gemini season special report ep. 22
the duality of man / brand schisms / social media alter-egos / no slop, pure thought
On the eve of the TikTok Ban, the most anticlimactic event of the century, I explained to a former boss that the biggest shift wouldn’t be the loss of revenue from TikTok Shop but a much more esoteric problem: the loss of the alter-ego.
For the last five years the appeal of TikTok (other than its addictive algorithm) has been that it’s a safe place to put that other self, the one you might not want your aunt, middle school frenemy, or that Hinge date from three years ago to see. The self that’s a little embarrassing but also a little more honest in its desire for attention, expression, validation.
Brands, the smart ones at least, have done the same. They’ve constructed unique content strategies for each social platform. On Instagram, brands post the output: the campaign imagery, the custom fonts, the aspirational vision.
On TikTok, we get peeks behind the curtain and attempts to entertain. Heritage brands are humbled by the heinous in-app font. Luxury brands trade exclusivity for eyeballs. D2C promises community but settles for engagement. But this bifurcation allows even the most serious brands to have a silly side, a chance to relate. The people love it. They want Loewe to crash out. They want to see Marc Jacobs on some Teletubbies. They want Alex Consani.
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TikTok offers the carrot of Virality. Instagram waves the stick of Judgement.
TikTok validates every passing thought, the daily mundane slog, the Gua sha routine, the increasingly more elaborate ways we try to stave off boredom. Instagram wants your Hallmark moments, it wants engagements, birthdays, babies, hard launches. It wants a hot photo of your hot mom in her prime.
I’m interested in understanding imagery as both a byproduct and catalyst of culture. As brands continue to embrace duality their identity gets diluted. If you close your eyes you can imagine a Calvin Klein image: the neutral backdrop, the model’s gaze, the clean lines. Can you imagine the TikTok though? That’s the thing, TikTok requires a certain visual conformity that is hard to put a stamp on, that’s hard to own.
And while I think there’s a knee jerk reaction to like these more “human” interpretations of a brands identity, I’m not convinced it will last. The consumer might grow skeptical of brands mirroring their own behavior and of corporations cosplaying as individuals.
In a decade from now are people going to reference back to a particular TikTok video, probably not. The magic of fast content is that is reactionary, spontaneous, and raw. But there is still a need to create imagery (video too) that provokes. Images that can be remembered. The continued obsession with campaigns from the ‘90s and early aughts isn’t just nostalgia, it’s because at the time an image had to stand on its own.
It had to be enough.
Here’s a screenshot from my phone with some bonus thoughts on the Substack of it all:
