Give me a high five
Our days often begin and end with a press of the power button and are filled with clicks, swipes, memes, and double-clicks. We scroll through Instagram while watching Netflix. We listen to music while working or playing video games. We binge on podcasts during our morning commutes. We snack on 8-second clips on TikTok like Tatranka cookies. Swipe left, right, up, or down to get to the next 8-second clip.
An information surplus creates demand for what is scarce. Attention. We used to call this the information economy. But an economy is defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value). And what is scarce in an age of information abundance? Attention. The growth of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of the richest people, and the power of governments are all based on acquiring, monetizing, and managing attention.
We are witnessing a marketing phenomenon in which messaging and authenticity are being traded for view counts and attention. This may not last forever, but this trend has been gaining momentum for at least ten years. The political changes of the 2020s are, in fact, the result of this trend, in which the ability to hold people’s attention trumps the content and merit of policies.
The phenomenon of the attention economy emerged around 2009, when online solutions from Facebook (now Meta) and Google (now Alphabet) began to gain a significant foothold in the advertising market. Gradually, these two companies came to account for 65% of the global advertising market. Since then, a number of others have joined them (TikTok, Twitter/X, etc.), leaving only a small slice of the original advertising pie for traditional media such as newspapers, television, magazines, and radio.
Until then, public awareness had been a byproduct of capitalism. Producers of goods need to get information about purchasing options to consumers. But hardly anyone wants to consume advertising itself. Gradually, starting in the 1980s, we became accustomed to the idea that public awareness through quality news coverage and journalism—as the proverbial watchdog of democracy—is free or paid for by the state through license fees. But even back then, we were paying with our attention. However, if you take away two-thirds of the “watchdog of democracy’s” food bowl, it has only a few options left to prevent itself from starving to death.
Multiple Crises
The media must make themselves heard more and keep you glued to your screens and receivers. This brings us to a stage where traditional media can easily give the impression of a “multi-crisis.” In a new and potentially dangerous situation—whether it’s COVID, an ice storm, an aptly named storm, floods, or a conflict in a country you’ve never heard of before—our brains naturally begin to demand information so we can prepare to flee or fight. Even though wildfires are happening thousands of kilometers away from you, you watch them several times a day. They pose no threat to you, nor can you help in any way, and yet you keep watching. A polycrisis is, of course, extremely politically appealing, because there is no easier way to win voter favor than by protecting one’s people from external dangers, and public figures simply fuel this narrative, thereby boosting viewership of traditional media. Will it mean anything to you—or to the person whose house burned down in California—to hear the Secretary of State’s condolences? No, it won’t, but it will make it onto the screen.
Capturing attention is proving to be a clearly profitable business if you don’t have to produce the content yourself (like traditional media) but your users do it for you. In a 2019 study by McGuffin, analysts asked social media users how many of them would be willing to pay to use these platforms and how much they would be willing to pay. At the time, YouTube was the most highly valued platform, with 72% of people willing to pay $4.20 per month for it. The analysts then calculated how much the profits of these platforms would increase if a sufficient number of users began paying the amounts identified. Although Reddit was by no means the most highly valued platform, its annual revenue would have increased by more than 10,000%. In the case of YouTube, the increase would have been nearly 2,000%. So far, however, it appears that paying for attention is more beneficial for both sides.
Information isn't free. And the information that is free is just for fun.
A second option for traditional media is to start charging for their content to make up for the loss of advertising revenue. This is exactly what happened, and for many years, The New York Times served as a textbook example: after introducing a subscription model in 2015, it generated $2.64 in profit per reader, compared to Business Insider—which had been freely available until then—which earned an average of only $0.55 per reader from advertising. Relying on organic viewership also proved risky for the American network NBC. It paid $7.65 billion for the broadcast rights to five Olympic Games but earned only $1.2 billion in advertising revenue from the 2024 broadcast.
However, the subscription model is also problematic. First and foremost, it turns verified, high-quality information into a commodity accessible only to a portion of society. It thus creates a privileged position for those who don’t mind sending part of their paycheck to media companies. Consider how heated the political and social debate became simply over the increase in license fees for Czech Television and Czech Radio. Seventy-one percent of people in the Czech Republic oppose this increase. In reality, this means that credible, high-quality information is viewed as untrustworthy by those who are unwilling or unable to pay for it. Much of that information is already behind a paywall, so even if you send it to them, you won’t convince them of its truth. On the contrary, they’ll turn to sources where they can find information for free.
And this brings us, in a way, to the heart of this “watchdog of democracy.” The late behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman was the first to shake up the field of economics with his discovery that people do not make decisions based on economic principles. Since the 1980s, when he became the founder of behavioral economics, he has influenced many of us and the way we view methods for communicating a message or product to people. Toward the end of his scientific career, he came up with an even more startling finding—one that simultaneously contradicted all his previous findings: People do not make decisions based on arguments. They believe arguments because they reinforce their existing beliefs. Even if you tell them after the fact in an experiment that they had incorrect information, their beliefs persist.
Stereotypes are the building blocks of communication
So is it possible that marketing doesn’t need to solve problems, but can simply build on well-researched stereotypes held by the target audience? The more information and content that’s available, the more the line between truth and lies—between facts and fiction—blurs. The natural reaction is for each of us to start creating our own truth and seeking out information that supports it. And in an age of an abundance of “free” information, this is very easy—made even easier by the fact that a language model or social media algorithm will now do it for you.
It’s even worse than that. Not only do people not make decisions based on economic considerations, but they also refuse to change their minds even when the facts change. People believe the facts that support their convictions. The cornerstone of (political) marketing is therefore a shared stereotype, emotion, or experience.
The public prefers authenticity over elaborateness. While many leaders are able to convey their extensive knowledge of an issue to voters, voters themselves do not possess this knowledge and prefer someone who, like them, is guided primarily by convictions and values. Someone like them—someone genuine—evokes a primary positive emotion. At work, I call him or her “chief.” And it’s the same with communication—if someone expresses themselves as clumsily as I do, that’s someone I can trust. A message based on a shared stereotype, experience, or emotion is authentic and trustworthy because it resonates with both the sender and the recipient.
Many people—some more skillfully than others—take advantage of the attention economy. An ad for Belveder vodka—which I bet you’ve never heard of before—shows Daniel Craig dancing in Paris for two and a half minutes without any meaningful message, just to grab attention. Climate activists throw ketchup at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Not because the Mona Lisa has any connection to climate change or because they want to damage it. But because it’s the most famous work of art in the world. Filip Turek, in a very calculated move, publicly attacks on Twitter the well-known former presidential candidate and his opponent in the European Parliament elections, Danuše Nerudová. If she hadn’t responded to him, he wouldn’t have gained the attention that ultimately landed him a seat in the European Parliament and propelled him into high-level politics.
Don't be afraid to say, "I don't know."
All of the above also lies behind Donald Trump’s landslide victory. Is there a defense against this? Hardly. Daniel Kahneman, mentioned earlier, also gave the world another concept. He called it “fast and slow thinking.” The human brain has limited capacity, which hasn’t evolved much physiologically over the past few thousand years. It is unable to process the sheer volume of information that comes at us. So we rely on “fast thinking,” which automates our decision-making. For example, unless you’re a BMW driver, you don’t have to think too hard about whether to use your turn signal when turning while driving. However, thanks to stereotypes, we’re applying this “fast” thinking more and more often to situations where it would be worth waiting, assessing the context, gathering more information, and seeing how the situation develops. We can only hope that some people will start to think slowly and more often answer the question: “I don’t know yet.”