Instagram Stories launched and every brand manager I know had a minor existential crisis. Not because the format is hard (it's not), but because ephemeral content demands something brands have spent decades avoiding: spontaneity.
Instagram Stories launched and every brand manager I know had a minor existential crisis.
The story format rewards realness over production value. It's 15 seconds of proof that someone at your company is actually alive and thinking. The brands winning at Stories aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones willing to show the draft, the mess, the unfinished thought.
I've been watching how Glossier uses Stories versus how legacy beauty brands do it, and the gap is staggering. Glossier's Stories feel like a text from your cool friend. Everyone else's feel like a PowerPoint deck someone reformatted vertically.
At Nemo we've been pushing clients to treat Stories as their brand's sketchbook, not their gallery wall. Most of them hate this advice. The ones who take it are seeing engagement rates that make their grid posts look dead.
The deeper lesson: platforms keep inventing formats that punish polish and reward presence. Brands that can't be present in real-time will keep losing ground to ones that can. The disappearing isn't the feature. The appearing is.
Truffles is asleep on my keyboard as I write this, which feels like editorial commentary.