Meme Team: Viral Marketing & Pop Culture
Meme Team is the podcast where we discuss viral pop culture moments in movies, TV, music, sports, and politics.
Host Sonia Baschez breaks down real campaigns, brand decisions, and creative marketing strategies behind the moments everyone's talking about. Part funny marketing stories, part marketing big picture strategy, each episode unpacks why something worked, why it failed, or why it spread.
Topics include trending marketing moves, AI marketing campaigns, cause marketing campaigns, brand storytelling, and the culture-commerce overlap that shapes what we consume. If you want impactful marketing thinking, not just tactics, this is the show.
New episodes every week.
Recent Episodes
34
Oct. 8, 2026
Winners and Losers: Warner Bros, Paramount, YouTube, Amazon, Apple
Warner Bros. and Paramount are merging under the Skydance name, YouTube is done rewarding content farms, Amazon MGM turned a movie set into a creator activation, and Apple just quietly blocked half the ad tech industry from iOS 27. Sonia Baschez and fractional GTM advisor Gregory Kennedy break down what each of these moves actually means for brands, creators, and anyone paying attention to where the media industry is heading. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:40 Warner Bros. + Paramount become Skydance
33
Oct. 1, 2026
Disney, Taylor Swift, Letterboxd, and Meta Are All Living on Borrowed Trust
Disney just announced John Watts for Star Wars Episode 10 and simultaneously undermined him by pairing him with Simon Kinberg — the writer behind X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Fantastic Four, and a failed Twilight Zone reboot. Taylor Swift's bonus "encore" to Life of a Showgirl got dismissed by critics and hit number one anyway. Letterboxd is up for sale at $300M with A24, NYT, Netflix, Sony, and Paramount all circling. And on the same day Meta unveiled its Muse Charm AI wearable, news broke that Muse AI
32
Sept. 24, 2026
Choose Equity: Mbappe, Lili Reinhart, Netflix, & Xbox
Mbappe just walked away from a lifetime Nike deal for equity at On Running, and Thierry Henry has been quietly running the football strategy behind it since 2025. Meanwhile, Lily Reinhart built a viral press tour for The Love Hypothesis with basically no help from Amazon, then Amazon showed up after she hit 1.7M impressions on her own. Four stories this week about which brands are staying ahead and which are reacting too late. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:19 Mbappe, On Running, and Nike's brand cris
31
Aug. 20, 2026
Document for Content: Hollywood, Mamdani, American Tourists, and Hilary Duff
Prada is making films with Barry Jenkins and Zohran Mamdani has 69% approval for posting about potholes. Hilary Duff just sold out a tour that has nothing to do with nostalgia, and Americans are spending $350 a day in Europe while Portugal buys ads in Times Square. Sonia and brand strategist Gia Jasing get into all four stories on the Meme Team, the podcast where we discuss viral pop culture moments in movies, TV, music, and politics. Timestamps 0:00 Brands are the new Hollywood (Martin Scorses
30
Aug. 13, 2026
Untitled
Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto calling for open, democratized AI the same week Meta was defending itself in six active monopoly lawsuits. Bumble scrapped the women-message-first rule, which was literally the brand. Obama launched a book podcast on an audio platform and somehow it's one of the smarter marketing moves of the year. Jonathan K. Lowe joined me to talk through all of it, plus the FAA quietly solving a hiring crisis by recruiting video gamers. Timestamps 0:00 Zuckerberg'
29
Aug. 10, 2026
Fans deserve better: Disney, Vinyl, Flock, BTS
Spider-Man Brand New Day just hit $1 billion, and Disney's CEO is already publicly attaching Avengers Doomsday to that momentum. That's a bold bet with a lot riding on it. Sonia Baschez and journalist Shannon Miller look at the gap between brands that genuinely show up for fans and brands that just extract from them, from Disney's new TikTok creator deal to vinyl labels charging $40 for incomplete pressings to Flock Safety's police camera cover-up. Timestamps 00:00 Disney, Josh DeMaro, and the
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