There is a growing belief in marketing that attention is transferable…
There is a growing belief in marketing that attention is transferable. It isn’t.
DoorDash may have bought Brooklyn Beckham, but what it received was the entire Beckham family psychodrama bundled in for free. Whether orchestrated or not, the story has overwhelmed the product. Nobody is discussing food delivery. Nobody is discussing the brand proposition. They are discussing Nicola Peltz, Victoria Beckham, and the free to air family soap opera. The advertiser may have secured millions of impressions but has effectively rented itself a seat at a very public therapy session.
This is where modern marketing and all knowing ad creatives often loses its bearings. Attention has become so fetishised that the industry increasingly mistakes noise for effectiveness. Adland can sometimes resemble a drunk man at an auction, frantically bidding for attention without stopping to ask whether anyone will remember what he bought when the hammer falls.
The old PT Barnum doctrine was never that all publicity is good publicity. That is the bastardised version repeated by people who have never actually studied Barnum. The real lesson was that publicity had to lead somewhere. Curiosity had to become commerce. Attention had to become affection. Noise had to create value. Today we seem to have left EQ at the door.
If the story surrounding the celebrity is larger than the story of the brand, then the brand risks becoming little more than a plastic pot plant on a BBC studio set. It may trend, it may generate column inches, it may dominate social feeds for a day or two, but that is not the same thing as building meaning. The question is not whether people noticed. The question is what they noticed.
Because if consumers leave remembering the feud but not the food, the campaign may have succeeded in generating attention while failing in the far more difficult task of generating value.
