Going offline to spread ideas by word of mouth

I think digital advertising is dead. Advertising used to be scarce. Only people and organisations with deep pockets could buy our attention.

Today, however, anybody can open Facebook Ads Manager and buy advertisements. The ease of buying ads means even people we cannot trust can, at least, try to grab our attention. We are more at risk of scams and bad products. To protect ourselves, we look for other, more difficult signals to validate other people’s intentions, especially online. For a few years on the internet, this was social proof — views, likes and followers.

How was social proof acquired? By constantly showing up and consistently delivering. Today, the biggest influencers and podcasts were built over years of showing up, week after week, and year after year. It is in their showing up that we inferred a kernel of truth in their gospel. So, we gave them a like, left a comment, or told our friends about them. When we did this, the algorithms also shared their content with people like us, which created social proof. While news could spread quickly on the internet, some people earned our trust by showing up over and over again, by doing the hard thing.

However, we are now in an era where showing up online is becoming easier by the day. 61.5% of internet traffic is by non-humans. A growing number of videos on YouTube, especially documentaries, are stitched together with Artificial Intelligence tools. Even their research is regurgitated by ChatGPT and similar tools. So, what it means to show up is becoming cheaper and will therefore lose its value as a signal we can trust.

Nevertheless, trust remains the glue of society and a well from which we draw meaning. We need other people to fulfil our needs, and we find the right people, whom we find through a calculus of trust. While some believe machines will easily fill these needs, including deeply personal ones like love and affection, I do not buy this view. I cling to what might become the archaic idea that another person is something like me, and I therefore relate to them in a way that one cannot relate to a machine.

Part of dealing in trust means looking for signals that are hard to create. This makes trust-building a relative exercise, since what is hard today may not be hard tomorrow. However, this does not imply that what is easy today will be even easier tomorrow. Writing a letter by hand, for instance, is harder today than it was 50 years ago because we are so accustomed to typing and printing. Learning to play a musical instrument is harder today because cooking something with software is so much easier. But it is precisely because things are harder and therefore signal dedication that we value them.

This is my problem with digital advertising. Perhaps we will value the person who travels halfway across the country to share a message. Their message will not spread because they single-handedly tell as many people as possible. Rather, it will spread because of their demonstrated willingness to pay the price of spreading it. When this happens, the people who care, as Seth Godin would put it, will tell their friends. And so, the message will spread.

It will not be the person or organisation with the largest advertising budget that will spread their message. Indeed, they might be able to buy the advertisements, but I wonder whether they will rally people to take action. Buying advertisements will no longer be the same as buying traction. On the contrary, the people who do something worth talking about, like Ibrahim Traore, will rally people to a frenzy and convert them into walking and talking billboards.