Fly By News 1.23.26: Tech-First, Memory-First, Culture-First

January 23, 2026

Marketing has a funny way of pretending it lives in a clean little box. Brand on one side. Performance on the other. Creative in one meeting, finance in another. Then reality shows up with a chair and sits at the head of the table.

When a major media company rebuilds its data org overnight, that is not “industry news.” That is an operational warning shot for every brand that relies on platforms, attribution, and audience signals.

When a beer giant drags a legendary character out of retirement to fight slumping sales, that is not “a fun ad story.” That is a reminder that memory still moves product, even in a world drowning in content.

And when a 2026 social trends report drops 18 shifts at once, that is not “more marketing thought leadership.” That is a map of how discovery, trust, and culture are being rewired in real time.

Let’s expand each story with the context brands need, plus the actions you can take this quarter to stay ahead.

Hawke Blog Editorial Guidelines…

1) Paramount Goes Tech-First, Full Stop: What That Means For Brands

The Context: Data Is Becoming The Operating System, Not The Report Card

According to Business Insider, Paramount’s new CEO, David Ellison, is restructuring the company’s data and insights leadership and broadening the scope of its streaming data head to oversee data across the business. The explicit goal being communicated internally is a “tech-first media company,” with less fragmentation and faster execution.

This is the part marketers should care about: when a company that used to define itself by studios, networks, and programming is reorganizing around data infrastructure, it is admitting the economics changed. Streaming has been steadily taking share, but the pace is now brutal. Nielsen reported that streaming reached 47.5% of total U.S. TV viewing in December 2025, a record share in The Gauge.

Put simply: the companies supplying “attention” are becoming software-driven businesses because attention itself is being priced, packaged, and predicted by systems.

The Marketing Translation: Brands Need A Tech-First Commercial Brain Too

Most brands are still running a very human workflow in a machine-speed environment:

A campaign launches.
Reporting comes in.
Everyone argues about attribution.
Optimizations happen next week.
Creative updates happen next month.
The market changes tomorrow morning.

A “tech-first” approach does not mean “buy more tools.” It means shortening the distance between signal and decision.

Here’s what Paramount is really signaling to the market: data leadership is being centralized so they can break silos, unify measurement, and move faster as one team.
Brands need the same posture, even if you are not a media company.

What Brands Should Do: The 6-Week Tech-First Sprint

If you want an actionable plan that does not turn into a 9-month data project, do this:

Step 1: Identify Your “Decision Latency”

Write down the last five meaningful decisions your team made (budget shifts, creative pivots, offer changes, channel reallocations). For each one, track:

Date the signal appeared (performance drop, inventory issue, CPA spike, comments changing tone)
Date the decision was made
Date the change shipped

If your “signal-to-ship” time is longer than two weeks for paid media or social creative, you are playing a slow sport in a fast league.

Step 2: Standardize One Weekly “Executive Dashboard” That Actually Gets Used

Not a reporting dump. A decision board.

Include:

Revenue and contribution margin (not just ROAS)
CAC by channel and by cohort (new vs returning)
Creative winners and losers (with spend-weighted performance)
Inventory and fulfillment constraints (because marketing cannot outspend operations forever)

If you want to operationalize how Hawke thinks about performance levers, you can cross-reference how we approach advanced paid social and optimization here: https://hawkemedia.com/insights/paid-social-media-advertising/

Step 3: Collapse “Insights” Into Creative Production

Paramount is reducing fragmentation to move faster. Brands should do the same by connecting insights directly to creative briefs.

A practical method:

Every Monday: pull top 10 ad comments and top 10 customer support complaints
Tag them by theme (price fear, shipping anxiety, quality skepticism, confusion, desire)
Turn the top 2 themes into creative hypotheses by Tuesday
Ship 4 new variations by Friday

Step 4: Promote One Person To Own Measurement Integrity

Not the analytics person who “helps,” but an owner who is accountable for:

consistent UTM hygiene
event tracking accuracy
platform pixel health
attribution model alignment
naming conventions

Brands lose more money to measurement slop than they admit out loud.

Step 5: Build A Single Source Of Truth For Offers

One spreadsheet, one database, one doc. Whatever works. The goal is simple: prevent the “which promo is live?” chaos that kills conversion rates and makes your team look unserious.

Step 6: Run One “AI Analytics Pilot” That Has a Clear Output

Do not boil the ocean. Pick one job:

anomaly detection on spend and CPA
creative pattern analysis
automated insights summaries
customer sentiment clustering

Then define what “done” looks like. A weekly alert. A Slack ping. A 10-line summary the team actually reads.

A Quick Anecdote That Feels Familiar

Picture a brand with a viral moment. CPMs surge, TikTok comments explode, customer service tickets triple, and the site slows down. The marketing team keeps spending because “momentum.” Ops is screaming because inventory. Finance is nervous because margin. Social is trying to answer 600 comments with three people and a prayer.

A tech-first org does not panic. It routes signal to decisions. It makes tradeoffs visible. That is the real advantage.

2) Dos Equis Revives The Most Interesting Man: Why Nostalgia Still Wins (When It’s Done Right)

The Context: When Sales Stall, Memory Becomes a Growth Lever

Dos Equis is bringing back “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” played by the original actor Jonathan Goldsmith, as part of a new “Stay Thirsty” platform that will run across big broadcast moments and social. Marketing Dive reports that the original campaign ran for a decade and helped more than triple the size of the brand, per Heineken USA’s internal sales volume data.

This is not subtle. Beer is facing category headwinds, and Dos Equis is responding with a cultural weapon.

The Marketing Translation: Cultural Memory Is Still a Shortcut to Trust

Nostalgia works because it cheats the hardest part of marketing: earning attention from a cold start.

The Most Interesting Man is not just an ad. It is a mental file folder:

tone
humor
personality
quoteability
social proof (“everyone knows this”)

Marketing Dive also notes that Dos Equis is modernizing the character for a social-first world, including teasers across platforms and activations tied to major sports broadcasts.

This is the difference between nostalgia that lands and nostalgia that feels like a desperate reunion tour.

What Brands Should Do: A Nostalgia Playbook That Does Not Feel Like Cosplay

Not every brand has a famous character. That is fine. You still have memory assets. You just have to find them.

Step 1: Inventory Your “Memory Assets”

Look for:

an old hero product that customers still mention
a discontinued SKU people beg for
a visual signature (packaging, color, tagline)
a founder story moment that gets repeated
a creative platform that used to perform

Then check your owned data:

top-performing ads from 2 to 5 years ago
highest-engagement organic posts in your history
top search queries in your brand terms

Step 2: Modernize the Meaning, Not Just the Creative

Dos Equis did not simply re-air the old commercials. It reintroduced the character inside today’s attention economy, leaning harder into social and culture-reactive riffs.

Your version might be:

the same product, now positioned for a new use case
the same founder story, now told through customer POV
the same slogan, now adapted to a modern tension

Step 3: Script the “Why Now?”

If you cannot answer why this is returning now, the audience will do it for you, and they will be mean.

A strong “why now” sounds like:

“We’re bringing back the version people actually loved, because the world is loud and we want to keep it simple.”
“You kept asking, so we listened.”
“We found the original formula, and it still slaps.”

Step 4: Build a Nostalgia Ladder Across Channels

Think like a showrunner:

Teaser: short, mysterious, culture-coded
Reveal: a hero asset with full context
Continuation: episodic shorts, behind-the-scenes, creator riffs
Community: prompts that let fans participate

If you want a practical framework for ensuring creative does not become random chaos, Hawke’s creative strategy steps are a solid anchor: https://hawkemedia.com/insights/build-effective-creative-strategy/

Step 5: Make It Shoppable Without Killing the Vibe

If nostalgia is the attention hook, your commerce path has to be frictionless:

landing page that loads fast
offer clarity in five seconds
social proof visible immediately
inventory alignment (nothing kills a comeback like “sold out” with no plan)

A Believable Example

A DTC brand I’ve seen in the wild had a “legendary” first product that launched the company, then got buried under newer releases. Customers kept asking for it. The team finally brought it back as a limited run and paired it with founder commentary, old packaging nods, and modern UGC.

The best part: CAC dropped because customers did half the marketing for them. The comeback became a community event, not just a product drop.

That is what Dos Equis is betting on at mass scale.

3) The 2026 Social Trends Report: 18 Shifts Brands Should Actually Operationalize

The Context: Social Is Becoming Search, Research, and Culture Infrastructure

Hootsuite’s “The 18 social media trends to shape your 2026 strategy” outlines shifts across algorithms, authenticity, social search, creator ROI, first-party data, fragmented identities, creative pattern analytics, LinkedIn’s creative era, Gen Alpha “chaos culture,” nostalgia remix culture, employee advocacy, micro-dramas, and Substack’s rise as a social platform.

This is the big picture: social is not simply distribution anymore. It is where people discover brands, validate brands, and decide whether they trust brands.

Data supports the scale of the behavior shift. DataReportal reports 5.66 billion social media user identities worldwide as of October 2025, with continued growth.

The Marketing Translation: Your 2026 Strategy Should Be Built Around Discovery, Trust, and Fluency

Let’s turn a few of the most operationally useful trends into actions you can deploy.

Trend: Social Content Must Adapt to Search

Hootsuite calls out social evolving into a search engine.
This means captions, hooks, and on-screen text should answer real questions, not just vibe.

Action: Build a “Social SEO” Keyword Map

Pull top 20 questions from customer support
Pull top 20 “People also ask” questions from Google for your category
Turn each into a 20 to 40 second “answer video”
Pin the best-performing answers

Trend: Human Authenticity Wins, AI Tools Are Table Stakes

Hootsuite frames it as authenticity beating perfect polish, while AI becomes normal tooling.

Action: Create Two Production Lanes

Lane A: fast, human, reactive content (phone-shot, founder, employee, creator)
Lane B: premium campaigns (polished, evergreen, hero assets)

The mistake brands make is forcing everything through Lane B. That is how you become slow and forgettable.

Trend: Creator Partnerships Are Shifting Toward ROI

The era of “good vibes, big reach” is ending.

Action: Define a Creator Performance Contract
Even for gifting, define:

content usage rights
required CTAs
tracking method (codes, links, TikTok Shop affiliate)
timeline and deliverables
what “success” means

If TikTok is a major lever for you, Hawke’s TikTok growth engine overview covers how creator, content, and conversion need to work together: https://hawkemedia.com/tiktok/

Trend: Employee Advocacy Equals Authenticity Amplified

Hootsuite elevates employee advocacy as a trust channel.

Action: Launch a Weekly “Employee Clip” System

1 prompt per week
1 employee per department
45 seconds, one lesson
Examples:
“What customers misunderstand about our product”
“The most common mistake we see”
“How we choose quality”

It creates scale without fake polish.

Trend: Identities Are Fragmented Across Apps

You do not have one audience. You have many versions of your audience, showing up in different moods across different platforms.

Action: Write Platform-Specific Identity Briefs
For each platform, define:

user mindset
content norms
what “credible” looks like there
what tone gets punished

Then stop copy-pasting.

What This Means in Practice: Your 2026 Social Operating System

Here’s a simple model to steal:

Discovery Engine
Search-forward answers, platform-native hooks, consistency in themes
Trust Engine
Creators, employees, customer proof, clear claims with receipts
Conversion Engine
Frictionless landing pages, clean offers, retargeting, lifecycle follow-up

If you want a related Hawke read that connects social shifts to operational planning for 2026, this post is directly in the lane: https://hawkemedia.com/insights/2025-social-media-trends/

The Takeaway: Three Stories, One Reality

Paramount is telling you speed and systems win.
Dos Equis is telling you memory still sells.
Hootsuite is telling you social is becoming the front door for discovery and trust.

So if you are building a 2026 plan, do not start with “which platforms.” Start with this: