Most brands scroll past a trending moment and think, “We should do something with this.” Then someone opens a new tab, puts together a quick post, slaps a hashtag on it, and hits publish. Three hours later, the comment section is either silent or outraged. Neither is a good outcome.
Trendjacking, when it works, looks effortless. When it fails, it looks exactly what it is: a brand that tries too hard or is never bothered to read the room at all. If you have ever wondered what trendjacking is, why brands bother with it, and how to pull off an effective trendjacking campaign without landing in the wrong kind of conversation, this piece covers all of that, including where it most commonly goes wrong.
What Trendjacking Actually Means
Trendjacking is when a brand steps into a popular conversation, a viral moment, a meme, or a cultural event that is already capturing public attention, and adds its own voice to it.
The idea is not new. Marketers have been doing versions of this for decades under the older name of newsjacking, which involved brands inserting themselves into breaking news to earn media coverage. What changed is speed. Social media turned this from a slow-moving PR tactic into something that has to happen in hours, sometimes minutes, for it to land at all.
The moment that put trendjacking on every marketer’s radar happened during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. The stadium in New Orleans suffered an unexpected power outage mid-game. The match paused for 34 minutes. While the whole country sat watching nothing, Oreo’s social media team published a single image: a dimly lit Oreo cookie with the words “Power out? No problem.
You can still dunk in the dark.” The tweet received over 10,000 retweets and 18,000 likes within an hour. The whole thing cost next to nothing and outperformed campaigns that took months to plan.
That moment rewired how marketing teams thought about social media, and the industry has been chasing that same feeling ever since, sometimes well, often not.
Why Brands Do It (and Why the Numbers Make It Complicated)
The appeal is obvious. A trending topic already has an audience. If a brand shows up there with something clever, that attention can spill over. It lowers content production costs and makes a brand feel culturally alive rather than like a company posting into a void.
But here is where it gets uncomfortable. The 2025 Sprout Social Index, which surveyed over 4,000 consumers, found that 40% think it is cool when brands participate in trends, 33% find it embarrassing, and 27% say it only works if a brand posts within the first 24 to 48 hours of a trend breaking.
That means a third of your potential audience starts from scepticism before you have even posted anything. And more than a quarter of the people who might have been on your side will discount the effort entirely if you are late.
The same research found that 93% of consumers believe it is important for brands to keep up with online culture. There is a meaningful difference, though, between staying culturally aware and chasing every hashtag that appears in the trending tab. The audience can feel that difference, even when they cannot articulate it.
When It Goes Right
Creating impactful trendjacking content starts with one question: does this feel like us, or does it feel like us trying to be something else?
Consider how several brands handled the Spotify Wrapped phenomenon. Every year, the platform’s annual listening roundup becomes a social event of its own. RyanAir built “RyanAir Wrapped,” summarising a year in travel in its characteristically blunt style: the number of people who clapped on landing, the top complaints, the most-photographed wing views from seat 12C. It worked because it was entirely in character. The format was borrowed. Everything else was unmistakably RyanAir.
The trend provides a stage. What the brand does on it still has to feel like itself.
When Trendjacking Goes Wrong
Understanding when trendjacking goes wrong is just as important as knowing when to do it, and the examples that make the point are not subtle.
In September 2014, DiGiorno Pizza spotted a trending hashtag: #WhyIStayed. They posted “#WhyIStayed You had pizza.” The hashtag had been started by domestic violence survivors sharing the reasons they had stayed in abusive relationships. Within minutes, DiGiorno faced a wave of outrage. The tweet was deleted. The company spent two days issuing individual apologies before going silent on the platform for three weeks. Nobody accused them of bad intent. The damage came entirely from one person not bothering to click on the hashtag before posting.
Pepsi’s 2017 advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner made a different kind of error, one that involved far more planning and cost far more to undo. The commercial showed Jenner handing a Pepsi to a police officer at a protest, framed as a gesture of unity. Critics responded immediately, arguing that the ad reduced serious social movements to a product placement opportunity. Pepsi pulled it within 24 hours. The DiGiorno mistake was carelessness. The Pepsi mistake was something more troubling: a brand that understood the cultural moment well enough to reference it, but not well enough to understand what it actually meant to the people living it.
Both failures still get cited today. That is worth sitting with.
The Checklist That Separates Smart from Sloppy
Knowing how to pull off an effective trendjacking campaign comes down less to creative instinct and more to asking the right questions before anything gets written.
Is there a genuine connection here? The link between the trend and what your brand does has to feel earned, not engineered. A financial services brand posting about a viral food moment is trying too hard. The more a brand has to stretch to make the connection, the more the audience notices the stretch.
Do we actually understand what this trend means? This sounds obvious. It is also the thing teams skip most often. A trending hashtag can carry layers of context, community history, or sensitivity that are not obvious from a quick glance at the top posts. Spend five minutes understanding the origin before spending two hours producing content about it.
Are we adding something, or just repeating what fifty other brands have already posted? Joining a trend by doing exactly what everyone else is doing produces noise. The goal is to say something only your brand would say, in a format that fits the platform, while the moment is still alive enough to matter.
Timing is not a minor detail here. The 2025 Sprout Social Index is clear that the 48-hour window is real, and for brands with long approval chains, it can close before the first draft is even reviewed.
Building a Process That Can Actually Move Fast
Slow trendjacking is almost always an organisational problem, not a creative one.
Teams that execute well on trends tend to share one habit more than any other: they have already made the decisions that would otherwise slow them down. They know which types of cultural moments the brand will engage with and which ones it will leave alone. They have a small group of people who can assess a trend and approve a post without a three-day review cycle. And they monitor what is happening continuously rather than scrambling when something has already peaked.
That pre-agreed clarity matters more as the pace increases. As upcoming trendjacking trends accelerate, particularly with AI tools now surfacing viral moments faster than any human team can track manually, the brands without a clear internal brief will consistently arrive too late or post the wrong thing under pressure.
The 2026 Sprout Social Content Strategy Report found that 70% of social users think brands do a reasonable job of keeping up with trends, but 43% say brands fail to produce genuinely original content. That is the tension worth managing: culturally aware enough to spot the right moments, distinct enough to do something with them that is actually worth reading.
What Trendjacking Cannot Fix
If an account has low engagement because the content has no real point of view, chasing trends will not change that. It might produce a spike or two. It will not build an audience that stays.
The 2025 Sprout Social data found that about half of consumers say original content is what makes their favourite brands stand out on social media. Trendjacking amplifies what is already there. If nothing is there, the trend content just disappears faster.
Measuring success and finding learnings for the future matters more than most teams treat it. A single viral post tells you almost nothing useful. What tells you something is whether trend-led content consistently brings in the right kind of attention: new followers who do not immediately leave, comments from people who actually care about your category, and inbound enquiries that mention what you posted. If the engagement vanishes within 48 hours and leaves nothing behind, the post works as entertainment. That is fine. It is just not the same thing as marketing.
Key Takeaways
- Trendjacking is joining a viral moment in a way that is genuinely relevant to your brand, not just anything currently trending.
- Timing is non-negotiable: 27% of consumers say a brand’s participation only works within the first 24 to 48 hours.
- Always understand what a trend actually means before posting anything about it.
- The best trendjacking makes the brand more itself, not less.
- A third of consumers find brands joining trends embarrassing, so the bar for participation should always be genuine relevance.
- Trendjacking is a tactic that supplements a clear brand identity; it cannot replace one.
FAQs
What is the difference between trendjacking and newsjacking?
Newsjacking involves inserting your brand into breaking news, usually through press releases or editorial content, with media coverage as the goal. Trendjacking is broader and more social: it covers memes, cultural moments, viral conversations, and platform-specific formats. The mechanics overlap, but the intended audience is different. Newsjacking targets journalists. Trendjacking targets the people already in the conversation.
How do you know whether a trend is right for your brand?
Ask whether there is a genuine connection between the trend and what your brand does, whether your team actually understands what the trend means and where it came from, and whether you have something worth adding rather than repeating. If any one of those questions does not have a good answer, sit it out.
What if the trend moves too fast for our approval process?
This is a structural problem, not a creative one. The realistic fix is to pre-agree, in writing, what types of content can move quickly and who can approve them. Trend-responsive content needs a shorter chain than campaign-level work. If every post requires four sign-offs, the window will close before you get there.
Should smaller brands bother with trendjacking at all?
Yes, and smaller brands often have a genuine advantage. They can move faster, involve fewer decision-makers, and tend to have a more specific audience, which makes relevance easier to assess. A small brand with a clear point of view and the ability to move in hours can outperform a larger brand with a slow review process and an unclear sense of who it is.
What is the biggest mistake brands make with trendjacking?
Posting without understanding what a trend actually means. The DiGiorno situation was not a strategy failure. It was a contextual failure: someone saw a trending hashtag, did not read what it was about, and posted something that caused real damage. Ten seconds of research would have prevented all of it.
Conclusion
The brands that win at trendjacking are rarely the fastest. They are the ones that already know which trends to ignore.
That sounds simple. It is actually the product of having done the identity work beforehand: knowing what the brand stands for clearly enough that when something breaks, the decision about whether to engage takes seconds rather than a committee meeting.
What we find consistently at Ellipsis Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Pune, is that the brands missing the most trend opportunities are not missing them because they cannot move fast. They are missing them because they have not decided who they are yet. When that clarity exists, the right moments are obvious. When it does not, every trending conversation feels like it might be the one to jump on, and that is exactly how brands end up in the wrong ones.
If that sounds familiar, that is the conversation worth having first. At Ellipsis Digital, that is exactly where we start.
