I was doomscrolling the other night, half-cut on a warm lager, when it hit me. Half my feed had gone full retro. Not the usual polished influencer nonsense, but proper daft dances that looked like they belonged in a 1987 nightclub, kids doing transformation videos to songs their parents used to play in the car, and everyone banging on about some Dai Dai challenge tied to the World Cup.
According to the numbers floating around, that particular dance linked to Shakira and Burna Boy racked up over 5.3 million posts on TikTok by early July. Five point three million. That's not some brand campaign. That's people piling in because it's fun, it's silly, and it feels like something human for once.
The World Cup effect
The tournament has clearly lit a fuse. Analyses of July activity show World Cup energy everywhere: dance challenges, glitch edits of players, emotional acting bits, football stereotype arguments, and nostalgia pouring out of every corner. Transformation videos using How You Like Me Now by The Heavy. The Promise dance trend pulling in that old When in Rome synth-pop track from 1987 for slower, aesthetic group routines. It's all second-hand nostalgia for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, kids rediscovering sounds that stopped being cool before they were born.
Startups.co.uk reported the dominance of this FIFA World Cup energy alongside those 80s dance crazes and the older music fuelling short-form transformation videos. Makes you wonder if the algorithm finally realised it can't fake the warmth of proper cultural memory.
Real life over synthetic polish
Beneath the football frenzy sits something steadier. The 2026 trend reports keep hammering the same point: people are fed up with the overproduced, the fully generated, the too-perfect. They want authenticity. Real human faces, employee posts that don't feel like marketing, user-generated stuff that actually connects. Short-form vertical video is still king, usually between 15 and 60 seconds, but the content inside it is shifting towards the genuine.
Hybrid human and AI material is creeping in, sure, because efficiency matters. Yet the audiences respond far better when the human bit shines through. It's a quiet rebellion against the machine trying to do all the talking.
