How Niches Took Over the Mainstream
Does no one care what a random person in North Dakota thinks anymore?
Earlier this week, Marc Jacobs posted this SNL skit where Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman play him and Julia Fox as the hosts of the “It Girl Thanksgiving” to his Instagram page. The video is peppered with characters, references, and jokes that target a very specific type of a young bicoastal creative who is online enough to know Rachel Sennott’s origin story, follows cigfluencers on Instagram, and works in something fashion-adjacent — hence the post-ironic references to The Row. It’s one thing to see something like this on a local meme account, like Nolita Dirtbag or Starter Packs of NYC (although these jokes might be too on the nose for both), but it’s a bit of a trip to watch a mainstream production take a stab at sceney humor. How long do we have until John Mulaney plays a freelance creative director sipping on some nutty wine at a streetwear popup? I pulled up SNL’s YouTube channel and watched a couple more videos from the night, including Charli XCX’s 360 performance in which she kept clinging on to an awkwardly empty Gucci Jackie bag — a really odd product placement that I’ve seen a couple of fashion editors mention jokingly earlier this week. This whole thing rekindled my interest in something I’ve been curious about for a while now: Who is legacy media for anymore? Why does it keep leaning into the niche online culture even though it consistently fails to engage with it in a way that doesn’t make the intended audience cringe? And what kind of press opportunities actually move the needle for creative talent and brands that want to speak to creatives, these days?
“A lot of brands and companies want broadcast placements because the viewership is usually wide and vast,” explains
, the writer of a PR industry-focused newsletter RePressed, and the fashion publicist behind the iconic Miss PR Piggy account. “Before "viral" was a common term, everyone wanted that one moment that would allow them to "hit it big" like "Oprah's Favorite Things" or something. Then they would expect to have an influx of press opportunities to follow and have it be smooth sailing afterwards. However, the hype always dies down eventually and virality, hype, and cool-factor are all difficult to sustain.” What adds another layer of complexity here is that while brands and talent still go to legacy media for mainstream validation and distribution, the mass outlets increasingly want to speak to the niche indie audiences in a desperate attempt to claw their way back into cultural relevancy but lack the tools and the confidence to execute it well. As a result, you get a bunch of small but creative indie productions with a strong point of view that resonate deeply within a specific scene, and these strange caricatures of them that nod to the same scene but are so watered down for mass distribution that they end up not really speaking to anyone.
“I am an indie girlie at heart, so I see a lot of value in indie media. I'd like my clients to be in outlets that other editors and writers read,” Carrie tells me. “These types of publications usually take the most risk, have interesting story ideas, and are aesthetically interesting too. They also feel more human.” Bored by the mainstream outlets, I’ve been on a indie kick myself. I’ve flipped through Katharina Korbjuhn’s Paradigm trilogy not completely getting what I was looking at until halfway through the second PDF, let the creepy eroticism of the King Kong Magazine pull me into its messed up little world, spotted Comme des Garçons ads in the back of The Whitney Review, and marveled at the level of detail and craftsmanship that a family of creatives from Singapore puts into their annual famzine. High-quality indie media is more than a broadcast channel. It’s a time capsule, a storytelling opportunity, and a chance to make something interesting alongside the creatives that don’t always fit into the brand-safe mass mold, before the culture at large catches on. The limited reach is the obvious concern here, but Carrie reassured me that quality PR is supposed to be a slow burn: “Timing is so important. Most clients don't see that entering the world of formalized PR is a long, slow game. They all want immediate results and their dream placements. I get it because they are paying a lot of money for PR, but if they want the right brand positioning to ultimately create brand longevity, it's more strategic to embrace a slow burn, making the brand more potent and mediagenic along the way with PR's guidance.”
Over the past few months, I’ve read about Kareem Rahma’s strange encounter with Kamala Harris who bombed her Subway Take, listened to people talk at length about the power of alternative men’s media, saw Francis Ford Coppola promote his latest movie by raving about halva on Perfectly Imperfect, and watched one of the downtown’s favorite artists MJ Lenderman perform on Jimmy Fallon. On his episode of How Long Gone two years ago, MJ joked about wanting his first late night appearance to be James Corden. “[Corden’s] like: “Yea, we are doing something kind of indie for the last show. Mariah Carey was in the works, but we decided to kind of pass it up. Everyone welcome MJ Lendeman to the stage,” Chris Black, the co-host of HLG, joked back at him. But honestly, if this conversation happened a few years later, in the media landscape where indie has a new kind of mainstream ambition, and the mainstream is desperate to feed off the coolness of indie, I wouldn’t have taken this option completely off the table. In the post-election world specifically, there is a renewed interest in the niches, and we are yet to see all the clownery and awkward content that will inevitably come out of the mass take on it.
The week before the whole “It Girl Thanksgiving” debacle, Bill Burr hosted SNL alongside Mk.gee — a musician with a “your artist’s favorite artist” reputation who haven’t done much press or marketing until very recently. When he tells Joe Coscarelli who profiled him for The New York Times that his signature “cracked, shrouded and fuzzy” sound that currently falls somewhere in between jazz, AOR and classic rock, should be pop music, the writer notes that it might be “a bit much, coming from a relative unknown surrounded by messy piles of secondhand musical gear and beer cans.” But by the end of the piece, it becomes very clear that what comes off as abrasive “better than everyone” attitude is actually an excellent take on how pop culture ought to move forward. There are what Mk.gee calls “clowns moving how somebody would move in pop music” and artists chasing the more abstract promise of pop — “universality as the byproduct of something great”: “Experimentalism has no meaning unless it’s done on the grandest scale. I just don’t want to join somebody else’s citadel. I want to build my own thing, my own castle with my friends, because that’s what’s needed. And if people want to come, they can come.” Perhaps, if his PR team took the time to understand what he is saying here, they wouldn’t have booked Jimmy Kimmel and SNL.
Putting this back in the context of mass and indie media and where creatives and their brands fit into that landscape gives us a good idea about what the mainstream could look like in three to five years. There is a new kind of culture movers who are hungry for mass appeal but aren’t willing to compromise their values or water down their message in exchange for a faster rise to the top. They have the patience to embrace the slow burn and build a loyal fandom around the type of art and content that takes a while to really get into for what Coscarelli calls the generation “that has been over-served everything they have ever wanted, often in too-obvious packages. And strangely enough, at a certain tipping point, people start flocking to it in masses — The Row is referenced on prime time national TV, the buzziest movies of the year come from Neon, Utopia, and Mubi rather than Netflix, text media is on the rise, and indie musicians are rapidly breaking into pop and quietly selling out arenas. There is a lot of mass distribution power that comes with building out an entirely new bucket rather than aiming to make it into the biggest one that already exists.
There is a type of a business exec that calls this “bubble think,” which Carrie has commemorated in a meme that reiterates the line that every creative dreads in a strategy meeting at a brand with mainstream ambitions. And since everyone, including network television and presidential candidates, wants to speak to the niches these days, I half-jokingly asked her if it’s ever worth considering what a random person in North Dakota thinks. “The market is cluttered with brands. Brands have to be pretty special in order for anyone to care nowadays,” Carrie tells me. “Watering down your strategy from the jump to have mass appeal is incorrect and will absolutely affect the press coverage outcome. Niche appeal creates mass appeal later. Why hadn't anyone heard of Chicken Shop Date until recently? And yet the show has been around for 10 years and has featured very public celebrities since its inception. Sometimes it takes a while for the culture to catch up to genius.” Where this leaves the old guards of the mass? I am not sure, but I am excited to see the entirely new world that indie is building for itself in the mainstream.
IN THE MARGINS
For those of you who are eager to feed into the niches and build your own buckets, I’ve started an ongoing list of indie publications and productions that I think you should pitch to and work with on Busy Corner.
If you enjoyed Carrie’s comments, check out her newsletter RePressed for more BTS from the PR world, hot takes, strategy tips, and more delivered in your inbox weekly.
While everyone else is wrapping up a gift guide, I threw together a couple of fun party favor ideas for your holiday extravaganza over at The Guest List for the wonderful team at Partiful. Thank you
, , , , and for chiming in <3 Sadly, I had to cut ’s birthday gift bags that contained “one loose cigarette, a condom, and Twizzlers” from the final edit, but I need you all to know that it’s a fantastic option too.
adored every word
holy crap vik this was so good