‘We've sent the algorithm to sleep. We've alienated our under-35 audience, and can't reach them with traditional media. We're stuck in 200-view jail, and we've got tumbleweed in the comments.’

That's the opening line of nine out of ten client briefs that land on my desk. Then I look at their TikTok feed, and the prognosis writes itself. Polished ads shot for a different channel, workplace announcements that wouldn't even interest the people who work there, and content that assumes you're itching to hear all about products from a random brand.

The shift most brands have missed

TikTok and Reels are social entertainment platforms. By default, you’re talking to people who don't follow you, and will swipe in 0.4 seconds if you bore them.

This is both brilliant and terrible news for brands. Brilliant, because if your content bangs, you have access to an ‘unreachable’ Gen Z audience spending three-plus hours a day on the platform. Terrible, because most brands are so thoroughly un-entertaining, their content doesn’t get pushed out on the FYP in the first place.

The fix is simple, but uncomfortable. Accept that nobody cares about your brand, and let this starting point corner you into being wildly interesting.

Whose fault is this, actually?

Let's not pretend legal departments are the villains of this story. They're a convenient scapegoat for an industry that doesn't want to look in the mirror. The two culprits I want to pick on are CMOs, and traditional social agencies.

CMOs, because they’re obsessed with having a tidy bird’s-eye view of the marketing plan with the same creative running across OLV, OOH, PR, and yes, Social. Because that’s the working mode they’ve understood for the last thirty years. And the reason so many brands on social are stuck in broadcast mode.

But we can’t let social agencies off the hook either. They’ve spent the last 15 years billing by the hour for mediocre content. And in 2026, they’re utterly incapable of producing social content at the speed and scale that modern brands need.

But the problem goes one layer deeper than this if we’re really being honest. The small number of UK brands doing social well are doing it on TikTok because C-suite brand leaders still don’t have the app installed on their phones. Instagram gets watched like a hawk by the exec team. And that means they’ll call the Social Lead if there’s no post to go with yesterday’s press release, or demand a video gets pulled because they don’t get the joke. But as TikTok matures and more C-suite install the app on their phone, brand output could actually start going backwards. 

The brands getting it right do one thing the rest structurally can't

Brands like Currys, RSPB, Tesco, and Brita are leading the pack right now. But Currys deserves a special mention. If I had to name a single thing they do that no one else can match, it's speed. They can shoot and post a video in twenty minutes. No other UK brand is even close. That's why when they jump on a trend (see their Canadian curling scandal post) they’re often best and first, which is a killer combo.

Speed creatively de-risks everything. If it isn't funny, it doesn't get posted. The stakes are low enough for creatives to pitch their wildest “hear me out” idea without staking their career on it. And nobody has to defend a piece of mid content just because two weeks of production budget went into it.

Now look at the 90% getting it wrong: Brands killing the joke, making it about themselves, or aimlessly showing up in spaces they shouldn’t. Two things I saw that annoyed me far more than it should have: Domino’s commenting ‘great goal’ on a viral football video. (It was a great goal, but what’s it got to do with pizza?) And Kinder posting a literal pack shot to celebrate World Chocolate Day and patting themselves on the back for the ‘playful, reactive content’. On both counts you could throw an entire media budget at these and it still wouldn't move the brand needle by a millimetre.

What to actually do on Monday morning

If you're a CMO reading this and any of it stings, here's the prescription. It's free and it's brutal. Starting Monday, demand that your social agency create genuinely entertaining content for non-followers. Then, on the next three rounds of feedback, your only note should be ‘make it funnier’.

Within a fortnight, you'll find out if your social agency is actually capable of doing what you need. Most aren't, but that’s genuinely useful information. Because the alternative is spending another year in 200-view jail.