Marketing Pains #4: Sharing — the gearing of collective attention
The proliferation of digital channels has disintermediated our collective attention into endless personalized streams. It’s no surprise that conflict coupled with disbelief thrives on the internet as parties informed by different echo-chambers cannot reconcile their different worlds.
[Part of the series: Marketing Pains ]
We all used to get roughly the same news. It was on TV at night or in the newspaper the next morning. Now your news may be entirely different to the next person’s depending on the medium, source and your taste. The same goes for other types of information and media too.
It’s not all heterogeny though, there is still very much commonality but popularity doesn’t look like it used to. Both the subject matter and mechanisms of popularity have changed drastically. The polished taste projected by editorial gatekeepers has fallen to the morbid subconscious taste of the crowd.
The simple ability to share media has fundamentally and profoundly changed what we pay attention to. What used to be passive consumption is now giant voting system. Skipping is a vote down, watching, engaging and particularly sharing is a vote up.
We now collectively determine what the most popular subject matter is in real-time. Uncontrolled, it moves quickly and often violently. This is a hostile environment for brands that take days, weeks or months to formulate communication.
People’s dopamine fueled desire to be on top of the latest cultural events incentivizes sharing and seeking of topical information. This is obviously self-reinforcing, so we’re not just changing the ranking of popularity but re-weighting it with runaway winners that leave less oxygen for everything else. Sharing creates gearing.
This is exacerbated by platforms. Algorithms demote things that receive no love to give more space to things that do. Platforms tell you what’s trending or popular — making it even more popular. Attention is zero-sum. Everyone only has 24 hours in a day — so bigger winners means bigger or more losers.
The shape of popularity has become more parabolic, where winners go viral and the long tail of average things becomes increasingly obscure. Brands are very much average. Big brands don’t have the right makeup to access virality consistently. The gearing of collective attention leaves them competing for diminishing returns.
Why would Nike, a god amongst brands, get political with an ad campaign if they already transcended politics? It goes against the nature of big brands to narrow their audience when they’re doing perfectly fine with a broader one.
The answer is simple. When Nike attached themselves to the Colin Kaepernick controversy they rode a rocket ship of attention. They got more attention than the company has in its history; the kind of outsized attention only possible within the new gearing of shared attention.
Whether this was a result of their strategy or not, this campaign was a response to the slow suffocation of ordinary things — that tempts brands further from their nature. The interconnectedness and immediacy of technology have magnified our collective attention and given strong emotions a huge advantage over mild ones. Fear and anger will trump just about everything else in a shared media world.
Mild emotions don’t tend to go viral. Recently we witnessed an athlete do something that couldn’t be more aligned with Nike’s brand and purpose. Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in under 2 hours — a monumental feat many thought was physically impossible not long ago. He couldn’t have done it without the help of Nike and its Breaking2 project too. They provided the best training, facilities and new products. Nike truly deserves credit in this.
Eliud’s record run did its rounds on social media, but in the pace of today’s media cycle, it came and went quickly — replaced by the usual cocktail of trending politics and celebrity non-news. Unlike the Kaepernick campaign, the greatest run in history didn’t put Nike in the global spotlight.
In the scary gearing of collective attention, controversy trumps excellence. Pure athleticism, worthy of the god of victory, just doesn’t appeal to the taste of the crowd as much as spite does. How can brands compete with that?
Media used to be insular; like having many private and civilized conversations. Now, brands are dealing with a connected mob audience. Their morbid taste isn’t for the mildness of brands and the parabolic gearing of what does get attention, makes paid media less effective.
With a connected audience, advertising has become less popular and brands are slowly being suffocated by the new economics of media.
Read more of the Marketing Pains series:
- What’s really causing these — Marketing Pains?
- #1: Transparency — the magic killer
- #2: Fragmentation — the shrinking of attention spans
- #3: Skippability — the democratization of attention
- #4: Sharing — the gearing of collective attention
