By Rena Tsangari, PR & Events Manager
You may have seen the Spider-Man carousel on social media. A hand stretches from one slide into the next, turning a familiar carousel format into something more interactive and encouraging users to keep swiping. At first, the idea feels fresh. Then creators begin adapting it, brands follow and agencies consider how their clients might join the moment. Within days, versions appear across unrelated sectors and what initially captured attention starts to become familiar.
This cycle has become part of everyday communications. New formats, visual styles and AI tools emerge constantly, creating pressure for brands to respond quickly and remain part of the conversation. Yet speed is only one part of relevance. A trend may create an opportunity to experiment or connect with a wider cultural moment, but it can just as easily take a brand somewhere that has little to do with its identity.
The more useful question is whether the trend gives the brand a meaningful reason to participate.
How relevance becomes repetition
Most social media trends do not begin with companies or carefully planned campaigns. They usually emerge because a creator or online community experiments with an idea that others find entertaining, relatable or easy to reproduce.
As people begin adapting it, platforms detect the engagement and introduce the content to wider audiences. Larger creators can accelerate its reach, while brands often bring the format into mainstream communication. People may start trends, but algorithms play an important role in determining how far they travel and can make a conversation appear much bigger or more universal than it really is.
The Spider-Man carousel illustrates that process well. Its initial appeal comes from using a familiar cultural reference in an unexpected way and turning an ordinary carousel into a visual interaction. As more versions appear, however, the novelty gradually declines.
This is the natural lifecycle of many social media trends. Originality inspires adaptation, adaptation creates familiarity and familiarity eventually leads to saturation. By the time some companies publish their own version, much of the creative opportunity may already have disappeared.
Without a clear connection to the brand, participating in a trend risks becoming decoration rather than communication.
Attention is not the objective
The pressure to remain relevant is often tied to another ambition: going viral. Yet visibility alone tells us very little about whether communication has actually achieved its objective.
Apple experienced this with its 2024 “Crush!” advertisement for the iPad Pro. The film showed musical instruments, books, cameras, paints and other creative tools being destroyed by a hydraulic press before revealing the device. The intended idea was to demonstrate how many creative capabilities could be contained within one product.
For many viewers, however, the imagery communicated something very different. Instead of celebrating creativity, the advertisement was interpreted as a technology company literally crushing the tools of human expression. Apple later apologised following the criticism.
The campaign generated significant attention, but the reaction demonstrated the difference between visibility and effective communication. A message can travel widely while still creating an association the brand never intended.
Going viral may mean being seen, but effective communication requires people to understand the message and remember the organisation for the right reasons. That is why reach, impressions and engagement cannot be the only measures of whether an idea has worked. The more important question is whether the execution supports the reputation, message and behaviour the organisation wants people to associate with it.
AI makes creation easier, but distinction harder
Generative AI adds another dimension to this challenge. Visual creation has become faster and far more accessible, allowing teams to experiment with campaign concepts, images and social media graphics in a fraction of the time previously required. This creates genuine opportunities for exploration, but it also increases the risk of different organisations producing work that feels remarkably similar.
Spend enough time scrolling through social media and certain AI aesthetics start to become recognisable: highly polished surfaces, exaggerated lighting, oversized typography and compositions designed for immediate impact. The issue is not that AI can only produce this type of work. It is that, without strong creative direction, businesses using similar tools and similar prompts can easily arrive at similar results.
Coca-Cola's AI-generated Christmas advertising brought this tension into wider discussion when it recreated the familiar world of its “Holidays Are Coming” campaign. The technology was able to reproduce trucks, snow, lights and recognisable brand cues, yet some viewers felt that the emotional warmth traditionally associated with the campaign had been weakened.
This is where the distinction between generating content and creating effective communication becomes important.
A prompt can tell a tool what to generate, but a creative brief explains why the work needs to exist, who it needs to reach, what it should make people feel and what they should remember afterwards.
Someone still has to decide whether the concept is appropriate, whether the visual hierarchy works, whether the typography supports the message and whether the result genuinely reflects the identity of the organisation behind it.
AI therefore does not remove the need for creative professionals. If anything, easier execution places greater value on direction, judgment and taste. Technology can generate an image, but human creativity still provides the context, meaning and strategic intent that turn an image into communication.
Choosing the right moments
None of this means that brands should avoid trends or AI. Experimentation remains important, and new formats can create genuinely interesting ways to communicate. AI can also help teams explore ideas more quickly and broaden the range of creative possibilities available to them.
The challenge is knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing.
Before adopting a viral format, visual style or technology, three questions can help guide the decision.
There should be a credible connection between the idea and the organisation using it. If the audience has to work too hard to understand why a brand is participating, the connection may not be strong enough.
Reproducing a format is relatively easy. The harder task is finding a perspective, message or creative treatment that makes the execution distinctive and strengthens the identity of the brand using it.
If the format becomes more memorable than the message, it may create engagement without building meaningful brand value.
Timing and execution still matter, but neither can compensate for a weak connection between the trend and the organisation adopting it. In some cases, the right decision will be to move quickly. In others, it may be to reinterpret the idea or simply let the moment pass.
Relevance requires judgment
At Purpose Communications, we often return to the idea that Progress is our Purpose. In communications, progress is not about adopting every new technology, format or social trend as quickly as possible. It is about recognising which developments can genuinely move a brand forward and understanding how to use them without weakening what makes that brand distinctive.
AI will continue to make content easier to produce, while social media will make successful ideas easier to identify, reproduce and distribute. As that happens, access to the latest tool or format becomes less important as a source of differentiation.
What matters increasingly is the thinking behind the work: the ability to understand context, identify the right opportunities, bring an original perspective and know when participation adds value to the brand.
When everyone has access to the same trends and increasingly similar tools, relevance will depend less on the ability to follow what is happening and more on the judgment to decide what is actually worth doing.
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