Author name: Shubranshu Singh

The idea of bringing advertising closer to entertainment and pop culture was always a theoretical no brainer but never a practical choice of the mainstream players. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] TikTok’s rise is meteoric. Yes, it’s creating a new generation of celebrities – many of whom are younger than the YouTubers who came before them. But the rise of TikTok has wider ramifications, arising from the fact that it was made by, and is still owned by, a Chinese company. (Representational image by Alice Donovan Rouse via Unsplash) Physicist Michael Goldhaber coined a term in 1997 to describe how he believed the world economic order would change in the internet age. He noted that the present world economy is often characterized as an information economy. However, economies get built on underlying scarcity, whereas information is truly more abundant than ever. What is scarce is people’s attention. Therefore, he predicted correctly that “seeking attention” would become a core activity of the digital age. He called it the “attention economy” where attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention. Goldhaber wrote that the global economy is shifting from a material-based economy to one based on the capacity of human attention. All consumer decisions are meditated even when seemingly impulsive. Hence we must ask: Is influence proportional to fame? Is media exposure as a driver of celebrity sustainable even if effective? Why does public attention lead to sell-ebrity ? Has public visibility as a means for personal branding become a free for all in the age of the all-pervasive internet? Is the notion of authenticity central to evaluations of content or is it more a worthy mention than an honest concern? As brands worked to build themselves out into social media personalities, individuals on social media worked to simplify and distil their personalities into easily understandable personal brands. At an exhibition in Stockholm in 1968, the American pop art pioneer Andy Warhol wrote: ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ Back then it was an inconceivable, outrageous idea but now reality has caught up. There are no socially acknowledged benchmarks for fame. Virality can propel anyone to instant fame in a blaze of glory. Then, the next dud video takes the star back to relative anonymity. Now, a run of successful self-shot videos can propel an individual to the orbit of a celebrity creator multi-millionaire. In Warhol’s time, fame was awarded to a few by a small set of gatekeepers -editors, publishers, culture builders, public relations folks. You had to be admitted. Achievement led to admission. And admission, in turn, led to achievement. There was no way to storm the gates. Today, a single, super-fast, ever-mutating social media app with Chinese ownership with an inscrutable algorithm is the biggest fame engine. The science of fame building in terms of network has been very sharply summarised by Albert-László Barabási  in his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. “A few years ago, physicist César Hidalgo and his team devised a way to rank the most famous people of all time. The criterion used for the Pantheon project was the number of languages a person’s Wikipedia pages appear in. The most famous musician? Jimi Hendrix. The most famous American? Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps inevitably, the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle heads the entire list. Among celebrities, reality-television star Kim Kardashian comes 14th, although her fame clearly outweighs any recorded achievement “ wrote Mark Buchanan in his review in  Nature, the leading science journal Barabási claims that such paradoxes are reflective of deep social laws that can be understood through science. Success and recognition in many realms may have only a tenuous link to effort, skill or inherent excellence. We need to test how influence and attention flows through social networks. TikTok is not charmed by prior celebrity stature. Anyone has the potential to go viral on TikTok. Its algorithm works on what’s called a ‘content graph’, looking at what folks previously engaged with, rather than a ‘social graph’ – based on followership. That makes it possible for a video to go super-viral from very ordinary origins. TikTok’s rise is meteoric. Yes, it’s creating a new generation of celebrities – many of whom are younger than the YouTubers who came before them. But the rise of TikTok has wider ramifications, arising from the fact that it was made by, and is still owned by, a Chinese company. The way we consume content is closely linked to our lifestyles. Today, we live in an on-demand economy. When we care, we share. Mobility is on demand be it Uber, Lyft or Grab. Tinder, Bumble, Raya help us date. Music on demand is a rage be it Spotify or Apple Music. We eat on demand with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Swiggy or Zomato. We watch content on demand and YouTube is a universe of its own. But there is also Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. We rate services and value experiences. This consumer pays for exactly what he wants and when he wants it. This is consumption maximisation and not demand minimalism. The new ‘on demand’ consumer refuses to pay for anything not needed. We increasingly cut the cord from cable TV companies and use ad blockers. Therefore, the idea of bringing advertising closer to entertainment and pop culture was always a theoretical no brainer but never a practical choice of the mainstream players. The big spenders invested in branded content as a fad. Through till Y2K, the global mainline agencies carried the mental baggage of the golden era of print and television. There is no denying that, following the success of campaigns such as BMW Films many similar attempts by brands and talented creatives resulted in failure. Meanwhile Facebook and then Instagram grew at a never before seen pace. Then, into such a playing field walked in TikTok. In Jan 2013, about a year after Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance , a video sharing platform Vine, that was TikTok’s spiritual forefather, came into existence.

Broadly the quest for status via consumption is an intended outcome of prestige brand consumption. It signals that we have access, to something exciting, enriching and more fun. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] To make bonds, connections and emotive associations is the nature of social man but all the while he craves the halo of singularity. Indeed, we are unified in our hunger for exclusivity. (Image: Andrik Langfield via Unsplash) Building reach is the start of all glory in marketing. Reach before you preach. Get famous before you try to persuade. Facts feed narratives that in turn get woven into stories. These stories create a reputation, and a brand is nothing but a ‘reputation of reputations’. This is taken as sine qua non across categories. When it comes to prestige and luxury, the essence holds but mutates in form. In this world, the knowing must invoke the craving not the having. It is important for luxury to remain accessible at a stretch. Those who desire desperately often never end up deserving, that’s the cruel reality. This need to belong to the ‘in crowd’ is what fuels the fire of desire.Reach many but be accessible to a few. A velvet rope has become the very hard boundary between the in and the out crowd. The red carpet lies beyond this red rope. A ‘velvet rope’ is used literally of course, but even more so figuratively. It marks the barrier which may be only a foot or two off the ground yet it may take a lifetime or even generations to cross over. The velvet rope is credited to George and Louise Boldt when they opened the first Waldorf hotel, later to become The Waldorf Astoria, on 33rd Street and 5th Avenue in New York City in 1894. But it was at another New York legend, Studio 54, in the year 1977 that Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, made it a high symbol of ‘admission restricted’ as the marker of status and cool. The dance club ran for four short years, but it burned into collective memory the desire is to make it past that velvet rope and belong to the select few. Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous, existentialist dictum ‘L’enfer c’est les autres’ – ‘Hell is other people’ can be a benchmark for successful modern ‘prestige roping’. Make no mistake, the ultimate goal for all prestige brands is maximization of revenue but being rare and scarce builds and protect a brand’s equity. Traditional mass marketing is about serving needs, prestige brand building is the business of creating desire. Their job is to keep us wanting …to stand and shine above and beyond their competition, creating an allure that goes beyond reason. The desperation should be such that the response can only be a rush to splurge and indulge. The one major defining conflict -largely subconscious- is that between individualists and collectivists. A modern prestige powerhouse brand relieves this contradiction by only staying slightly out of reach, balancing inclusivity with exclusivity. You are never permanently in but never out forever either. Forever longing for a sense of belonging. How is this balance between inviting proximity and maintaining distance made possible? The brand expansion is always done top-down. The showcase targets are very aspirational to the volume targets. Immense care is taken to nurture and foster relationships with a small base of tastemakers and trendsetters. Growth is best when gradual, carrying along original fans as continuous proof of their superiority and desirability as well as advocates/evangelists to help them target and convert the broader market. The entire approach must preserve a sense of rarity, a feeling of exclusivity strategically controlling supply to foster demand. Underlying it all is a simple outpricing of some consumers to give the rest a feeling of being in. Broadly the quest for status via consumption is an intended outcome of prestige brand consumption. It signals that we have access, to something exciting, enriching and more fun. Man is pulled by two contradictions the need to belong and the need to stand out. The urge for exclusivity assumes that the others will know of it. Even when exceptional, man wants recognition of the envious collective. To make bonds, connections and emotive associations is the nature of social man but all the while he craves the halo of singularity. Indeed, we are unified in our hunger for exclusivity. The MINI brand is a great example of this act particularly since its re-launch in 2001, with the BMW group, A classic case on how to market without over-marketing. They built desirability and equity while growing at double digit rates, all the while adhering to a rule of ambiguity that folks buy into the lifestyle with the MINI, but they need a lifetime to belong. When it launched in the US, it deliberately limited sales to 25,000 cars of the 200,000 that were then produced annually. Of course, they wanted to conquer this most important market of all, but they wanted to build and protect their elusive-exclusive equity at the same time. A tightrope indeed, and quite a gamble, but it paid off. Playing hard to get and yet, or rather because of it, making it all the way to the top. They created a sense of scarcity and exclusivity of belonging to a certain aspirational elite of creative and cultured sophisticates. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller describes this as ‘the two audiences’ in his seminal work Spent. Advertisements for accessible luxury goods typically find themselves in magazines with broad circulation. The brand can reasonably assume that most people reading that magazine are unlikely to make a purchase, but widespread advertising serves the goal of informing wider social circles of a brand’s lofty status. Everyone knows that BMW is the “ultimate driving machine” even though less than 1% of us has ever driven one. “The advertising of luxury brands educates the general population to help elevate the status of those -and only those – who can afford their products” points out Miller. This broad, socially widespread, acculturation is necessary for signalling

Social media is a show cabinet for the individual. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist claims that the way the Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. The need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, is forever increasing. The view of self is now constructed from online evaluation of others. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Everything is measured in terms of likes and shares. The power a social network brings to politics is, by itself, something worthwhile. (Representative image by George Kedenburg III via Unsplash)   “In modern thought, (if not in fact) Nothing is that doesn’t act, So that is reckoned wisdom which Describes the scratch but not the itch.” – Anonymous Stanza referenced in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man when mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ Our lives, careers, reputations and identities are now essentially digital constructs. We must understand this well whether it attracts or repels us. The internet is impacting our methods and capacities for concentration, attention, interpretation, assimilation etc. Our monkey brains are now distracted by a hundred lit screens and links. Social media has folded inside out from being a circle of friends to an always on performance of manicured imagery on a stage. Its cadence is faster, its content shorter. It is now enabled through learning which humans cannot match. This is not a Luddite scare. It is a well rationalised body of knowledge. We must appreciate it to be able to use it well. As early as 2011, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, painted a dire picture of the effect of the Internet on our mind. Since then, smartphones and cheap bandwidth has made the internet truly ubiquitous. It is the phone screen that has become the canvas of our lives. I have been a student and practitioner of communication. I have read many of the 20th- century media theorists and thinkers namely — Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer Marshall McLuhan, Umberto Eco, Walter Ong, Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Shoshana Zuboff. All of them foretold or saw this reality. Zuboff’s termed it ‘The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism’ in her eponymously titled book. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan and his axiom that “the medium is the message” is fully manifest. McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content. Media is impacting its own matter. Mediums are not neutral, and content is anything but king. An oral culture is distinct from a written culture. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd. Do not imagine that exceptions will make the rule. It is the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Eventually the medium acquires a vice like grip over content. Switch on any news channel and keep aside the search for ideological neutrality, objectivity etc. Just see the format – the look, tone, temperament of the anchors, the graphics, the conflict, the decibel levels, the absence of depth, the sensationalism. This is true across the world, in varying degrees. Why? Simply because it is a business. The news content is assessed for return via ratings in every minute of its existence. In his deeply impactful book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” published in 1985, Postman argued that junk television is the belief system that every subject in the world is a branch of entertainment. And there is no biz like show biz. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” said Postman, in an aggrieved, moralising tone. Entertainment subsumes our expectations for everything. Viable candidates in all fields of life must be able to capture the screen. Media platforms now algorithmically obsess the world with the same narrow spectrum of topics and sameness is now ingrained. In the recent past, be it on account of the rise of radicalism, post-truth narratives, the absence of facts or the growth of manipulation – the mood turned against Silicon Valley. Henry Kissinger, no less, wrote a book on Artificial Intelligence. Elon Musk warned of its dire consequences. But for the most part, the spotlight has been on successful billionaires, corporations and methods. It has not been on the development and direction of technology itself. The pace of development is such that anyone armed with only facts becomes outdated soon. A generic, fact-based critique is attacked as Luddite. The furore on privacy is a bit passe. Generative AI is only accelerating the mode of compliant dullness. Where is the freedom to choose? Social media is a show cabinet for the individual. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist claims that the way the Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. The need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, is forever increasing. The view of self is now constructed from online evaluation of others. Twitter compressed ideas to a finite set of alphabets. You originate but more often you join a discussion. How others react and respond decides your idea’s worth. In 1970s for the first time, it became manifest that it’s attention not money that is our most precious commodity and a threatened resource. Economists Thomas Davenport and John Beck called it the driving force of our society and termed it ‘the attention economy’. Jenny Odell’s book – “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” was published in 2019. She explains how attention becomes driven by norm. You are compelled to pay attention to what others pay attention to. Traditionally, fetching and retaining attention was the job of advertising agencies and media. Today, attention wielding is an essential life skill. In the past, the patent solution for breaking through noise