Some of the smartest brands on social media right now are busy producing entire episodes for their grids. They’re building characters that audiences want to get to know, and storylines that keep them coming back week after week. What used to require a network deal and a writers’ room can now launch from a single TikTok account. 

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What Are Brand Episodic Series?

Episodic brand series are one of the hottest things on social media at the moment. TV, of course, did it first. And creators like Amelia Dimoldenberg (Chicken Shop Date), The Call Center Series, and Boman Martinez-Reid (@bomanizer) have been putting out episodic content for years, building loyal audiences one installment at a time. Now, brands are hopping on the trend, recognizing that serialized storytelling is one of the few formats that cuts through the noise of an oversaturated, repetitive feed.

Instead of a single campaign or a standalone post, episodic content gives audiences a world to return to. There are characters to root for, storylines to follow, and a reason to come back to the profile. It’s social media, but structured like your favorite TV show.

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Why This Format is Working 

There are a few forces aligning to make this the perfect moment for brand episodic content.

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It doesn’t feel like advertising. The best episodic series soft-sell, or don't sell at all for weeks on end. Audiences are increasingly allergic to obvious marketing, and serialized content earns their attention by entertaining first and pitching second (or sometimes never even pitching).

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It creates a habit loop. When audiences know a new episode drops every week, your content stops competing for attention and starts getting scheduled into people's routines. Users love to leave a “my show is on” comment all over these types of series. 

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It builds lore. Recurring characters, inside jokes, callbacks to earlier episodes build over time, and a good series creates the kind of brand familiarity that a single ad never could. Audiences start to feel like they're in on something, and that feeling of shared knowledge turns casual viewers into actual fans.

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It builds trust. When a brand earns your time across ten episodes before asking for anything in return, the relationship it builds is fundamentally different from the one created by a targeted ad. Audiences develop a kind of affection that translates to real brand loyalty.

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The virality ceiling is high. Episodic content that resonates doesn't just get viewed once and forgotten about – it gets clipped, shared, discussed, and rewatched. You can capture a new viewer on episode six, which leads them to go back and start from episode one. It gets shared to groupchats, reposted on stories, and becomes synonymous with the brand. 

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Who’s Doing it Best?

1. InStyle: The Intern. InStyle is a legacy fashion magazine that figured out how to turn its own workplace into a show.

The Intern is a scripted mockumentary series that lives on InStyle's TikTok and Instagram, following a rotating cast of real influencers and creators playing chaotic interns navigating the frenzy of a fashion magazine office. The format seems to draw inspiration from The Office with confessional asides, awkward silences, and exaggerated versions of real-life employees acting out workplace insanities. Instead of positioning fashion as untouchable glamour, the series reframes it as attainable, with an air of parody. The interns are incompetent. The editors are barely holding it together. But it's exactly the content a younger audience wants from a fashion brand.

In its first year alone, InStyle published seven seasons, each featuring three-minute episodes, which collectively racked up 40 million views. Four of the seven seasons landed a brand sponsor, including Fossil and E.l.f. The series has also proven to be a discovery engine: InStyle's editor-in-chief Sally Holmes noted the show has been instrumental in reaching a broader, younger audience who might not have even known what InStyle is without it.

Now, InStyle is extending the universe with a second series called The Boss, starring Julia Fox as the team's new ambassador of slayage. The show that started as an experiment is now a full content franchise, and the template for what a media brand's social presence can look like.

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2. Ramp. Ramp made an unconventional bet: instead of chasing relevance through celebrity influencers or trendy audio, they built an entire brand persona around Brian Baumgartner, who plays Kevin Malone, the chaos-prone accountant from The Office.

Ramp sells software to finance teams, and Kevin Malone is arguably the most famous fictional accountant in pop culture history. The nostalgia is built in, the audience is pre-warmed, and the joke writes itself.

It started with a stunt in naming Baumgartner CFO for a day, and then they kept pulling the thread. They added Andy Buckley, who plays David Wallace in The Office, expanding the universe and giving fans something to get excited about. They ran a Super Bowl social episodic series, and hosted a public tailgate where attendees were invited to dress as Baumgartner – bald caps, ill-fitting suits, even pots of beans – with two Super Bowl tickets going to the best costume. The event hit capacity so fast that Ramp had to post: "Too Many Brians Want Chili. We are at capacity." They found a character, found the joke, and committed to it across every format and touchpoint. It's the bit that kept on bitting.

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3. Bilt: Roomies. This is the case study everyone in brand marketing is talking about. Bilt, a fintech company that lets renters earn points on their rent, made a scripted mockumentary series called Roomies. They launched it on an entirely separate social account, @RoomiesRoomiesRoomies, with no visible Bilt branding anywhere.

The show follows a 25-year-old from Ohio moving to New York, finding roommates, and figuring out life. It's genuinely funny, and it is basically a TV show that lives on your phone. After nine episodes that racked up millions of views, Bilt's name still hadn't been mentioned once.

Bilt's CMO put the strategy plainly: "It's about being part of the cultural conversation, not interrupting it." Their target audience is young people navigating life transitions like moving, renting, and figuring out adulthood – which is precisely what Roomies is about. The product never has to be mentioned because the show is already living inside the exact emotional experience Bilt exists to serve. When those viewers eventually need what Bilt offers, the brand has already earned their trust, one episode at a time.

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4. Canva: Creating Canva Create. It’s the brand new, limited scripted series Canva recently released as a countdown to their annual Canva Create conference.

Instead of posting a save-the-date or running a campaign, they turned the lead-up into a show. Each episode follows the internal office team scrambling to pull the event together: hiring a consultant who may or may not know what they're doing, solving the mystery of who stole the team's confetti stash, and navigating the general chaos of a company trying not to embarrass itself on its biggest day.

The premise is smart for several reasons. It takes something that could easily be a dry promotional push ("come to our conference!") and wraps it in the growing kind of workplace comedy that social media audiences can't scroll past. And by releasing episodes as a countdown, Canva turned their event marketing into a spectacle.

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Gap’s Big Move in the Content Industry

Possibly the most telling sign that episodic social media content is here to stay as a serious format, is a serious job listing. Gap recently created a brand new executive role: Vice President of Development, based in West Hollywood. The position, which pays between $300,000 and $360,000 USD, sits within Gap's newly formed entertainment division and reports to their first-ever Chief Entertainment Officer, former Paramount executive Pam Kaufman. The role is tasked with collaborating with production companies, studios, and distribution partners to develop content that "elevates brand relevance, drives cultural impact, and creates scalable storytelling franchises over time". 

Gap didn't arrive at this investment randomly. Their Better in Denim campaign from summer 2025, starring Katseye dancing to Kelis' "Milkshake," became one of the most talked-about brand moments of the year. The campaign delivered 8 billion media impressions. On their earnings call, CEO Richard Dickson said the Katseye campaign generated 20 million views in its first three days, which is more views than the full length of their last four releases combined. That kind of result potentially changed a company's entire marketing philosophy.

The idea being that fashion is entertainment is one that can create fandoms, inspire movements, and fuel sustained growth. When a retailer starts describing its marketing strategy in terms of franchises and fandoms, the line between brand and studio has officially blurred.

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How Can You Draw Inspiration

The thing about episodic content is that you don’t need a Hollywood budget. Bilt's Roomies was produced in-house and Ramp's series is made by a small team. These brands had an idea with legs and the discipline to be consistent.

The question to ask yourself isn't "what do we want to say?" It's "what would people want to watch?" There's a difference between content that communicates a brand message and content that earns a place on someone's calendar. The goal is the latter. You want someone scrolling their feed on a Thursday to think: "Oh, their new episode is out."

Start with a concept rooted in something your audience actually cares about, not your product. Bilt created a very successful show about moving to a new city and figuring life out, which happens to be the exact experience their customers are living. Find that common ground and build on it. And with Planoly’s auto-post tool, it’s easy to schedule out your episodes so you can focus on creating new content. Commit to the schedule like your audience is counting on it – because if you do it right, they will be.