The talk was delivered by Kaja Aulik, Senior Creative Strategist at Bolt, drawing on hands-on experience from zero-budget experiments, large-scale brand campaigns, and cultural side projects that reached millions without traditional performance marketing.

You are not competing with brands, you are competing with life

One of the core insights of the session was that brands often misunderstand their real competition. On social media, you are not competing with similar companies. You are competing with weddings, memes, war news, brain rot, Eurovision, group chats, and procrastination itself.

People do not scroll social media looking for brands. They scroll to be entertained, distracted, or emotionally validated. Content that assumes attention is already lost.

People don’t miss content, they miss scrolling.

This reframes the problem: if your content disappears, it is not because the algorithm hates you, but because your post did not earn a micro-decision to stop, save, or send.

Figma blindness is killing your reach

Kaja described a phenomenon she called Canva or Figma blindness: the moment marketers open a design tool, they stop thinking like users. Content that looks beautiful on a white artboard often collapses once it enters a chaotic feed filled with emotion, noise, and context.

Designing for social requires designing for interruption. Thumbnails, first seconds, and immediate relevance matter more than layout precision or brand guidelines. The question is not does this look good, but would I send this to a friend?

Social media lives in private spaces now

One of the strongest shifts highlighted was how social media has moved away from public actions toward private ones. Likes and comments are no longer the main signals of relevance. Shares, saves, screenshots, and DMs are.

People rarely repost brand content. They send it to friends. They reference it in conversations. They use it as cultural currency.

If your content doesn’t live in someone’s DMs, it barely exists.

This changes how success should be measured. Reach without resonance is noise. Content that becomes part of conversations travels further than content that asks for engagement directly.

Brands are characters, not stories

Kaja challenged the traditional idea that brands control their narrative. In today’s fragmented media reality, brands exist as characters across many parallel stories, perceived differently depending on context, experience, and culture.

A single bad service interaction can outweigh months of polished content. At the same time, a well-timed comment, joke, or cultural reference can outperform expensive campaigns.

This means brands should stop trying to explain who they are and start behaving like someone worth reacting to.

Data shows the past, culture shapes the future

Another key distinction was between data and intuition. Metrics are useful, but they only describe what already happened. They rarely predict what will break through next.

Virality comes from unexpected connections, remixing existing ideas, cultural signals, or internal data in new ways. Kaja illustrated this with examples where obscure insights or overlooked data points became the foundation for high-impact creative concepts.

Everything is a remix, but you can always tell who made it.

The differentiator is not originality, but perspective.

B2B is still human

For founders who assume these principles only apply to B2C, the session offered a blunt reminder: B2B is still human-to-human. Decision-makers are stressed, distracted, and emotionally driven just like everyone else.

This does not mean making memes at all costs. It means removing unnecessary corporate stiffness, using clearer language, and respecting how people actually consume content.

What brands should do differently

The session did not offer formulas, but it did offer a mindset shift. Strong social media presence is built by:
• Thinking like a user, not a marketer
• Designing for sharing, not approval
• Treating content as part of culture, not announcements
• Using AI as a tool, not an excuse for mediocrity
• Accepting that attention is earned, not owed

The uncomfortable truth is that most content fails not because of algorithms, budgets, or platforms, but because it was never interesting enough to matter.
In a feed where everything is competing at once, the brands that win are the ones that stop asking for attention and start deserving it.