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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.
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| ai-assisted content
giovanni gallucci: Good morning. This is giovanni gallucci, joined by Chloe Dawn and Rachel Donovan, and this is the Daily Trend Report.
chloe dawn: Morning. I brought a diet soda, and I'm not explaining myself.
rachel donovan: Morning. I've had the Mustang windows down since Fort Davis, so if I sound windblown, I earned it.
giovanni gallucci: Today, Threads hands out badges and accidentally publishes its grading sheet. Coca-Cola puts fiber in Fresca. And a tequila brand offers to pay for your ride home, which is the nicest thing a liquor company has said to me all year.
rachel donovan: Threads started handing out badges yesterday. They're called Gems. Travis flagged it out of Social Media Today, and Jayme had it too. A little icon shows up on the post in the feed, the author gets a notification, and they can share a post about it or pass.
giovanni gallucci: And everybody's going to read that as a participation trophy.
rachel donovan: It is a participation trophy. It's a sticker for posting.
giovanni gallucci: The sticker's worthless. Read the rules that come with it. That's the part worth your morning.
rachel donovan: There are three of them. Perspective, meaning the post brings something fresh. Discussion, meaning people go back and forth. And originality, meaning it's your own work. Anything recycled or crossposted from another app does not qualify. American users only, for now.
chloe dawn: Crossposted. So, the scheduler.
rachel donovan: The scheduler. One caption, one picture, nine in the morning, blasted to five apps at once.
giovanni gallucci: Which is how most small brands run social, and I understand why. It saves an hour a week. It also tells every platform you don't think much of it. Threads just wrote down, in public, that it can tell the difference.
rachel donovan: But Meta hasn't said a Gem does anything. No word on how often they fire. No word on whether a Gem gets you more reach. So why should a four-person brand rearrange its week for a badge?
giovanni gallucci: Because platforms almost never tell you what they want in plain English. They make you guess off your analytics for a year. This time they handed you the grading sheet. You don't have to believe in the badge to use the rubric.
chloe dawn: And the rubric isn't hard. Have an opinion, start an argument, write it yourself.
giovanni gallucci: It's hard for exactly one kind of company. The one whose post got approved by legal six weeks ago. They can't have a fresh take on a Tuesday. You can.
rachel donovan: There's a number behind this, too. Travis pulled it from Dash Social's trend report, which got a second round of pickup this week. Brands posting six times a week or less saw twenty percent higher engagement than the heavy posters.
giovanni gallucci: Give them the other one.
rachel donovan: Quarterly follower growth on Instagram fell from one point seven percent in twenty twenty-three to point nine this year. Shares went up more than fifty percent. And more than half of Instagram views now come from people who don't follow you.
giovanni gallucci: So the follower count is a slow leak, and the share is the whole game. Nobody shares the thing you posted in five places at once. They share the thing that sounds like a person said it to them.
chloe dawn: The volume people won't like hearing that.
giovanni gallucci: The volume people built a machine for a world that's gone. Twenty posts a week of nothing used to buy you presence. Now it buys you a reputation for being wallpaper.
rachel donovan: OK. So what does writing native on Threads look like for, say, a coffee roaster with two employees?
giovanni gallucci: Pick two posts a week that only exist there. Each one is a position somebody could argue with. Not "the fall blend is back." More like "light roast is something people tolerate because it photographs well," and then you defend it.
rachel donovan: That one's going to get you letters.
giovanni gallucci: Good. Letters are the discussion part of the rubric. And you write it in the voice you'd use across the counter, not the voice on the bag. Then you stay in that thread while it's warm. Don't schedule it and drive to the bank.
chloe dawn: And when the native post flops?
giovanni gallucci: Some of them will. A flop on Threads costs you a little pride and nothing else. Nobody screenshots a quiet post. The brand that tries twice a week for a month learns more about its own voice than the brand that blasted the same caption for a year.
chloe dawn: What about the stuff that's fine to crosspost?
giovanni gallucci: Keep the scheduler for the evergreen things. Hours, a new flavor, the holiday ship date. Pull Threads off the blast list and leave the rest alone. One room at a time.
rachel donovan: And somebody in every category is going to win the first one.
giovanni gallucci: So watch who wins one in yours. It's a public record of what the platform rewards, posted for free. Study it the way you'd study a competitor's best sellers. Then go write something they couldn't.
giovanni gallucci: Three things you can do before lunch.
giovanni gallucci: One. Open your scheduler today and take Threads off the blast list. Leave every other channel the way it is.
chloe dawn: Two. Write two posts a week that only live on Threads, and make each one a position somebody could argue with.
rachel donovan: Three. Cap the whole brand at six posts a week, and spend the hours you saved making those six sound like nobody else.
chloe dawn: Coca-Cola is putting fiber in Coke Zero. Six grams of prebiotic fiber in Coke Zero Sugar, Sprite Zero Sugar and Fresca, piloting in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania starting late October. Kendall had the details out of Food Dive.
rachel donovan: In Fresca.
chloe dawn: In Fresca. And Eddie paired it with a Food Dive interview with Olipop's new CEO, Christian Patiño Webb. He came over from Electrolit in August. He says the category is getting about one new competitor a week.
giovanni gallucci: One a week. That's not a category anymore. That's a gold rush with a fiber requirement.
chloe dawn: Here's what gets me. Independents spent years teaching people what a prebiotic even is. The giant waits until the shopper's trained, then stirs a powder into a can it already had.
giovanni gallucci: And the dumbest framing you'll hear all week is "Coke validates the category." Validation is the word a big company uses right before it takes your shelf. Nobody in Atlanta woke up wanting to validate anybody.
chloe dawn: PepsiCo already bought Poppi for about two billion dollars. So both giants are in now.
giovanni gallucci: Both giants, and look at what they brought. Trucks. Cold boxes. Trade spend. Every gas station between here and El Paso. What they didn't bring is the better number.
chloe dawn: Olipop runs up to nine grams of fiber a can. Poppi's about two. Coke's pilot is six.
rachel donovan: So the independent wins on the label.
giovanni gallucci: The independent wins if somebody hears about the label. That's the catch. Nobody reads the back of a can standing at the cooler. They read it at home, later, after they've already asked somebody which one's worth buying.
rachel donovan: And who are they asking?
giovanni gallucci: More and more, a machine. Kendall and Eddie both flagged an S E Ranking study this week. A hundred thousand search keywords. Social media links show up in sixty-seven point six six percent of Google's AI Overviews.
chloe dawn: Two out of three?
giovanni gallucci: Two out of three. About a third of the answers in Google's AI Mode. Eight point four percent of the answers from the most popular chatbot app. And YouTube was the social source Google quoted most, then Reddit, then LinkedIn.
chloe dawn: So when somebody types "which prebiotic soda has the most fiber," the answer gets built out of somebody's posts.
giovanni gallucci: Out of somebody's posts. And right now, for most small brands, it isn't theirs. Coke can buy the cooler door. It can't buy the sentence a machine writes when your customer asks a question at eleven at night.
rachel donovan: Why wouldn't Coke just out-post them?
giovanni gallucci: They'll try. But a big brand posts lifestyle. Somebody on a dock holding a can, golden hour, nobody talking. There's no answer in that for a machine to quote. The small brand that films a plain forty-second answer to a plain question, with its own number said out loud, is making the exact thing the machine goes looking for.
chloe dawn: Its own number. Not a side-by-side with Coke.
giovanni gallucci: Never the side-by-side. Comparisons draw lawyers, and they keep the conversation on the other guy's can. Say what's in yours. Let the shopper do the math. Shoppers are good at math when nobody's yelling at them.
chloe dawn: So what does that look like on a Tuesday?
giovanni gallucci: You write down the questions people ask about your category. Not your brand, the category. "What does prebiotic even mean." "How much fiber should a soda have." "Why does this one taste like root beer." Each one becomes a short video. The question is the title. Your answer starts in the first sentence. Your number gets said out loud and typed in the caption, because the machine reads text, not vibes.
rachel donovan: And where does it go?
giovanni gallucci: YouTube first, because that's the social source Google quotes most. Then wherever else you like. But the title is the exact question a person would type, in the words they'd type it, typos and all if that's how they search.
rachel donovan: And the pilot is only three states.
giovanni gallucci: Three states, starting late October. When it rolls wider, a lot of people are going to wonder out loud what a prebiotic is and whether the one in their Fresca counts. Every answer you post before then is already sitting there when they go looking. Get there early.
chloe dawn: So the hero shot is a sentence.
giovanni gallucci: The hero shot is a sentence. Which is lucky, because sentences are cheap, and the independent who built the category is better at them than the company that just showed up.
giovanni gallucci: Three moves, then we keep rolling.
giovanni gallucci: One. Type your category's most common question into Google this morning and look at whose posts the AI answer is quoting. That's your competition, not the cooler door.
chloe dawn: Two. Say your own number in the first sentence of the video and type it in the caption. Never put a competitor's can next to yours.
rachel donovan: Three. Put the answers on YouTube with the exact question as the title, worded the way a tired person types it at night.
giovanni gallucci: Eddie and Travis both landed on the same campaign this week, and it's the smartest thing a liquor brand has done in a while. Espolòn Tequila is paying half your Uber or Lyft fare.
rachel donovan: Half?
giovanni gallucci: Fifty percent, up to twenty-five dollars, for rides during the peak Halloween and Día de los Muertos hours, through November first. Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Houston and Austin. It's called Fare Share, out of Campari, which owns the brand.
chloe dawn: Why the timing?
giovanni gallucci: Because last Halloween, surge pricing in the big cities hit eight to nine times the normal fare. Everybody who went out remembers seeing that number on the sidewalk at one in the morning. Espolòn picked a fight with something its customer already hates, and took the customer's side.
rachel donovan: And it's a responsible-drinking message without a single wagging finger.
giovanni gallucci: Not one. Nobody's lecturing you. They're just paying for the ride. The dumbest framing of this is "it's a discount in a costume." A discount is about your price. This is about their problem. Completely different post.
chloe dawn: And it gives creators something to share that isn't a bottle on a marble countertop.
giovanni gallucci: That's the content part. A creator can't do much with a product shot. A creator can do plenty with "the tequila people are paying for your ride home." It's useful, and useful travels.
rachel donovan: Travis had a second one that rhymes with it. Southwest.
giovanni gallucci: Southwest launched "Enter Airplane Mode" on October fifth. Adam Scott narrates. The ask is ridiculous and perfect. Upload a screenshot of your phone's home screen, buried in notifications, and you earn Rapid Rewards points. Or take a burnout quiz. More than a hundred eighty-five million points on the table.
chloe dawn: So the entry is proof that you're miserable.
giovanni gallucci: The entry is proof of the annoyance. That's the whole trick. Two seconds of effort, and the thing they hand you is the content. Every screenshot is a little confession, and people love to confess when there's a prize.
rachel donovan: Neither of these is about the product, though.
giovanni gallucci: On purpose. Both brands found an annoyance sitting right next to the thing they sell. Getting home from the bar. Your phone yelling at you before a trip. They paid down a slice of it in public, and they let the proof become the post.
chloe dawn: Now give me the flop.
giovanni gallucci: Amazon. Twitch opened a Shopping category on October sixth, day one of Prime Big Deal Days. Front page. Its own spot in the navigation. They stocked it with Amazon Live hosts working from assigned product lists. Tubefilter checked in and found six streams with sixty-five viewers between them.
rachel donovan: Sixty-five. Total.
giovanni gallucci: Total. That's a decent crowd for a Tuesday night at a bar in Alpine. It's not a crowd for the biggest retailer on earth on the front page of Twitch. They bought placement and forgot that people on Twitch follow a person, not a shelf. Nobody watching had a problem those hosts were solving.
chloe dawn: So how does a little brand run the Espolòn version without Campari's money?
giovanni gallucci: Smaller annoyance, smaller slice, same shape. Say you're a kolache shop in Waco. On football Saturdays, parking downtown is a nightmare. You pay the first hour on the meter for anybody who posts a picture of their parking receipt and tags you. Now your feed fills up with receipts and people standing in your line.
rachel donovan: Or a hot sauce company.
giovanni gallucci: A hot sauce company asks for a photo of the saddest desk lunch you ate this week. The five worst get a bottle. You repost the worst lunches on your own feed. Your audience brings the tragedy, and you bring the rescue.
chloe dawn: And the product is in none of the photos.
giovanni gallucci: The product shows up as the fix, and that's the right order. Pick the annoyance first, pay for a slice of it, make the proof the entry, then repost the proof. Keep it small enough to honor every single one, because the first person you stiff becomes the post everybody shares.
rachel donovan: How do you know it worked?
giovanni gallucci: Count the entries, then count the strangers. If half the people posting receipts never followed you before, it traveled. If it's just your regulars, you picked an annoyance only your regulars have. Pick a bigger one next time.
rachel donovan: And when does it end?
giovanni gallucci: On a date you say up front, the way Espolòn did. November first. An open-ended giveaway turns into a chore. A deadline turns it into an event, and people show up for events.
giovanni gallucci: Three to close it out.
giovanni gallucci: One. Write down the one annoyance your customer complains about this month that sits right next to what you sell, not inside it.
chloe dawn: Two. Pay down a small, specific slice of it, and make a photo or a screenshot of the problem the way in.
rachel donovan: Three. Repost the best entries on your own feed, set an end date on day one, and honor every single one.
giovanni gallucci: That's the Daily Trend Report. Tomorrow's Saturday, which means the Weekend Trend Report, and Sunday brings the Week Ahead, so get your coffee ready. If your brand has a scheduler, a content calendar, and nobody running the room, that's my job. I run the strategy, make the content and manage the community for food and beverage brands, with fifteen-plus years doing organic social in food and beverage. gallucci dot net or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
chloe dawn: Have a good weekend.
rachel donovan: Drive safe out there.