Is Substack the new Reddit?
Plus Dan Frommer's mid-year report, Ollie x Zola's pawesome partnership, the new MTA OOH offering, and the Norwegian x British Airways social bet
I missed y’all last week!!! Puerto Rico was beautiful and I got more sleep in the last week than I have in the past 6 months. I am feeling refreshed and grateful. There’s a lot of new folks here - welcome and so glad to have you here! 💛
Welcome to The Pollinatr, a weekly newsletter for strategists who want to stay ahead of culture. To say I’m obsessed with strategy is an understatement. I’ve been every possible type of strategist in my career - media strategy, comms strategy, brand strategy, marketing strategy, social strategy. And the one thing I know to be true for any strategist is that staying on top of culture is a full-time job - spotting the signals, connecting the dots, and figuring out what it actually means for your brand. That’s why I write The Pollinatr - to do the legwork for strategists so they can stay ahead of culture. Aka, I’m the strategist’s strategist.
🐝 Pollen [week of July 13]
Insights, ideas, and inspo to get your brain buzzin and make your brands break through.
Seven questions to write better insights is a great, quick read for strategists. We all have our methods for getting to an insight, but this one helped me shake things up and attack the problem through different lenses. New ways of looking at things are always helpful!
Dan Frommer’s data is fantastic and he just dropped Consumer Trends 2026 mid-year report. He’s coined a new audience term called The Optimizers: “A third of Americans say they’re in ‘optimization mode’ — trying to get an edge on life through healthier choices and smart shortcuts.” Here’s one of my fav stats:
More optimizers would rather feel 10 years younger than look 10 years younger. HOWEVER look at the general age splits: All age ranges would rather FEEL younger than LOOK younger. AND the older people get, the bigger this grows. There’s a big insight in here for brands - that perhaps the key motivating factor for a lot of things people buy isn’t to improve their looks, but to improve how they feel. That’s a massive audience mindset shift that should impact the framing across your brand strategy and messaging.
I think this is probably your last week to jump on this trend but I still love it: “Me preparing for the Netflix documentary about ____ .” It’s gotta be something over the top, related to your brand, and slightly self-depricating to work. Also, Netflix’s response was soooo good.
Obsesseddddd with the recent Ollie x Zola partnership. Ollie partnered with Zola to offer “Dogs of Honor” a complimentary wedding-day meal, because while dogs have earned their spot in the wedding, their wedding day meal is often completely overlooked. Major shout out to Allison Stadd 🥁 and her team at Ollie and nice&frank for this one!
Jello-shots are getting chic. This is super fun and is pointing to something I feel has been bubbling u: the concept of play and
Really enjoying Ciroc’s social content. Saw this social post and did a deep dive and then loved this post and this post too. They’re going hard at the dirty martini girlie which means I am squarely in their target audience. I love how un-staged a lot of their posts look (e.g. using the snapchat text on screen) especially for a category that tends to focus on pristine, polished imagery.
As you know, I’ve been loving the creative, real-time World Cup moments brands are pulling off and my latest fav is Norwegian and British Airways’ recent bet. The loser of the match had to change their social profile to the other brand’s logo - they turned it into a mini campaign (the Norwegian SMM flew to London) and Norwegian Airlines stood by their promise after their loss.
The Odyssey is starting their movie promoooooo and I’m JAZZED. I got 300 pages through it at the beach and is just as good of a read as I remembered from high school.
Fun social format to try: “Automatic red cards in the ____/for the ___ ” Southern Living did it here for “Automatic red cards in the South”.
A tiny bit of old news but still need to shout out Reddit’s “People are the best” campaign. They absolutely NAILED the insight on this one - leaning into their competitive advantage in a way that pretty much no other brands can compete with. Reddit is THE place for recommendations from real humans.
For any of my fellow media/comms nerds, apparently there’s a new OOH placement available with the MTA in NYC to brand the subway signs as a part of premium advertising offering.
Sephora’s Quiet Hours initiative is a simple and smart way to create an inclusive environment for neurodiverse shoppers in their stores. I like this because it’s a reminder that it doesn’t always take some massive program to make a big impact.
Is Substack the new Reddit? I’ve noticed people on Substack asking for recos in chats for things completely unrelated to the newsletter itself - hair loss remedies, postpartum bathing suit brands, honeymoon ideas. Just scroll Melanie Masarin’s (Founder of Ghia) Night Shade’s chat for a look. Marketers should be paying attention to this: Substack is becoming a recommendation engine. It makes sense - newsletters often create groups of likeminded people and now the readers are realizing they have a lot in common and would trust each other’s recommendations. And I love that it’s not anonymous - it feels more trustworthy / verifiable in a lot of ways.
Side note, although Substack isn’t a top source for AEO (yet), I wouldn’t be surprised at some point if it became one.
What should a brand do? I wrote about 5 Substack strategies your brand can use and shared a competitive analysis of my favorite brand Substacks
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🐝 Michelle