THE BOLT: The Start of 2026 — Staples Baddie, A Nostalgia Takeover + The Great Pinterest Exodus ⚡️

January and February handed us Olympic moments, a nostalgia renaissance, a mascot war, a platform identity crisis, and the accidental influencer of the year. Welcome to this edition of The BOLT, where we break down the ideas, movements, and campaigns shaping the start of 2026.

ALYSA LIU DIDN'T ASK FOR YOUR ATTENTION. THAT'S EXACTLY WHY SHE HAS IT.

210,000 followers. Then gold. Then 6.2 million. Authenticity isn't a strategy. It's the thing every strategy is trying to replicate.

In a digital world increasingly saturated with curated content, paid partnerships, and AI-generated everything, audiences have become very good at sensing when something is real. And they gravitate towards it hard when they find it. Alysa Liu is the perfect case study. She walked into the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics with halo-styled highlights, a lip piercing, and a PinkPantheress soundtrack, not to build a brand, but because that's who she is. She walked out not only as a gold medalist but as the new people's princess.

Right after her skate and just before her press interview, she paused and asked for her lipstick. It wasn't a brand-engineered moment; just Alysa being Alysa. TikTok did the rest, tracking down the product: Rare Beauty's Soft Pinch Tinted Lip Oil Stain in Delight. Rare Beauty didn't brief her. There was no contract, no forced mention, no camera held up to the tube. When all eyes were on her, she was simply caught using something she loved, and millions of people took notice. That is the most powerful form of influencer marketing that exists.

Credit: Getty Images

NOSTALGIA IS THE NEW STRATEGY

Transformation era? Sure. Just as soon as we finish rewatching Hannah Montana.

The year of the snake just ended, and it was supposed to mean something. Transformation. Shedding what no longer serves you. Stepping forward, lighter. And maybe we did shed. But somewhere in the process, we picked the old skin back up, held it to the light, and thought, wait, this is actually it. Out with the old, in with the older.

On February 17, Disney announced the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special, streaming March 24 on Disney+, with Miley Cyrus sitting down with Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper to revisit the moments, music, and memories that defined an era. The teaser hit 123.3 million organic views in a single day. For a show that ended in 2011, that's not a content play, that's a cultural event. Nostalgia has quietly graduated from a marketing tactic to a full revenue strategy. You don't have to convince someone to care about something they already love. You just have to remind them it exists. The year of the horse is here, all momentum and forward motion. We're just bringing 2006 with us for the ride.

Credit: Disneyplus

PEPSI POKED THE BEAR (LITERALLY)

Directed by Taika Waititi. Soundtracked by Queen's "I Want to Break Free." Starring Coke's mascot. Having an existential crisis.

A lot of people called this year's Super Bowl ads mid, and honestly, fair. But Pepsi's "The Choice" was something else. The ad opens with Coca-Cola's polar bear in a blind taste test between Pepsi Zero Sugar and Coke Zero Sugar. The bear, stripped of his brand loyalty and left with only his taste buds, chooses Pepsi. The commercial continues with the bear on a therapist's couch, wandering sadly past restaurant windows, before ultimately converting. It's delightfully devilish.

Pepsi borrowed its biggest competitor's most beloved asset, gave him a crisis, and made him a spokesperson. But it raises a real question worth sitting with: at what point does calling out the competition stop being a power move and start being free advertising? There's a fine line between a subtle dig and a commercial that spends 60 seconds making sure you think about Coca-Cola. Every viewer who laughed at that polar bear also thought about Coke, their mascot, their brand, their legacy. Pepsi bet that the comparison would land so decisively in their favor that it didn't matter. And this time, it did. But that's a dangerous game to play, and not every brand has the cultural weight to pull it off. The ad is a masterclass in challenger brand strategy, but only because Pepsi won. If the taste test had felt forced, or the bear had felt like a lawsuit waiting to happen, we'd be having a very different conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vKCq52wWUY

Credit: Pepsi

THE GREAT PINTEREST EXODUS

The platform had a soul. Then it met its algorithm.

Pinterest was the internet at its most intentional, slow, aesthetic, and personal. A platform with a soul, built entirely on the idea that humans curating the things they love was enough. In early 2026, longtime users, particularly artists and creatives, started sounding the alarm. The AI slop had taken over. Feeds once filled with hand-curated recipes, mood boards, and original artwork are now flooded with technically polished, emotionally hollow content generated by machines and monetized by ghost accounts. The woman behind your new favorite recipe? AI-generated. Her slow cooker instructions? Telling you to "log" the chicken. Pinterest forgot its soul. Its users didn't. And Pinterest knew it; user backlash was loud enough that the platform introduced AI content controls in October, a quiet acknowledgment that something had gone wrong. For marketers, this is the cautionary tale: optimize for efficiency all you want, but if your audience came to you for human connection and creativity, and you trade that in for scale, you will lose them. And they will tell everyone.

THE STAPLES BADDIE AND THE RISE OF THE EMPLOYED INFLUENCER

She clocked in. The internet clocked her.

On January 13th, Kaeden Rowland, a 22-year-old Staples employee in upstate New York, posted a video from behind the counter. Red work shirt, lanyard, name tag. The video took off. Then another. Then another. Now she's been coined The Staples Baddie, with nearly half a million TikTok followers and a pinned video sitting at 5.4 million views. Her content ranges from printer ASMR to coil binding tutorials to one-liners that the internet can't stop reposting.

She isn't a hired influencer or a brand-appointed spokesperson, she's an hourly employee who genuinely loves what she does, and it shows in every single video. That's the employee influencer era in a nutshell: the most compelling brand content isn't coming from a creative brief, it's coming from the people already living inside the brand every day. Staples' official TikTok account has 47,000 followers. Kaeden has 472,000. When the brand caught wind of what was happening, they didn't send a cease and desist, they sent a care package. Their CMO told Fast Company they connected with her to share their appreciation and are exploring opportunities to collaborate. Smart. Because the moment you over-corporatize something this organic, you kill it. The influencer economy is recalibrating in real time. The person who genuinely can't stop talking about something they love will always outperform the person who was paid to do it.

The thread running through all of it? Authenticity keeps winning, whether it's a figure skater doing it for herself, a platform hemorrhaging users by forgetting its roots, or a 22-year-old with cheekbones and a lanyard who became the best marketer in the office supply industry without even trying.

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