What's Working Is Nonsense: Murky Waters Ahead For Attention Hacking The Internet
The recent era of political strategy has shown a continuous pattern and trend in social media where garnering outrageous headlines (from all political sides of media) has become a go-to marketing tactic. Outrage drives clicks, clicks drive conversation, and conversation mobilizes audiences across all shades of sentiment. And simply by the measure of “volume of social conversation”, the age-old idea that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, we can see how sparking outrage became a creative marketing approach for driving visibility in culture. Lately we’re seeing a shift from outrage to something evolved: nonsense.
There is a new pattern emerging where the top “things” earning media are more the disastrous, nonsensical moments of pop culture. Let’s begin with April’s Coachella, where among the top stories was Grimes’ “disastrous” set where she couldn’t stop music from playing at 2X speed. More recently, Amber Rose drove headlines with the announcement that she was endorsing Trump. Cam'ron avoided sharing an opinion on Diddy while drinking a sex stimulant live on CNN – and it nearly short circuited the internet this week. WTF is actually going on with all of this nonsense? It’s hard to ignore that none of these personalities have the Q Score power to get this much press in a normal landscape where someone like Billie Eilish, a global superstar by traditional measures, just dropped a new album. Perhaps Sabrina Carpenter knows something with the unapologetic nonsense underlying her TikTok-contagious lyric “That’s that me, espresso”, which has become a real contender for song of the Summer. What does this lyric mean? That’s the point. It’s purposefully nonsensical and earning media everywhere as audiences search and dissect it for answers.
Elsewhere in the world -- what does Bluey have in common with a NYC live stream portal to Dublin? A lot. In case you missed that infamous Wonka “experience” in Glasgow, the more recent Bluey event at a Las Vegas Dirt Dog will do, where parents say a bearded man in a onesie was being passed off as Bluey. Like McDonald’s wiping the smile from its Happy Meal boxes for Mental Health Awareness Week, by traditional corporate measures these moments each faced backlash. By volume of social buzz? Above and beyond expectations. Similarly, what began earlier this month as an art project to “bring the world closer together" with a video portal between Dublin and NYC, was halted following a series of uncomfortable shares – among others, an OnlyFans model flashed a group of people on the other side of the world. The story and artist's name are all over social feeds.
These recent beats in pop culture make somewhat of an uncomfortable case for what moves the internet and its marketing metrics. With all of this nonsense, the waters ahead may get a little choppy when it comes to attention hacking the internet.