind of the excuse for the story about the ad.
[HOST] Pretty much. And it isn't only the big shops. Digiday walked through a creator named Grace Wells, who made her name doing fake epic commercials for random objects on TikTok. One branded video of hers takes about a hundred hours, brief to delivery.
[GUEST] For one video?
[HOST] Two and a half work weeks for something people watch in thirty seconds. And when people see the hundred hours, they value the thirty seconds differently.
[GUEST:sarcastic] Now, Gio, isn't this just the anti-AI thing again? Everybody's doing handmade for Christmas because they're scared of looking like a robot made it.
[HOST:thoughtful] Karten herself won't call it an anti-AI trend, and I agree with her. I make a lot of content with AI. My clients' feeds are full of it. The audience doesn't hate tools. What they want is evidence that a person with taste made the calls. Who picked the shot, who tasted the batch, who said no to the first version. You can show that whether the camera was real or the model was.
[GUEST] So you'd show the prompt?
[HOST] I'd show the prompt, the ten bad versions, and the one you kept, and why. That's a making-of. For a food brand it's even easier, because your process is already interesting. Somebody is standing over a kettle at five in the morning. Somebody is driving to a farm. Somebody is throwing out a batch because it came out wrong.
[GUEST:mischievous] You've told me about throwing out a batch of something before.
[HOST:happy] Many times. And the batch you threw out is better content than the batch you sold. The thrown-out batch has a decision in it.
[GUEST] Okay, so what do people do with this?
[HOST] Three things. One. Every time you shoot anything, a product photo, a recipe video, a launch, assign one person to film the shoot itself on a phone. Hands, mess, the setup, the bad takes. That's your context footage, and it costs you nothing extra. Keep it even if it's ugly. Two. Post the process before the hero. Put the making-of up two or three days ahead of the finished piece, so when the polished version lands, people already know who made it and what it took. Watch which one gets the saves and the shares. My bet is the process wins.
[GUEST] And three?
[HOST] Three. Pick one number from the work and say it out loud. Eight months. A hundred hours. Four hundred pounds of peppers. Forty batches before the recipe was right. Put it in the first line of the caption and the first second of the video. A number like that tells people this took a real person a real amount of time, and nobody has to explain it.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 2: Fewer Creators, Longer Leashes]
[GUEST] Okay, second one. Clark and Jayme both had this. Digiday ran a piece Thursday on Guinness, and the headline is that Guinness is going slow on creators.
[HOST:mischievous] Which sounds like a confession and is actually a strategy.
[GUEST] So the guy talking is Paddy Carberry, he's global marketing manager and head of sport for Guinness. He said on a podcast they don't plan to sign creators en masse. They'll let it build on its own.
[HOST] And he gave a great reason. He said if they chased every trend, the brand would become the dad dancing at the disco.
[GUEST:happy] Which is a very Irish way to say cringe.
[HOST] It's the most accurate thing a beer marketer has said all year. Now, why can Guinness get away with this? Because its drinkers already make the content. You know Split the G?
[GUEST] I do now. You take a sip and try to get the line of foam to land right in the middle of the G on the glass.
[HOST] That's been floating around since at least 2018. It had an Urban Dictionary entry that year. Nobody at Diageo invented it. Drinkers made it a pub game, then a social format, and celebrities started doing it without a brief. Then there's Singing Pints, which came out of a TikTok trend where people make the foam look like a mouth singing. Guinness turned that into a campaign in 2023, brought it back this summer, and Carberry called it one of the best pieces of content they've made in ten years.
[GUEST] So they found the thing people were already doing and just pointed at it.
[HOST] They amplify the ritual. And Digiday says the analysts see Guinness shifting the work toward community management. Watching what drinkers do and turning up the volume.
[GUEST] Okay, but here's my problem with that. Eddie had the other side of this. Unilever told investors on November fourth that it now works with five hundred thousand creators.
[HOST:surprised] Half a million.
[GUEST] Up from three hundred thousand. And before their current CEO, it was about twenty thousand.
[HOST] And they say they're making twelve times the content they made in 2024 at ninety percent lower cost. And they said a video's return goes negative after about four days.
[GUEST:sarcastic] Four days. That's a carton of strawberries.
[HOST] That's a content treadmill. You can run it if you have a soap company's budget and a hundred brands to feed. A small food brand that tries to copy it ends up with a thin slice of a crowd Unilever is already paying.
[GUEST] So where do the hauls come in? Because Business Insider had a piece this week too.
[HOST] The headline was that creator marketers are rethinking their approach as hauls and unboxings lose their cool. The big pile of free product on the bed, ten brands in sixty seconds. People have watched a thousand of those. They scroll right past.
[GUEST:curious] So what replaced it?
[HOST] Fewer people, longer. The brands getting results are picking a handful of creators who actually use the thing, and keeping them for months. A creator who has eaten your granola on camera for six months is worth more than sixty who opened a box once.
[GUEST] That's kind of how I pick a mechanic. I don't trust the one with the best sign. I trust the one my neighbor has gone to for nine years.
[HOST:happy] Same math. Nine years of the same guy fixing the same truck is a review nobody can buy.
[GUEST] Okay. Takeaways.
[HOST] One. Cut your gifting list in half. Take the money and time you were spending on boxes to strangers and give it to three creators who already post about your category. Sign them for six months and let them use the product on camera the way they'd use it anyway. Three is a number you can manage, talk to every week and know by name. Two. Find your ritual. Go read a month of tagged posts, comments and reviews, and look for the thing customers keep doing that you didn't ask for. The way they pour it, the way they stack it, the dumb thing they do with the last bite. Give it a name, do it yourself on camera, and reshare every person who copies it. And if you can't find one, invent a small one and do it first, a hundred times, until somebody does it back. Three. Put a person on community management before you put money in another creator. Somebody who answers every comment, every tag and every stitch the same day, with a name and a voice. That's what Guinness is actually doing, and it's the cheapest seat in the house.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 3: The Cocktail Can Got A Real Pour]
[GUEST] So, food and beverage. Travis and Kendall both had this, and it's from the liquor aisle. Food Dive wrote up IWSR's new numbers on canned cocktails on Wednesday.
[HOST] And IWSR is who the whole drinks business reads when it wants to know what's moving. Give them the headline numbers.
[GUEST] Okay. US ready-to-drink volume fell one percent last year. Hard seltzer fell eight percent. But RTD cocktails grew seventeen percent. And spirit-based cocktails and long drinks were up fifty-three percent.
[HOST:excited] Fifty-three. In a category that shrank overall.
[GUEST:surprised] And this is the one I didn't expect. Only two percent of that growth came from new launches.
[HOST] That two percent tells you everything. The growth didn't come from the shiny new thing. It came from cans that were already on the shelf, mostly the ones with real liquor in them, selling more.
[GUEST] Then there's whiskey sours. Canned whiskey sours grew more than fifteen hundred percent.
[HOST] And they're now about two-thirds of all whiskey RTD volume, while whiskey RTDs overall fell eleven percent. So one drink people already know how to order at a bar is carrying an entire sub-category.
[GUEST:thoughtful] Why now, though? Canned cocktails have been around forever.
[HOST] They have, but a lot of what was in those cans was malt with flavoring and a cocktail name on the label. Drinkers figured that out. IWSR says people are trading up, the same thing that happened in beer and tequila. When people drink less, they want what they do drink to be real. A real spirit in a can is a short label, and a short label is a story you can tell. And look at what's winning inside that. A whiskey sour is a drink everybody already knows, so nobody has to explain it. The cans that grow are the ones where the shopper can picture the bar version before they crack it open. That's a social lesson too. If people can't picture your product in one second, your video has to work twice as hard.
[GUEST] And the big guys are buying in?
[HOST] Mark Anthony, which owns White Claw, bought The Finnish Long Drink. Constellation bought SpikedAde, a hard sports drink. Boston Beer and Sazerac are in. And Jumex, the Mexican nectar brand, just put out a hard nectar with real reposado tequila, made with AriZona.
[GUEST:sarcastic] Hard sports drinks. That's a sentence.
[HOST] IWSR's analyst said there's a new wave of vodka RTDs borrowing sports drink cues. Electrolytes, ade flavors. I'd watch it, but I wouldn't build a brand on it. Sports drink cues in a vodka can are a trend about the label. Real spirit is a trend about the drink, and drink trends last longer.
[GUEST] So if I'm a little distillery outside Austin, what do I do with this?
[HOST] You have something White Claw can't buy, which is a bartender, a still, and a back bar. The social play writes itself, and almost nobody small is doing it. One. Shoot the side by side. Your bartender builds the cocktail the long way at the bar, with your spirit, every step, then cracks the can next to it and pours it into the same glass. Same color, same garnish. Let people look at the two glasses. No narration needed, just the pour and the sip.
[GUEST:mischievous] And a cowboy taste-tests both blind.
[HOST] Yes. That's the second video. Two. Put the label on camera. Turn the can around and read the back out loud, the spirit, the juice, whatever's in it, and say how many things are in there. Short labels are the trend in every aisle right now, and in the liquor aisle hardly anybody is saying it out loud on video.
[GUEST] And three?
[HOST] Three. Make the bar your content studio. Every Thursday, have whoever's behind your bar make one drink on camera with your can as the base. A twist, a garnish, a riff. Fifty-two of those is a year of content, all of it shot in a room you already pay for, by a person who already knows how to talk to a crowd. And keep it to people over twenty-one on camera and in the targeting. Alcohol rules are strict, and the platforms enforce them.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 4: Big Food Is Selling Your Idea Back To You]
[GUEST:happy] Last one. And Gio, I think this one is going to make you a little cranky. Kraft Heinz had its investor day this week. Eddie had it, Kendall had it. Food Dive wrote it up Thursday. They told investors sales will start growing again in the second half of 2027.
[HOST] And what did they point to as proof?
[GUEST] Heinz Simply and Heinz Zero. Simpler ketchup and the no-sugar one. Both grew double digits.
[HOST:annoyed] Of course they did. A hundred-and-fifty-seven-year-old company finally figured out what small condiment brands have been proving for years. Less sugar, shorter label. And now they're telling Wall Street it's their innovation.
[GUEST] They also said almost half their pipeline is health and wellness, including more protein. They moved Kraft Mac and Cheese into a protein group. There's a lactose-free Philadelphia.
[HOST] And they've committed seven hundred million dollars to marketing and innovation. So the idea the independents built is about to get a seven-hundred-million-dollar ad budget behind it. Shelf space, coupons, endcaps, a television spot during football.
[GUEST] Then there's Costco. Jayme had this, and Travis too. Inc. reported Costco is rolling out Kirkland Signature prebiotic soda.
[HOST] Give me the price, because the price is the story.
[GUEST] Eighteen cans for fourteen eighty-nine. About eighty-three cents a can. Six grams of fiber, five grams of sugar, thirty-five calories. Strawberry lemon, orange, cherry lime. And on Costco's own site, Olipop is fifteen cans for twenty-three ninety-nine.
[HOST:appalled] So the nutrition panel that built that whole category is now a store brand at half the price. And shoppers found the pallets and posted them before Costco even announced it.
[GUEST] And General Mills is doing Dunkin' cereal. Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnamon Caramel Latte. Reese's Puffs Peanut Butter Mocha. No coffee in it, and no caffeine. At Walmart in December.
[HOST] That's somebody else's flavor equity glued onto an old box because the box has nothing new to say. I'm not mad at the cereal. I'm mad at calling it innovation. And it tells you where Big Food's head is. When the core product stops growing, you borrow somebody else's name, somebody else's ingredient story, or somebody else's whole category, and you put your logo on it.
[GUEST:curious] Okay, but if I'm a small soda brand and Costco just made my pitch for eighty-three cents a can, isn't that bad news?
[HOST:thoughtful] It's bad news if your whole social presence is the nutrition panel. If every post you've made is six grams of fiber and five grams of sugar, Kirkland just cloned your feed. Kraft Heinz can copy a label. It can't copy a founder, a town, or the guy who drives the tomatoes in.
[GUEST] So the content moves somewhere else.
[HOST] It moves off the panel and onto everything a store brand can't fake. And that's where small brands win on social every time, because the big guys can't get that specific through their own approval process. A store brand can't show you the founder sitting in a parking lot after the first buyer said yes. You can. And that video will beat anything with a nutrition panel on it.
[GUEST] Okay. Takeaways.
[HOST] One. Audit your last thirty posts. Count how many are just the label, the grams, the claims. If it's more than a third, you're competing with Kirkland on Kirkland's terms. Replace half of them with people: the founder, the maker, the farmer, the customer. Half is what it takes. Two. Say when you started, on camera. Your launch date, your first batch, the first store that took a chance on you. You don't have to trash anybody by name, and you shouldn't. Just put your date on the record, because when the giant shows up in your aisle, the date is the one thing they can't buy.
[GUEST] And three?
[HOST] Three. Do the taste test and post every result. Your product against the store brand, real people, no script, faces on camera. If you win, you've got a video the giant can't answer. If you lose a round, post that too, and post what you're changing. A brand that shows its losses is a brand people believe when it shows its wins.
[STINGER]
[OUTRO]
[HOST] That's the Weekend Trend Report. If you run a food or beverage brand and you've got customers who love the product, but your comments are quiet, nobody tags you and nobody's making anything with it, that's the problem I fix. I run community management and UGC for food and beverage brands. Answering every comment, finding the ritual your customers already have, and building the small group of creators who'll stick with you for a year. Fifteen-plus years running organic social media for food and beverage brands. gallucci dot net, or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
[GUEST] And tomorrow?
[HOST] Tomorrow in this same feed is The Week Ahead, with what's coming and what to post before it gets here. Thanks, Rachel.
[GUEST:happy] Bye, Gio. I'm going to go practice splitting the G.
[HOST] Now go make something worth following.