After many months toiling in darkness, I have a big announcement to make. I’m buying Twitter. Kidding, but I did get my first sunburn of the year. Spring is (finally) here. The brands are horny. The end is nigh. Let’s talk shop.

— Francis, Content at Air

This week’s plot:

• Brands, memes, and authenticity 🎭
• Working with a new generation of influencers 🤳
• What “Direct to Community” looks like 👀

Say it with me: mul-ti-hy-phe-nate. Who isn’t, these days? Like, we get it, “I too wear many hats.” Now more than ever, it’s simply how people work. Especially Gen Z.

Why? There’s a more complex explanation, but also a few simple reasons. The rise of the gig economy and the unchanging minimum wage. The growth of social media and the creator economy. How easy it’s become to learn skills online. Ok, there's a lot of reasons.

We got on the horn with Kate Glavan, rising star and (you guessed it) all around multi-hyphenate to talk memes, influencing, and brands.

A podcaster, memer, influencer, and entrepreneur walk into a bar supplement shop. Supplement-tender says, “Hey Kate, got your magnesium ready to go!”

Who is Kate Glavan? Well, if not for the pandemic, she says she’d just be in law school. But, pandemic. Along with Emma Roepke, she co-hosts the podcast Sea Moss Girlies and runs a prolific meme page by the same name. Their niche? Wellness, but they also interview folks like Becca Millstein, CEO of Fishwife.

Glavan is also a savvy influencer, partnered with the likes of Athletic Greens and Hoka. Also also, she’s a sharp writer — her last job before taking influencing, memeing, and podding full-time was Editorial Assistant at Currently. One final hyphen for you: entrepreneur. Her and Roepke are about to launch a supplement brand called suppl. Let’s get into it.

On Brand: How did Sea Moss Girlies come to be?

Kate Glavan: Emma and I started the podcast in December 2020. It was initially called “Voice Memo”, because that’s how we made it. We drafted 50 episodes, but the concept was all over the place. By episode 7, called “Wellness is Fucked,” it clicked.

The meme page started at the same time, we just needed an IG page. The podcast content was so high-info, getting into the weeds on magnesium and such, but these dumb memes were gaining traction way faster.

Honestly, we were annoyed — saw it as nobody takes us seriously, we’re a joke, they just like the memes. But it’s become a full, unified concept. We actually have a position in the wellness industry. We have an engaged community between the pod, the IG, and on Geneva. [Note: Geneva is a group chat app and the Sea Moss Girlies feature on their latest billboard]

OB: What, to you, are memes?

KG: They’re important to us, but we don’t think too hard about them. Throughout the week, Emma and I source images from Pinterest, Tumblr, IG, Twitter — wherever.

The most stressful part of Emma and my meme routine is who is posting the first meme of the day. It’s quite funny, actually. We both have our little morning routines and will text each morning around 9am something like “morning bestie! i got first meme hope u have a good day :)”

Since we’re super serious about aesthetic + consistency, we post 3 memes a day — usually around 10am, 1pm, and 5pm to give everyone lots of laughs through the day and make sure our IG grid looks good.Then we just take turns making and publishing them on IG. There’s no secret, all the editing just happens in the IG stories app. Takes 20 seconds.

We definitely have consistent content and themes, which makes it easy. There’s always jokes about magnesium or going on a silly little walk. When we make memes about a specific diet or lifestyle (like keto or intermittent fasting), the comment section goes wild.

Our memes are just authentic to who we are, our lives. We had one about “If they have this stuff in their house, run,” and it was all these supplements and products that we have in our houses. The comments were so mad, but we’re just making fun of ourselves.

OB: Should brands meme? Why or why not?

KG: Brands often copy what we do, which is flattering. I’ll say this — I don’t want a brand to be my best friend. I want to buy a product from them and move on. Gen Z is more like, fuck the system, fuck capitalism. We’re aware of the brand-consumer relationship, marketing us shit we actually don’t need to buy.

I don’t know that brands should meme or be too jokey with their consumers — it tends to feel shady and convoluted.

On a personal level, I think it’s sad that people today don’t feel they can affect political action. Sometimes it feels like all we can do to better the world is buy from a company that does carbon offsets. But brands are in business to make profit; they should just be honest about that.

All that said, when brands interact in the DMs with their customers to answer questions, respond to feedback, etc. — I find that to be genuine. Over at seamossgirlies HQ and on my own personal IG, I make an effort to reply to every single DM.

OB: The wellness community you’ve built reads like a corrective to the highly polished, relatively exclusive vibe of Goop. How will this play into your planning for suppl, your upcoming supplements brand?

KG: We want it to be inclusive, to be helpful. Our audience is young, they don’t make Goop money. They don’t have a community where they can talk openly. Emma and I have been the most unwell in our lives when we didn’t have community — that’s the major ethos behind Sea Moss Girlies, and the intent with suppl.

Our greatest asset is our community — we’ve run hundreds of Google surveys with them over the past year, figuring out what they’re looking for. They are who the brand is for — the 4,000 sea moss girlies in our Geneva group.

We’ve been building in not quite in public, but privately within our community. I really think Direct to Community is the future. The community came first for us, and we want all of this to be for them. But it will be a refined version of what we already do — don’t expect memes on product packaging.

Give the creator full control

• If you give them a strict script or social copy, it’ll flop.

Find people already talking about your product

• Social listening will guide you to your brand’s best influencers.
• They need to already know, care, and be excited about the product.
• Never cut a check if they don’t really care about your product.

True brand affinity beats follower count

• An influencer with 10k followers who loves your product is a better investment than a 100k follower account who doesn’t.

Never muzzle your influencers

• A commenter on one of Kate’s Hoka-sponsored posts asked about sustainability, since the materials aren’t all recycled. Instead of parroting a company line, Kate explained she wears the shoes to shreds — that’s sustainability, for her. That reply drove more positive comments.

Must-reads, hot takes, and rising trends:

• Fishwife’s perfect branding drove wild organic growth, here’s how they plan to double down with paid and a new strategy
• We wrote about how your performance and brand strategies can and should feed each other
• Should you care about YouTube shorts? Yes, apparently

Marketing + Creative jobs at our favorite brand-forward companies:

• Pattern needs a Social Media Manager
• Loom needs a Strategic Marketing Associate
• Curology needs a Senior Visual Designer

Air is also hiring for a variety of roles! Click here to apply.

As always, thanks for reading — and thanks for supporting Red Hook Initiative and purchasing our Earth Day shirt last time! We were able to sell out and raise $1000. Didn’t get one? No worries, we’ve got ya. First person to reply to this email with your honest feedback (on this issue or On Brand generally) gets a shirt on us.

— Francis Zierer, Content at Air

On Brand is a bi-monthly newsletter where we dissect viral #branded moments, interview marketers and creatives at the most on-it brands, and generally vibe out on the wide world of brands.

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