Creativebrief's latest piece asks a question that's been quietly reshaping briefs for a while now: has virality had its day?
Our own Annie Harte, Audience Strategy Lead at eight&four, wrote the piece. Her answer isn't that virality is dead. It's that it's no longer the only way content earns its keep.
"A piece of content doesn't need millions of views to be able to influence or have impact," she writes.
Annie traces virality back to its unplanned origins: Keyboard Cat, David After Dentist, Charlie Bit My Finger, none of it engineered, all of it just funny enough to pass on. Brands took note and tried to manufacture the same effect, turning "make us go viral" into a brief in its own right. But the way people use social has shifted. We arrive with a question now, not to stumble across something. Where to eat in New York. Whether Korean beauty is worth it. Which running shoes to buy. And with AI synthesising all that human content into a single answer, a piece of content only needs to be useful enough to become part of it.
Her wider point is about where credibility now shows up. Reddit threads, old YouTube explainers, niche recommendations buried in a Facebook Group: none of it breaks the internet, but it answers a question, or changes a mind, or ends up folded into an AI overview somebody else sees.
Read the full piece on Creativebrief.
