The great distraction: focus in a fractured world

As a strategist, I am always on the lookout for what I call the 'context change' – where you borrow a principle from one area of human thought, experience or endeavour and apply it to a new one.

Throughout history we have seen many of these in practice: from applying the principles of manufacturing to warfare, to applying the principles of technology to the social state. And now, true to form, we have the Trumpy take on this: applying the principles of viral communication to government.

Not quite six months into his new term, Trumpers has fulfilled many of his campaign promises through applying shock and awe to the arena of governance (not just the back-and-forth of politics as he and Bannon did in Trump 1.0). In less time than it's taken us here in Australia to agree to the terms of reference for a productivity commission, he has launched trade wars, wars on people not named Jeffrey of all shapes, sizes and sexualities, reshaped the international order, blown up a mountain, played golf every weekend and slashed their federal government. He has also pushed through Congress one bill some call beautiful but all agree is big that contains most of his domestic agenda. They are interesting because they create a new playbook that will be imitated and replicated. Speed matters today more than anything else.

He has executed much of what he promised – actions for which a majority of Americans voted – in less time than I take to agree on a vacation destination. They are not children, nor is it wise to see people who do not agree with your position as somehow inferior because they frame the world differently. They have so far successfully applied the principle of shock and awe to overwhelm any opposition.

Sit rep

The hardest thing these days is not to gain attention, but to hold your own. In a world where objective truth is no longer shared through mediums we once all had in common, it can be easily argued that our distraction is the most dangerous thing in human society. The risk of course of this type of argument is that it smacks of ‘old man yells at clouds’. And it is true, I do actually yell at clouds especially when we now have 15% less of them than we used to. This is also me making my point. While our natural world is falling through the gaps in our attention span, we are all struggling to process the amount of information in front of us that tells us just how quickly things are changing. It is important to note that there is a new playbook in communication where it is better to force opposition to lean away from the facts through the sheer velocity of information being sent at them than to actually address the problem.

This is also my struggle with the state of the profession of marketing today and the application of our skillsets proficiently. Much like the natural world is caught between the laws of thermodynamics being applied to a warming planet with clear consequences from heatwaves to downpours we also struggle to apply the science side of our discipline because first we would need to agree it has one.

Marketing is primarily taught through the business faculty of universities. The study of business is free of laws with few exceptions such as compounding returns, supply and demand and category specific things such as Moore’s Law when it comes to computer chips. You are more likely to find case studies than the laws of the physical sciences. We can see that marketing science can uncover stable, testable patterns – there is plenty we know but more we do not consistently apply. We have proven principles like category growth, which comes from broadening mental and physical availability to reach more buyers more often. We also know that there are principles to balancing your brand building and sales activation or that outspending your current share of category will lead to stronger sales and brands.

We seem to like picking our own working theories where we are the potential case study, but we have much less agreement that there are core principles. This makes sense as marketing ultimately is not a natural force so can’t have laws per se. What we do know is that marketing effectiveness is not random as it follows predictable patterns, but we are still crying out for our own Einstein or Newton to define our rules.

While principles mostly apply, the context does change

If you have two unsolved variables you cannot solve the equation. This is ultimately the schism in marketing theory today. On one side we are unsettled on our principles and on the other our context continually changes. We are caught in our own version of arguing that gravity only affects some things while also trying to build tactics out for life on both Mars and Earth. It is our context that we can solve for.

The context through which we build brands today is fundamentally different from the pre-Internet era. It is shaped by audience control, digital speed and channel complexity. Before the web, we as brands spoke and customers listened. Now, social media, review platforms and blogs give consumers a real‑time voice to each other about the brands we market. It was a world of set and forget whereas now we can create endless A/B options and should be continually refining our content.

We also have to deal with channel complexity. Where once a handful of mass channels sufficed, brands now juggle apps, socials, podcasts, streaming, TikToking and twitching. Consistency of tone and experience across hundreds of touchpoints is both a challenge and an opportunity.

The Meta-medium that saves our marketing arses

I do get tired of the doom scrolling in our industry. It is just as likely to get better than worse from here. When you look ahead (and if you believe) AI will enable marketers to achieve better personalisation through predictive insight. Not sure this context is going to lead to fewer of us. It could lead to us finally getting on top of the chaos that the explosion of mediums has had on our profession. A control board for the digital age, if you like.

We will be able to forecast trends, optimise spend in real time and automate routine customer interactions while voice and VR experiences will help us to raise the bar for brand engagement. This could be our golden age where we finally know and measure what works while our profession’s combination of human creativity and data fluency forms most businesses’ competitive advantage.

Marketing is a way of being that we as humans have created. We can easily see how science has formed the foundation on which automotive systems, power grids, communication networks, medical devices and countless everyday technologies are built – reminding us that deep, universal principles can yield infinite real-world innovation.

Marshall McLuhan famously taught us that ‘the medium is the message,’ meaning that the form through which content is delivered has a greater impact on society than the content itself. By this logic AI qualifies as a medium because it fundamentally reshapes our modes of perception and interaction. Whether it is generative text, image recognition or conversational agents, AI alters the scale, speed and pattern of our communication. Just ask Elon’s new porn bot.

I do wonder whether, if in relation to AI, McLuhan would have gone further and seen it as an all-encompassing force that subsumes earlier media. Through AI we could see the collapse of boundaries between reading, listening, watching and creating. This echoes his idea of media as ‘extensions of man,’ with AI extending our cognitive and sensory capacities.

In short, McLuhan would most likely describe AI not merely as another medium in the plurality of ‘media,’ but as a transformative, Meta‑medium or environment, one that re‑defines human extension and social organisation. It will also finally settle for us what truly works in marketing not as laws but clear principles that work in specific contexts.

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Be better to each other.