Welcome to Silence, Brand!, a potluck of internet absurdity at the intersection of brand marketing and internet culture written by a collective of award winning digital marketing professionals. If you like what we do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This week’s Silence, Brand! Live, started with an unusually quiet internet. With Lollapalooza winding down and very few major brand activations hitting the timeline, the team found themselves doing what the internet rarely allows: sitting with their thoughts.
That lull quickly gave way to conversations about collapsing concert etiquette, Burger King’s questionable pregnancy campaign, Perez Hilton’s chaotic livestream, and what it actually means for brands to participate in internet culture responsibly.
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Has the internet hit a late-summer lull? The episode opened with an observation that the internet felt unusually slow this week. Outside of the aftermath of Lollapalooza, there were very few notable brand activations or launches, raising the question of whether the internet simply runs out of steam in late summer.
Why are artists asking fans not to pee and poop at concerts? While discussing Lollapalooza, the conversation shifted toward how concert etiquette seems to have dramatically changed over the past several years, with longtime concertgoers noticing behaviors that previously would have been unthinkable.
One of the strangest emerging trends is artists now explicitly asking audiences not to relieve themselves during shows. The group explored how this could be tied to post-pandemic socialization, the mainstreaming of festival culture, and the collision between traditional concert etiquette and large-scale event behavior.
Things once associated with events like New Year's Eve in Times Square may have crossed into music festivals as entirely new audiences entered concert spaces after COVID. Rather than learning existing norms, attendees simply brought different expectations with them.
Burger King accidentally wandered into one of the internet's most sensitive topics. The panel unpacked Burger King Trinidad & Tobago's campaign announcing "baby burgers" through a staged pregnancy reveal complete with a positive pregnancy test and ultrasound imagery.
The discussion centered on the idea that pregnancy and motherhood are emotionally complex experiences. While brands can absolutely create meaningful campaigns around parenthood, using pregnancy solely as the setup for a food joke ignores the many realities surrounding infertility, pregnancy loss, and reproductive rights.
As brands increasingly personify themselves online, but often fail to appreciate the emotional weight that comes with adopting deeply human experiences as marketing devices.
The internet remembers Perez Hilton. The conversation then shifted to Perez Hilton’s highly publicized TikTok livestream and mental health emergency. Rather than focusing solely on the livestream itself, we discussed how Perez Hilton spent years building a career by profiting from celebrity scandals and public humiliation. That history shaped how audiences interpreted the moment in real time.
The internet ultimately decides who receives empathy and who doesn’t. Fair or not, decades of public behavior influence whether audiences respond with compassion, skepticism, or outright dismissal.
Spectacle has no ceiling anymore. Perez Hilton’s livestream also became a broader conversation about attention economics. When creators are rewarded for increasingly dramatic behavior, the question becomes less “What will people do for views?” and more “Is there anything they won’t do?”. Anyone choosing to build a brand online is also choosing to exist within an ecosystem where unpredictable, emotionally charged, and sometimes disturbing events happen every day.
Overall, participating in internet culture requires more than understanding memes or jumping on trends — it requires understanding people. Whether you're making a joke about pregnancy or reacting to a viral internet spectacle, context matters, history matters, and audiences rarely separate the message from the larger cultural moment surrounding it.
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We hope you enjoyed this installment of Silence, Brand!—a tri-weekly, late-night potluck of internet absurdity 🦀
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