The Cult of the Carousel: Why Brands Still Worship the Swipe
There’s something deeply tragic about a well-funded brand campaign tucked neatly into an Instagram carousel, like a wedding cake squashed into a bento box. You swipe through five slides. There's a stat. Oh look, a smiling person. Something aspirational. Swipe. A colour gradient. Swipe. Was that a call to action? Swipe. Gone.
In a year when everyone is supposedly allergic to content fatigue, marketers have tripled down on these multi-frame monologues. Why? Because someone in a meeting said "engagement" with the steely confidence of a Roman emperor.
Here’s the problem: carousels are fine for recipes. Or jeans. But if you’re telling me about your bold social impact strategy or a design-led packaging update, and you’ve chosen this format, you’ve automatically capped your own story’s impact. These swipable tombstones of creativity rarely land because their very structure assumes a passive reader. I don’t want to be passively educated. I want to be seduced. Challenged. Maybe even lightly trolled.
And yet, the carousel persists. Like eyeshadow in 2003, it rains down because it looks good on a spreadsheet. That's the real reason. The slow drip of time-on-post metrics. We worship metrics now. But some stories aren’t built for metrics. Some work better messy. With motion. With a beat. With conflict. It’s time to set some of these narratives free. Save the carousel for the before-and-after shots and let the deeper stuff breathe somewhere else. You know, like a real story would.
In a year when everyone is supposedly allergic to content fatigue, marketers have tripled down on these multi-frame monologues. Why? Because someone in a meeting said "engagement" with the steely confidence of a Roman emperor.
Here’s the problem: carousels are fine for recipes. Or jeans. But if you’re telling me about your bold social impact strategy or a design-led packaging update, and you’ve chosen this format, you’ve automatically capped your own story’s impact. These swipable tombstones of creativity rarely land because their very structure assumes a passive reader. I don’t want to be passively educated. I want to be seduced. Challenged. Maybe even lightly trolled.
And yet, the carousel persists. Like eyeshadow in 2003, it rains down because it looks good on a spreadsheet. That's the real reason. The slow drip of time-on-post metrics. We worship metrics now. But some stories aren’t built for metrics. Some work better messy. With motion. With a beat. With conflict. It’s time to set some of these narratives free. Save the carousel for the before-and-after shots and let the deeper stuff breathe somewhere else. You know, like a real story would.