The Algorithm Was Never Your Audience

By Greg Harrison & Ryan Bucci

Sit in enough marketing meetings and you notice how much of the conversation is about the algorithm. What it rewards, which format it favors, and how to reverse-engineer an idea so the feed will pick it up. We have, collectively, spent a decade making work for a machine.

But here's the problem: the machine has never wanted anything. It doesn't laugh, get a lump in its throat, or text a friend, "You have to see this." It simply ranks what people already responded to. Watch time, shares, saves, the hesitation before a thumb keeps moving, those are human choices, and the machine sits downstream from them. It's a measure of the audience, not the actual audience.

And yet the techniques we use to get noticed show how confused we are about the difference: copying the formats, tweaking the first-two-second hooks, and pushing it out with a big media spend. The focus is gaming the audience's brains, not reaching the people attached to them. And in 2026, with everyone running the same playbook, and AI further optimizing content, placement, and buying, it's become an ever-accelerating arms race of speed without taste. We've optimized our way into being ignored.

But the people and brands actually breaking through aren't trying to beat the algorithm. They're giving it something worth sharing, something a person genuinely wants, seeks out, and remembers. A great recent example is the film Backrooms. It began as a horror series on YouTube: indie, strange, with the kind of premise no studio would greenlight from a pitch. But people found it, loved it, and shared it, building an entire fandom organically.

Then A24 turned it into a film, directed by its 20-year-old creator, that opened to $81 million on a $10-million budget, knocked the latest Star Wars movie out of the number-one spot, and became the studio's biggest film ever within two weeks. Nobody bought that audience. It was earned one share at a time, until it grew beyond the internet.

And it isn't a one-off. The same weekend, Obsession, a horror film made by another YouTube-born filmmaker for less than a million dollars, did something no movie had done in more than forty years: its box office grew in both its second and third weekends. People weren't just finding the work, they were sending each other to it.

For us, this is what being culture-first means. It isn't about a specific aesthetic or chasing a platform trend, it's a thoughtful decision about who you're making the work for and what you actually have to say to them. Culture is the collective expression of what people choose to repeat, remix, and reward, and you earn a place in it by saying something that matters to them.

The work we're proudest of doesn't open with a product truth or a positioning statement, but with a cultural tension — something unresolved that people are already arguing about at dinner — and an honest question: does this brand have any standing to say something here? If it doesn't, no media budget on earth buys its way in. If it does, you barely need one.

There's a reason this comes naturally to people who grew up marketing entertainment. At Mocean, our craft was born from campaigns for films and TV series: the job of making audiences care about a story before a single ticket is sold. That's a useful discipline to bring to brands, because entertainment never had the luxury of buying attention it hadn't earned. A weak film with a massive media spend still collapses on its second weekend, no matter the franchise behind it. The audience has always held the deciding vote. They simply vote faster now, and on everything, all the time.

The uncomfortable truth is that none of this can be reverse-engineered, and no AI can automate meaning. You have to understand a culture well enough to truly add something to it, which is why we start with the audience before the brief. We pay attention to what people are discussing, quoting, and repeating. Then, when a signal points to a truth the brand can credibly own, we respond quickly, creating in the native language of the platform it will live on, before the moment passes.

This is how we make work for the humans on the other side of the algorithm. Get it right and the distribution takes care of itself. Get it wrong and no amount of optimization will save you.

The audience was always the point. And it still is.

Greg Harrison is CMO and Ryan Bucci is CCO at Mocean.