Hey, welcome back to The Interline Podcast. Normally on these shows I’m talking to someone whose world has some overlap with mine: tech founders, brand owners, analysts, CEOs, economists, lawyers and so on. They all live in the kind of professional space I spend my days in, but it’s generally populated by people of a certain vintage — folks in their thirties, forties and fifties, building or talking about products, services and ideas designed for other people of a certain vintage who work for other businesses.
Now, I’m not implying that I know everything about all of those spaces. If you listen to these shows for long enough, you’ll know that’s demonstrably not true. But I do at least feel comfortable holding my own in most of those conversations because they generally happen in a world I understand, and because in almost all of those cases I’ve seen and experienced both sides of the coin.
Today, though, we’re way out of my depth — not because we’re going outside the confines of fashion technology, mind you, but because we’re about to talk about social media, influencers, the attention economy, virality and so on: young people’s stuff. I’m being a bit glib there. I’m not a dinosaur. I’m in my mid-forties, so I was around for the early days of Facebook when it hit universities. I did that whole phase of oversharing and testing the frontiers as the first generation to be handed Web 2.0 with basically no guardrails, and then I was part of the cohort that spent the next decade trying to scrub a lot of that content from the internet’s collective memory. I had a Twitter account for a little while and an Instagram profile, although I never really put much on it.
But, as I’ve said on here a few times and on The Edit with Grace, I haven’t used social media in my personal life for about a decade. I’ve never opened TikTok, and I’ve never unironically spelt ‘maxing’ with two or more x’s. That means this is the first show in nearly a year’s worth of weekly interviews where I understand the business side of the thing we’re about to talk about, but I’ve been deliberately disconnected from the cultural side long enough that the whole thing feels alien to me.
I understand the emphasis fashion has placed on social advertising and influencer-creator partnerships from a commercial perspective, but I’ve never been personally advertised to on a purely algorithmic platform, except perhaps Reddit. Obviously, I see Google search ads and so on, but that’s not quite the same thing. You might be thinking: but he said he had an Instagram account. True. That was in the year or two after launch, when the home feed was in reverse chronological order rather than being algorithmic.
I have some insight into our audience analytics for this show, and I certainly do for The Interline in general. I know I’m not alone in my age bracket, but I also know that we have younger listeners and readers for whom a lot of what I’ve just said probably sounded like a guy in beige slacks and a button-down blowing dust off his LPs. That’s all the more reason to bring in someone who’s both a practising expert and analyst when it comes to creating meaning and results out of social strategy and creative partnerships — and who’s also a certified young person, or at least younger.
Bryony Barker is that person. She’s the incoming global strategy director at Pulse Advertising, a worldwide social and influencer agency that’s worked with companies including Selfridges, Beats by Dre, MINI and MAC Cosmetics. I brought her on partly to plug a gap in my own knowledge, but primarily because our data tells us that the content fashion is putting in front of consumers is becoming progressively more synthetic — read: generated — over time.
I want to understand whether the tension between AI, live experiences and the attention economy is real, and how that hooks into the kind of authenticity that influencers and creators deal in. I’m also using Bryony as a proxy for conversations I’ve had off the record with people after Cannes Lions, which I was invited to but couldn’t attend.
I’ve definitely compartmentalised influencer marketing in my head as being much scrappier, smaller and less professional than it actually is. Creators are now bona fide media businesses in a really serious way, and that has implications for how fashion thinks about content, marketing, systems and technology.
So let’s get into my conversation with Bryony.
Never miss an episode
Get notifications for new podcast episodes, plus our weekly news analysis, events, and more, delivered straight to your inbox.
NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Hi. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to this one. We start every show with the same two things. People who listen regularly will be familiar with this: we investigate what the guest’s day-to-day job consists of, and we ask them to define something that sounds basic but hopefully ends up being illuminating.
Your day-to-day might be a bit in flux, because you’ve only recently taken up the post at Pulse Advertising. You’ve done that in an interesting period for social, where that one word can mean brand positioning, the creator economy, paid media, social commerce and a lot more — and where much of it probably has an AI-heavy twist.
So perhaps our best starting point is less ‘what do you do at Pulse?’ because that may still be taking shape, and more ‘what are you employed to do today that looks different from the longer-term social strategy work you’ve done for years?’ How far do you think your clients and the wider market’s understanding of the evolution in social, advertising and attention has kept pace with what’s actually going on?
Number one, great question. In my history — and it’s something I talk about a lot — social has grown from being seen as the ugly stepsister of the channel mix to becoming a sort of language that agencies and brands alike are trying to speak natively. It’s been a wild ride: there have been ups and downs, arguments, fallouts, protests and then almost parades for it. I don’t think that wild ride is going to change any time soon.
My job, from when I started to where I am now, is to give clients, brands and teams an understanding of the world of social and help guide them through it. I translate behaviours they might not understand at first glance, make connections, find patterns and show them how they can use them.
Sometimes that can be bleeding-edge, at the forefront of behaviours and how people are changing their relationships with the algorithm. Sometimes it can be about getting comfortable with it in the first place. What has remained constant is that clients are always curious. Everything comes from that place of curiosity, whether it’s ‘I’m not on social, I don’t get it, help me understand it’ or clients sending me WhatsApps about trends: ‘Have you seen this? What algorithm are you on?’
It’s a landscape that changes incredibly quickly and can feel disorientating, like you’re on a waltzer. At the same time, you’ve got to enjoy the ride, because it’s not going to stop or become easier any time soon.
That’s a good answer, and I am one of those people who doesn’t use social media in their personal life. I’ll have some professional curiosity here, looking at this through the lens of people who listen to the show and read The Interline: global brands and retailers. I may also show some of my ignorance as we go.
I professionally engage with social media as a kind of hostage: I feel like I have to. It’s productive, and I’ve seen value from it, but it’s not something I engage with personally. It does occupy an increasingly important part of the channel mix, to use your analogy.
The definition I wanted to ask you about is attention. Attention has moved across channels, and that’s probably the catalyst for some of what we’re going to discuss. I don’t mean attention in the sense of AI model development, but in the sense that everybody in advertising seems to be reaching for the same thing: a share of their ideal customer’s scarce mental space. I’ve heard it expressed as ‘we compete with sleep’.
People have limited time, attention and mental capacity. I work in advertising in a perpendicular way as a provider — The Interline is an ad-supported publication — so I know that traditional metrics such as impressions and views don’t carry the weight they used to. The word I might historically have fallen back on is engagement, but I don’t think that’s synonymous with attention.
For our audience of fashion brands, define attention for me. What is it, how is it different from watch time, engagement and conversion, and how do you measure it?
God, another great and big question. If you had someone else sitting on this podcast, they might give you a slightly different answer, because there’s both an objective and a subjective side to the methodology behind attention.
When we take a step back and think about where social has gone, we’ve been through the follower era and the engagement era, and now we’re in the attention economy. You’re competing with sleep, leisure, time with your family and any kind of time in general — entertainment, education, shopping.
For me, in human terms, before we add metrics, it’s making sure the time someone spends with you on that platform is spent well. What that looks like differs from brand to brand. For a fashion brand, it could be inspiring someone, helping them understand how a new cut fits or how a new line differs, giving them the confidence to try a different style, or simply making the brand easier to recall in a shopping moment.
I agree that attention can’t be synonymous with, or exchanged for, watch time, engagement or conversion. Each represents only part of what we’re talking about. Watch time tells you how long someone stayed, engagement is a visible way of seeing that someone interacted, and conversion tells you that they took a particular action. Attention sits across all three, but it can’t be isolated. It asks whether content actually registers with a person and creates an effect.
At Pulse, we talk about this quite a lot, particularly through our proprietary tool, Pi Metrics. We’re thinking about how you can look beyond a single platform or metric to understand effects across different dimensions. We think of them as behaviour signals: how deeply someone watched, saved, shared, searched, clicked, reviewed, interacted or sent something in a group chat.
It’s everything that happens around that piece of content: the attention it garners, the quality of the conversation, whether the brand reached a new or relevant audience, whether associations shifted and whether it contributed to consideration or commercial behaviour afterwards.
Attention is a lofty concept, and my initial answer is probably quite romantic, but it’s only valuable when it changes something — when someone remembers something or feels different.
I prefer the lofty answer to what I would have defined it as, which is the Clockwork Orange version: prying your eyelids open and forcing you to pay attention. It’s good to know there’s a more noble aim behind it.
I think so. Everyone will have a slightly different answer, but for me it’s the meaningfulness of what we’re doing and deriving something from it.
You did a short interview a couple of years ago that came up in our research, where you talked about the traditional content-strategy model: a company develops cornerstone assets for a hero broadcast and then reduces them for use elsewhere. That’s the world I grew up in.
You shoot, edit and grade a TV or digital-out-of-home campaign, get it ready, then chop it into clips for social media. You called that ‘tired’ and suggested a better alternative: building a ‘cultural ecosystem’ where a brand tells its story through a million moments.
That seems right from my vantage point. If everybody is consuming short slices of big content, perhaps the short slices should be the content, and you mix upwards afterwards. It’s the same force behind vertical-video microdramas. Why make a traditional film that gets cut up and distributed across TikTok if you can go straight to making the vertical content and assemble a supercut later?
As much as I understand why it’s happening, I’m not sure I like it. I’m a long-form attention guy. If you have a million moments, how do you get cohesion across them in the way you would get brand cohesion from one big deliverable?
I think cohesion is a fair point in the fractious, rabbit-hole landscape of social. When I use the phrase ‘a million moments’, I don’t mean unruly or sprawling or everything everywhere for everyone. I mean all the different ways someone can arrive at your brand with social in this day and age.
The point is to challenge how a brand story might be delivered, rather than beginning with a definitive hero message that has gone through every round of approval. Consumer journeys aren’t linear anymore — and part of me wonders whether they ever really were. One person might discover a brand through a creator, another through a product review on Trustpilot, another through a cultural moment, search or a friend sharing something in a group chat.
All of those encounters build an impression. It should be coherent, but they don’t need to look identical. They don’t need to be splinters chopped out of one big thing just to be repetitive or frequent. It’s about where the cohesion comes from.
In the top-down model, a message goes from a hero asset into several other moments almost identically. In a cultural ecosystem, everything comes from a consistent point of view. The work is to define a clear role for the brand, recognise the creative codes and build shared principles so that every expression connects with, and builds on, the others.
That isn’t easy. Strategy has to work very hard to become tight and directional, but it allows execution to be flexible. Brands still need to be clear about what they believe, the world they want to build and the associations they want to create. It’s not about throwing that thinking away; it’s about letting creators, communities and different formats work naturally within it.
I’m not suggesting brands abandon hero content. It’s about the weight you give it, and how you allow it to live alongside all those other moments.
I’m a systems guy, and that puts me in mind of reusable components: things you set down at the strategic level. You can slice them as literal buttons and graphics, or as principles, beliefs and relationships. Provided that framework exists, people or agents can execute within pre-approved guardrails.
I’ve heard of a creator called CatGPT, who’s been leading the way. She’s brought back landline phones and talks openly about still having a creative hero asset, but handing over to Claude to think about how it can be spliced into those millions of moments. It’s not necessarily top-down; it’s about how it appears in different places and formats.
I haven’t heard of her, and you’ve just made me feel a million years old. I grew up with landline phones and big, wide jeans, and all of that is coming back. My childhood is being remixed in front of me.
I was invited to Cannes Lions this year to speak on a panel but couldn’t attend. I’ve kept up with what came out of the event and spoken to people who were there. Two watchwords were AI and creators, so let’s pick up creators.
The CEO of Digitas talked in a Verge interview about the increasing crossover between creators and marketers. I have a show lined up with a creator who is candid about the fact that being a creator now means running a fairly ruthless, traditional media business as well as being a savvy marketing professional. It’s not just making cool videos.
Fashion has understood the value of influencer relationships for a long time, but those relationships were narrowly scoped: individual people selling reach, trust and cultural cachet. Now creators are building empires, which feels like a different type of transaction for the brand. What’s going on?
Massively. Agencies and brands are catching up with creators because being a creator is a serious business. It can look easy and comfortable on the internet, built around filming parts of your life and exchanging content for exposure, but successful creators are building empires.
They’re talking to an audience, running a content operation, managing commercial relationships, anticipating what people will care about next and working out how to keep offering it. Some handle all of that themselves as solo Swiss Army knives. Others are entire businesses with managers, strategists, production teams, editors, production lines and intellectual property.
Lena Dunham, for example, had a strategist around her Substack launch: Dolly Meckler, thinking about how to integrate Substack and its content in the best way. At the other end of the spectrum, UGC creators may not have a large audience because that’s not their purpose; they offer brands a highly effective production capability.
The definition of ‘creator’ now spans people, businesses and smaller entities. That spectrum is enormous, and our understanding of it needs to catch up.
As someone who runs a media business, I’ve seen the creator economy as fundamentally different from what we’ve done. The Interline is a fairly traditional magazine operation in a lot of ways. Now the two seem less different.
If I’m a fashion brand briefing a creator, how tightly managed should it be? The previous influencer relationship was straightforward: you bought into someone’s audience and authenticity, then gave them relatively free rein. If you’re working with someone who looks more like traditional media, perhaps you give a narrower brief to minimise brand risk.
The closer creators get to traditional media, the more they need to deal in proper disclosures. How should a brand balance buying an asset or placement with leasing someone’s authenticity? This seems as though it should change the procurement process.
That’s the bit we’re still catching up with. The creator economy has expanded at a rate the advertising world may not have matched. That doesn’t mean working with creators needs to be templated or cookie-cutter.
The funnel approach isn’t completely outdated; it has its time and place. It’s an easy system, and we love systems as a way of thinking about how to achieve things. But the most important question for a brand is how open it can be to working with a creator, rather than simply giving them work to do.
It is a collaboration, and audiences can sense when there is value exchange on both sides. That doesn’t mean giving up the reins completely. It means being rigorous about the role you’re trying to play and what you need the creator to play within that role.
Once the role is clearly defined, you know the freedoms the creator has to work within, in a way their audience will believe. The objective, audience and product truth all need necessary boundaries, but that shouldn’t mean dictating every word, shot and creative decision. That removes the value exchange and judgement that made you choose that creator in the first place.
I’ve always struggled with the idea of leasing or buying authenticity, because it makes authenticity sound like a commodity. The value is in the collaboration and in creating something meaningful for both sides.
The thing this puts me in mind of is the increasingly high hoops YouTubers have had to jump through to justify talking about VPNs in advertising placements. People across lifestyle and technology segments have to create natural segues into why you need a VPN.
Partnership and collaboration make sense when you’ve identified the right audience and the placement is organic. How do you think about the relationship between creator content and AI? We make long-form, expert, human-authored content, and that seems more important as we’re surrounded by snackable synthetic media.
Are people flocking to longer, more detailed videos from creators? Then there’s the other side: content brands make with creators becomes training data for future AI runs or part of inference-time search for LLMs. You’re competing against AI but also fuelling it.
I guess my remit is social, so when I think about this relationship, what any audience member wants from social is their prerogative. My For You page would look very different from yours if you were on TikTok.
Some people love long-form video, and I don’t think long-form has disappeared. Some love the AI fruit dramas dominating certain feeds. Others prefer traditional memes or the intimacy of personal diarising, which is part of why Substack is growing. Some people just want a quick laugh and then move on.
The interesting thing is that social is full of contradictions, and humans are full of contradictory behaviours. AI is giving us new types of content, creators and methods, with a time and place for audiences of all kinds.
The problem isn’t necessarily the artificiality of AI; it’s the ambiguity about where it is being used and whether that use is declared. There’s a difference between knowingly choosing to interact with a fruit drama that clearly uses AI and being led to believe that a synthetic person’s event or endorsement is real.
That was the same when influencer marketing first arrived. We needed clarifications and declarations. Audiences should have the right to know what they’re giving their attention to, whether that’s AI, a real human or anything in between.
In your suite of metrics, is share of LLM search or share of ChatGPT answers becoming a more important measure? Is there a through-line from one to the other?
It’s definitely a recurring conversation: how to optimise content so it appears in LLM answers, depending on the brand. We haven’t always been able to control reviews in certain environments, but it’s an ongoing conversation.
It doesn’t outweigh the question of how you use AI across other realms of content — organic social, adverts, your website and everything else. It’s touching every point. I wouldn’t say it’s isolated.
For listeners who think social is a sideshow to traditional advertising, I want to point to the parent company of OnlyFans, Fenix, selling a stake to Architect Capital at a valuation of more than $3 billion. One purpose was to offer financial services and related products to creators.
The opportunity isn’t just distribution and a share of the creator economy. It’s business software and banking for creators. BNP Paribas has specialist advisers for creators, too. There is a lot of unstructured money in this economy, and creators need capital, employees, tools, services, systems and software.
How are you seeing the formalisation of the creator economy? Is social content becoming more operationally sophisticated as well as more strategically aware? What platforms do creators use when working with brands?
I’ve said it before, but the business of creators is serious. There’s an emergence of third-party platforms. In the UK, for example, there are influencers and representatives giving HMRC advice to creators about what they can disclose and what is tax-deductible. If they receive a gift, they may need to declare it as income.
There are layers and intricacies that aren’t obvious at first glance. When influencer marketing first emerged, it was the Wild West. One influencer could quote a price very different from another because they were considering it in different ways. Now the infrastructure is beginning to reflect the value that influencer marketing and creators have built.
We don’t necessarily want to add more infrastructure, but the work does need to be supported by the right codes and systems. The power of creators has always been their direct personal agility. The challenge is professionalising the business without professionalising away the intimacy that made it valuable.
That’s where agencies become more important. We act as a bridge, not another barrier. We handle operational complexity, contracts, rights, disclosure, measurement and long-term thinking. We consult with clients and influencer partners to make the most fruitful work possible, both for the audience and for the relationship between the brand and the creator.
It’s less about being a middleman passing things back and forth, and more about nurturing relationships with infrastructure in place. Structure without distance, I would say.
Do you know what proportion of creators above a certain threshold are represented by agencies, and what proportion do it themselves?
I wouldn’t be able to call that from memory. Various end-to-end platforms let you manage influencer outreach, deliverables and contracting in one system. Some creators like that; some don’t, because they have a manager and the manager is the one using the system.
It isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and I don’t know the numbers. It would be interesting to understand whether that creates more potential for technology to emerge. There are incredible tools out there, but sometimes proximity and picking up the phone is easier.
That happens across fashion when designing and making garments, too. A WhatsApp message or phone call can still determine something.
We use a short-link platform with a creator and influencer referral system, although we’re not partners with anybody. What I took away from it is that creator revenue or return should be judged over a longer horizon than people might think.
The instinctive short-term measures are conversion and the share of attention you mentioned, but I’m guessing there’s a longer tail. What’s the balance between short- and long-horizon metrics when judging the return on influencer investment?
The IPA backed this up with its creator effectiveness study, which found that influencer marketing has a longer-tail impact than you might give it credit for. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all or cookie-cutter approach to attribution. There’s both art and science in how you attribute revenue.
ROI is one of the biggest topics in influencer marketing because we’ve historically measured only the easiest parts to see: UTM tracking, creator codes and TikTok Shop. Those are immediate results that tell you, ‘Yes, we did it’, but they’re only one part of how people shop.
I could see a creator wearing a pair of shoes four times before I start Googling the brand, taking a screenshot and putting it into Google Lens, or saving the post and encountering it again. The creator might then work with that brand. The relationship between all those actions and the eventual sale is difficult to determine.
What you have to do is show up in all the right ways, going back to those million moments. Revenue is an important way of measuring ROI, but there are several avenues. Has the brand become more visible among the people it wants to talk to? Is there a return in attention, with people spending meaningful time with the brand rather than its competitors?
Is there a return in perception — are the associations and conversations around the brand changing? Participation is another: sharing, searching, recommendations and what’s in someone’s basket. All those effects contribute to acquisition, sales and longer-term customer value.
The system has to look at both immediate and long-term effects, depending on the objective. Sometimes the goal is to get something out there and sell it, and modern tools can do that. But social is now so permeated through our lives that we need to think more intelligently about longer-term effects and attribution.
We’ve talked about social strategy at creator and brand level, but the biggest force in the room is the platform owners. Success on TikTok Shop may come from good strategy, relationship management and content, but it also depends on ByteDance. The same is true of every closed-graph social network.
Non-owned channels are places where the relationship between brand, creator and consumer is mediated by an algorithm that can change on a whim. With AI discovery, referrals and transactions becoming a bigger part of the puzzle, which parts of that relationship should the brand or retailer try to own?
What happens if social channels decide not to play ball, or if users decide they don’t like algorithmic social media and want something more controllable? Adam Mosseri has said that much of the action on Instagram happens in direct messages rather than the feed, and that doesn’t sound like advertising in the way I understand it.
We’ve been through eras, as I said at the beginning. Interest-driven algorithms changed our relationship with platforms and how we consume content. Now we can go into the backend of an algorithm, see how we’re being defined and change what we do and don’t want to see.
That power is a signal that social is ultimately about how close people want to get to what interests them. For brands, distribution and winning a trend aren’t always the end goal. The goal should be becoming something people actively choose to remain close to, return to and spend time with.
That’s why broadcast channels and activity in DMs rather than the feed can be successful. Platforms provide reach, but they can’t manufacture interest or build affinity. Humans have to do that in the first place.
Social isn’t simply advertising. An organic presence is about customer service, product discovery, entertainment, recommendation, community and conversation. Advertising puts a brand in front of someone; social gives that person the ability to pull the brand closer by choice, keep it at a distance or remove it entirely.
That is the ecosystem: where can you show up, use the platform to your advantage and prove that spending time with you is worthwhile?
I read a Substack article recently called ‘Temperature Zero’. Its point was that we’ve never had more tools for personalised algorithms or more potential diversity, yet the big feed regresses to the mean and everything starts to look the same — a monoculture.
As a brand, that’s probably not what you want to jump on. Perhaps advertising’s job is to be part of the monoculture, while social’s job is to be part of what happens on its periphery.
It’s about basic brand principles: being differentiated or distinct. Monocultures are one thing, and the big shared moments — the World Cup, for example — are another. We all experience them, but we have different relationships with them and different entry points.
You can think more elaborately and dynamically about where you’re trying to reach people and how you want to treat them. Whether doubling down on monoculture or escaping from it is part of your strategy is a decision in itself.
A couple of weeks ago we published our AI report for the year. Our survey suggested that fashion is comfortable using AI in content and marketing, and respondents expect more consumer-facing creative to be touched by or generated by AI.
The platforms are making it easier to generate, personalise and distribute creative at industrial scale through programmatic content creation and established bidding systems. We’ve all seen that go wrong, such as the REI bike with two handlebars.
The positive vision is a localised, personalised, relevant ad at peak intent. The flip side is creative becoming so ubiquitous that it disappears, whether personalised or not. Is AI helping or hindering social in the long term?
You can see the utopia of personalised recommendations and the feeling of being seen. But our use of AI is still an endeavour of reaching humans. AI offers enormous opportunities for localisation, personalisation, faster experimentation and more accessible production.
It will be most helpful when it amplifies an already strong idea, rather than becoming the idea or compensating for the absence of one. Fashion brands need a clear point of view, recognisable creative codes and an understanding of why someone should care.
AI can help those ideas travel further and adapt to different formats and contexts, if that works for the audience. It can make marketing more accessible, responsive and relevant, but the advantage shouldn’t come from producing more. It should come from making ideas work harder and smarter while remembering that the person receiving them is still human — for now.
We could end up with our own AI agents doing the hard work and bringing it back to us, but the powerful concept remains: humans using AI to reach other humans.
I interviewed a creative director from Zalando who talked about setting the overall direction for a generative campaign, then using AI to regionalise, localise and contextualise it. If the central message resonates, the consumer might want to see the clothes on someone who looks like them, in a relevant location. That seems like a low-stakes way to personalise without compromising the original intent.
Because in that framework you’re thinking about what the person receiving the work gains. Is it a person who looks like me? Is it in my language? Is it an environment I recognise? The resonance and relevance come through more strongly, and you’re using the technology in a way that benefits the person you’re trying to reach.
I have one final question. What happens to a generation that never gets on social? Brands may not be marketing to under-sixteens, but those people grow up quickly.
I’ve got three children in that bracket, and it feels as though they’ll be conditioned to value in-person experiences more than parasocial ones. I don’t know if the solution is more pop-ups and events, because those may simply give people a place to create content that is consumed online.
If fashion is competing for attention, what does it look like to follow that attention when it moves to places unlike what we think of as social today? I can predict video games, TV and physical spaces, but I’m sure there are channels I can’t see. What does an agency do in that eventuality?
It’s a really interesting topic, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Gen Alpha, how they appear in briefs and how we’re targeting them. There has been a lot of news about social-media restrictions, bans and platforms being held accountable for the addictions they create.
Even if children aren’t on social yet, and there are increasing restrictions and legislation, that doesn’t mean social or the behaviours it has created will disappear. Your point about where we’ll see it between IRL and URL is important. I don’t think they’re opposing choices; increasingly, they’re a connected journey.
You can learn about something in one place and encounter it in another, with the connection still there. The opportunity is to create experiences people actively value because they provide access, participation, entertainment or a sense of belonging. Creators can extend or interpret those invitations, but they shouldn’t be the only reason events exist.
An agency’s or strategist’s role isn’t to defend the current definition of social media. It’s to stay close to emerging behaviours, translate them into genuine opportunities and connect people with the right expertise.
That will evolve as more things happen, platforms emerge and behaviours change. Technology will have a massive impact, and some of it may not currently touch advertising. The principle remains the same: attention is valuable only when the people spending time with us and the work we do feel that time is worthwhile.
Wherever attention moves — real-life spaces, online spaces or spaces we don’t yet have a definition for — the task isn’t simply to place brands in front of people. It’s to help them earn a meaningful role.
One final question, not on my script: for a brand listening to this, what’s something you would encourage it to take away and think about in its social strategy right now that may not be top of mind but should be?
I think everything is risk-averse. You’re investing money, you want to see a return and you have to prove why it works to your higher-ups. We’re all between rocks and hard places.
But the brands willing to hold strong opinions loosely, explore, do their due diligence and remain open to risk can find rewards beyond what they imagined. The platforms and rules change, and they follow audience behaviour, so everything is an educated guess.
As long as you’ve done the due diligence to understand the situation, take a risk. Not risk for risk’s sake, but as good a risk as you can take while remaining comfortable.
All right. Perfect. Bryony, thanks so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed this. It gave me a lot of personal and professional insight. Let’s do this again in the next year or two and see how things have changed.
It’s been really fun from my side as well. Lots of food for thought.
And that’s the end of my chat with Bryony. I’ll keep this ending brief because we’ve gone over time, as I am wont to do. Hopefully I didn’t come across as too clueless today; I feel like I did an okay job. There’s definitely more about the creator economy that I need to research, but I think Bryony did a good job of bringing me — and potentially some of you — up to speed.
To be clear, I’m not about to sign up for TikTok, but I am going to spend more time understanding how that platform and others fit into media portfolios that are much more operationalised, structured and industrialised than I lazily let myself believe. There’s a big fashion-technology story here that I haven’t had my eye on.
We’re shifting gears next week to something pretty different, although I do have a creator in this space booked as a guest for later in the year. We’ll come back to this topic in a couple of months, which is also your window into what it takes to organise a weekly interview show. I hope what we put out sounds spontaneous, timely and interesting every time, but you really do have to book people a long way out if you’re going to put out 52 episodes of one interview show a year, not to mention 52 episodes of another show.
For now, thanks for listening. Check out The Edit on Tuesdays from me and Grace Robinson, our Social Editor, and I’ll speak to you again really soon.
