Silence, Brand! LIVE

About Silence, Brand! LIVE

A (probably) weekly live stream where our crabby crew chats about breaking in marketing and internet culture. 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. Featuring Dayna Castillo, Ryan Benson, Dejaih Smith, and Benton Williams. silencebrand.substack.com (https://silencebrand.substack.com/s/silence-brand-live?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

🦀 Anonymous Crab 🦀

Category

business · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

18 Jun 2025

Latest episode

19 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

30 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   19 Oct 2026

   🦀 Silence, Brand! Live: Ryan chased down Krafts Pocket Parm truck

   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), we we opened with a firsthand investigation into Kraft’s disastrous Pocket Parm rollout before spiraling into TikTok’s newest comment-sharing feature, a livestreaming creator bringing back the joy of pandemic-era internet entertainment, a North Carolina pizza shop that accidentally mastered social strategy, Chipotle’s enormous bag, and a Pringles sweepstakes that requires participants to be dead. Between pop-up activations that forgot to tell people where to pop up, creators finding success by being themselves, and brands discovering increasingly elaborate ways to get attention, we kept returning to one question: what happens when brands get so caught up in the campaign that they forget about the people it’s supposed to reach? 🦀 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: Kraft’s Pocket Parm activation was a hot mess on wheels. Ryan managed to acquire Kraft Natural Cheese’s miniature Parmesan shakers after chasing a promotional truck around Los Angeles, and the experience was apparently more difficult than obtaining pit tickets for the Eras Tour. The campaign featured confusing schedules, vague locations, last-minute changes, and a truck that sometimes drove away before people could find it. The product was cute!The experience was an endurance test! A beautifully designed campaign deck doesn’t help someone find a truck that’s already driven away. A pop-up still requires actual planning. Kraft’s promotional materials listed multiple locations without sufficiently clear timing or directions, leaving consumers to play an involuntary game of Where’s Waldo with a flatbed truck. At one point, Ryan followed the truck around USC while campus police repeatedly moved it along. Meanwhile, frustrated customers were met with responses directing them back to captions that hadn’t answered their questions in the first place and in other instances, being met with captions on posts being turned off all together. We discussed the difference between manufacturing excitement and manufacturing inconvenience, because people shouldn’t need a private investigator to obtain a tiny bottle of Parmesan shaky cheese. TikTok is finally acknowledging that culture happens in the comments. TikTok’s new comment-reposting feature (https://www.tiktok.com/discover/how-to-add-comments-to-your-repost-new-update?lang=en) lets people amplify individual comments, introducing another layer of participation beyond making videos or replying directly. We compared it to Tumblr reblogs and quote tweets, although the execution still feels a little half-baked. For brands, it creates an opportunity to acknowledge conversations without barging into someone’s replies. For everyone whose greatest internet accomplishment is getting the top comment, it might finally be time to update the résumé. LoozeCannon1 is bringing back the joy of 2020 TikTok. We checked in on creator loozecannon1 whose freestyle Michael Jackson impersonations and nightly livestream battles have been attracting enormous audiences. One battle reportedly peaked around 50,000 viewers and 50 million likes, with fans spending real money on virtual gifts simply because they enjoyed the entertainment. We discussed how his success resembles the early days of comfort streaming, when people gathered online to watch creators do something entertaining without being constantly pushed toward a shopping cart. Brands looking to participate should pay attention to what already makes the experience enjoyable, rather than trying to turn the whole thing into an advertisement. Pizza Vino discovered that repetition is a feature, not a bug. A North Carolina pizza shop has been gaining attention on TikTok thanks to Zach, an employee whose straightforward delivery, distinctive mannerisms, and extremely simple videos have become their own recognizable format. He asks questions, tells people about the pizza or sweet tea, swings his arms around a little, and gets millions of views. We compared his newer videos with the restaurant’s older, more conventionally produced content (https://www.tiktok.com/@pizzavino/video/7496294237068250411) and discussed why the less polished approach works better. Sometimes the best social strategy is to stop trying to look like a commercial and simply tell people that the restaurant sells pizza. Is it authentic if the creator knows it’s a bit? Zach’s success prompted a debate about where genuine personality ends and deliberate performance begins. His mannerisms seem to become more exaggerated as the videos progress, but that doesn’t necessarily make the content less authentic. We landed somewhere around the idea that he knows what people enjoy about him and has learned how to amplify it. There’s a difference between developing a recognizable persona and manufacturing a personality from scratch. Also, he has sweet tea. (https://www.tiktok.com/@pizzavino/video/7690609705978252557?refer=player_v1&referer_video_id=7690609705978252557&referrer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2Fplayer%2Fv1%2F7696682346162015502%3Fembed_from%3Doembed%26music_info%3D1%26description%3D1%26autoplay%3D1%26muted%3D1&utm_campaign=&utm_source=unknown) TikTok creators are becoming the entertainment industry. (https://playbill.com/article/ashby-florence-will-join-marla-mindelle-josh-sharp-in-a-kidman-carol-off-broadway) (https://playbill.com/article/ashby-florence-will-join-marla-mindelle-josh-sharp-in-a-kidman-carol-off-broadway)We celebrated creator Ashby’s move into an off-Broadway opportunity before discussing TikTok’s plans to co-produce creator-led micro-series. The conversation expanded into vertical dramas, AI-generated entertainment, and the possibility of TikTok developing its own original programming (https://deadline.com/tag/made-by-us-studios/). We compared the platform’s ambitions to the early days of Netflix originals, when streaming companies began evolving from distributors into studios. Creators are already building audiences and developing recognizable characters online. The next question is how those relationships translate into longer-form entertainment. Chipotle made a big-ass bag, and we had questions. (https://www.marketingdive.com/news/brand-new-bag-chipotle-unreal-snacks-reach-for-fashion-relevancy/832488/) Chipotle brought back its enormous branded to-go bag, which is apparently large enough to compete with IKEA’s iconic blue shopping bag. The campaign leaned into the absurdity with comparisons to other recognizable retail totes (https://www.instagram.com/p/DeiJZ1kT6R1/), including bags from Trader Joe’s and Gap. We discussed whether the oversized accessory was a fashion statement, a catering announcement, or simply an opportunity to say “big ass” on the brand’s Instagram. We also briefly confused it with a completely different $425 designer bag (https://rachelcomey.com/products/coco-bag), because nothing says modern consumer culture like accidentally conducting luxury handbag research during a burrito giveaway. Pringles wants to put you in a can when you die. For Halloween, Pringles introduced a sweepstakes offering 200 years’ worth of chips, complete with funeral-themed creative and references to a last will and “tastement.” The campaign draws on the real brand lore surrounding the inventor of the Pringles can, who reportedly wanted his ashes buried in one. We appreciated the connection to the product’s history, but also discussed how brands navigate humor about death when audiences are increasingly exposed to real-world tragedy. Liquid Death may have normalized morbid marketing (https://themarketingmillennials.com/articles/2023-01-04/how-liquid-death-built-a-700m-business-with-a-cult-following-in-3-years/), but that doesn’t mean every consumer is necessarily ready to joke about their own funeral arrangements. Kelly Clarkson accidentally started a luxury furniture PR crisis. (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/kelly-clarkson-art-of-play-bird-molly-speaks-out-1236733601/) After Kelly Clarkson shared an experience of being dismissed at a Brooklyn boutique, the situation escalated into a public controversy. We discussed footage of the interaction, the shop owner’s increasingly defensive response, and the reported decision to dramatically raise the item’s price. Rather than treating the situation as an opportunity for accountability or even a playful resolution, the store appeared (https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/10/13/kelly-clarkson-art-of-play-brooklyn-security-footage/92242626007/) to be making the situation worse. We also considered whether Clarkson’s point was less about being a celebrity who wasn’t recognized and more about how the store might treat an ordinary customer who doesn’t look wealthy. AI might finally help us escape Big Printer Ink. We discussed reports of people using chatbots and reverse-engineering tools to work around HP printer restrictions that prevent certain third-party cartridges from functioning. The idea of using AI to regain control over a product someone already owns was appealing, even as the conversation expanded into broader concerns about cybersecurity and increasingly powerful AI systems. Good marketing isn’t necessarily complicated, but it does require understanding what people actually want from the experience. Pizza Vino found success by stripping away unnecessary production and giving audiences a recognizable personality. Loose Cannon built a community around entertainment people genuinely wanted to watch. Kraft, meanwhile, managed to make a highly desirable product unnecessarily difficult to obtain. Brands spend enormous amounts of time trying to manufacture attention, but attention is only valuable when the experience behind it delivers. We’ll be back next week with more internet anthropology, questionable campaign logistics, and whatever new consumer product requires us to conduct a citywide search and rescue operation. Our Lives are 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. And follow @silencebranddotnet (https://www.instagram.com/silencebranddotnet) on IG while youre at it. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan J DiLazio (https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialmediamenace/) • Dayna Castillo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynabeck/) • Dejaih Smith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dejaih-smith/) • 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 (mailto: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)

2. 

   11 Oct 2026

   🦀 Silence, Brand! Live: We are not brain-rotted. We are brain-fermented.

   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), we opened with a thorough investigation into Uncle Pussy and his increasingly complicated family tree before spiraling into AI-generated toothpaste captions, the ethics of rage bait, an internet-wide expedition to the Congo Basin, Michael Jackson impersonators, hurricane-name discourse, and the latest fashion aesthetic that has Gen Z spending ten thousand dollars to look like they aren’t trying. Between nonsensical Twitter memes, brands turning mistakes into engagement strategies, TikTok audiences developing parasocial relationships with explorers, and young people rediscovering archived designer clothing, we kept circling back to the same question: when does internet participation create something meaningful, and when are we all just enthusiastically feeding the algorithm? 🦀 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: Uncle Pussy is a state of mind. Gay Twitter has apparently adopted Uncle Pussy (https://x.com/search?q=uncle%20pussy&src=typed_query) as its latest linguistic obsession, and we spent a considerable amount of time attempting to understand a meme that does not particularly care whether anyone understands it. Nobody has to understand the original joke for the joke to keep evolving. The internet will continue avalanching with or without us. Pearl Pop “accidentally” published the ChatGPT prompt with its toothpaste ad. A brand selling toothpaste gummies for kids posted a TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@pearlpop/video/7691853593074224398?_r=1&_t=ZP-9AOowJX4rTr) with a promotional caption that began with what appeared to be an AI assistant’s response to a copywriting request. Rather than quietly correcting the mistake, Pearl Pop left the post running and replied to criticism by joking that it was too busy inventing the future of toothpaste to proofread. The product itself seemed interesting, but the social strategy was considerably more questionable. Did someone forget to delete the ChatGPT instructions, or did we just witness a very successful piece of manufactured incompetence? Is rage bait a Brand W, a Brand L, or a Brand IDK? The Pearl Pop moment turned into a larger discussion about whether deliberately irritating an audience can be an effective awareness strategy. The post had accumulated thousands of likes, bookmarks, and hundreds of comments, while the brand was also running more straightforward educational content and retargeting ads. We compared the tactic with American Eagle’s controversial advertising and asked whether short-term attention is worth potentially damaging consumer trust. If outrage gets people into the funnel, does that make it good marketing? And what happens when brands decide being annoying is their entire personality? The internet has collectively adopted a man exploring the Congo Basin. (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/article/millions-are-watching-ash-dykes-travel-through-the-congo-basin-why-do-we-love-watching-other-people-put-themselves-through-extreme-adventures-160333132.html) Explorer Ash Dykes (https://www.tiktok.com/@ash_dykes) has been documenting his expedition, and TikTok audiences are following along with a mixture of fascination, concern, and the energy of a parent watching their child make an extremely questionable decision. Lost luggage, ominous travel setbacks, crocodiles, and the general dangers of the region have only intensified the collective anxiety. People are making videos about quitting their jobs to follow the expedition, while others are joking that their personal equivalent of exploring the Congo Basin is venturing into the bushes outside Marshalls. Not every viral moment needs a brand in the comments. We wondered how long it would take for companies to insert themselves into the Congo Basin discourse, particularly after recalling a previous stunt involving ELF sunscreen being delivered (https://people.com/elf-cosmetics-dropped-spf-via-plane-to-sailor-in-ocean-11742356) to a sailor attempting an ocean crossing. But an expedition involving real physical risks, local communities, and culturally significant land isn’t necessarily the ideal environment for a consumer brand looking for impressions. Sometimes the correct marketing move is to simply watch the TikToks like everyone else. Michael Jackson TikTok has become its own little universe. A detour into the internet’s latest Michael Jackson obsession introduced us to a livestreaming impersonator reportedly attracting tens of thousands of viewers, children discovering Michael Jackson through newer media, and a small Michael Jackson doll (https://shop.tiktok.com/us/pdp/michael-jackson-doll-28cm-plush-bendable-figure-collectible/1732474635254076166?source=ecommerce_shoppingguide&enter_method=feed_list_search_word&first_entrance=google&first_entrance_tt_scene=seo&btm_pre=a18064.b0.c37359.d52761_i0&btm_pre_show_id=51dfc087-d86c-4f87-83e1-8479bb669452&btm_transfer_id=48cfbc25-3ada-4f36-9e13-b589c35a6976) that people are treating like an extremely cursed Elf on the Shelf. The IRS is coming, but this time it’s the weather. A collection of storms (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/10/09/desantis-hurricane-isaias-pronounciation/92170731007/) with names forming the initials IRS inspired jokes about the government coming for everyone ahead of tax season. That led us to a clip of Ron DeSantis (https://www.tiktok.com/@puppetplayers/video/7694657725216607501?_r=1&_t=ZT-9AQ0hVpOpCA) insisting on calling a storm “Isaiah” (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en-US&hl=en-us&client=safari&hs=OK7V&sca_esv=d9a0b2731d9ca0d5&q=isaias+hurricane+pronunciation&docid=uXrFJ94g_pdd6M&ibp=video&shem=epsd1,ivsple,rimspwouoe&shndl=41&shmd=H4sIAAAAAAAA_31Uy27bRhRFEXRDZB-gq2svgqSwXnYcxAIMg1ZSPxA5iSXDUDfCcHgljjWcYWeGppVVsgmSTYC0H-BP6D81P-D8Qe6MROfpaiEQnMNzzz3nkNHr29GdfV2B0_DcaKVLxREOLBPM_jbLnCtst9VCxc28cJg2XKLazal1zAne5DpviZxN0e78tU0n3fgo3drjx3OuhzzDcb86Krb6h6qxOxin6km8MZTy0Um_L8-yh1t7oxenyUVj_Ci-a7c77d8_RU-RGQUuQ-DaGOQOClJEggRN0wr0JBwqltcK18KNZ9zpBA2st9cfwn5pjOBM1ZAmQBQ9Fpbrc4J4OJEWdFlkWiFtAYlBNkt1pdbAzqVkiUSwzqAleqZSSEQiiVGSKuXwwsFEeyJhg5JmFO3WgN4C0I38aAv3itrQFMQ0a_wZjxqlvQ90xGDPIM7gnBnBlKtXux71ZcdsDXJkSqgprFomz7-x4qk26SqQnNURyyrMPPU1qLkKBw4MTtBYH69_IGdnhH4mUxgihZijCiYXGTqoMg2sdJk2pNeDd7We-Um1DtobHUrptSxSyv3lUkufDCMY-TEUeSCn6kQR0K_dbbehAT-tmb2GbBJkIAlzF3qSqgDHWFBAfpUa01knTG9ZjkHIiNDPKUnBiejq8p-3MDRMWZKaw1yX5rsKCQVnpXVAwkuHPoeUzZtExYxb4sktrZgUL70LholgvVj0ctCPj4cQ5xgqBjHn3sC4KEDpagWuLt__C_U7Y12ZCh3eEVsg8izXqZjQc4uFri4_vIM9st0PnVAZYFqKFL1B1_xP1FQKm8GA7EptF6Kau6qq5o-ki1mOUmrxzdYfxDl-TLWWmqW2mblcRj_XP6y3rISjYYG3_x0vxfrfm7-_NipodlRf6Rvg73D6s0g6a5nLGzdJjaJDHYyl1vKMKYXSrz8lUxgps6G1lMeMevT15jTelQkGjuVzrZPeYOPB8f4gFi96m1vsaKNzOBwno2nrjEZEy08LS-hJ6HQ74b3WlKj5ErEuvDAbjryEsB81jHbg9VL_b30EgzKx3IgkxBgsWcjrUntv2uBHMovMOYk7tkzG9M2ZCJOH-9sd-pSd-s8FsVvfCZBihlTiIzo_Rx8dm6HZARjpEnzCqQbhVuCGUC8-_vrql8tbnwHrIGZNBAYAAA&shmds=v1_ARwrE23Laq2uOVu7xg6h8xiyzIbwufD0mRFJY8UGeIDbZDIwtQ&source=sh/x/vid/m1/3&kgs=bfb71c913f58ed31&utm_source=epsd1,ivsple,rimspwouoe,sh/x/vid/m1/3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:72b54d48,vid:yUUsG5_t-Kc,st:0) rather than attempting its actual name, which prompted a conversation about pronunciation, cultural assumptions, and why openly refusing to learn a name is a strange thing to brag about. We also learned about the system for recycling storm names and retiring those associated with particularly destructive events. What the hell is Ball Hog? (https://www.thecut.com/article/out-hypebeasts-in-ball-hogs.html) Gen Z has introduced another fashion term, this time describing a style built around expensive, often archived designer pieces that might look relatively ordinary to someone outside the fashion internet. At first, we wondered whether this was simply quiet luxury with a new name, but an explainer (https://www.tiktok.com/@archive.oos/video/7688592285948267789?q=ball%20hog&t=1791573839225) helped connect it to the earlier hypebeast era and renewed interest in archival fashion. Think designer pieces from previous decades, streetwear influences, and an outfit worth ten thousand dollars that doesn’t necessarily announce its price tag to everyone in the room. Gen Z is remixing the fashion eras it was too young to experience. The Ball Hog discussion became an exploration of how younger audiences rediscover and reinterpret styles from the late 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Much like the Y2K revival, archival fashion gives people access to an aesthetic they may remember only vaguely, or never experienced firsthand. What looks like a brand-new trend is often a familiar cultural language being reconstructed by people with different reference points. Well! That’s the episode! The internet doesn’t require everything to be understandable, useful, or even particularly original for people to build meaning around it. A ridiculous phrase becomes a shared language. An expedition becomes appointment viewing. A decades-old fashion aesthetic gets a new name and an entirely new audience. These moments become interesting because people collectively decide they’re worth participating in. For brands, that creates both an opportunity and a temptation. The same participatory energy that builds communities can also be exploited for impressions, especially when outrage and confusion perform just as well as genuine enthusiasm. But getting people to talk about something and giving them a reason to care about it aren’t necessarily the same achievement. Our Lives are 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. And follow @silencebranddotnet (https://www.instagram.com/silencebranddotnet) on IG while youre at it. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan J DiLazio (https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialmediamenace/) • Dayna Castillo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynabeck/) • Dejaih Smith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dejaih-smith/) • 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 (mailto: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)

3. 

   2 Oct 2026

   🦀 Silence, Brand! Live: fat bears and subaru lovers

   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), we opened with a formal grievance against Starbucks for taking away the apple crisp macchiato while allowing banana bread matcha to roam freely through fall before spiraling into nepo bears, Discord mascot violence, a parking lot full of identical orange Subarus, candy corn pizza, and spooky ranch. Between Fat Bear Week, Wumpus protest art, Sunshine Orange Crosstrek enthusiasts, and brands collectively deciding spooky season is a personality, we figured out that people yearn for community, and apparently they will build it around literally anything. A bear. A car. A Discord server. A pumpkin. Give people one extremely specific thing to care about together and they will figure out the rest. 🦀 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: Starbucks has lost the seasonal beverage plot. Ryan opened with a grievance: why can someone get a banana bread matcha in September while the apple crisp macchiato is nowhere to be found? Apple is fall. Pumpkin is fall. Banana feels suspiciously early summer. The Starbucks Cinematic Universe has rules, and somebody needs to respect the lore. Editor’s Note: During a post-show fact check, it appears that Apple Crisp typically releases later than Pumpkin Spice Lattes and may possibly make an appearance this season. In 2025, it released on October 9th. (https://about.starbucks.com/press/2025/fan-favorite-apple-crisp-is-back-at-starbucks-starting-oct-9/) Fat Bear Week remains one of the internet’s purest institutions. (https://apnews.com/article/fat-bear-week-alaska-katmai-04538e13c022fcfc08344aac8eeace5e) Backpack won Fat Bear Week, but the victory came with nepo bear allegations because his mother previously won in 2019. She is apparently known as the Duchess of Density. We support women. Fat Bear Week is internet culture that actually comes from the internet. We got into why something as beloved as Fat Bear Week can still completely miss people who otherwise live online. A lot of what gets called “internet culture” is actually pop culture happening somewhere else and getting amplified online. Fat Bear Week is different. The bears do not know they are competing. The entire competition is born online, lives online, and remains beautifully niche. Take that Love Island. Discord users responded to age verification with extremely high-effort Wumpus violence. (https://kotaku.com/discords-second-attempt-to-roll-out-age-verification-is-going-badly-2000737908) After Discord rolled out age-verification changes, we looked at users’ increasingly elaborate protest art involving the platform’s mascot. The images were gruesome, but the effort behind them also said something about the community’s relationship with Discord: these weren’t casual users complaining about an app they didn’t care about. They were people angry at a platform that had become infrastructure for their friendships and communities. Turns out a beloved mascot can also become your emotional punching bag. Mascots are usually designed to create affinity, but Wumpus became the stand-in for Discord itself. Instead of directing all of that anger toward a faceless company or executive, users could take the cute little embodiment of the brand and put him through unimaginable horrors. Poor Wumpus. (But great brand semiotics) Subaru understood that sometimes the correct brand strategy is “love you too.” (https://www.ruralintelligence.com/i-cant-call-it-stupid-anymore-great-barringtons-sunshine-orange-subaru-parade-brings-out-the-sun-and-tears-of-joy/)In Maryland, the second annual Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstreks meetup happened over the weekend. The event was originated by a single person within the community, and Subaru’s participation appeared relatively light-touch. The fueled participation with officially licensed pins, amplification of the organizer’s content (https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd4reEdjfdZ/?hl=en&img_index=2), and enough involvement to support what was already happening without swallowing it whole. The group contrasted that with the uncool version, where a brand sees a community idea working and immediately tries to recreate it somewhere else under its own control. [whatever happened to that lesbian christmas commercial (https://lnkd.in/p/gnkXpWVD)anyway???] Candy corn pizza looked rage bait directly in Dejaih’s eyes. (https://tombstonecandycornpizza.myshopify.com/) (https://tombstonecandycornpizza.myshopify.com/)Tombstone introduced a candy corn pizza, which nobody was particularly eager to eat but everyone could appreciate as a seasonal conversation starter. Candy corn is already the pineapple-on-pizza discourse of Halloween candy, so putting it on an actual pizza feels less like food innovation and more like fulfilling a prophecy. Black ranch is the correct amount of Halloween food whimsy. Hidden Valley entered spooky season with dark-colored ranch made using cocoa powder and fruit juice, immediately evoking memories of purple Shrek ketchup (Shreketchup if you will (https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/6tyhm6/does_anyone_remember_colored_shrek_ketchup_donkey/)). Unlike simply making something bizarre for attention, we felt this was a cute way to put Halloween directly into a product people already use. Spooky, adorable, hopefully edible. The streets are for trick-or-treating. (https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-announces-largest-ever-trick-or-streets-with-160-c)The group discussed plans in New York to close streets for Halloween activities and immediately landed on the community benefits of giving people a designated place to gather. Trick-or-treating can feel increasingly noncommunal when half the houses have their lights off and nobody knows which neighbors want to participate. October 1 is apparently Halloween First. Dayna reported live from the streets of Instagram on the extremely robust genre of “me on September 30 versus me on October 1” brand memes. Except upon further investigation, some brands had already started making versions in late August and early September. Spooky season no longer begins in October. It begins whenever everyone collectively decides summer is spiritually over. Halloween might be the April Fools’ Day of fall. The group noticed that brands seem unusually comfortable getting weird during Halloween, from memes to fake products to bizarre seasonal experiments. Unlike other holidays that come with more cultural or religious baggage, spooky season gives brands permission to jack around for a month and audiences seem largely down for the whimsy. Halloween becomes a sandbox between summer and the inevitable arrival of Christmas marketing. Well! That’s the episode!So what we’re getting at is people really do yearn for community, but community works best when participation feels voluntary, specific, and a little bit stupid. Fat Bear Week works because everyone gets to care about a bear. The Crosstrek meetup works because people already cared enough to organize it themselves. And the strongest communities don’t need brands to invent a reason for people to gather. Sometimes they just need the brand, platform, or city to make a little room and say, “yeah, go have fun.” We’ll be back next week with more internet anthropology, more seasonal grievances, and more things that make us ask, “is this community building, or did 100 people just accidentally buy the same orange Subaru?” Our Lives are 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. And follow @silencebranddotnet (https://www.instagram.com/silencebranddotnet) on IG while youre at it. We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀 Ryan J DiLazio (https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialmediamenace/) • Dayna Castillo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daynabeck/) • Dejaih Smith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dejaih-smith/) • 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 (mailto: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)

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