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Lessons from our three most-read stories from last month.
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Morning Brew promotes its top stories from last month, featuring marketing strategies from brands like BetterHelp and Whoop. The newsletter highlights BetterHelp's comments-section strategy, which has shown significant growth after a viral comment on a TikTok video. It shares insights from BetterHelp's chief growth officer on the brand's approach to speaking to communities through comment sections.
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583 words · about 2 min to read
September 26, 2026
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Sponsor Logo: Tatari
It’s Saturday, and we’re here with a special send featuring our top stories from last month. Whether it’s BetterHelp’s comments-section strategy, Whoop’s sports sponsorships approach, or an OOH activation from K18 involving a gigantic ball of real human hair, there’s likely something every kind of marketer can learn from.
In today’s edition:
Chat room 📲
Wrist watch ⌚
Hair affair ✂️
—Kristina Monllos, Jasmine Sheena, Jennimai Nguyen
SOCIAL & INFLUENCERS
Posting notes
Screenshots of BetterHelp's comments coupled together in a collage.
Screenshots via BetterHelp
Sometimes all it takes is one comment to make a change.
That could be taken as a grand statement about life, but here, it’s a literal one: After posting a comment on a video that went viral last year, BetterHelp’s marketing team has doubled down on the comment section as a growth strategy.
“The team had a breakthrough moment with the Pitch Perfect conversation that was happening online,” Sara Brooks, chief growth officer for BetterHelp, told us, referring to a comment the brand made on the viral post of college students performing a capella from last November. (The film features college a capella groups competing for prizes.) “The team came into the comments section in TikTok and said, ‘Close enough! Welcome back, Treblemakers!’ And it really resonated with the community. Got over 300,000 likes on just one comment. We started to see, ‘Hmm, something is happening here.’”
It can be hard for some marketers to replicate viral success, but for BetterHelp, the move fit into a larger strategic shift to focus on speaking to communities. Since its first outsized response to that TikTok comment, BetterHelp has continued to find different comment sections to be a part of—mostly on TikTok, where BetterHelp has 537,400 followers, and on Instagram, where the brand has more than 635,000 followers.
“What we found is that this is a really repeatable, scalable way to show up in culture,” Brooks said. “Fast forward to today, our follower count on TikTok, our daily new followers has grown a hundredfold. People [are] really resonating with the brand as we’re showing up in these cultural conversations.”
Brands have long shown up in the comments section of viral TikToks and Instagram videos, with some, like Dove and HelloFresh, playing in the space for years with the goal of garnering positive brand sentiment and centering their brands in cultural conversations. Often, that cultural conversation revolves around a fandom of some sort, like a TV show or a franchise.
For BetterHelp, though, the shift is more than just being part of cultural conversation—it’s a growth strategy.
“We’re fortunate in that, for better or worse, mental health is part of the cultural conversation,” she said. “But where there are cultural conversations that your brand can earn the right to be in, add some value and show up, and I think that it could be a great success.”
Continue reading here.—KM
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Sponsored By Tatari
It’s prime time for growth
Marketers could use a clear view of what’s next.
At Forward 2026, the leaders behind some of the fastest-growing platforms and consumer brands reveal what’s driving the future of TV advertising.
You’ll get a look into the real-world playbooks of brands turning cultural moments into awareness, conversions, and revenue. Hear from:
Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman on Reddit’s evolving role in the advertising landscape and how communities reshape brand discovery
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