The brands were ready for Taylor Swift’s engagement

Taylor Swift posted an announcement of her engagement to Travis Kelce at around noon E.T. on August 26. By 12:30 p.m., Sour Patch Kids, Duolingo, and Buffalo Wild Wings had all tweeted about it. 

In today’s era of reactive digital marketing, brands with wildly successful social media presences tend to echo the same mantra: It’s all about speed. Companies like Duolingo, Amtrak, and Heinz have scored some of their most successful posts by chiming in on whatever discourse is currently dominating X feeds. 

Brands react to Taylor Swift’s engagement

For most brands, X is the platform of choice for rolling out the quickest possible response to a piece of breaking news, given the low lift required. Today, brands from across a wide range of categories came out in droves on the platform to offer their two cents on the Swift and Kelce engagement.

“SUDDENLY I BELIEVE IN LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” Sour Patch Kids wrote. 

“But when will it be your Spanish teacher’s turn,” Duolingo quipped in response to Swift’s Instagram caption, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” 

“WE WILL CATER THE WEDDING,” Buffalo Wild Wings offered. 

“It’s a love story, and baby she said yes,” Crumbl cookies wrote above a pairing of cookies clearly meant to represent the future newlyweds. 

Even the city of Cleveland couldn’t pass up the opportunity to alert its followers to the news with a tweet that’s already scored more than 20,000 likes—a startling sum compared with the account’s usual posts, which tend to net less than 10 likes apiece.

Other brands tried different avenues to turn Swift’s announcement into their own win, including GrubHub, which sent a push notification to customers reading: “And we say yes to takeout. Order your favorites today.”

Why is Buffalo Wild Wings congratulating Taylor Swift?

For many of these brands, this quick turnaround content geared toward Swifties is already taking off. Buffalo Wild Wings’ tweet, for example, is its second-most successful post of the month—behind only its post celebrating Swift’s upcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl. 

After Swift announced the new album on August 13, brands similarly used the news as fodder for their own posts, from Sesame Street’s Elmo to United Airlines and Tic Tac. On LinkedIn, the trend stirred up a discussion among marketers about whether reactive marketing is truly worthwhile. One post by social media strategist Kieran Hughes that called the strategy “lazy marketing” garnered nearly 2,000 reactions and 400 comments.

“Sesame Street, FedEx, Dunkin’, airlines—everyone jumping on the same bandwagon within hours. And I can’t help but think, when did we decide that being first to react was more important than being strategically relevant?” Hughes wrote. “This isn’t cultural marketing. It’s cultural desperation. Real cultural marketing means understanding why something matters, not just that it’s trending.”

On the one hand, Hughes is touching on a real concern for both social media users and brand managers. “Bandwagon” marketing has become an unavoidable trope over the last several years, and when it’s overplayed, it can easily come off as annoying, low effort, and even cringeworthy. But on the other hand, when done correctly, posts like these can drum up outsized engagement from larger fan bases that wouldn’t normally interact with a brand.

In a direct response to Hughes, marketer Ashley Rutstein, who runs the account @stuffaboutadvertising, noted that many of the posts cited in his critique had outperformed those brands’ other recent content: Buffalo Wild Wings’ response on X notched 10,000 likes, compared with its average in the hundreds; Scrub Daddy’s Instagram post attracted nearly 100,000 likes; United Airlines’ Instagram post drew more than 500 comments; and FedEx’s tweet was its most-liked post all year.

Brand posts that appeal to the attention economy (especially when it comes to one of the internet’s most beloved pop stars) work, whether we like it or not—and the immediate reaction to Swift’s engagement is yet another data point to prove it.