By Wednesday night my entire feed was seventy years old. Friends, coworkers, three former clients, a hockey team, a guy I went to high school with who has never posted anything, all of them jowly and silver and delighted about it. FaceApp, a photo filter out of St. Petersburg, had taken the week.
By Thursday the story was the terms of service. By Friday there was a letter from a United States senator asking the FBI to look at it, and the same feed was full of people explaining that the app had a broad license to your uploaded photo and a Russian parent company.
In between those two days, a lot of brand accounts posted an aged version of their mascot.
Some of them were funny. All of them were fast. That is the part the agency deck will brag about, the turnaround time, and it is the least interesting thing that happened.
You cannot own a cultural moment you did not build and do not understand. You can only rent one, and the lease can be revoked by Thursday.
Here is the part that gets lost. Reactive social is not free. It looks free because the media cost is zero, but you are spending brand equity, and the exchange rate moves without warning. When the story turned from cute to who has your face, every brand in that thread got repriced. Not punished, mostly. Just repriced, into the bucket labeled things that chase.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Somebody pulls up the trending list at 9:15, and the question on the table becomes how do we get in, never should we, and never what is this thing actually about. Nobody in that room had read the terms of service. Nobody had asked who owns the company. The filter was a toy for four days, and toys have owners.
Two rules I would actually defend. One, if you cannot explain what the thing is, who made it, and why people like it, you do not post about it. Two, ask whether the moment does any work for you. Wendy's roasting people on Twitter is a moment that compounds, because it is the same voice every day and the audience came for it. A one-off aging filter compounds nothing. It is a costume.
You cannot own a cultural moment you did not build and do not understand.
The brands that got through the week clean were the ones that did nothing, which is a sentence no social manager wants to hear in a performance review.
Saturday I did karaoke in Southeast Portland, the sticky place, and the host who calls everyone baby put me down for Fleetwood Mac. Four people watched. Nobody filtered me into a senior citizen. It was, in every measurable way, a better use of a face.