The Trendy-to-Tacky Lifecycle

If you open up a trending TikTok video, you’ll likely see a pattern on display. On the surface, while it might appear whimsical or harmless, peeling back the onion will give you a front row seat to a principle that can catapult your career (as a builder or content/SEO professional), or cause you to be thrown into the beige bin of average, safe work.

The trend I’m referring to is brands commenting on viral videos with witty, buttoned-down replies. The comments are meant to illustrate a groundedness, a relatability, a “cool uncle.” When this first started happening, this was of course very funny and even charming. It showed that brands were willing to take a risk. To hand the keys over to their Head of Social, or Gen Z social hire. This trend quickly, rapidly, and assuredly devolved into the opposite of what it originally was: safe, cringey, and boring. When the John Deeres and Jiffy Lubes of the world are parroting “slay, Queen” and whatever brain rot is trending that week, innovation of a medium becomes exploitation of a moment.

This example follows what I’ve started referring to as the Trendy-to-Tacky Lifecycle. Stated plainly: every format, platform, and tactic travels the same road from innovative to trendy to tacky, and the stretch between the second stop and the third one is always shorter than the people riding it expect. People and brands who get it already get it, and those who don’t could benefit (or at least avoid biting themselves in the ass) from paying more attention to it. And, today in the ephemeral, short form scroll economy, where trends move at the speed of light, it’s become even more important. Here’s how it usually happens:

The stages matter less than the distance between them, which keeps shrinking. A format used to have a year or two in the middle of that chart. Now something can go from genuinely novel to a case study in what not to do inside a single quarter, which means the lag between when your agency pitches an idea and when it lands on your feed is often long enough to move it a full stage down.

The same thing happens with the “Uncle Rule” when it comes to social media adoption. Every platform gets exactly one window where its earliest users feel free to be themselves on it, and that window closes the moment the people they were getting away from show up.

Nobody in that loop is doing anything wrong. The uncle isn’t the villain, he just showed up, and his showing up is proof the platform worked. But the arrival is a signal, and reading it correctly is the difference between building where the attention is going and buying billboards where it just was.

We see this time and time again play out, across different technologies, across different verticals. We’re seeing it right now with the macro and micro rejection of AI. Luddite Clubs, which started with a handful of Brooklyn teenagers trading smartphones for flip phones, now have chapters at Columbia, Vassar, Pomona, and Temple. Commencement speakers who praise AI are getting booed off the stage by the graduating class, which happened at three separate ceremonies in a single month this spring. Creators have started putting “No AI” in their titles and thumbnails, and they are putting it there because it works as a selling point.

Two years ago, telling everyone you were using AI was the trendy move. Watch where it lands next.

Maybe you’re reading this and “duh” is crossing your lips, you don’t need this article. If you didn’t, then take a moment to take inventory of where a trend or decision or technology is in the Trendy-to-Tacky Lifecycle. It’s the same instinct that separates the strategists who last from the ones who chase every trend with the same budget, and the same one you’ll need when leadership asks why you aren’t on whatever platform their kid uses.

It might sacrifice a few dozen more likes in your monthly social media reports, but it will buy you good will over time.