2025/2026 Visual Insights & Forecast Report
Emotional Fluency Is the New Competitive Advantage Inside the ListenFirst 2025/2026 Visual Forecast — and what it tells us about the next era of digital behavior What people want from content has changed. Again. But this time, it’s not a format shift. It’s not a new platform. It’s not even about speed. It’s about emotional […]
TikTok’s Privacy Overhaul and the Rise of a Real‑World Backlash
A seemingly routine policy update turned into a cultural flashpoint, prompting a wave of mass deletions as users grapple with heightened data collection and mounting political anxiety. When millions of TikTok users opened the app earlier this month, they were greeted with a demand to accept a new privacy policy before scrolling could resume. On […]
365 Buttons
365 Buttons, and How It Actually Only Has To Make Sense To Me. The 365 Buttons meme is more than a TikTok bit. It’s a quiet rejection of platform logic, productivity culture, and overexplained marketing. Brands should pay attention to what it signals: the return of the personal, the offline, and the unapologetically inexplicable. A […]
TikTok Shop and the #DeInfluence Trend
“This Isn’t TikTok Anymore”: Creators Are Calling Time on the Commerce-ification of the Feed TikTok Shop isn’t just cluttering the feed. It’s reshaping what influence feels like, and not everyone’s buying in. A Personal Note (and a Familiar One) In a recent Trending RX piece, I wrote about what happened when I tested a TikTok […]
Fall in the House of Labubu
Labubu: What happens when the fandom cools, and the brand scrambles to keep the wheel turning? This article is a follow-up to our “The Rise of Labubu” deep dive from July 2025. You can read it here. In 2025, Labubu wasn’t just a toy. It was a flex. The bug-eyed gremlin from Pop Mart’s The […]
TL;DR: Aesthetics Predict Power
Do you want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out the full article here! How Social Media Trends Have Foreshadowed Every U.S. Presidential Win Since 2016 Over the past decade, presidential outcomes in the U.S. have been preceded—often eerily—by shifts in visual culture. Across TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram, style trends in fashion and home […]