12 Trendjacking Examples — What Worked, What Didn't, and What’s the Difference
A trend used to give you a week. Now you get an afternoon.
That's the problem with most trendjacking examples online: they show the winning post and skip the twelve hours of judgment calls before someone hit publish. Plenty of brands jump on cultural moments. Far fewer do it without leaving behind a screenshot users pass around for years.
The gap between trendjacking posts people still cite and the ones they still mock is rarely speed. Both marketing teams moved at lightning speed. One read the room first.
Below are 12 trendjacking examples from 2025 and 2026 that landed, three that didn't, the difference between trendjacking, newsjacking, and moment marketing, and how to vet a trend before you post.
The following examples are recent on purpose. Every deck on this subject still opens with the same decade-old tweet, and social media has changed personality twice since then. Nothing here is older than 2025, and half of it happened this year.
What is trendjacking?
Trendjacking is the practice of inserting a brand into a trending cultural conversation on social media — a meme, a challenge, a hashtag, a shared moment — to earn attention without paying for it. The trend sets the timing, not your content calendar. It borrows momentum that already exists instead of building it from zero. Trendjacking works when a brand adds something to the conversation on social media, and fails when the brand only interrupts it.
Trend jacking, trend-jacking, trendjacking — same thing. Spelling was never the hard part. The skill is putting your own spin on a cultural conversation that already has momentum, then getting trendjacking content live while users still care. Anyone can create a post; the trick is knowing whether it will contribute anything.
Trendjacking vs. newsjacking vs. moment marketing
Three terms, three sources of momentum, and social media managers use all three interchangeably. Trend jacking rides a cultural trend with a shelf life, like a meme format or trending audio. Newsjacking rides a breaking news story — a corporate scandal, a product recall. Moment marketing reacts to one scheduled event, like an awards show or a game.
The overlap is real, which is why these get mixed up in meetings. One event can trigger all three — a viral ad gaffe is breaking news on Monday, a meme format by Wednesday, a live-event punchline by the weekend. The label matters less than the risk attached to a particular trend. Current events are riskiest because the facts are still moving. Cultural trends give you room to think. For the tidy definitions, the social listening glossary has the rest of the vocabulary.
Why trendjacking works for brands
Trendjacking works because attention is already pointed somewhere, and you choose to stand there. You skip the hardest part of any marketing strategy: getting anyone to care at all. Social media platforms amplify content tied to trending topics, so an early, well-judged post gets distribution a scheduled one never would. Taking advantage of that costs a fraction of a produced campaign, because the trend supplies the premise free.
That makes it a powerful tool for any business that needs to draw attention without a media budget. Users engage with trendjacking posts because they look like something a person made, not a quarterly deliverable, and that's where deeper connections with an audience come from.
A second payoff is harder to put on a slide. A tweet, a TikTok, a billboard — whatever the format, a good trendjack shows there are people behind the logo, with a sense of humor and a pulse. It's also high risk, which is why many brands sit these moments out.
Relevance has gotten more demanding, though. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer report on brand growth found relevance now runs through utility, identity, community, and emotion — not just pop culture — and warns that being relevant at scale means you "inherently risk alienating" someone. Cultural relevance is table stakes now; showing up credibly is the work. Brands alike chase the same viral moments, so the ones that stay relevant bring a point of view, not just a fast turnaround.
12 trendjacking examples that show how it's done
Every entry follows the same shape: the trend, what the brand did, the engagement result where a real number exists, and the lesson. Many brands show up in the same cultural moments because the biggest ones pull other brands in automatically. Note how often the audience got there first.
1. Astronomer hires the one person nobody expected
The trend: A kiss cam at a Coldplay show in July 2025 caught two of the company's executives mid-embrace. The internet did the rest.
What they did: After both resigned, Astronomer posted a deadpan video with Gwyneth Paltrow — Chris Martin's ex-wife — as a "very temporary spokesperson" answering only dull questions about data pipelines.
The result: Per Variety, the tweet passed 30 million views, one of the most-watched viral moments of the year on social media.
The lesson: When the trend is about you, the only winning move is acknowledging it and changing the subject on your own terms.
2. Pizza Hut Malaysia turns a scandal into a cheese joke
The trend: The same kiss cam clip, which spawned a week of brand riffs.
What they did: The team recreated the jumbotron shot with a couple mid-pizza, captioned to suggest the man was simply loyal to cheese — one of eleven brand responses Marketing-Interactive tracked that week.
The lesson: The joke pointed at the pizza, not the two people. That small distinction decides whether a post ages well or gets deleted.
3. Jet2 owns the meme it accidentally created
The trend: A line from an old Jet2 ad resurfaced as the trending audio of summer 2025, soundtracking millions of holiday-disaster clips across social media.
What they did: Instead of issuing a brand-safety statement, Jet2 posted to its own trending audio, ran a lip-sync giveaway, and let users create whatever they wanted with it.
The result: In its interim results, reported by Euronews, Jet2 put the tagline at over 80 billion global views across 11.8 million posts.
The lesson: When online culture remixes your brand, the fastest way to lose is to correct people. A great example of doing nothing well.
4. Amul puts its mascot on the boat
The trend: "Aura farming" — the impossibly calm dance an 11-year-old performed on a racing boat in Indonesia, which footballers and NFL players spent the summer copying.
What they did: For Onam, Amul's mascot did the same dance on the same kind of boat, in Kerala dress and sunglasses — a global meme made culturally relevant to one market.
The lesson: A global trend translates best when you route it through something local your target audience already recognizes.
5. Nongshim leans into a cameo it never paid for
The trend: Netflix's K-Pop Demon Hunters became 2025's runaway hit, and viewers noticed the on-screen noodles looked a lot like Nongshim's.
What they did: It started selling co-branded products tied to the film's groups, and other Korean food brands ran with the same idea.
The lesson: Users found the connection first. Confirming one beats inventing one, and trend jacking rarely gets easier than that.
6. Sam Adams lets the Tartan Army write the ad
The trend: In June 2026, Scotland's travelling support arrived in Boston for the World Cup and drank the city dry.
What they did: Boston Beer went public with the numbers instead of quietly restocking: 91 kegs of Boston Lager through one taproom, four times a busy July 4th weekend, and four emergency deliveries.
The result: The story ran on ESPN and across the UK media, and a British retailer started importing the lager again on the back of it.
The lesson: Sam Adams sponsored nothing. It just counted what was happening and said it out loud.
7. Skoda India and the fake-apology wave
The trend: The "sorry, not sorry" format — a sombre apology graphic that turns out to apologize for being too good.
What they did: Skoda, Myntra, Haldiram's, and others used the hot topic to create content around their own product joke. A strategist quoted by Gulf News noted the format lets brands create content that reclaims the narrative instead of reacting defensively.
The lesson: Format trends are the lowest-risk kind. They also burn out fastest.
8. Dairy Queen brings Taylor and Swift to the Super Bowl
The trend: Months of speculation that Taylor Swift would headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show. She didn't.
What they did: DQ signed NFL players Tyrod Taylor and D'Andre Swift for a "Taylor and Swift Halftime Feast," with a creative bit where both men point out that they don't sing.
The result: Its agency's case study reports DQ ranked fourth in category engagement during Super Bowl week, up 441% year over year, with no in-game media buy.
The lesson: You can trend jack a rumour, provided the punchline is the rumour and not the person.
9. Burger King and Wendy's take a bigger bite
The trend: In March 2026, a McDonald's CEO taste-test video went viral for a small bite and some very corporate adjectives.
What they did: Burger King's president filmed himself eating a Whopper. Wendy's US president answered with a Baconator and a tweet-length dig about ice cream machines.
The lesson: Competitive trend jacking works when the joke doubles as a demo of the product you already promote. It stops working the second it reads as cruelty.
10. KitKat turns a real theft into a manhunt
The trend: In late March 2026, thieves took 413,793 KitKat bars in transit across Europe. The number alone made it a story.
What they did: Nestlé went public, then launched a tracker letting users check a wrapper's batch code against the stolen shipment. Domino's, KFC, and Ryanair piled on, and the story travelled the world.
The result: Fortune reports 2.2 million people engaged with the tracker, and KitKat's daily social video views went from about one million to 29 million.
The lesson: Sometimes the trend is your own bad news, and the whole world is already watching. Participation beats a press release.
11. Asics answers a rival's billboard in a day
The trend: Days before the 2026 Boston Marathon, a Nike store sign reading "Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated" set the running side of social media on fire.
What they did: Asics put up a billboard near the course — "Runners. Walkers. All welcome" — telling Front Office Sports it did so because all movement matters.
The lesson: The cleanest trendjacks are the ones your existing brand values already contain. Asics didn't need a new position, just a printer.
12. Ecco arrives late on purpose and still wins
The trend: The same Boston backlash, two days later, once everyone had commented.
What they did: Ecco ran walking-themed billboards, gave away 100 pairs of shoes to everyday walkers, and staffed route cheering stations, per Campaign US.
The lesson: Arriving second is fine if you arrive with something to do rather than say. The key is contributing to a moment, not commenting on it.
When trendjacking strategy goes wrong: three cautionary examples
Nike misjudges the room at an emotional event
The sign was meant as a wink to competitive runners. During marathon week — when nearly everyone walks part of the course — it read as gatekeeping. Nike pulled it within a day and apologized for missing the mark. Not everyone agreed it should have: The Drum argued the line was "cheeky, not offensive" and the retreat was the real error. That split verdict is usually the sign you're on a fine line.
The kiss-cam pile-on involved real people
The Coldplay moment produced some genuinely good stuff. It also produced a lot of posts about two identifiable, doxxed private people and their marriages. The jokes got uncomfortable the moment the pile-on stopped being about a jumbotron and started being about people's lives. Plenty of those posts read differently by day three.
The fake-apology format got copied to death
Format trends have a half-life, and the fake corporate apology hit it fast: clever in September, filler by December, once every category had run it. Popular content formats fall flat once they stop feeling like a discovery. Being twentieth isn't a trendjacking strategy — it's a content calendar with nothing in it.
How to spot and vet a trend jacking opportunity with YouScan
Speed without a vetting process is how brands end up in articles like this one. Run every candidate through these checks before anything reaches social media. This workflow fits inside a two-hour window, which is roughly what social teams get.
Set spike alerts on your category, not just your brand. Track product terms, competitor names, and your audience's interests, so trending topics surface while they still have room to grow. Persistent social listening dashboards beat someone remembering to check TikTok.
Read sentiment and context before anyone opens a design file. Volume tells you a trend exists; sentiment tells you whether it's safe to touch. Some trends are conversations, not formats — a trending hashtag about domestic violence, grief, or an arrest is how brands go viral for all the wrong reasons.
Separate the calendar from the culture. A new iPhone launch, Mother's Day, the Super Bowl — scheduled moments are moment marketing, not trend jacking. Save reactive capacity for the latest trends nobody saw coming.
Check who is driving it. Pull the demographics and interests behind the conversation and compare them to your buyers. Viral trends that peak with the wrong target audience are trends to skip; the relevant trends are the ones your actual audience is already in.
Ask where it started. Some trends now incubate where your team doesn't scroll, including AI-agent networks — which is why YouScan added Moltbook monitoring. A strange sentence to write, and also the job now.
Move fast on a pre-approved path. Decide in advance who signs off on reactive content and their maximum turnaround. Most misses aren't creative failures — they're approval failures, and social media managers are rarely the holdup.
Measure what happened after. Track mention volume, sentiment shift, and share of voice against everyone else who jumped in. If your reporting can't tell a trendjack from a normal Tuesday, you can't argue for the next one, and success stops being a business conversation.
YouScan's docs cover what the trends function does, and our trend analysis tools rundown compares options. Related:
brand mentions, social listening vs. social monitoring, and how a reputation crisis builds when nobody's watching.
The part most articles skip
Every win above shares one quality: the brand understood the room it was walking into before it posted anything to social media. Every failure shares the opposite. Speed is the entry fee, not the advantage — every marketing team in the world is fast now.
The marketers who win at this aren't the ones with the best ideas on the day. They're the ones whose trendjacking strategy tells them which conversations to skip.
Stop chasing short-term spikes and build predisposition by showing up credibly, over and over. Less exciting than "go viral," and harder to promote internally. Also, the thing that compounds.
For more, see our guerrilla marketing examples and fashion's cultural moments.
See the trend before your competitors do. Book a YouScan demo and find out whether spike detection and sentiment analysis would have flagged your last trendjacking opportunity — or talked you out of your last near-miss.
FAQ
What is trendjacking?
Trendjacking is when a brand inserts itself into a trending cultural conversation — a meme, challenge, hashtag, or shared moment — to gain visibility and engagement on social media without paid media. It rides momentum that already exists rather than building it from scratch. Done well, it helps a brand stay relevant and shows cultural awareness. Done without checking the trend's context or fit, it backfires fast.
What is the difference between trendjacking and newsjacking?
Trendjacking rides a cultural trend with some shelf life, like a meme or challenge. Newsjacking rides a breaking news story, such as a corporate scandal. Moment marketing, a related third term, reacts to one live event like an awards show. The practical difference is source: trends come from culture, news from headlines, moments from a single scheduled event.
Why does trendjacking sometimes go wrong?
Trendjacking usually fails on context, not timing. Marketers react to a trend's volume — how much people are talking — without reading what they're saying or why the trend exists. Mismatched tone, jokes at the expense of real people, and misreading what a hashtag means are the most common mistakes behind a backfire.
How can I find trendjacking opportunities before they peak?
Set up real-time monitoring across social media for keywords, hashtags, and topics relevant to your industry and audience, then set alerts for spikes in mention volume. Catching a trend early, while sentiment is still forming and before competitors respond, gives social media managers the best chance to create something relevant instead of arriving twentieth with the same joke.
