TR.BIZ: 7.22.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off from Kyle at The Trend Report™. Today, we’re discussing political brattiness, trends at a music festival, and the depreciation of sustainability in culture.

🩹 Branded: Celebrities come to Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the last spaces of Google’s original utilitarian brilliance: a good tool that does its job well with little interruption by excess tech (ahem: Gemini). The brand recently launched a collab with the band The Marías via a cute little Short driving to a custom map made by the band to share their North American hidden gems. It’s cute! And features a few personal faves too, from Thai Town’s natural wines hub Lolo in LA to Vining’s classic river spot Canoe in Atlanta to the iconic Japanese garden in Portland. It’s a simple way to push a feature that has long existed but seems to be picking up steam: making your own Google map. “If you’re meeting friends before a show or finding a destination for a dinner out, you can use a list in Google Maps to rally your crew,” a blog by the brand explains. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more where this comes from.

• What can you do about this? Think about collabs with public figures from celebrities to creators very intelligently. Think low lift but heavy on what is natural for them. Everyone uses Google Maps and makes their own maps! Just have them make a map and keep it at that: easy. Comfortable, even! See also the Amelia Dimoldenberg x Peachy Dens collab, which allowed the creator to make her own ads — and it’s gone very well. In contrast? The Kylie Jenner x Miu Miu collab, which feels unnatural and forced — and is unanimously hated.

🏛️ Politicultural: Kamala was brat but now the world is brat

Today is the one year anniversary of “kamala IS brat” and people have a lot of thoughts, which is kicking up general feelings about this summer versus last summer, politics then versus politics now. As we anticipate the thinkpieces, theres’s an itchy feeling that the idea of brattiness crossed over from pop moment to a curse on these times, that we did come to be ruled by brats — just not the brats many wanted. The world’s top brat has spent the week trying to sober people up from a mass child rape hallucination by demanding sports team bring back racist names, dumping FBI files on civil rights leaders, and posting AI slop. Summer 2025 has coalesced all the bad things about summer 2024, thrusting us into a toxic soup where noted moron creators The Nelk Boys interview Netanyahu, pushing the economy of idiot-interviewers forward in evil ways Jimmy Fallon could only dream of. (The Boys now “regret” the interview.) Then there’s stuff like the recent Jubilee video, where icon

Mehdi Hasan

faces 20 conservatives — but it becomes apparent very quickly that these are self-proclaimed fascists and racists whose ideologies are being amplified. We await what will happen when these chickens come home to roost, especially given last week’s Fox endorsed use of the “Nazi.”

• What can you do about this? All this is ragebait and I’d ignore. What’s curious — and already exhausting — is this moment is being used by Democrats to campaign. Gavin Newsom has his trolling strategy, Andy Bashear is in Vogue, Jon Ossoff is running campaign ads: the space is already crowded as the Obama shadow looms large when we need to move on. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is eating them up, via an unhinged interview with Channel 5 that is scoring big clout points. If you must post, stick to culture and do something about the Olympics. Better yet, muse on how the Coldplay cheaters was actually last year.

🎪 Eventful: Live trends from the SOUNDIT Festival