The Mandai Wildlife Reserve, a tourist park in Singapore, posted a video late last year that became a viral hit: two of its millennial-aged employees, wearing staff uniforms, described the park using Gen Z lingo. “Pop off, queen,” one of them dryly intones. “Slay,” says another.
“We let our Gen Z intern write the marketing script,” was the video’s headline — which quickly became a meme across social media, with dozens of brands offering their own spin.
The trend was part of a broader movement within marketing.
First companies paid social media influencers to hawk their products. Now, they’re turning inward: It’s not just social media interns popping up all over corporate social media — it’s employees with all sorts of jobs, who have been tapped by their employers, sometimes through formal programs, to help build the brand.
On Lego’s official TikTok page, its designers explain their process. An Instagram page run by Delta Air Lines called “Life at Delta” features aviation maintenance technicians running through their daily routines and groups of employees dancing to trending audio clips. Portillo’s, the Chicago-based fast food chain, recently announced that it was creating an internal influencer program designed to grow employee followings on their own accounts.
Though the program is still new, Portillo’s has said it would like to have an internal influencer working at every location.
Employees “are among the most-trusted sources” for consumers, said Lachlan Williams, a brand strategist in Britain, because “they’re real people with insider knowledge.” Companies have been leveraging that credibility for decades, for example by using sales clerks as company ambassadors.
But only in recent years has the strategy started leaking onto social media, with many brands seeing it as cheaper and more efficient than using outside insiders, Williams said.
Some companies are extending the strategy to employees’ personal accounts. While it’s become common for employees to star on in-house brand channels, a handful of companies are giving them more creative control. For example, DHL encourages couriers to record themselves on their routes while responding to prompts and to post the videos to their own accounts with the hashtag #YellowUnited. It then highlights some of those videos on the corporate brand page.
The company offers courses on how to create compelling posts and increase audience engagement to its couriers. Similar programs exist at Nordstrom, Adobe and Dell.
Most internal influencers aren’t paid extra for their appearances on social media. However, Williams said more companies are “recognizing that this is additional work, and compensating accordingly.” That might mean a bonus, a pay bump, special access or a free product.
Controlling the message can be challenging. Employee-focused content, especially when it is posted directly to employee accounts, tends to be spontaneous and off-the-cuff — which is what makes it so appealingly authentic. But that spontaneity can conflict with the careful messaging intended by the brand. An Instagram Reel about vintage Lego sets, for example, might clash with a strategic focus on up-and-coming designs.
“If you let employees just communicate whatever they want, they’ll do whatever it is that interests them,” Williams said. “Sometimes that will align with the business’s strategic objectives, but a lot of the time it won’t — and sometimes it may even pull against them.”
“It’s a balance,” said Chelsea Thompson-O’Brien, a vice president of customer experience strategy at the marketing agency VML, about how much companies should vet employee influencer content. “If you’re too strict, the content itself becomes wallpaper; if you’re too loose, your brand could suffer in the process.”
Thompson-O’Brien said that the ideal scenario was to have several people approve content, “but not so many that you forget why you even wanted to share to begin with.”
Balazs Balogh, an in-house content creator on DHL’s global social media team, said that the creative process depends partly on the topic. “For topics like H.R. and sustainability, we align on the core message but have the freedom to bring those stories to life in our own way,” he said. More generic or evergreen topics require even less planning and oversight.
Could it backfire? If employees aren’t genuinely enthusiastic, it might, Williams said, adding, “When employee stories don’t match the marketing, it creates dissonance.”
Thompson-O’Brien said using employees as influencers is particularly useful in areas “where the employer brand reputation and overall employee satisfaction has a major impact on the brand perception.” But putting marketing in employee hands also increases the need for those boxes to be checked.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Inflation edged higher last month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finally published the Consumer Price Index Friday. (The release was 10 days late, delayed by complications from the government shutdown.) It showed headline inflation rising by 3 percent, year-on-year, the fastest pace since the start of 2025 as tariff costs appear to be lifting the prices of certain goods. Still, the Fed is widely expected to lower interest rates by one-quarter point at its meeting next week.
Warner Bros. Discovery is considering a sale. It said it was open to a variety of deals, including a sale of the entire company or a spinoff of some assets, and had received interest from multiple buyers. Lauren Hirsch and Andrew reported that one of those suitors, Paramount, made three takeover offers in four weeks starting in mid-September, according to a letter that its C.E.O., David Ellison, sent to the board.
A gambling scandal strikes the N.B.A. Two separate federal indictments on Thursday detailed illegal betting on N.B.A. games using insider information and illegal poker games run by the mafia. They’re linked by overlapping defendants, which include current and former N.B.A. coaches and players. The cases have raised questions about the proliferation of sports betting and professional leagues’ efforts to tap into the business.
More big deals: Elon Musk defended his proposed $1 trillion Tesla pay package. The U.S. added new sanctions against Russia’s oil industry. General Motors and Target announced corporate layoffs. Travis Kelce joined an activist campaign at Six Flags. And bankers are on track for record bonuses this year.
Too big to fail?
As glitches hit Starbucks orders, Coinbase and Robinhood trades, Lyft rides and all sorts of services that disrupted daily life Monday during an Amazon Web Services outage, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts argued, “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period.”
Three companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — account for more than 70 percent of the cloud services market, according to Gartner. And some experts said the outage was evidence of overreliance on them. DealBook’s Sarah Kessler asked experts how that risk could be mitigated. Here are three ideas:
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Make the services interoperable: Allow companies to easily and quickly change providers of cloud services, so if that one goes down, it’s easy to bring in a backup. “No business really wants to be entirely dependent on one provider,” said Robin Berjon, the co-founder of EuroStack, a policy initiative aimed at making Europe less dependent on U.S. tech giants. But, he added, “doing multi-cloud, where you spread your operations across multiple providers, is difficult and expensive.”
Making it simple is easier said than done, said James Grimmelmann, who directs the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law and Technology. While electric grids and internet routing organically developed to be interoperable, he said, cloud services are much more complicated. “It would be like trying to invent a lot of internet technology all at once rather than in the decades that internet concepts were worked out,” he said, adding, “that’s not to say it wouldn’t be healthy to start to do some of that work.”
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Create a public option: Have the government operate, own or pay someone else to operate a cloud service. A public option would be unlikely to compete on price or cutting-edge features, Grimmelmann said, but could be a fallback option that is required to offer service to everyone, which would, among other things, “protect people against some of the worst dangers of an oligopoly: losing access with no alternatives.”
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Monitor resilience: “Require thorough audits, thorough reports, thorough reporting after an outage,” suggested Rebecca Wright, a professor of computer science at Barnard College. Companies could be required to take actions based on the results of an audit or invest a certain amount of profits in making sure the infrastructure is resilient, she added.
While dependency on so few providers creates a vulnerability, she said, swinging too far the other way — not relying on large services — could weaken cybersecurity: “To do it well is not straightforward.”
What about antitrust law? It could come into play, Grimmelmann said, but it’s hard to de-tangle anticompetitive practices “from the efficiency benefits that come from selling a lot of these services together and to a lot of people.”
A scary streak
“Black Phone 2,” a sequel to the hit 2022 horror film directed by Scott Derrickson that landed in theaters last week during prime spooky season, earned more than $42 million at the global box office on its opening weekend. That figure easily cleared its $30 million budget in what seems to be another coup for a wildly lucrative genre, reports Marsh.
With a record 35 horror films in wide release this year, up from 28 in 2024, the genre is tracking to gross about $2.65 billion, also a record, according to the box office analyst David A. Gross. “The Conjuring 4” leads the way with $475 million, while the acclaimed vampire hit “Sinners” earned $376 million.
Horror movies are reliable moneymakers in Hollywood. Unlike other stalwart genres like superhero and action films, some of the biggest horror flick hits didn’t cost much at all to produce: “Paranormal Activity” (2007) earned more than $200 million on a budget just over $200,000, while “Insidious” (2011) earned nearly $100 million on a budget of only $1.5 million. By comparison, the recent “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” earned $600 million, but cost almost $400 million to produce — a more typical spend-to-profit ratio among action, sci-fi and fantasy films.
As the movie business struggles with superhero fatigue and disappointing blockbuster revenues more broadly, studios are turning more and more to horror, which offers both a promise of sizable profits and — more appealingly still — less sizable risk.
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