In May, an anonymous artist published a painting by Claude Monet on X, accompanied by a simple warning: “made by AI”. The caption had a provocation: explain why that work would be inferior to a “real” Monet.
The content went viral and there was no shortage of criticism of the brushstrokes, colors and supposed lack of soul in the image. Days later the revelation came, the screen was authenticpainted by Monet in 1915.
The experiment said less about art and more about the dynamics of networks, where interpretation and context shape the way we judge what we see. At a time when we are increasingly discussing authorship, AI and authenticity, the episode exposes something bigger.
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We rarely consume content neutrally. Context matters and often changes everything.
This logic is at the heart of digital culture. On networks, the meaning of a message is constructed both by those who create it and by those who interpret, comment and share it.
That’s where the power of engagement and virality lies, as active communities don’t just consume content, they attribute meaning to it.
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In an environment where attention is fought for in real time, participating in the right conversations has become as important as the message itself.
The calendar is a behavior map
If the context changes the way we interpret a message, major cultural moments act as accelerators of this dynamic. These are periods in which millions of people share content, emotions and conversations at the same time.
The life of the Brazilian consumer is organized by peaks. According to the NielsenIQ Ebit Webshoppers panel, 74% of purchases are motivated by seasonal actions. It’s not a retail detail: it’s a behavioral structure.
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Valentine’s Day mobilizes tens of millions of consumers; the Festas Juninas generate billions; Black Friday reorganizes the entire last quarter of those who sell online.
The brand that communicates all year in the same way treats this map as if it were flat. And he isn’t. Each cultural peak opens a window in which the entire country starts talking about the same thing at the same time.
At first glance, this may seem like saturation. In practice, it is usually exactly the opposite.
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Everyone on the same topic (and it’s okay)
When the whole country starts talking about the same thing, it is common to fear repetition. But it is precisely in these moments that belonging is born. What changes is not the subject, but the interpretation that each community makes of it.
The World Cup is perhaps the most obvious example. Football is the center, but the conversation has not only been in the stadium for a long time. It appears in the kitchen, in humor, in motherhood, in the home routine.
The same event unfolds in hundreds of versions, because each creator translates that moment into the language of their own audience.
The creator’s true asset is adaptability. It is the only medium capable of rewriting a message in real time for different contexts. That’s why the investment logic has changed.
Traditional media buys a break in people’s attention; the creator is invited into it. In great cultural moments, this proximity becomes connection.
It was this logic that led us to structure, for the World Cup, an operation capable of transforming a single event into dozens of simultaneous readings.
In practice, this is what we are building with the 2026 Summoneda partnership between Play9 and Globo, which reúne 26 creators ahead of the narrative and a network of 2,000 micro and nano creators across the country.
Each translates the same game into the context of its audience. And it is this sum of versions, more than the repetition of a single message, that generates belonging on a national scale.
But translating the same event into dozens of versions, each adapted to a different community, requires an increasingly scarce resource in the market: time.
Where creativity meets scale
This is where AI comes in. Not to create in our place, but to handle the scale. According to Stanford University’s AI Index 2026, Generative AI reached 53% population adoption in just three yearsa faster pace than that observed with the personal computer or the internet itself.
The same report points out something less discussed. Technology adoption does not just depend on income or infrastructure. And here Brazil takes the lead. We have a trait that works in our favor, the ability to take a reference and transform it into multiple versions.
This is evident in the scale of production and the agility with which Brazilians enter current conversations. It’s no surprise that we are recognized worldwide for our almost inexhaustible ability to create and go viral.
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AI does not take creativity out of the picture. It increases our capacity and speed of response.
It allows you to monitor the cultural calendar in real time, test formats and accelerate learning, freeing up time, an increasingly scarce resource, for what remains essential, the human eye to make decisions, set the tone and identify the most relevant meanings.
Reading culture is the new differentiator
Technology will continue to accelerate production, with AI profoundly transforming the way we create, distribute and consume content in the coming years.
But great cultural moments continue to offer opportunities that no tool completely automates, such as creating relevant connections from a shared context.
It is in this space that creators become strategic. They not only produce content, but translate culture for different communities, fueling conversations and transforming the same subject into countless versions capable of generating identification and belonging.
In the end, the most relevant brands will not be those that produce the most content, but those that develop the greatest capacity for cultural reading.
The algorithm will continue to distribute content at scale, but deciding what matters, who matters to whom, and when it matters remains a deeply human exercise.
