The unsexy industry's guide to Instagram. Greetings from Cannes ✋

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Brave New Media

The Brave New Business Journal

Issue 08 · Tuesday, 23 June 2026 · Reading time: 6 minutes

Nobody opens Instagram hoping to see a reel about freight, racking, or cold-chain compliance. That is exactly why the field is open.

The people winning on Instagram in 2026 are not the ones with the most exciting subject. They are the ones who package an ordinary subject in the right format. Your topic is not the problem. Your format is.

Here are the tricks worth stealing, then a quick dispatch from Cannes.

01 · THE INSTAGRAM PLAYBOOK

The Instagram tricks for industries nobody calls sexy

Format beats topic. A dull subject with the right format and hook will outperform an exciting subject with a tired one. Tax strategy, warehouse throughput, procurement: all viable. The variable you control is how you frame it, not what you talk about.

Kill these two formats:

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The 7-second clip with trending audio and "read the caption." It used to trick watch time. It is dead now.

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The over-polished, AI-scripted talking head. They all sound the same, and people feel it.

Do these two instead:

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Raw "yapping." Phone in hand, no tripod, talking to the camera like you are talking to one colleague. Harder than it looks, which is the point. It reads as human.

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Creative formats. Rankings, tier lists, brackets, head-to-heads, series, challenges, street interviews. "We graded five warehouse layouts, S-tier to F." "Day 1 of explaining one freight term until people stop asking."

Use the SHARE test:

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S: Simple. Clear enough for a distracted person in two seconds. Cut the jargon in the first frame.

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H: Hook. You have 1.7 seconds before someone scrolls. What is on screen matters more than the words.

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A: Authentic. Means one thing in practice: shrink the time between the idea and the post.

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R: Relatable, through specificity. Not "supply chains are stressful." Instead: "the container sat at port all weekend, the customer called twice, the tracking page hadn't moved in six days." Specifics are what let people see themselves in it.

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E: Entertaining. Education alone is boring. Teach, but wrap it so people actually stop.

What the algorithm rewards. Shares drive new reach. Likes drive reach to your existing followers. The platform's real goal is conversations, especially DMs. So the win is content someone sends to a colleague. "Tag the ops manager who needs this" is a reach engine.

Beat burnout by batching. Burnout comes from overthinking each post, not from posting often. Build seven days of content before you post again. Then just post. Stop polishing in drafts.

Repost. Run every reel again 60 to 90 days later. It is your content. Give a post up to three swings before retiring it.

A few quick calls:

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Carousels over single photos. A second slide gets a second chance in the feed.

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Stories are where a logistics brand stops being a logo and earns know, like, trust. It is also where you sell, because the trust is already built.

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Skip Instagram Live unless you already have an audience. It does not reach new people.

On money, be clear-eyed. Instagram pays creators almost nothing, even at millions of views. The point is reach that starts conversations off-platform, then a consult, a service, a relationship. For B2B supply chain, that was always the model.

On AI. As polished output gets free, polish stops being the edge. Value wins, and value includes entertainment, not just instruction. The raw, specific, human post beats the flawless generic one. Good news for an industry that thinks it has nothing visual to show.

02 · FROM CANNES

Dispatch: Brave New at Cannes

Cannes Lions 2026
Highlights from the world’s biggest week in creativity

We made our debut at Cannes this week, Monday the 22nd. Three things from the ground:

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Human creativity is the starting point. The idea originates with a person. AI scales it, it does not seed it. That came up again and again.

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Salesforce is going full speed on its F1 partnership. Brand-as-spectacle is getting bigger budgets, not smaller.

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AI is broadly accepted, less so by the creatives themselves, but the openness is there. The people closest to the craft are the most cautious, which is the honest reaction, and the room is leaning toward experimenting rather than away.

The throughline with the playbook above: the tools got cheap, so human judgment got valuable. Same lesson on a 45-second reel as on a Cannes stage.

03 · THE NUDGE

The Nudge

Pick one boring thing you know cold. Make one raw, 45-second, talking-to-one-person reel about it this week. No script, no tripod. Post it before you talk yourself out of it. Then send it to one person who needs it. That is the whole loop.