Episode · 2026-07-03
Social Trends are Cringe?
Social Trends are Cringe? | Pine-Sol's Unhinged TikTok | Meta's 73T Monthly Token Burn
Rundown
Chris Hall and Colin debate whether jumping on trendy TikTok content (like Pine-Sol's viral 'OMG DePine' characters turned TikTok Shop products) is cringe or smart marketing, then dig into Meta's massive AI engineering spend and a widely mocked USA-soccer pizza giveaway tied to a red card. The back half features guest interviews: an IzzyGift founder on building a gift-card and store-credit retention platform after learning to code from a Twitter-sourced coach, and David of Good Protein on scaling inside a crowded protein category.
Takes from this episode
Brands that get creators to produce trend content for free and then draw backlash should instead properly pay and activate with those creators.
It's cringe to hop on a creator trend for free, to be honest.
Pine-Sol's organic 'OMG DePine' TikTok characters were smartly converted into real products now selling out on TikTok Shop.
Once the OMG DePine characters became... attracting an audience, Clorox turned them into products. And now they are selling out and Pine-Sol is going hard on TikTok Shop.
Meta's enormous AI spending is a necessary, if wasteful and expensive, evil for the company to evolve to its next stage.
This is, unfortunately, a necessary evil in order for them to evolve into a much greater company.
Meta's huge AI engineering headcount hasn't visibly produced results, and it's doubtful the investment has improved the ad product.
I don't know that they have shipped anything that's 9,000 engineers worth... I'm not sure it's been going to the ad product.
Rewarding a red card with a free-pizza giveaway was a lazy activation choice; brands should tie promotions to positive outcomes instead.
It should have been like you win by X amount of goals and we'll give away a million dollars of free pizza or something like that. Something positive and uplifting with Team USA.
Gift cards are an effective retention tool because recipients reliably spend well above the card's face value when they return.
On average, we see that people spend approximately 40% more than whatever the gift card value is.