From The Attention Economy To The Intimacy Economy

I can’t shake the feeling that something’s gone missing… and when I get this feeling I also start feeling that I am “The Olds” (or, as Harley Finkelstein likes to remind me: BOOMER!).

We used to have moments that everyone shared.
Albums… commercials… TV finales.
Even ads that landed as cultural events (hello, Apple 1984).
Love them or hate them… you knew about them.
You could talk about them at the office… in the coffee line… on the subway.

They gave us a common language… a kind of communal glue.

Now?
It’s all fragments…
Algorithms feed us personalized universes.
Media is hyper-targeted.
Communities splinter into smaller and smaller niches (with more and more people).
I’ll still orbit the music business with my bass podcast and can’t name five Taylor Swift songs… and I’m paying attention.

We care about brands more than ever. 

We carry them, wear them, define ourselves by them.
But increasingly, we experience them alone.
Scrolling in isolation, laughing at memes only our corner of the internet sees, living in For You Page feeds that overlap less and less (even when you have common interests).
I often find myself loving a product or service that no one else has even heard of.
It’s progress… but it also feels like loss.

And it’s a new way to think about marketing when you have a business.

We’ve shifted from The Attention Economy to what I call The Intimacy Economy.
The question is: will leaders design for connection at scale… or settle for clicks in isolation?
And this shift happened because culture isn’t just what we consume… it’s what we share (and that has changed).

So if we stop the sharing part at scale (or how we engage with brands shifted), what happens to the meaning?

What happens to the joy of connection when discovery is reduced to your personal feeds that may now be filled with Grid Zero?
I wonder if this is why nostalgia hits us so hard now.
We don’t just miss the shows or the music… but perhaps we miss the togetherness of it (and this is what all of those studies on raging loneliness and anxiety don’t talk about?).
The sense that we were all tuned in, at the same time, to the same thing… but now we’re not… so we’re “out of synch”?

This isn’t an argument against personalization or progress.

It’s a reminder that leaders, creators and brands have a choice: chase clicks in isolation… or build moments that bring people together.
And that’s what struck me while editing my conversation with Annie Wilson for this week’s Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast.
Annie has great book out called, The Growth Dilemma – Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things (along with co-author Ryan Hamilton).

Because maybe the future of marketing isn’t about reaching everyone… but about reaching everyone differently.

Maybe it’s about finding new ways to help us feel like we’re experiencing something together again… in a world that isn’t grooving that way.
I’m trying to think of the last time I felt part of a truly shared cultural moment… do you have any?

And if not… is that part of the problem leaders and marketers need to solve?

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