Thinkbox
Campaign ran a Year Ahead feature recently on cultural trends in which things such as Labubu and Group 7 were cited as examples of 2025’s culture.
I’m not so sure. I think this confuses culture with novelty and fleeting limelight. Culture isn’t defined by how quickly something spreads but by whether it soaks in.
It’s true these things erupted and grabbed a moment. But they disappeared just as quickly.
Culture isn’t about blazing once. It’s about blazing and then being shared, remembered, and returned to. That distinction matters, and it’s where TV comes in – TV is a system designed for recurring, shared entertainment at scale.
Scale without staying power
Take Group 7, an algorithm experiment on TikTok that unexpectedly became a self-declared community. Users felt "chosen" by the platform, bonded by scarcity, inside jokes and a sense of belonging, and celebrities and brands piled in.
At its peak, Group 7 generated more than 80 million views, 800,000-plus videos and a boost in online search from people trying to understand it.
So far, so good. A moment, attention, curiosity. But there’s a catch. When you shift from global data to the UK, the story changes dramatically.
Despite its global reach, Group 7 generated only a few thousand weekly searches in the UK at its peak, dropping into the hundreds within weeks. It wasn’t a cultural wave any UK advertiser could ride, it was barely a ripple.
This is a recurring pattern with social virality. It can feel enormous on-platform and when global views are added together, yet struggle to scale locally or endure over time. Attention spikes, then evaporates. The phenomenon quickly becomes a phantom.
These moments feel big because they arrive suddenly and dominate feeds (especially the feeds of a young, urban and curious marketing community). It’s a dopamine-addicted world and these are strong doses. But their cultural half-life is short.
This isn’t about peaks, it’s about depth
Now, let’s look at TV. Take Married at First Sight. A decade after its debut, this show remains a cultural fixture. Interest doesn’t just peak, it sustains, resurfaces and widens over time. Even off-air, it attracts more curiosity than many viral moments ever achieve. When it returns, it scales predictably, holding attention for months rather than days.
The same pattern appears with long-running formats like I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!. More than 20 years on, it still delivers mass audiences, enormous participation, front pages and sustained conversation. Not just viewers, but voters, streamers, and sharers.
And these are only the long-running shows. Newer shows like Stranger Things or Day of the Jackal also generate both a peak and then maintain a high plateau as they scale around the UK.
That’s culture: something that generates repetition, familiarity, and shared memory.
Culture isn’t what explodes, it’s what endures
Social platforms excel at novelty, because they are optimised for discovery, dopamine and rapid spread.
But TV takes novelty and adds staying power. TV shows entice people back, week after week, year after year. TV allows culture to accumulate, not reset.
TV is also reassuringly predictable (if only there was an alluring, aspirational way to say predictable). Who knows what the next viral novelty will be but, when it erupts, any advertiser wishing to ride its wave will need to scramble like mad before it disappears back into the ocean. TV shows afford confidence.
In a year as chaotic as 2025, it was easy to mistake intensity for importance. Some moments felt enormous, then vanished almost immediately.
But when you look at what people returned to, talked about together and remembered, a clear pattern emerges: the biggest cultural moments weren’t always the loudest, they were the ones we shared.
If your goal in 2026 is attention, novelty will get you there quickly. If your goal is attention and culture, though, then longevity matters just as much as scale.
This article was originally published in Campaign.