Marcus Foley, co-founder of Tommy Digital, took to the Social Media Fest stage with a challenge for the room: how much of what you made last week does anyone actually remember?
It''s a question that stings a little. Because most of us know the honest answer.
Marcus has spent years working with beauty brands, Koti, Netflix and others, and he keeps running into the same problem. Content that performs. Content the dashboard says is working. Content that, a day later, nobody can recall.
At Social Media Fest 2026, he laid out what he''s calling the Anti-Algorithm Formula: a framework for building brands that are genuinely distinctive rather than just optimised.
The problem: we''re optimising for replication
Marcus put it plainly. Right now, most brands are "optimising for replication over originality and imitation over expression." The algorithm learns from patterns and reinforces them. The same signals get amplified, the same aesthetics get rewarded, the same formats keep showing up. High views, green dashboards, but low recall.
He showed the room a slide of 14 beauty brand product demos played side by side. Same shots. Same camera angles. Same editing pace. Same music. Viewable. Even valuable. But memorable? Not really.
"If you''re not remembered, nothing else matters at all."
That''s the problem with sameness. And it''s not just beauty. Walk through any category, wellness, hydration, B2B SaaS, financial services, and you''ll find the same thing. Standardised language. Predictable formats. Brands that could belong to anyone.
Algorithmic brands vs distinctive brands
Marcus broke down the difference between brands that chase the algorithm and brands that build something lasting.
Algorithmic brands ask: what does the data want? They follow category norms, say what the product does, and aim for smooth, frictionless, instantly familiar content. Their goal is to be liked. Their metric is viewability.
Distinctive brands ask: what''s our unique truth? They create separation from the category, show what the product means rather than what it does, and aim to surprise or provoke. Their goal is to be known and remembered. Their metric is recall.
Neither is entirely wrong, but the balance matters. And right now, most brands are sitting too far to the algorithmic side.
The six components of the Anti-Algorithm Formula
1. The distinctiveness framework
Marcus uses a four-part lens to spot where a brand''s opportunity lies: being different, innovation, memory triggers, and relevance. The key is understanding that being different isn''t always the answer. In a saturated category, being the most distinctive-looking thing on the shelf isn''t enough if everything looks distinctive. Sometimes the opportunity is elsewhere, in how you communicate, the emotional territory you occupy, or how precisely relevant you are at the right moment.
2. Rule of law
This is your brand''s foundation, your story, your world, your belief system. Without it, you don''t have a point of view, you just have outputs.
Marcus gave the example of Juliette Has a Gun. Everything that brand does ties back to one central idea: a Shakespearean heroine transported to the 21st century, with perfume as a weapon of seduction. Every piece of content, every campaign, every touchpoint connects back to that world. That''s rule of law working.
3. Know yourself and do it on purpose
This is about stance, what you stand for, the position you take, your role in the category. Marcus used wrestling as an analogy: the great wrestlers are either ultimate protagonists or ultimate protectors. Everyone either loves them or hates them. The ones who sit in the middle don''t connect with anyone.
"Be one or the other. Don''t be in between. If you''re not like a great wrestler, you''re probably going to fail."
4. Distinctive brand world assets
Once you have your world, you need assets that make it visible, visual codes, tone of voice, consistent behaviours. The problem is that chasing algorithm trends breaks the compound effect. You keep shifting to follow the next thing, and you lose the repetition that makes a brand recognisable.
Marcus pointed to brands like the Kardashian beauty lines, often dismissed, but actually built with extraordinary discipline. Consistent assets, consistent system, consistent law. That consistency is what turns a brand into something recognisable.
5. The smile on the mind
This is about cognitive engagement: giving the audience something to complete, to decode, to think about. Marcus referenced the "75/25 rule", you give 75%, the audience brings the other 25%. Think of the way McDonald''s uses its arches cropped on motorway signs, or an ad that makes you stop and think "wait, I get it."
That moment of engagement is what makes something stick. You can''t manufacture it for every piece of content, but building it in when you can is what separates content that whispers past in three seconds from content that stays with someone.
6. Emotional resonance
"People don''t remember what you say. They remember what you felt."
Marcus is open about being an emotional person, and he uses Hitchcock as his reference point. Hitchcock had two scripts for every film: one with the actors'' lines, and one with what he wanted the audience to feel from every scene. Marcus''s challenge to the room: what do you want people to feel from your content? Because once someone feels something, they can''t turn it off. It becomes memorable by chemical default.
Three beauty brands doing it differently
To ground all of this, Marcus walked through three beauty brands from the report he''s currently producing.
The Ordinary rejected the entire category playbook. Beauty is built on the promise of miracle transformation, glossy visuals, elevated language, aspirational fantasy. The Ordinary stripped all of that away. Clinical, functional, anti-glamour. They exposed the category''s exaggeration by refusing to participate in it. Distinctiveness through subtraction.
Typology takes a different route: distinctiveness through restraint and discipline. Nothing is accidental. Tight framing, controlled compositions, intentional imbalance, subtle differences applied consistently until they become unmistakable. The packaging itself isn''t particularly unique. But the way they show up in the feed is.
Vacation, the SPF brand, went the other direction entirely. While the category defaults to protection, caution and clinical messaging, Vacation built a world around leisure, play and 80s nostalgia. Every piece of content is a gift in its own right. Born from a pirate radio station community, it has a brand world that has nothing to do with sun safety and everything to do with how it feels to be on holiday.
Three different routes. Three different executions. But all three start from the same place: understanding the category, finding the contrast, and building something deliberately.
The takeaway
Marcus summed it up simply. If the system pulls you left, the anti-algorithm formula is how you move right.
That doesn''t mean ignoring performance data or refusing to chase trends entirely. It means building the discipline first, your law, your stance, your assets, your consistency, and then chasing the algorithm from that foundation rather than letting the algorithm define you.
"Product plus personality equals brand."
The brands that get remembered are the ones that decide what they stand for before they decide what to post. Most brands are doing it the other way around.
Marcus Foley is co-founder of Tommy. He presented at Social Media Fest 2026, London.