Earned Advocacy

Virality is becoming a liability. In an always-on culture, when everything is optimised for smoothness, meaning stops sticking. Ana Andjelic makes a similar point: if brands want staying power beyond the length of a feed refresh, they need to stop paying for attention and focus on earning advocacy.

Content can now be produced quickly and inexpensively. Generative AI is only accelerating what Matt Klein calls “dashboard culture” and Ruby Justice Thelot calls “looksmaxxing” – creative optimisation based on performance metrics. That leads to a feedback loop of sameness, rewarding what already performs. By playing the optimisation game, brands compress the window for creative decisions that look wrong before they look right. 

What’s more, with AI agents on the rise – software assistants that manage and filter content, recommendations and purchases for individual users – virality culture becomes increasingly obsolete. As NEMESIS recently pointed out, agents can instantly scan markets to surface the cheapest, fastest-delivered or best-rated option. The result is to strip away hard-won brand loyalty. Any advantage gained from consumer habit is lost if products can be reduced to white-label commodities. So what’s left? 

Platforms and agents can’t displace how an experience unfolds over time. At least not at the human layer. Having researched how societal acceleration encourages reactivity for individuals and organisations alike, my findings point to a vicious cycle with diminishing returns. The ability to opt out of this cycle is more aspirational than ever. Brands need to shift their focus away from reactivity and start treating time-perception itself as a creative strategy.

That requires spaces where attention is sustained because audiences feel a sense of continuity there. Membership models, such as AAA24, do exactly that. From physical welcome packs to priority screenings, the membership experience immerses you in a world where nothing else is getting in the way. Access to A24’s film catalogue becomes an ongoing journey, with each film release deepening the relationship instead of competing for attention from scratch.

Another approach is multisensory storytelling. Fragrance brands know this playbook well. They bridge cinematic visuals, retail environments and bottle design with the scent itself to build a story across dimensions. Our sense of smell is directly wired to memory, making scent marketing an underrated medium for creating a feeling of continuity across space and isolated moments.

Offline, designing time means creating environments where people lose track of it. IKEA does this at scale in its labyrinthine warehouses. Aimé Leon Dore’s cafés double as social spaces where people linger beyond the length of a purchase. Outernet’s wrap-around screens create moments that feel like portals.

If brands leave platforms and agents to set the tempo, differentiation collapses. The ones that endure will be the ones that design how time unfolds on their terms.