😭 Who needs the brand when you have drama?

Don’t invent a story. Find something that is crying out to be made and then hand it over to someone who can make it well. Singaporean real estate portal Property Guru’s Moving Out Show on TikTok has been a big success lately because they identified real drama in a place where their product genuinely has a role. Every young Singaporean relates to the tensions, cultural and financial, of moving out of home. As an example, it underlines the growing trend of giving creators the guiding hand in branded content. Happy Thursday, Simon

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A nine-part TikTok and Instagram microdrama about leaving your parents’ place hit 3.3 million views before anyone found out who made it. The Moving Out Show ran on brand-new accounts with zero mention of PropertyGuru, no cross-posting and no paid boost, just a Gen Z cast (TikTokers Charlene Oh and Ryan Ang among them). It crossed a million organic views in 48 hours, with 68% of viewers from Gen Z. The reveal happens inside episode nine itself, which drops the fiction for real Singaporeans talking about moving out before PropertyGuru discloses it made the whole thing. A survey released the same day found four in five young Singaporeans want to move out, only 15% have, held back less by guilt than by needing roughly S$20,000 saved first. The drama is real.

Brands used to hand creators a brief and rent their audience for a week. That’s flipping, and a new relationship is being negotiated. PepsiCo’s sparkling water, bubly, built its whole summer campaign around creator Erin Miller‘s 2000s nostalgia persona instead of squeezing her into an existing concept. Aéropostale went further, co-designing an entire collection with TikToker Déjà Clark. Agencies say clients now want feedback sessions with creators before products even launch. It means brands do need to trust the creator. Olive oil brand Kosterina found out the hard way. Giving an influencer a tight script and instructions on how to post bombed its campaign. Funnily enough, the audience can smell a brief a mile off. While legal, leadership and other stakeholders still keep the final say, the team who shapes the initial brief is expanding.

TikTok Shop held its first Singapore summit and pledged to train 1,000 local sellers by 2027 and 3,000 creators this year in livestreaming and short-video selling. Four programmes back it: LIVE Host Academy, Affiliate Accelerator, Short Video Programme, and a Growth Accelerator for sellers. Live viewership in Singapore is up 150% year on year, the gross merchandise value, known as GMV (i.e. how much was sold in dollar terms) was up by by 70 per cent. Kim’s Duet, a second-generation coffee roastery, went through the Growth Accelerator and posted 42% month-on-month GMV growth in June. Not a bad return for a family business that was still figuring out livestreaming a year ago.

If your AI content reaches the EU, the labelling rules kicked in on 2 August. Article 50 covers AI-generated or manipulated image, audio and video, and applies regardless of where you're based. Metadata on its own likely won't do it, since the label has to be visible at first encounter. Creative and satirical work gets flexibility on how, not whether. Nothing published before 2 August needs relabelling. Build a persistent on-screen label into your export template and add an AI-use field to your briefs while you're at it.

A drone that doesn't sink feels like it should have existed years ago. This one floats, takes off and lands directly on water, and rights itself if it flips over. Anyone who's shot near the ocean knows exactly how useful that is, usually because they've lost a drone finding out. We had to see it for ourselves.

Looking for a format? According to this creator there are five formats that are working for creators. It really depends on what type of creator you are and what value you have to offer. Figure that out and you’re halfway there.

Weeks after The Odyssey landed, people are still comparing 35mm and IMAX, and the joke has now found its way into home office content. People are rating their remote setups like projection formats, complete with aspect ratio labels and monitor comparisons. Deeply niche, and executed with far more commitment than the premise deserved.

We've been having a bit of fun with the reels lately, and this week it was my turn in front of the camera. A quick this or that on the creator questions everyone has an opinion about. Nice to be on the other side of the lens for once, though I'll let you judge whether the answers hold up.