Let the audience leave fingerprints on the work

Larissa Vaz, Barcelona, on social listening as the work itself.

Something I keep coming back to these days: most beauty and fashion brands brief us on what they want to say on social. The brands actually winning the feed right now are doing the opposite. They are listening to what their audience is already saying, and letting that voice show up in the work itself. As research, yes, and as the actual ad.

Strong examples, in my humble opinion. Sol de Janeiro stopped naming fragrances and let consumers talk to each other in numbers: 62. 71. 40. Mielle entered a Black hair conversation that was already understood, translated it into mainstream Gen Z without flattening it, and sold to P&G for around 700 million dollars after that push. Nuts, right? And one of my favourites, K18, watched creators rewrite its application instructions on TikTok and simply updated its own guidance to match. The brand is being co-authored, in public, and it is leaning in. Isn’t that cool?

The technology to read culture across markets and languages is here, and the intelligence to make sense of it is here. So maybe what we are still missing is the courage to let the audience leave fingerprints on the work.

Can we all let what we hear actually change what we make? I would frankly love more of that. The brand that says yes builds memory. The brand that says no keeps making ads the algorithm has already seen. How do you feel?