The Subreddit No Brand Can Touch.
On girl dinner, real vulnerability, and the campaigns that will try to copy it anyway.
A woman posted a photo of M&Ms and pretzels from a Las Vegas hotel room. Her husband and kids were downstairs at some gaming arena. She was alone for the evening, eating snacks and watching Netflix.
Ten years ago she was a single mom. She was dating someone who wasn’t good for her or her son. She was living paycheck to paycheck and had no idea what her future looked like. She ended the post: “So I’m going to set my phone down, eat a few more pretzels and m&ms, and be grateful.”
The post went up on r/GirlDinnerDiaries, a subreddit where women share a photo of whatever they’re eating and share a confession or story along with it. The food is incidental, the point is the story.
I look at this Reddit almost nightly before I go to bed. I like reading the stories and seeing the bad food photos. It also makes me feel connected to these women, the way they’re sharing these stories and confessions is so vulnerable.
It’s funny, that word “vulnerable” has shown up so much in my professional work too. Every brand wants to be authentic and vulnerable with their audience. They want to feel human. Brands want the feeling of r/GirlDinnerDiaries. They want the rawness, the emotional connection, the comment thread where a thousand women say “I’ve been there.” They want the engagement rate of a woman eating pretzels alone in a hotel room and telling you the truth about the last decade of her life.
They just don’t want the actual conditions that produce it.
Because the conditions are: no production value. No narrative arc. No call to action. No branded hashtag. No trending audio. No good lighting. No face. That’s what vulnerability looks like…nothing like a campaign.
TikTok figured out years ago that the performance of vulnerability drives engagement. Get good lighting on your tears. Add a trending sound to your confession. Film the breakdown, then film the recovery, then sell the skincare routine that cleared your stress acne. The algorithm rewards the appearance of honesty, which is different than honesty.
Every few months, some brand will try to reverse-engineer authenticity. They’ll launch a campaign about “real moments” or “unfiltered stories.” They’ll cast real people instead of models. The brief will say “authentic.” The creative will be approved by seven people. The legal team will flag the copy. The client will ask if it can be “a little more vulnerable but also aspirational.” Someone will suggest adding a product shot.
Meanwhile, a woman in a subreddit nobody greenlit will post a photo of cold leftovers and write three sentences about her divorce, and 900 people will tell her they understand.
I don’t have a tidy takeaway here. I’m not going to tell you what brands should learn from this, because the lesson is one they can’t really use. The most honest place on the internet works because nobody is selling anything. The moment someone tries, it stops working. Maybe some places are just meant to be unbranded.
Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe it’s okay for some parts of the internet to just be for people, for human connection.
Xx, Caitlin
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Monday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.