It was raining in Barcelona. Three minutes into the Champions League opener against Feyenoord, Raphinha cut inside and two defenders went sliding across the wet grass, right past him and out of the play. He slotted it home before either of them had stopped moving.

Footage of the play went viral almost instantaneously. Then the fans got hold of it. They slowed it down and froze the frame on Raphinha jogging on while two grown men skated past like they’d been cut from a water ballet. Somebody decided it belonged in the Louvre. Before long, people all over the world were remaking Feyenoord’s back line.

Two days later I caught ESPN’s Futbol Americas segment, headlined “Raphinha’s goal for Barcelona STOLE THE INTERNET.” I figured I was in for a breakdown of the finish. Instead the host spent most of it scrolling through fan memes and cracking up at them, going on about how creative people had been. A network with a studio full of analysts spent its airtime on memes nobody was paid to make.

Nobody briefed the internet. There was no hashtag and no template, and a sports network still ended up reporting what the crowd made.

Two men on the grass

You could put it down to the weather. I don’t. Putting two defenders on the ground with one change of direction is football brilliance, and Raphinha made that frame himself. He’s having a year of years and this was just another example of his exceptional talent. The rain just made it ridiculous.

What the crowd added was a different kind of creative brilliance. They took a display of skill and turned it into metaphor. When the still frame began circulating in meme form, the two defenders were tucked into bed under star-print blankets, set adrift in a canoe, handed kayak paddles, and parked in folding chairs with fishing rods. Someone set up a banana stand beside the penalty area. One post just said the goal was so good it sent both defenders to sleep.

The finish was clean and didn’t leave anyone much to add. The slide was where people found room. As football, the goal was complete. As culture it had barely started.

Unpaid work

Nobody was paid to put a Feyenoord defender in a canoe. People did it to make their friends laugh, or to be the one who wrote the line everybody else ended up repeating.

In 2012, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely published a study on a phenomenon they called the IKEA effect. Their research showed that people value things more when they’ve helped create them. Marketers quote that part a lot. They tend to skip the condition: the effect only held when people finished the task. When they failed, or when what they’d built got destroyed, the extra value disappeared.

My read is that this frozen frame from the Champions League opener made success easy. Two men lying flat on a wet pitch practically tell you what to do with them. You didn’t need to be a comedian to craft something meme-worthy.

The IKEA effect study has an honest limit. The attachment goes to whatever the person made, so the fan loves their own meme. What Raphinha and Barcelona got out of that single moment was a goal that stayed alive for days, carried around by people who each owned a small piece of it.

The loop

None of this behavior is new. Fans have always taken the best moments from memorable games and relived them, in the stands and in the pub the next day. What’s changed is what they can do with those moments after they’ve passed. People now have the tools to add their own creativity and flair to any given moment, and to do it within hours. Anyone with CapCut on their phone can do what used to require an edit suite.

And their creative output travels. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, said in early 2025 that sends are among the signals that count most, and that they carry extra weight for reaching people who don’t already follow you. The Raphinha frame kept moving because everyone who got it could add their own twist before sending it on.

Things happen, and then the audience gets to work on them. That’s how culture moves, and the clever brands are paying attention.

Harnessing it

Every brand’s way into that loop will be its own. A football club’s won’t look like a beer brand’s or a bank’s, and each should grow from how the brand already markets.

What travels is the shape of the Raphinha goal. The ball in the net was finished. The two men on the grass were left over, and that’s what people went to work on. Every brand has moments with something left over. The move was ESPN’s: notice what people were doing with it, and put what they’d made in front of everyone else. ESPN made none of the memes. It just recognized what the crowd had built and gave it a bigger stage. Doing that means seeing value in work you didn’t direct, and that’s the hard part for most brands, because it asks them to give up credit for something that works.

Get it right and you find out how potent an audience is once it has something worth working on.

Three seconds

Raphinha’s goal was over in three seconds. The story ran for days because people invested time and creativity into it. And because one broadcaster had the sense to hand them the stage.

Sources

• ESPN, Barcelona 5–1 Feyenoord (Sep 9, 2026): https://www.espn.com/soccer/match/_/gameId/401915424/feyenoord-rotterdam-barcelona

• ESPN FC, Futbol Americas, “Raphinha’s goal for Barcelona STOLE THE INTERNET” (Sep 11, 2026):

• Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460: https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/861385

• Social Media Today, Mosseri on Instagram ranking signals (Jan 2025): https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-shares-algorithm-insights-2025/738034/

In 2014, Campari handed us the American launch of Aperol. The global work was already running, and it was doing what drinks advertising typically does: selling an iconic product as a hero image or portraying an aspirational lifestyle. In this case, it was a young woman with red hair, among friends, the bottle, the glowing orange drink, mostly on billboards. The brief was to make a version of that for here.

We could have. It would have been easy, and it would have been ineffective, because the problem underneath the brief was one the ordinary answer couldn’t solve. The Spritz was enormous in Italy, and almost nobody in America knew what it was. Low awareness, new market, build the brand. A billboard can announce a bottle. It cannot teach a country a drink.

As always, we went back to the brief and read it again, and again. Sitting inside it were three things the client had mentioned almost in passing, as background.

1. Aperol had a ritual: a 3-2-1 formula for building the spritz that people learned and then repeated for each other.

2. The color made strangers ask what you were drinking.

3. And the client kept using the word infectious to describe how the drink moved from table to table.

Each of these details described a thing the drink was already doing to the people who encountered it. Teaching, prompting, spreading.

Then the target. Millennials, with an eye on people just past legal drinking age, so the brand could grow up alongside them. The generation raised to distrust the billboard and trust the friend, the group text, the table.

We looked at that for a while and said something that felt obvious in the room and reckless on paper. Nobody needs to see another ad for a drink. Especially not this audience.

The ideas we cultivated after that realization sprang out of the client’s own material. If the product is infectious, put it in the medium built for contagion, which in 2014 meant social. And if you are on social with that audience, recognize that you are in a place where people are not looking for advertising. They follow things and join things, and they pass along whatever is worth passing along.

So we didn’t launch a product campaign. We launched a society.

What we actually built

The Aperol Brunch Society had a mantra and a manifesto. It had a way in: order an Aperol Spritz at brunch, and joining was something you did rather than something you clicked. Its social presence came from the Society rather than Aperol, which put the brand in the position of host rather than speaker.

And it had a job attached to it. Campari would hire four Chief Brunch Officers, one each in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Miami, to represent the brand through the summer. You applied by posting an Instagram video making your case and tagging it. The strongest applicants were interviewed, and four of them were hired.

Four strangers, found through a hashtag.

That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part that usually sits at the back of a long list of campaign extensions which never see the light of day, because the brand would have to give up some control. Those applications weren’t sweepstakes entries. People made something, put their name on it in public, and eventually the brand’s presence in its four biggest American markets, during its first real summer here, belonged to four people Campari had recruited through Instagram. The contribution had a consequence.

And for an agency, this was so counterintuitive at the time. Our work was to set the conditions and announce the society and the search. But most of the content people saw was not made by us or our client. It was made by people for other people. Whether they were announcing they were joining the society or promoting why they should be Chief Brunch Officer, this was their narrative, their creativity being passed around, not ours.

It worked. Engagement tripled, and sales rose between 25 and 45 percent across the four target markets.

What came later is harder to assign. The Aperol Spritz went on to become a genuine thing in America, particularly with the people we were talking to. And plenty of that belongs to decisions made inside the company that had nothing to do with us. I won’t claim more of it than is ours. But I have believed ever since that a brand introducing itself through an invitation gets further than a brand announcing that it has arrived.

That was twelve years ago.

The surprising part isn’t that it worked. It’s that work like this still arrives in the world as a special case, a clever thing that ran beside the real campaign rather than a different account of what the campaign could be.

Why nothing much changed

It isn’t a vocabulary problem, because for most of this stretch there was no vocabulary. Nobody in that room in 2014 said the word participation, us included. Ask the industry at the time what the Brunch Society was, and you would have been told a social campaign, or UGC, or a nice stunt. Something tactical. Possibly a brilliant one-off. What went unsaid, by us as much as anyone, was that it had worked by hooking into something people already wanted to do, and that the same thing would work again anywhere that appetite was real.

Nearly everything the approach needed in 2014 has since become ordinary, from creator infrastructure to direct distribution to the ability to convene people without buying an ad spot first. And if you sat in most briefings this month across agencies, you would still hear the client’s ask come out as the ad.

The reason is what it costs.

When you push people toward a brand, you craft, and you control. You choose the frame, the cut, the line, and the last half second of the film. The work leaves the building finished, and its quality is something you can stand next to and point at. Nearly everything the business knows how to reward is built for that.

When you invite people to participate with a brand, you give a good deal of that away. An invitation requires an opening for acceptance, and an opening is by definition the part of the narrative you left for someone else to finish. You build loops rather than endings. You find out what the thing actually is only after other people have been inside it for a while. The craft doesn’t disappear, but it moves down from the surface of the work into the design of the conditions. The work becomes deciding what people are free to change, what they get back for taking part, and whether anything they do alters an outcome. That’s harder to see and much harder to put in a reel.

That trade is real, and I don’t think it helps to pretend otherwise. I still feel the pull toward the finished object. So does most of the industry, and it isn’t a failing. The people making these calls were trained in a period when the finished object was the entire job.

The filing problem

Then there’s what happens to an invitation after it succeeds.

It gets filed. The industry keeps two bins, one marked campaign and one marked activation, and participation lands in the second one almost every time. That sorting isn’t cosmetic. Once something is an activation, it gets activation money, activation timing and activation measurement, and it shows up in next year’s plan as a line beneath the real work. The campaign stays the strategy. The invitation becomes the interesting thing that happened next to it.

This is how twelve years of evidence can pile up without moving anything. Each piece gets logged as an exception rather than counted as a pattern.

You can see the same sorting in how the work gets recognized, though not in the way people usually assume. Recognition was never the problem. The Brunch Society won. Social-native awards shows have rewarded work like it for years, and the award world moved toward results a long time ago, so participatory work cases perfectly well, because the evidence is in what people actually did.

The problem is which lane it wins in. It gets honored as social, or as experience, or as engagement, and the lane it wins in quietly becomes the lane it belongs to. Recognition and reclassification arrive together. A film that wins is the brand’s work. An invitation that wins is the social team’s work.

That’s not a complaint about taste. It’s a description of an incentive structure, and incentive structures are why good arguments lose to mediocre ones for decades at a time.

Some of that is structural, and some of it is what we were raised to value. Most CMOs and creative leaders are still judged on campaigns, on commercials, because that is the history the whole business grew up inside. A creative director takes pride in the ability to craft a story. Far fewer take pride in building an environment where regular people contribute something to a brand. Budgets can be moved in a quarter. Pride takes longer.

Both, not either

Which brings me to something important to note.

This isn’t a replacement. Agencies shouldn’t stop making ads and brands shouldn’t stop wanting them. Push and invite coexist, and plenty of good shops do only one of them perfectly well.

The asymmetry sits elsewhere. What a brand most wants to put out and what the person at the other end most wants to experience have been drifting apart for years, and they are moving in opposite directions. The appetite for being told is going down. The appetite for having something to do is going up. The judgment now is mostly about which side of that gap a given problem sits on, and being good enough at both to be trusted when you argue for the harder one.

Where it gets decided

An agency can only sell what somebody is willing to buy, and most of this gets settled long before the pitch. It gets settled in the brief. Before anyone has an idea, the client has described what it wants help with. How that problem is framed determines how much room there is to solve it.

Aperol’s brief was an awareness brief, which is about as conventional as they come, and the answer still wasn’t an ad. Awareness is a problem. An ad is one answer to it. People can also discover a drink because someone at their table orders one, makes one, or shows them how. If the job is to get more people to know the drink, all of those routes are worth considering. An invitation gives people something to do that brings someone else into contact with the brand.

That possibility gets harder to see when the brief has already named the deliverable. When the brief says film, the work is a film, and everything after that is a conversation about how good the film is. The agency has been asked to make something specific. Asking whether that thing is the best answer to the problem can sound like refusing the assignment.

A lot of marketers describe their own job in ways that narrow the options before the brief even gets written. The brand’s storyteller. The keeper of the narrative. Both of those foreground what the brand will say rather than what anyone will be able to do. If your responsibility is the story, it makes sense to ask an agency for something that tells it.

That matters because the material for an invitation may already be sitting in front of you. If you’re looking for a story to tell, you might see it only as something to mention in the ad.

Campari had already written the invitation, by the way. The 3-2-1 ritual was right there in the brief. It had simply been filed as a product detail rather than as the thing people were going to do with each other.

The ask

So pull up the brief on your desk. Not the strategy deck, the brief.

Find the line that states the challenge. If it asks the team what the brand should say, you will get something to say. That may well be correct, because plenty of problems are answered by something to say, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of amateurism.

But if it asks how to connect with the person at the other end, you have left the door open, and the answer might be an invitation.

That’s the difference, and it’s one line long.

The Aperol Brunch Society was created for Campari America. Campaign details and reported results are on the record at the Shorty Awards.

I’ve owned an agency for seventeen years, and there have always been social experts working in my shop. I’ve followed what worked when social first emerged, and I’ve stayed on top of changes in media. I could explain any of it to a client.

Then this year, a small team and I launched a YouTube show of our own creation, The Spread Sheet, and I found out the difference between knowing about media and experiencing the results myself.

We made a great show intro. Crafted and on-brand, the kind of thing you put in your highlight reel. It didn’t work. YouTube doesn’t reward a perfectly crafted show intro. Not anymore. It rewards an opening that gives somebody a reason to keep watching twelve seconds later. Our intro was doing a job the medium had stopped asking for.

That was the first correction of many, and after enough of them we started joking that the algorithm was our creative director. The joke landed because it was largely true, and because none of us liked it.

The algorithm shouldn’t be your boss. But refusing to listen to it isn’t a way to stand by your creative principles. It’s just a refusal to understand the medium.

Creative people have always worked with constraints. Advertising people even more so, as constraints define everything we do. We’re doing work for clients, not ourselves. We’re working within the parameters of a brand. More tactically, a television spot has thirty seconds. A billboard has three. Every medium carries rules that shape what good work looks like inside it, and understanding those rules has always been part of the job.

Social platforms are no different, with one exception.

Their rules are alive. They watch what people do, learn from it, and adjust what gets distributed next. A billboard doesn’t change size based on how many people looked at it. A feed does.

The Platform Wrote Part of Your Brief

It helps to be precise about what the algorithm actually is, because the industry talks about it as though it has opinions. It’s merely an instrument.

The algorithm doesn’t decide what matters. The platform does.

Every platform has business objectives. Keep people watching. Get them to come back. Encourage sharing. Reduce the stuff people abandon in two seconds. Those objectives become product priorities, the priorities become KPIs, and the algorithm gets engineered to pursue them.

Platform strategy, then KPIs, then algorithm, then distribution.

That’s a chain of command. Business goals get compressed into KPIs, KPIs get compiled into code, and by the time anyone in your building has opened a document, the platform has effectively written part of your creative brief.

You don’t have to reverse-engineer the platform’s priorities. They’ve already put them in writing. YouTube’s own creator documentation states that its systems use average view duration and average percentage viewed as signals to inform ranking, and that it looks at whether viewers enjoyed a video using likes and post-watch survey results. TikTok’s documentation describes user interactions as the signals its recommender systems use to predict interest. Instagram tells creators that how many people like, comment, share, and save a post, and how quickly, is part of what puts that post in front of people who don’t already follow them.

If a platform rewards retention, retention is in the brief. If it rewards sending, sending is in the brief. If it rewards creation or conversation, those behaviors are in there, too.

You can decide those aren’t the things your brand cares about. That’s a legitimate strategic choice. What you can’t do is make that choice and then act surprised when your work doesn’t travel.

The Algorithm Is Part of the Medium

Here’s the mistake I see most often, including in work I’ve been responsible for.

We treat the algorithm as something downstream of creativity. First we make the idea. Then we optimize it for TikTok, cut it for Reels, turn it vertical, add subtitles. All of that happens after the idea is already decided, and none of it touches the idea itself. We’re changing the costume, not the character.

Making the algorithm an afterthought leads to making production adaptations.The adaptation that matters happens earlier than that, when you’re still deciding what the work is for. Go back to our intro. We didn’t solve our opening by making it shorter. We solved it by accepting the opening had a different job than the one we designed it to do.

TikTok isn’t television turned sideways, and Instagram isn’t a digital magazine. Each platform has developed its own patterns of consumption, creation, and participation, and their algorithms reinforce those patterns every hour of every day. The algorithm is a component of the medium, not a layer sitting alongside it.

Gravity doesn’t tell an architect what building to design. But an architect who ignores gravity doesn’t get to call the collapse a creative choice.

Three Briefs at Once

None of which means you’ve got to hand the algorithm the keys, because there’s a real problem with doing that. The platform’s KPI and the brand’s KPI are different animals.

TikTok may want another minute of attention while a brand wants another decade of relevance. Instagram may reward something being sent, but a company eventually needs somebody to buy something. A platform may reward outrage where a brand requires trust.

Sometimes those goals overlap beautifully, and those are the moments worth building toward. Sometimes they’re in direct conflict, and the platform will happily reward you for damaging yourself. Chasing whatever produces engagement is an efficient way to generate a lot of activity and very little brand value.

“Give the algorithm what it wants” is abdication with a dashboard attached.

The job is to work with it, which means modern creative work has to address three briefs at the same time.

• The brand brief. What are we trying to accomplish for the business and the brand?

• The human brief. What would make somebody voluntarily invest time and effort in this? Participation is exactly that: the voluntary time and effort people put into a brand, and work that earns none of it gives the other two briefs nothing to carry.

• The platform brief. What behaviors does this specific environment actually reward?

Ignore the brand brief, and you create attention without value. Ignore the human brief, and nobody cares. Ignore the platform brief, and nobody sees what you’ve made.

The interesting work lives where all three intersect. The part most organizations get wrong is that the intersection has to shape the idea itself, not the way the idea gets adapted after it’s approved.

None of this is as new as it sounds. Years ago we made branded shows for eBay, and the person effectively steering the creative was a strategist working next to the director. Nobody called that a loss of craft. It was just a new arrangement of roles. The platform brief is that same arrangement with one more participant. One that never comes to the meeting and never explains its reasoning.

What the Algorithm Knows That We Don’t

Creative people often resist algorithms because algorithms reward things creative people find embarrassing.

Badly shot videos outperform beautifully produced films. Ridiculous ideas beat sophisticated ones. Something made in ten minutes travels further than something developed over ten weeks.

The available conclusion is that the algorithm rewards bad creative. Sometimes the work that travels is bad, and pretending otherwise isn’t honest. But the algorithm isn’t making an aesthetic judgment. It’s reporting what people did or liked or reacted to.

If that doesn’t resonate for you, there’s a second explanation that deserves more attention. The algorithm may be exposing a gap between what professionals believe people should value and what people actually value. That gap has always existed. We just never had continuous instrumentation pointed at it before.

Duolingo is useful here, because it looks like an accident and isn’t. A small in-house social team put the brand’s green owl mascot on TikTok and let it behave in ways no brand-safety document would have pre-approved. The account grew into millions of followers with effectively no paid media behind it, and it kept working because the team read what people responded to instead of deciding in advance what the brand was allowed to be there.

That’s the algorithm reporting a fact, and a team being willing to hear it.

It doesn’t mean the audience is always right, or that popularity equals quality. Plenty of enormous numbers have done nothing for the businesses that paid for them.

What it does mean is that something happened. People responded. Creative people should be curious about why. That’s what good partners do. They show you something you couldn’t see on your own.

Learning Beats Optimizing

Part of the problem may be the language we’ve chosen.

“Optimize for the algorithm” makes the whole thing sound mechanical. It implies creativity happens first and then somebody retrofits it to satisfy a machine. No talented person wants that job, and framed that way, they’re right not to.

The better approach is to frame it as a question: what is the algorithm teaching us?

What made people stay? What did they pass along, and to whom? What did people do with our idea that we never anticipated? Which part of the work turned out to be useful to somebody, and which part did everyone ignore?

The answers are information rather than instructions. Instructions replace judgment. Information sharpens it. And sharper judgment on the next creative decision is the only durable advantage available in an environment that keeps changing its own rules.

Traditional advertising was built around finished objects. Develop the campaign, approve it, produce it, run it, measure afterward. The artifact was the deliverable, and the learning arrived too late to influence the artifact itself.

Algorithmic environments don’t work that way. You release something, people respond, the system responds to them, and distribution shifts. The work becomes part of a living system rather than a completed object.

This is where the industry tends to overcorrect. One camp turns creativity into endless A/B testing and surrenders every decision to performance data, which produces work that’s optimized into invisibility. The other insists taste alone should be sufficient, which produces work nobody sees.

The harder position sits in between. Having the conviction to put something distinctive out there, and the discipline to evolve it without sanding away whatever made it distinctive in the first place.

That’s creative intelligence at work.

The Audience Is in the Room

For decades, advertising described itself as consumer-centric while keeping consumers outside the creative process. We researched them, segmented them, tested ideas on them, then delivered finished communications to them. They were the audience for the work and never a participant in it. Research entered the room. The people it described never did.

Algorithmic media ended that arrangement. People’s behavior now affects distribution. Distribution affects what brands and creators make next. People respond to that, and the loop continues without asking anyone’s permission.

Creative, then response, then distribution, then creative again.

The audience hasn’t become the creative director. Neither has the algorithm. But both have entered the creative department, and that changes the role of the people who’ve traditionally controlled the work.

Our joke was wrong in the way useful jokes usually are. The algorithm was never running our room. It was the one collaborator that told us the truth every day and never once told us what to do about it.

The best creative leaders will operate between conviction and evidence, understanding what the brand needs, what people care about, and the behavioral system their ideas have to travel through.

The algorithm isn’t your creative director. It’s evidence that the audience is already in the room. Great creative leaders will know when to listen, when to disagree, and what to make next.

Sources

Average view duration, average percentage viewed and post-watch surveys as ranking signals. YouTube Help, Search & discovery tips: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11914225

YouTube on watch time, satisfaction and recommendations. YouTube Help, Performance FAQ: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141805

How TikTok recommends content. TikTok Support: https://support.tiktok.com/en/using-tiktok/exploring-videos/how-tiktok-recommends-content

What Instagram tells creators drives reach. Instagram for Creators: https://creators.instagram.com/blog/tips-for-improving-your-reach

Duolingo’s social team and TikTok growth. Technical.ly: https://technical.ly/company-culture/duolingo-viral-marketing-strategy-lessons/

Duo the Duolingo owl on TikTok, follower growth. Sookio: https://www.sookio.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-campaign-tiktok-duo-the-duolingo-owl

The algorithm doesn’t know whether your work is good. It knows what people do with it.

You can produce the most beautifully crafted film in your category. Perfect lighting, impeccable script, professional everything. If people watch it politely and move on, the platform learns something about it. Meanwhile, a video shot on a phone in a parking lot travels everywhere, because people send it to a friend, argue about it in the comments, imitate it, save it, and make their own version.

Craft is invisible to the algorithm. Consequence is the only thing it can see.

That distinction has become one of the most important facts in marketing, and most brands are still on the wrong side of it.

What the Platforms Actually Measure

There’s no universal algorithm. Every platform optimizes for different things, and every surface inside a platform ranks differently. But the drift is consistent, and the platforms have been unusually candid about it.

In January 2025, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told creators plainly: “The top three signals that matter most for ranking are watch time, likes and sends. So when looking at your insights, pay close attention to average watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach.” He’d been pointing at that last one for months, describing sends per reach as one of the most important signals the platform uses.

That last metric is worth reading twice. Not reach. Not impressions. The ratio between the people who saw the work and the people who forwarded it to one specific human being.

Read it as a creative brief, and it asks a single question: Did this give somebody a reason to put their own name on it in a private message?

TikTok describes its recommender systems the same way in its own documentation. Interactions become “signals that help the recommender systems predict content you’re more likely to be interested in,” and every candidate video gets ranked on predicted interest rather than on any assessment of the video itself. YouTube has spent years widening its definition of a good outcome, moving from raw watch time toward satisfaction, adding survey responses, returns, and shares to what it once counted in minutes.

Underneath the differences, these systems are all making the same move. They’re shifting from measuring whether someone was exposed to something toward measuring whether anything happened afterward.

Exposure is a cheap signal. Consequence is an expensive one. Culture is made entirely of consequence.

Content Is an Object. Culture Is a Behavior.

This is the distinction I keep coming back to, because it explains almost everything else.

Content is something a person watches. Culture is what starts happening because they watched it.

The distinction gets easier to use when you put a measure under it. The definition we work from is that participation is the voluntary time and effort invested in a brand. Watching costs time. Making your own version costs time and effort. Both are voluntary, and the voluntary part is what separates either one from reach, which nobody chooses.

A video is content. The dance thousands of people perform afterward is culture. A phrase is content. The moment people start using it on each other, it becomes culture. A brand makes a post, and that’s content. When people begin making their own versions, sending it to friends, turning it into a joke, adopting its language, or wearing it as a badge of who they are, something else is going on.

The clearest example I know is e.l.f. Cosmetics. In 2019, the brand, working with Movers+Shakers, did something almost no advertiser had tried. Instead of making a film, it commissioned an original song called “Eyes, Lips, Face” and released it into TikTok as a challenge.

The song was content. What followed was culture. More than five million people made their own videos using it. It became the fastest campaign to reach a billion views on the platform at the time, hitting that mark in six days. Then people started searching for the song on Spotify, so the team extended it into a full track. It reached number four on Spotify’s global viral chart and picked up roughly 300,000 playlist adds.

That’s the tell. The asset escaped the campaign. It stopped being an ad people watched and became a thing people used, which is an entirely different category of object.

The algorithm didn’t understand any of this philosophically. It never sat there and concluded, ah, culture. But it could see the behavioral exhaust culture leaves behind, the sending and responding and recreating and searching and returning and joining. Those behaviors reliably indicate that something mattered, so the systems distributed the thing that caused them.

Algorithms have accidentally become culture-detection machines.

Finished Work Has Nowhere to Go

This explains something brands have been frustrated by for a decade.

Most brand content is designed to be finished. We develop the message, craft the execution, polish the film, publish the post. Here it is. Please consume it. The audience has no role in the work other than receiving it. Then it gets stored on Ads of the World, and everyone moves on.

By traditional advertising standards, that can be a total success. The communication is clear, and the craft is extraordinary. Judged as a broadcast artifact, it works.

Social platforms ask a question broadcast never had to answer: What happens next?

Does someone send this to another person? Does it give them something to say? Does it become useful in a conversation they were already having? Does anyone want to add to it?

A great deal of brand content has no answer, because it arrives complete. Complete things are difficult to participate in because they contain no invitation.

The work most capable of producing culture shares a few qualities, and none of them are about production value.

None of this requires low production values. Beautifully made things create culture all the time. The mistake is believing beauty alone makes something move. Craft creates the thing. Participation creates the movement around it.

The Engagement Bait Problem

Participation doesn’t mean ending every post with “what do you think?” It doesn’t mean manufacturing controversy because comments are good for reach. It certainly doesn’t mean engagement pods, reply farms, or tricks designed to simulate activity.

Platforms are getting better at spotting all of it, and they’re increasingly willing to act. Instagram has said it removes accounts that repost other people’s content ten or more times in thirty days from recommendation surfaces entirely, and that when duplicates exist it recommends only the original. The arbitrage window on fake behavior keeps narrowing.

The objective is meaningful human consequence. Did this give people something worth doing?

Voluntary is the word carrying the weight in the definition. Bait extracts a response. Participation earns one, and the difference shows up eventually in whether anybody comes back.

That’s a much harder creative problem than making an ad. It’s also a far more interesting one.

What Changes in the Room

This changes the questions the industry needs to ask itself.

The old question was what we want people to know. That’s still important if there is genuine news or an introduction to make.

But now add another. What could this cause people to do?

Instead of designing the message and handing it to media, design the behavior around the message. People’s response to the work has become part of its distribution rather than a report filed afterward.

Instead of a content calendar full of things the brand intends to publish, build a view of the cultural moments, communities, and behaviors the brand could join or enable.

And instead of measuring only how many people something reached, study what happened because it reached them. Sends per reach is a more honest creative scorecard than impressions ever was.

In a participatory world, the audience has stopped being the destination of the media. The audience is part of the media system.

For decades, one of marketing’s central jobs was crafting a message and finding efficient ways to deliver it. That job hasn’t disappeared. But a second job has arrived alongside it. Creating the conditions under which people want to carry the idea themselves.

That demands a different toolkit. Cultural fluency. Community understanding. Speed. Generosity. A tolerance for unpredictability. And, hardest of all for most brands, a willingness to surrender a little control over what the work becomes.

The CMO is still crafting the message. They’re also building the playground.

Culture Has Always Worked This Way

Which is why this is bigger than a social media observation. It’s another instance of the larger shift from persuasion toward participation.

The traditional communications model imagined value moving in one direction. Brand to message to audience. The emerging model is messier and more alive. Brand to person to person to community to creation to reaction to adaptation, and back to the brand again.

So the most valuable thing a brand makes may no longer be the piece of work. It may be the human activity the work sets in motion.

That’s culture, and culture has always behaved this way. It doesn’t arrive fully formed from institutions. It gets repeated, altered, argued over, performed, and passed from one person to another.

Algorithms didn’t invent that behavior. They built the first distribution system large enough to see it.

Brands that understand participation now have a structural advantage rather than a stylistic one. The algorithm doesn’t want your content. It wants evidence that your content mattered to somebody, and the strongest evidence available is that they did something with it.

Which is the bet worth making. The most valuable brands will be the ones that have earned the largest groups of active participants, and the measure of a participant is what they were willing to give you that nobody asked them for.

Content gets distributed. Culture gets replicated.

Sources

Adam Mosseri on Instagram’s top three ranking signals, January 2025. Social Media Today: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-shares-algorithm-insights-2025/738034/

Adam Mosseri on sends per reach as a key driver of reach. Search Engine Journal: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/instagram-algorithm-shift-why-sends-matter-more-than-ever/521389/

Instagram making views the primary metric, with sends per reach alongside it. The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24215398/instagram-primary-metric-views

How TikTok recommends content. TikTok Support: https://support.tiktok.com/en/using-tiktok/exploring-videos/how-tiktok-recommends-content

e.l.f. Cosmetics #eyeslipsface campaign results. PRWeek: https://www.prweek.com/article/1699331/%E2%80%9Ceyes-lips-face%E2%80%9D-elf-cosmetics-built-its-brand-tiktok

e.l.f. #eyeslipsface song chart performance and playlist adds. Movers+Shakers: https://moversshakers.co/elf-tiktok-challenge

e.l.f. Cosmetics innovation on TikTok, campaign metrics. Shorty Awards: https://shortyawards.com/13th/elf-cosmetics-innovation-on-tiktok

Spotify Wrapped as a shareable annual format. Hightouch: https://hightouch.com/blog/how-spotify-wrapped-works

Ok everyone, I’m back. I apologize for the lack of essays over the past few weeks but the summer was hectic, The Echange has put out over 30 pieces of weekly content this year, and I needed a short break. But here we go with weekly drops through the end of the year. Enjoy.

In September 2005, the makers of the online game World of Warcraft added a new monster for players to fight. Beating it meant surviving a spell called Corrupted Blood, which drained your health quickly and was supposed to remain in that one remote corner of the game and vanish the moment the fight ended.

It didn’t stay put. A glitch let players’ in-game pets carry the infection out of the dungeon and into the crowded cities, where it jumped from one character to the next and killed weaker players in seconds. Within days, the game had a full-blown digital plague. Players scattered, some fleeing the infected cities, others staying behind to heal strangers, and a few hunting people down to spread it on purpose. The streets filled with the bones of the dead, and it ran for about a week before the studio wiped it out by resetting the servers (Wikipedia).

Nobody designed that. No one wrote it or approved it. A stray line of code produced an event so lifelike that epidemiologists later studied it as a model for how real people behave in a real outbreak (Lofgren and Fefferman, Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2007). Two decades on, players still tell the story. It is one of the most memorable things that ever happened in that game, and the designers had nothing to do with it. That turns out to be the whole point, and it is the thing most brands have never learned to build.

How Games Went Multiplayer

To see why that matters for a brand, it helps to look at how games themselves changed. For most of their history, video games were single-player. A designer wrote a story, built the levels, and set the challenges. You picked up the controller, played through the experience they had authored, reached the end, and put it down. It could be brilliant, but it was a finished thing handed to you. You were the audience for someone else’s work.

Multiplayer changed what a game even is. Once other real people are in the world with you, they become the most interesting thing in it. No designer can script another human being. The other players are unpredictable; they can help you or wreck your plans, and the game stops being a story you move through and becomes a place where things happen between you and everyone else. The designer’s job flips. You stop writing the story and start building a world that is good enough for other people to make their own stories inside.

That flip adds everything a single-player game structurally can’t. No two sessions play out the same way, so the world stays alive. What you do carries weight, because other people are there to see it. You become someone inside that world, known for how you play and what you contribute. And most of all, you have agency. You are not being told a story; you are acting inside one and changing it for other people, and that is a completely different feeling from watching.

You don’t need much for this to work. In the 2012 game Journey, you are paired with a stranger in a desert. You can’t speak to them, you can’t see their name, and the only thing you can do is move and give a single wordless chirp. That is the entire toolkit, and players routinely call the companionship that results one of the most affecting experiences they’ve ever had in a game (GamesIndustry.biz). The bond doesn’t come from more features. It comes from being given a reason to need another person and almost nothing to hide behind.

Designers have spent decades learning to build for this, and one rule they repeat is to start with the feeling. “Think of the feelings that you want to bring to the players,” as the designer Robin Hunicke has put it, and then work backward to the rules that might produce it (GamesIndustry.biz).

The Best Parts Are the Ones Nobody Planned

Here is the strange part. When you build a world with a few good rules and fill it with people, they start doing things you never planned. The rules combine in ways you didn’t foresee, players invent uses for them you never intended, and the results are often better than anything the designer could have written. Game designers have a word for this. They call it emergence, and the simplest way to think about it is unintended consequences that turn out to be the best part of the game.

The World of Warcraft plague was emergence. So was one of the strangest things ever to happen online. In 2017, and again in 2022, Reddit ran an experiment called r/place: a giant blank canvas where any user could place a single colored pixel, then had to wait before placing another. That was the entire game. One pixel at a time. In the 2022 run, more than ten million people placed over 160 million pixels across three and a half days, and what emerged was not chaos. Communities formed alliances, negotiated borders, defended their territory, and built enormous shared artworks, none of it required or designed by anyone (Adweek). The rule was almost insultingly simple. The behavior was a civilization.

One pixel at a time, ten million people, and a world with its own diplomacy. That ratio, a tiny rule and an enormous emergent result, is the thing worth holding onto.

Why Taking Part Creates Loyalty

There’s a well-documented reason this creates such strong attachment, and it has nothing to do with games. In a set of studies, researchers had people assemble IKEA boxes, fold origami, and build with LEGO, then measured how much they valued the results. People consistently prized the things they had made themselves far more than identical items made by someone else, to the point of rating their own clumsy efforts as highly as an expert’s. The researchers named it the IKEA effect (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012). Effort creates attachment. We don’t love what we’re handed. We love what we help make.

The same thing happens between people. “We like people better after we play a game with them,” the game researcher Jane McGonigal has noted, “even if they’ve beaten us badly” (TED, 2010). The warmth doesn’t come from winning. It comes from having taken part together. Put those two findings side by side and you have the whole engine. People value what they help build, and they bond with the people they build it alongside.

Your Brand Is Probably a Single-Player Game

Now put a brand where the game was, and the analogy does almost all the work. Most brands are still single-player games. The brand writes the story, which we call the campaign. The customer plays through it by watching, maybe mentions it to someone the next day, and then it ends. The brand is the author and the customer is the audience, exactly like a game you finish and set down. For a century that was the only option, because you couldn’t take part in a television commercial even if you wanted to.

A participatory brand is a multiplayer game. It doesn’t hand people a finished story. It builds a world with a few good rules, gives people real roles and real stakes inside it, and lets them make the meaning themselves, with each other. It doesn’t launch and then end the way a campaign does. It keeps going and compounds. Here is the whole shift at a glance.

Multiplayer Already Won

If that still sounds like a nice theory, look at the scoreboard in the medium the analogy comes from. Multiplayer didn’t just get popular. It won, and it won on the numbers a CMO actually reports. A great single-player game is sold once, and then it’s finished. The big multiplayer worlds never stop earning. Grand Theft Auto V shipped in 2013, and more than a decade later, its multiplayer mode, GTA Online, is still one of its publisher’s biggest earners, with cumulative bookings estimated at around $5 billion (per Take-Two Interactive results). Fortnite built its business entirely on multiplayer modes, gives the game away for free, and still made an estimated $5.4 billion in 2018, its peak year, on the way to 650 million registered accounts (Business of Apps). Roblox barely makes any games itself. Its users make them: more than 140 million people play every day, and its top thousand creators now average $1.3 million a year each, building the thing everyone else comes for (Roblox Q4 2025 shareholder letter). The whole industry reorganized around multiplayer because that is where the durability and the money turned out to be.

Brands that made the same shift show the same pattern. LEGO was on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s. A central part of how it became the largest toy company in the world was opening the brand up to its fans: letting them design sets and vote on which ones get made, with more than 2.8 million people taking part and winning designs earning their creators a share of the sales (MIT Sloan Management Review). Look at the loyalty leaders, and you see it land on the P&L. At Sephora, members of its Beauty Insider community are worth more than double the average customer, and that program now drives the large majority of the company’s sales (Sephora). Participation isn’t the soft, brand-warmth part of the plan. In the companies that commit to it, it’s the growth engine.

And it doesn’t ask you to bet the quarter. You don’t tear down the campaign machine to do this. You run a participatory layer next to it and let it compound, the same way a live game keeps earning long after its launch. A single-player brand gives you a spike you have to manufacture again every quarter. A multiplayer brand gives you an asset that grows while you sleep. The first is easier to defend in ninety days. The second is the one you’ll wish you had started three years ago.

Where It Doesn’t Work

None of this is a universal prescription, and pretending otherwise is how brands end up with an abandoned Discord server and a hashtag nobody used. A few honest limits are worth naming.

It only works if people have a reason to encounter each other around what you make. Some products are functional, bought rarely, or used alone, and there’s no natural reason for customers to meet. Insurance is not a multiplayer game. Neither is most business software.

It takes time. A participatory system compounds over years and looks weak next to a campaign in its first quarter. A brand that measures everything in ninety-day windows will kill it before it does anything.

And you have to accept outcomes you didn’t choose, because the whole point is that people act on their own. In 2016, a British research council let the public vote on the name of a new £200 million polar ship. Boaty McBoatface won in a landslide, 124,109 votes to runner-up Poppy-Mai’s 34,371. The council overruled the result and named the ship after Sir David Attenborough, and the lasting story became the broken promise, not the ship (HBS Working Knowledge). If you invite people to take part and then override them, you get the worst of both worlds. You’ve made them players and then treated them like an audience.

From Author to World-Builder

So the job changes. In a single-player brand, the marketer is an author, crafting the perfect message and pushing it out. In a multiplayer brand, the marketer is closer to a game designer, or a good referee. You set the rules, hand out the roles, keep the world fair, and then you step back and let people make things you couldn’t have scripted. You give up control of the story. What you get back is people who are attached to your brand because they helped build it, and attached to each other because of it.

A stray line of code once turned a fantasy game into a plague that people still talk about two decades later, and that scientists studied like a real one. It lasted because someone had built a world where something like that could happen, not because anyone wrote it. That is the opportunity in front of every brand now. Stop writing the story. Build the place where your customers write it themselves.

Sources

Corrupted Blood incident, World of Warcraft, September–October 2005 — outbreak mechanics, spread, duration, and the studio’s server reset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

Lofgren, Eric T.; Fefferman, Nina H. “The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics.” Lancet Infectious Diseases 7(9), 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17714675/

Journey (2012, thatgamecompany), on its deliberately minimal multiplayer design: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ten-years-later-jenova-chen-reflects-on-journey

Hunicke, Robin, on designing from the feeling first: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/journey-producer-start-with-feelings-not-mechanics

Reddit r/place 2017 and 2022 participation figures: https://www.adweek.com/media/reddits-r-place-april-fools-stunt-was-the-place-to-be/

Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online among Take-Two’s leading net-bookings contributors more than a decade after launch (Take-Two Interactive FY2025 results); ~$5B cumulative GTA Online bookings is an industry estimate compiled from Take-Two disclosures: https://www.take2games.com/ir/news/take-two-interactive-software-inc-reports-results-fourth-1

Fortnite revenue and player figures ($5.4B in 2018, its peak year; 650M registered accounts by 2023): https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/

Roblox daily active users (144M, Q4 2025) and top-creator earnings, plus its user-generated model (Roblox Q4 2025 shareholder letter): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1315098/000131509826000009/ex991-q42025shareholder.htm

Norton, Michael I.; Mochon, Daniel; Ariely, Dan. “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22(3), 2012: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41121

McGonigal, Jane. “Gaming can make a better world,” TED2010: https://janemcgonigal.com/2014/01/06/transcript-games-can-make-a-better-world/

LEGO Ideas community scale, vote thresholds, and creator rewards: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/lego-takes-customers-innovations-further/

LEGO’s near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s and turnaround into the world’s largest toy company: https://businesscall.substack.com/p/legos-turnaround-from-bankruptcy

Sephora Beauty Insider community value and share of sales (figures reported by Sephora, cited in a social.plus analysis): https://www.social.plus/blog/community-members-spend-2-5x-more---why-brand-communities-drive-growth

Boaty McBoatface naming poll, 2016 — vote totals and the lesson on overriding a public vote: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/the-legacy-of-boaty-mcboatface-beware-of-customers-who-vote

Target, customer, audience, community, tribe. Marketers use them as synonyms. They’re really five distances between a brand and a person, and read in order, they tell a single story about a brand learning to give up the center of the room.

Walk into any planning meeting, and you’ll hear five words used as if they mean the same thing. The target for the campaign. The customer we’re after. The audience we’re building. The community we want. The tribe we’re stewarding. They get swapped mid-sentence, each one a slightly warmer way of saying the last. But they aren’t synonyms. Each name names a different relationship between a brand and a person, and the distance between them is definitive.

Read them linearly, and they become one long move: a brand slowly stepping back from the center of the room.

Imagine drawing it

Here’s the simplest way to see the difference. Imagine sketching each of these five words as a small picture — the brand, the people it’s trying to reach, and where each one is standing in the room.

In the early words, the brand stands in the center, and everyone faces it. An audience is the clearest version: a crowd of people all turned inward, looking at the brand, and not one of them looking at anyone else. The room is full, but every face is pointed the same way.

Then the picture changes. People stop facing the brand and start turning to face each other. The brand is still in the room, but it’s no longer what everyone came to see, and by the last word it has stepped all the way out to the edge, while the people gather around something they share.

That move, from the center to the edge, is the whole story. The near end is attention: the brand in the middle with every face turned toward it. The far end is belonging: the people turned toward each other, holding together around something that would survive even if the brand walked out. Belonging is the only part that doesn’t disappear the moment the brand stops paying for it.

Now, one word at a time.

Where the arc forks

That’s the arc. Five distances, one direction, the brand letting go of the center an inch at a time. But community isn’t a single thing. It’s where the arc forks, and that fork is the most useful distinction here. There are two ways to have a community: you can join one that already exists, or build one that doesn’t.

Joining means the fire was already burning before you arrived. Red Bull didn’t invent action sports. Yeti didn’t invent hunting and fishing culture. Each found a passion that already had its people and earned a place near the fire. The work is service. The link belongs to the tribe, and the brand’s job is to be useful without trying to own it. You can’t walk into a fire someone else built and install yourself at the center without putting it out, so joining pushes you toward the edge by definition.

Building means no fire exists yet, so you light one. Harley-Davidson built the Owners Group. Peloton built the ride, the leaderboard, the shared 6 a.m. habit. And when you build, you can sit close to the center, because you lit the fire yourself. The brand doesn’t always have to give up the middle. Sometimes it earns the right to stand there.

But the center you get to keep isn’t the obvious one. A built community only becomes a community when its true center is the members’ shared identity (the rider they become at 6 a.m., the open road, the club), with the brand as host and badge rather than the sun everyone orbits. Keep the center on the logo, keep people facing you, and what you’ve built is an audience wearing a community badge, not a community. It’s the most common way this goes wrong.

Every fire has a cost

The two paths carry opposite costs. Borrow a fire and you warm yourself on energy you don’t control. It can carry a brand for years, and it can turn. Cova called that failure the counter-brand community, the tribe that organizes against the company that came courting. Light your own, and it’s yours, which sounds safer than it is. A built community runs on meaning the brand has to keep generating, and the day it stops feeding the fire, the fire goes cold. Control on one side, freedom from upkeep on the other.

Where it all leads

The whole arc points one way. Target is the brand alone with its intentions. Tribe is the brand at the edge of a fire full of people who’d still be there if the logo vanished. Everything between measures how much of the center the brand was willing to give away.

Every brand is built to be at the center of the room. The ones that build something lasting spend their whole lives earning their way out of it.

Attention is easy to buy and quick to leave. Belonging is what’s left in the room once the brand steps back.

A few months ago, I went down a research rabbit hole on shapes in the natural world. The kind of rabbit hole that starts with a passing curiosity and turns into something I could not stop thinking about, because the question it raised seemed to apply to everything I work on.

The question I could not stop turning over in my mind was this: Why does the natural world reuse so few structural forms?

A river system, a tree, and the bronchial network inside your lungs share a branching pattern that was never designed in common. Spirals show up in galaxies, in nautilus shells, in the way water drains from a basin. Hexagons appear in honeycomb, in basalt columns, in the compound eyes of insects, and in the lattice of certain crystals. Lattices, helices, fractals, vortices. The same handful of forms keep appearing across scales and substrates that have no obvious relationship to each other.

Biologists have a name for this. They call it morphology, from the Greek word for shape. Morphology is the discipline of structural form, separate from function. Two organisms with completely different functions can share a morphology. Two organisms with identical functions can have completely different morphologies. The form is its own variable, with its own logic and its own consequences.

The reason the natural world reuses so few forms is roughly this: Forms are constrained by underlying rules. The way fluids minimize resistance produces branching. The way materials distribute load produces hexagons. The way certain growth processes unfold produces spirals. Nature doesn’t have infinite stable configurations to choose from. There are only a few that satisfy the constraints. Once a form has been found that works, it gets used everywhere those same constraints apply.

It’s a simple truth explaining how the physical world is built.

The Same Question, Asked of Participation

Morphology. The study of form. Once I had the word, I could not stop applying it.

Then I applied it to my own body of work.

Participation is what I study. I have spent the last several years building a way of thinking about how human beings show up for things together, and an atlas of cases that documents how participation actually shows up in the world. The atlas has now grown to a few thousand cases, drawn from civic life, brand campaigns, cultural movements, religious practice, software communities, governance experiments, sports, education, organizing, and art. Almost every domain where humans participate in something larger than themselves.

So I dived into the Atlas cases with morphology in mind.

I did not know the answer when I started. But I had been noticing for a while that cases in the Atlas, which looked unrelated on the surface, seemed to behave in similar ways structurally. A beer campaign and a democratic governance platform. A fan community and an open-source software project. A religious pilgrimage and a viral hashtag. The activities had nothing in common. The behavior of the participation around them had quite a lot in common. I had been writing it off as a coincidence. Once I started thinking morphologically, it stopped looking like a coincidence.

So I went looking for the shapes.

The Primary Forms Emerge

What follows are my findings so far. I want to be careful about how I describe this, because the work is genuinely in progress and the patterns are still being tested. But I find it interesting enough to share what I am seeing revealed.

Eight recurring shapes have emerged from the data with enough consistency that I have started treating them as primary forms. They are not categories I imposed. They are structures observed and named after the fact, when the same configurations had already shown up enough times to demand naming. The original identification happened across the human-classified cases in the atlas. Since then, we have added shape as a classification criterion for the most recent 2,500 cases loaded, and it will be a criterion for every case going forward.

I do not know yet whether the eight will hold. I suspect some will sharpen. Some may merge. New ones may emerge as the atlas keeps expanding into corners of human participation it has not yet reached. What I know for sure is that participation has shapes, the shapes have rules, and the rules tell you something about the participation that no other measurement can.

Here are the eight as they currently stand.

The Eight Shapes

Hub. A central node radiates outward. The organizing entity controls the flow. Invitations go out from the center, responses come back to the center, and the center decides what gets seen. Old Spice’s response day was a Hub. Apple keynotes are Hubs. Reddit AMAs are Hubs. Most branded social media participation is a Hub. The brand or the celebrity is the sun, and everyone else orbits. Hubs can generate enormous short-term energy. They are also entirely dependent on the center continuing to invest. Remove the center, and the structure collapses, because there is no structure without it.

Swarm. Decentralized agents follow simple rules and produce emergent global behavior. No one is in charge. The rules are the architecture. The Ice Bucket Challenge was a Swarm. Wordle sharing was a Swarm. The Arab Spring, at its most generative, was a Swarm. The mechanics in each case were simple enough that millions of people could execute them independently without coordination. Swarms can achieve massive scale with almost no central investment. They are also almost impossible to sustain, because the simplicity that makes them spreadable makes them structurally thin. There is nothing left to belong to once the moment passes.

Loop. The output of participation becomes the next input. The system feeds itself. Dell IdeaStorm ran as a Loop: customer ideas fed product development, which fed new ideas, which fed more customer investment. LEGO Ideas runs as a Loop too, with customer designs becoming real products that drive more customers to submit. Loyalty programs at their best are Loops. Any system where contributing makes the thing better, and the thing being better attracts more contributing, has Loop architecture. Loops can be extraordinarily durable. They can also calcify. The same voices come to dominate, the feedback becomes self-referential, and the system starts optimizing for its own continuation rather than genuine openness.

Mesh. Every node is simultaneously a producer and a consumer. There is no distinction between the people who make the thing and the people who use it. Wikipedia is a Mesh. Linux is a Mesh. A functional DAO is a Mesh. The Mesh is the most democratic of the structures and the hardest to build, because it requires every participant to shift from consumer identity to contributor identity. Most attempts at Mesh participation quietly collapse back into Hub or Loop dynamics, either because the people at the center cannot actually let go, or because most participants prefer consuming to contributing.

Cluster. Dense local participation with loose connections between active groups. Fan communities are Clusters. Local civic groups are Clusters. A neighborhood mutual aid network is a Cluster. The internal density creates genuine belonging. People know each other, share history, and develop norms. The loose inter-cluster connections prevent insularity and let the broader movement grow. Clusters are among the most humanly satisfying participation structures, because the scale is right for actual relationship-building. They are also vulnerable to fragmentation. The loose connections can fray, and isolated pockets can quietly lose momentum.

Branch. Hierarchical cascading from a central stem. Participation is structured and sequential. You earn your way from one level to the next, and each level carries different rights and responsibilities. Franchise models are Branches. Martial arts belt systems are Branches. Most membership organizations with tiered structures are Branches. Branch participation is legible. People always know where they stand and what comes next. The risk is rigidity. The hierarchy that makes a Branch legible can also make it slow and hostile to the lateral energy that produces genuine innovation.

Constellation. Independent nodes organized by shared identity with no center. The diaspora is a Constellation. Distributed protest movements are Constellations. The global network of people who identify as surfers, or practitioners of a martial art, or adherents of a philosophy, with no central organizing entity holding them together. Distance does not weaken the bond in a Constellation the way it does in other shapes. A jiu jitsu practitioner in Chicago feels a line of connection to another practitioner in Cape Town or Kyoto, two people who may never meet but who recognize each other through what they share. A Cluster needs proximity. A Constellation does not. What holds a Constellation together is identity rather than architecture. People participate because of who they understand themselves to be. Constellations are extraordinarily resilient and almost impossible to direct. There is no center to defund, no structure to shut down. You cannot tell a Constellation where to go. You can at most create conditions that make certain directions more resonant.

Ritual. The most temporal of the eight shapes. The other seven have spatial form you can see at any moment. Ritual has a form that only exists across time. A community dog walk at 5 pm, a 7 am Sunday mass, and the annual Thanksgiving table where the same people sit in the same chairs across decades. Each individual occurrence traces a circle, a closed path that starts and ends in the same place. What turns repetition into a Ritual is what builds up across many circles stacked through time. Year ten of any practice is not year one. The participants have changed, and so has everything around them. The same form of participation returns, but the position has shifted along an axis that the participants couldn’t access when they started. That cumulative structure is a spiral. Hajj makes this literal: the Tawaf around the Kaaba traces a spiraling path, repeated seven times by every pilgrim. The shape of one instance is a circle. The shape of the practice is a spiral. The value is not what gets produced. It is what gets renewed: identity, belonging, continuity. Rituals score highest on identity because the activity becomes part of how people describe themselves. They are also the most resistant to optimization. The moment you try to make a Ritual more efficient, you have subverted what it is for.

Hybrid by Default

Most interesting participation is hybridized. The Swarm that becomes a Cluster over time. The Loop that develops Ritual properties as it matures. Other combinations show up constantly across the atlas, and the most useful classification names the dominant structure and the direction of drift, rather than forcing the case into a single box.

This is true of forms in nature, too. Trees are not pure branches. They are branches with a hexagonal cellular structure inside the bark and helical growth in the pith. The pure forms are useful as analytical primitives. The actual organisms are always combinations.

Moving Forward

What I am working out, in real time and with the help of an atlas that keeps expanding, is something close to this: Participation behaves more like the natural world than the dashboard culture of modern marketing has been able to display. It has structure. It has form. The forms have rules, and the rules determine behaviors.

The brands and institutions that build participation systems without understanding the morphology might be missing an opportunity.

The morphology itself is asymmetric in ways that may turn out to matter. Seven of the eight shapes are spatial structures you can diagram at a single moment. Ritual is the exception: a form that exists only across time. That asymmetry is honest about what the data shows, and it may turn out to be the most interesting thing about the taxonomy. The eight shapes may not all be the same kind of thing.

The next question I am following up on is one that the morphology has not yet answered. The shapes explain a lot about how participation behaves. They do not fully explain why some examples of the same shape persist for decades, and others collapse in a season. A Hub can be brittle or surprisingly enduring. A Cluster can fragment quickly or hold together for generations. The shape sets the conditions for what is possible. Something else determines whether the participation keeps turning.

I have a working hypothesis. The shape that turns participation into something self-sustaining is itself a shape, and the engineering of that shape is the spine of Wired to Participate, which releases in October.

For now, what I can say with reasonable confidence is that participation has shapes, the shapes are real, and that a new layer for participatory design might be in the process of revealing itself.

TLDR: The internet’s foundational media logic is breaking. Here’s what’s happening:

• Bots outnumber humans: 51% of web traffic in 2024 was automated, with sophisticated AI bots now mimicking human behavior at scale

• The core assumption fails: Digital advertising was built on the idea that impressions equal people. That’s no longer reliably true

• AI creates abundance everywhere: Every traditional signal (views, clicks, engagement, dwell time) can now be manufactured at zero marginal cost

• Only one thing remains scarce: Verified human presence. The actual person making a decision with stakes, in real time, in front of others

• Money is already moving: Marketing budgets are shifting toward live events, owned communities, and verified creators where proof of humanity is built into the structure, not the analytics report

• The new threshold: The only question that matters is whether a human originated the action and whether you can prove it. Everything else will be priced to zero

The industry spent 30 years optimizing for attention. The next 30 will be spent proving whose attention is real.

As long as there has been media, the entire business has run on a single question: how do we get in front of people?

The question hasn’t changed. The answer is breaking.

The infrastructure built around it is still operational. The trading desks. The attribution models. The impression-based pricing. The agency compensation structures keyed to media spend. Every assumption inside media operations traces back to attention being scarce and reach being the asset. For decades, brands paid for impressions because impressions were proof that a person had looked at something they otherwise would not have seen.

That logic is breaking quietly, and almost no one in the industry has updated their behavior.

THE LONG PATTERN OF SCARCITY

Technology has always organized itself around scarcity.

Sometimes it creates the scarcity. Sometimes it exploits one that already existed. Either way, the scarce resource is where value accumulates, and the technologies that win are the ones that figure out which scarcity will matter next.

Steam and the factory created scarcity around capital and coordinated labor. Broadcast created scarcity around airwaves and prime time: three networks, a finite number of evening hours, and an entire advertising economy organized around buying access to those windows. Digital created scarcity around attention. Inventory became infinite, distribution became frictionless, and the only resource that could not be manufactured at scale was the willingness of a person to look at something. The platforms that captured and resold that willingness became the largest companies in the world.

In every case, abundance somewhere produced scarcity somewhere else. The pattern held.

AI breaks the pattern by accelerating it past its own limits.

It is producing abundance everywhere at once. Content is infinite. Engagement is generatable. Personas are manufacturable. The signals the industry has historically priced as scarce can now be produced at zero marginal cost: views, clicks, dwell time, and sustained behavioral patterns. There is no remaining bottleneck inside the digital system that AI cannot saturate.

Which means the next scarcity has to come from outside the system.

The thing AI cannot generate is the actual human on the other end of it. The body in the room. The person making a decision in real time, with stakes, in front of other people who will know if they are faking. That presence is the new bottleneck. The only input the technology can’t simulate, scale, or replace.

AI IS THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY THAT MAKES HUMAN PRESENCE MORE SCARCE

For two centuries, technology has made human labor more abundant. AI runs the other direction. The digital substrate it operates inside is being saturated with signals that no human originated, and in a media economy built on signals, the only signal that retains value is the one that proves a human was actually there.

Call it proof of humanity.

The phrase sounds technical because most of the work being done on it has been technical. Bot detection. Identity verification. Cloudflare blocking AI scrapers. The detection-and-evasion arms race that runs in the background of every major platform.

Those tools matter. They are also the perimeter of something much larger.

The real shift is operational. The silent assumption that made the old media business work, that an impression equaled a person, is no longer reliably true. Once that assumption fails, every system stacked on top of it starts to wobble in ways that are difficult to see from the inside.

The numbers have been quietly arriving for those who care to read them. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, the firm’s twelfth annual study of automated traffic across its global network, found that for the first time in a decade, automated traffic surpassed human activity on the internet. Fifty-one percent of all web traffic in 2024 was non-human. Bad bots alone, the kind specifically engineered to mimic human behavior for fraudulent purposes, accounted for thirty-seven percent. The remaining human share has been declining for six consecutive years.

The trajectory matters more than the headline. The synthetic share registered in 2024 was crude by the standards of what is coming. The systems generating bot activity in 2026 were trained on human behavior at scale and have become very good at imitation. The signals the industry has historically used to filter for humans are now generatable: cursor movement, dwell time, and scroll velocity.

What sits underneath the modern internet is a layer of activity that is no longer being produced for any human to read or watch. It is being produced because optimization systems demand it, because other optimization systems consume it, and because the loops between them have become an economy of their own.

That economy can sustain itself for a long time before anyone with a P&L notices.

THE DASHBOARD LIES QUIETLY

Inside a marketing operation, this does not arrive as a crisis. It arrives as a slow disconnect.

Numbers that pencil cleanly on the dashboard but produce nothing in the field. Conversion lifts that show up in the model but not in the warehouse. Engagement rates climbing while the brand teams admit, in rooms with the door closed, that they cannot tell whether anything is actually moving. The instruments are calibrated. They’re monitoring the wrong signals.

Optimization engines do not care whether the data is human. They optimize against whatever signal they receive. If conversion behavior in the dataset is half synthetic, the model will confidently learn to drive more of it. The lookalike audiences will model audiences that do not exist. A creative test validated by bot traffic will greenlight a bad ad. The more sophisticated the operation, the deeper the contamination, because automation amplifies whatever it is fed.

The brands with the most reliable signal turn out to be the ones with the simplest measurement. That is an inversion the industry was not built for.

I’ve sat with senior performance marketers who describe the gap as a feeling first. The numbers say one thing, the gut says another, and the gut is right more often than they will admit out loud. Eventually, someone in the room asks the quiet question: whether the underlying data is even describing real people.

That question, asked once, changes how a marketing operation thinks about every input it receives.

PARTICIPATION AS PROOF

This is where participation stops being a soft word for engagement and starts being the only signal worth measuring.

Participation is proof of humanity expressed through action. A click can be produced by a script. A view can be paid for. A follower can be rented. The deeper forms of participation are harder to fake. Entering an experience, contributing to it, responding in real time to what other participants do, being shaped by what unfolds: that pattern degrades quickly when the underlying agent is not human, because the agent has no body, no history, no stake in the outcome, no social cost for getting it wrong.

Bot networks can simulate shallow participation. The simulation breaks down fast as the participation deepens. Real-time decisions in a shared environment, in front of other people who recognize coherence and incoherence, generate a signal that machines have not yet learned to forge well.

Anyone who has trained in jiujitsu has felt the cleaner version of this. You can roll with someone for thirty seconds and know whether they’ve had actual time on the mat. The pressure is wrong. The timing is wrong. The body lies to itself in ways that other bodies have already learned to read. A pretender in jiujitsu and a practitioner of jiujitsu register as different things almost immediately, and not because of any single signal you could name. It is the absence of the lived weight.

Real participation has weight. The simulator does not. The closer you stand to it, the easier it is to read the difference.

THE ORIGINATOR TEST

The objection I get is always some version of the same one. AI is going to participate too. Agents will comment, attend, coordinate, and even create. How is that different from a bot?

The answer is the originator.

A person orchestrating an agent is participating. The agent is a tool: the way a microphone is a tool, the way a phone is a tool, the way any extension is a tool. The intent originates with the human. The chain of action terminates in a body somewhere with social context and consequence. That is participation, even when most of the execution is automated.

A bot operating without any human originator is a different thing entirely. Nothing is being expressed. No one is participating. The activity is the byproduct of an optimization process that has no relationship to the people the activity is being measured against.

The threshold is not whether AI is involved but whether a human is.

Everything downstream of that distinction reorganizes once you accept it. Verification systems become provenance systems. Engagement metrics get audited for their chain of custody. The question every marketer learns to ask, on every signal, becomes some version of: did a person originate this, at what level of involvement, and through what structure?

WHERE THE MONEY IS ALREADY MOVING

The brands that figure this out a few years before the industry does will be the ones that move budget while it still costs nothing to move. They will fund the environments where the human signal is structural rather than promised. Direct community. Owned audience. Verified creators with real followings. Live events. Membership. The kinds of placements where proof is built into the architecture and not appended to the report.

The early evidence is already showing up in the spend data. Event Marketer’s EventTrack 2025 found that roughly three-quarters of Fortune 1000 marketers were increasing experiential investment heading into 2026. The trade press has been calling this an experiential rebound, which might be underplaying what is really happening. It is an early proof-of-human reallocation, even if the marketers doing it cannot yet articulate why their gut is pulling them there.

The most visible evidence is at festivals.

Coachella activations got materially better this year. Not incrementally better. Visibly better, in a way that anyone walking the grounds could feel. Adweek, reporting from on the ground at the festival, observed that the standout activations “felt less like marketing moments and more like experiences built around festival-goers.” The brands that showed up showed up with effort. Pinterest, a platform whose entire business is capturing attention through phones, built Coachella’s first-ever phone-free activation, asking guests to lock their devices away on entry in exchange for a more present, analog experience. It is the kind of choice that looks like marketing self-sabotage against a CPM model and looks rational against a model that prices verified human presence at a premium.

Which raises the question worth asking out loud. The Super Bowl has been the cathedral of impression-based advertising for forty years, the purest expression of the old logic: maximum simultaneous attention, premium pricing, the ads themselves becoming the cultural ritual. The model worked because the audience was real, the moment was singular, and proof of human was incidentally guaranteed by the format.

The question is whether the budget that has flowed there for two generations starts redirecting toward environments like Coachella. Live festivals. Cultural moments where participation is structural. Places where the brand is not interrupting the experience but is part of it, and where the proof of humanity is not something the analytics team has to argue for after the fact.

Live sports work this way. Newsletters with verified subscribers work this way. Creator partnerships with audiences that talk back work this way. Direct community works this way. None of these are new categories. What is new is the pricing logic.

PROOF OF HUMAN AS INVENTORY

Once you accept that proof of humanity is the new underlying scarcity, the consequence is that it becomes an inventory class.

The industry already organizes its buying around inventory classes. Network television was its own class. Programmatic display was its own class. Connected TV is its own class. Each one carries its own pricing logic, its own buyers, its own measurement standards, its own seat at the upfronts. They got organized as classes because they shared an underlying signal type and could be priced against each other.

Proof of humanity inventory will get organized the same way. The shared signal type is verified as a human originator at a usable level of involvement. The placements that clear that threshold will trade against each other; the placements that do not will trade against a different and rapidly cheapening pool. Live, opt-in, community-anchored, creator-led, membership-bounded environments belong in the first pool. Most programmatic display, most synthetic-amplifiable social, most reach-extended digital belongs in the second.

This is the part that the industry has not built the language for yet.

When it does, the consequences will be structural. Pricing changes, because proof-of-humanity inventory commands a premium that the old impression-based math cannot generate. Planning changes, because plans get built around human density rather than reach curves. Compensation changes, because billing against verified-human signal looks different from billing against impression volume. Measurement changes, because every metric becomes a provenance metric, weighted by the chain of custody on the underlying signal.

The naming has not happened yet. It is going to.

THE NEW LINE IN THE SYSTEM

This is not a moral argument about AI. The synthetic internet is not going away. AI will continue to extend what people can do, including the work of participating, and that is fine.

The threshold is the originator. Above it: proof. Below it: noise. Everything that happens inside marketing for the next decade will eventually have to clear that line or be priced as if it does not.

The industry spent thirty digital years optimizing for attention.

The next thirty will be spent proving whose attention is real.

Everything that cannot prove a human will be priced to zero. Everything that can will be the only thing worth buying.

3 of 3. Part One: The Campfire was Never Meant to be Interrupted. Part Two: A Gift to the Story.

Every creative brief in advertising starts with some version of these basic questions: Who is the audience? What do we want them to feel? What do we want them to do?

They are not bad questions. But they frame the audience as a target. They position the brand outside the experience, looking in, calculating the most efficient angle of interruptive entry.

There is a different question. One that most briefs never ask because it was an impossibility.

What role does this brand play in this world?

It is an entirely different approach, and one that is now possible. But it requires real creativity, just a different creativity than the industry has been trained on. Learning to adapt and become fluent in a world that is not yours.

This is the difference between adjacency and fluency.

Not what the brand wants from the audience. What does the audience’s world need from the brand? What could the brand contribute that would make the audience’s experience richer rather than shorter? What would a person who loves this story, this game, this community, this moment, actually want to receive?

That question invites a different kind of craft. Genuine curiosity about the world a brand is entering, rather than familiarity with the demographic profile of the people inside it.

Adjacency is what contextual advertising has always promised. Put a car ad near automotive content. Put a travel ad near vacation planning. Put a sports drink near the game. The logic is that proximity to relevant content increases receptivity. And it does, marginally. But adjacency is still an interruption. It is still someone walking up to the campfire with their own agenda. The only difference is that the agenda is loosely related to the story already being told.

Fluency is rarer than adjacency and harder to counterfeit. It means understanding the rules of a world well enough to operate inside it. Not just to be near it, but to belong to it.

A brand that is fluent in a story-world knows what that world values. It knows what its textures are, what its characters want, what its audience would recognize as native versus foreign. It can make something that feels like it came from inside the world rather than parachuted in from the outside.

Most brands have never had to develop that fluency before because the economic model of interruption did not require it. You bought time. You ran your spot. The audience either watched or looked away. Fluency was not the variable. Reach was.

When AI removes the production constraint, and the cost of making content calibrated to a specific story-world has dropped to nearly nothing, reach stops being the variable that matters most. You can reach anyone with almost anything for almost nothing. The new variable is belonging. It goes to brands willing to understand the worlds they want to join.

That is where the creative work actually lives now.

Think about what fluency requires in practice. A brand entering a story-world has to ask questions it has never been asked to ask. The questions stop being about the brand and start being about the world. Not “how do I tell these people about me?” but “how do I fit here, and what could I add?” That shift means setting brand guidelines aside. They were built for broadcast, not belonging. The work is determining a connective opportunity. Is there something the audience of this world actually needs that the brand can genuinely provide?

That last question is the hardest. Because it requires honesty about what the brand actually is, not just what it wants to project. The reality: some worlds are not yours to enter. There is a parallel here used in product sampling: “right people, right place, right time.” That’s a thoughtful approach that can now move beyond one-to-one marketing into mass marketing.

It all comes down to the basic mechanics of narrative. A character who does not fit the world breaks the story. A brand that does not fit the world breaks the spell. And breaking the spell, as the neuroscience makes clear, is not just aesthetically unpleasant. It reverses the very conditions that make the audience receptive in the first place.

This is a different posture than advertising. It is contribution. A brand that takes it seriously stops thinking of itself as a sender and starts thinking of itself as something a world could actually use. It makes things the audience wants. It builds mythology instead of messaging. It adds texture to an experience rather than taxing it.

Until now, that posture has been the exception. It was available only to the handful of brands with the resources and timelines to sustain it. It could not be the model.

What changes now is that the capacity to contribute at the level of the story, in context, at the moment the audience is inside the experience, is no longer reserved for the few. A brand willing to ask the right questions, and willing to develop genuine fluency in the worlds where its audience lives, can now act on that fluency in real time.

The brief changes from: how do we interrupt this audience efficiently?

To: how do we participate in this world honestly?

That is not a small shift. It changes what the creative team is asked to do. It changes what research is for. It changes what success looks like. An impression is no longer the unit. Belonging is.

And belonging, unlike an impression, compounds. A brand that earns its place in a world that people love is not forgotten when the content ends. It becomes part of what the audience carries out of the experience. Not as a message they received, but as a presence they recognized.

That is participation in the oldest sense of the word. Not broadcasting to people. Not even talking with them. But existing inside the same world, contributing to it, being part of what makes it worth returning to.

The campfire was always like this. No one sat around it to consume. They sat around it to share something. To be changed by it together.

For most of advertising’s history, brands sat outside that fire. They interrupted it, or tried to compete with it, or settled for being adjacent to it.

What happens next depends on whether they are willing to learn what it takes to sit inside it.

That requires fluency. Honesty. Genuine curiosity about the story-worlds where people choose to spend their time.

And it requires accepting something humbling: that belonging is not granted because you paid for it. It is earned because you understood the world well enough to add to it. Because the people sitting at that fire looked up when you arrived, and moved over to make room.

The seat at the campfire was always available. Brands now have what they need to show up as someone worth sitting next to.

2 of 3: Yesterday was part one.

The advertising industry is having the wrong argument about AI.

On one side, the advertising old guard warns that machine-generated content will flood the market with cheap, soulless work that degrades the craft. On the other, CFOs and holding company executives see a cost-efficiency revolution and want to know when the headcount reduction begins. Both sides are treating AI as a production tool. A faster, cheaper way to make the same thing they were already making.

Neither side is asking the more interesting question.

If the cost of making content approaches zero, what should we make? And more precisely: for whom?

I wrote recently about what a commercial break actually is. Not in the polite language of media buying, but in the honest language of human experience. It is someone walking up to a spellbinding campfire mid-story and interrupting it with something unrelated. Or worse, trying to out-entertain the story that the audience was already inhabiting. This interruption violates the neurological state that makes storytelling work. It extracts attention from the audience and converts it into revenue for someone else.

That model is not dying because AI arrived. It was already in its death throes. Ad blockers. Skip buttons. Subscription tiers. The audience has been voting with its attention for two decades. AI just makes the ad industry’s next move more urgent.

If, as creators, we no longer have production constraints, the excuse for irrelevance disappears.

Here is the question I’d like to raise instead: If commercials still have to exist, and for now they do, we need to stop asking “how do we interrupt well?” and start asking “how do we stop interrupting entirely?” I believe the answer is found not by removing ads from the equation, but by changing what an ad is allowed to be.

Think about what it means to watch something you are genuinely inside. A show about vampires. Not a procedural, not background television, but the kind of world-built storytelling that transports you. You are in that world. Its rules feel real. Its textures feel inhabited. You have relocated, in the neurological sense, to somewhere specific.

Now a brand appears.

In the current model, what happens is a hard cut. You are pulled out of the vampire world and placed inside a thirty-second story about a truck, or a pharmaceutical, or a fast food item. The truck story has its own visual grammar, its own emotional register, its own agenda. It is not in conversation with where you were. It is competing with it or simply indifferent to it.

What if instead the brand asked a different question?

What does this story-world need? What would feel like a gift to the audience rather than a toll?

I’m not talking about product placement. Product placement is a brand logo sitting in the frame of someone else’s story, hoping proximity does the work. What I am describing is something more intentional. A brand that studies the world it is entering and asks: what can we contribute to this experience? What can we add that the audience would actually want to receive?

If we can make almost anything for almost nothing, that question becomes answerable in ways it never was before.

A brand inside a vampire narrative is not stuck running its standard creative. It can make something that lives in that world. Something that extends the mythology rather than interrupts it. Something that the audience experiences not as an extraction but as an addition. A piece of the world they didn’t have before.

That is a different creative brief. It requires a different relationship between the brand and the story.

The industry term that gets closest to this is contextual advertising, but the current version of that idea is too thin. Contextual today means matching keywords, or placing a hotel ad near travel content, or a running shoe ad near a fitness segment. That is congruence at the category level. What I am envisioning is congruence at the world level. Not just does this ad relate to this content? But does this ad belong in this story? Does it understand the rules of this place? Does it add something that a person who loves this world would actually want to learn about, participate in, or buy?

The brands that have ever done anything close to this did it expensively and rarely. For a stretch, Red Bull pushed beyond sponsoring extreme sports to building the world those sports lived in. They made media, they created characters, they developed mythologies. The product was almost secondary to the story. The people who sought out Red Bull content weren’t interested in an energy drink. They sought that content because Red Bull had become fluent in a world they cared about.

That fluency used to require enormous resources and long time horizons. What changes now is that the barrier to fluency drops dramatically. A brand that can generate contextually appropriate content, calibrated to the specific world a viewer inhabits, at the moment they are inside it, is no longer making ads in the traditional sense. It is making contributions.

That is a different kind of value, and a different kind of relationship.

The audience knows the difference between a brand that understands their world and a brand that wandered into it with a thirty-second spot built for a different context entirely. One feels like a stranger interrupting. The other feels, at its best, like the story got a little bigger.

Currently, the industry argument about AI focuses on what it costs and what it threatens. Those are legitimate concerns. But the more urgent argument is about what it makes possible.

For the first time in the history of commercial storytelling, a brand can afford to ask not just how do I reach this audience, but what does this audience’s narrative world actually need from me?

That question is harder than making cheaper ads. It requires the brand to be genuinely curious about the story it is entering. To understand the rules of the world. To make something that adds rather than extracts. A situation where agencies and creative directors still hold massive relevance.

But it is the only question, in a world where interruption is optional, that leads anywhere worth going.

The campfire was always generous. The storyteller gave something. The audience received it and gave back their full attention. That exchange was never extraction. It was participation.

The brands that figure out how to belong inside that exchange, rather than interrupting it, will not just be more effective. They will be welcomed.

That is a different business entirely.

Tomorrow: what it means for a brand to belong to a world rather than just advertise near it.

1 of 3

Last Monday, I wrote about the physics of pull. This is what happens when you break it.

For most of human history, stories were protected in a very specific way, not by law or by custom, but by something more instinctive than either. When the storyteller spoke, everyone went quiet. No one had to tell them to do it. They did it independently because they wanted to be somewhere else, and the story was the only way to get there.

Bedouins gathered after dinner. Irish seanachaithe commanded silence in village homes. West African Griots spun mythic tales over crackling fires. Every oral tradition on earth treated the listening state as something worth preserving. You entered it deliberately. You were changed by it. And then, when it was over, you came back.

Researchers have a name for what happened inside you during those stories: narrative transportation1. The state where your brain actually relocates. Your heartbeat changes. Your sense of time bends. You are, in the most literal neurological sense, somewhere else. Studies show that people in this state aren’t just entertained. They are genuinely altered, their beliefs and behaviors quietly shifted by what they lived through in the story-world.

Narrative transportation is fragile. If anything breaks the coherence of the experience, the spell breaks. You surface. And what surfaces is a slightly disoriented person who has to rebuild the whole internal architecture from scratch.

Now imagine you are at a campfire. Someone is telling a story. A good one. The kind where the flames feel like punctuation, and nobody moves. You are in it. Enthralled.

And then someone else walks up and interrupts. Not to ask a question about the story. Not to add something to it. They want to tell you about something completely different. Their own thing. Their own agenda. It has nothing to do with where you were or where you were going. They just want a turn.

Or worse: they want to compete. They have their own story, and it’s louder and flashier and designed specifically to pull your attention away from the one you were already exploring. They are not joining the campfire. They are trying to become a better campfire.

That is a commercial break.

Not a metaphor for one. That is exactly what is happening every time.

We built an entire economy on that interruption. I’ve worked inside it for thirty years. I know the logic. Content costs money. Advertising funds content. Viewers get programming for free. There is a genuine exchange buried in there, and for a long time it held.

But watch what happened to the exchange rate.

In the 1970s, a prime-time hour of American television contained about eight minutes of commercials. By 2020, that figure had risen to between sixteen and twenty minutes. A thirty-minute show that once gave you twenty-six minutes of story now gives you nineteen to twenty-two. The content didn’t shrink because stories got shorter. It shrank because the interruption machine demanded more room.

Television writers did not resist the interruptions. They built around them. The breaks were not pauses in the story. They became the structural principle the story was built to serve.

That worked, in its way. Sitcoms and procedurals found their rhythm inside those constraints. Act out. Big moment. Cut. Act back in. Recap. Rebuild. Repeat.

Then streaming arrived and gave creators the ability to design for immersion instead of interruption. The results pushed beyond “good television.” They were a different medium entirely, built on the assumption that the spell would hold, that the viewer would stay inside, that the story could breathe on its own terms.

Streaming exposed something the ad industry had glossed over for decades: The moment you could design for continuous immersion, the interruption became visible as the choice it always was. Not a law of nature, a business model. And now that ad breaks are returning to streaming, the incongruity is sharper than it ever was in broadcast. Viewers know what the alternative feels like. The disconnect is harder to ignore.

Showrunners noticed what they had. And now, as platforms reintroduce ads into streaming, some of them are pushing back hard. Lulu Wang, whose show “Expats” was designed for continuous viewing, said recently that if she had known ad breaks would be inserted, she would have made the show differently. Alan Poul, executive producer of “Tokyo Vice,” said it plainly: “We fought so hard to get rid of commercials.”

That fight is not really about aesthetics. It is about what interruption does to the neurological state that makes storytelling work in the first place.

The research is unambiguous. Placing ads within narrative programming, specifically the kind that truly absorbs viewers, reduces the emotional impact of the ads. Not just the program, though, that is impacted, too. The mechanism being exploited is the same one being destroyed.

The campfire model was never about passive consumption. The story shaped the listener. The listener shaped the story. There was a feedback flow between teller and room that made the whole thing come alive. That exchange had a word. It was called participation.

But the advertising industry looked at it and saw something else: inventory.

So what we built instead was a toll booth at the entrance to the fire. You want the story? First, listen to us. First, look over here. First, let us have thirty seconds of wherever you are going.

The audience tolerated it because they had no other way in.

Now they do.

Tomorrow: what a brand would have to become to be welcomed at the fire instead of posted at the gate.

Spend enough time listening to podcasts and pundits, and you start to notice a pattern. We are surrounded by economies now. The attention economy. The creator economy. The intelligence economy. The trust economy. The experience economy. The ownership economy. The gig economy. The care economy. Every season adds another name to the list, and each new arrival tends to come with the same story: the last one is fading, the new scarcity is ascending, and the world is reorganizing around it.

This is something I felt I had to explore more.

Because the proliferation is real, and most of these terms are pointing at something genuine. But the story underneath them is confusing, and depending on which authority you’re listening to, it gets more so. We seem to talk about these economies in sequence, as if attention gave way to creators, and creators are giving way to intelligence, and history moves in a clean line from one dominant scarcity to the next. That is a timeline projected onto what is actually a network. And the difference between those two maps is not small.

What Makes an Economy Real

The word gets used loosely, but the concept has a structure.

An economy, at its most fundamental, is a system organized around the exchange of something scarce. Three conditions have to hold:

There is a resource that is not available in unlimited supply, There are participants who want that resource, and there are mechanisms for acquiring, exchanging, and capturing it.

Remove any one of those conditions, and you don’t have an economy. You have a trend, a community, maybe a movement. But not an economy.

The financial economy organized itself around capital. The labor economy organized itself around time and skill. These were legible for centuries because the scarcity was obvious and the mechanisms of exchange were formalized.

We built entire civilizations on these foundations because their physics were stable. The value of a dollar followed known laws. The price of a skilled hour rose predictably. Markets could be read, mapped, and anticipated. Then something changed the physics entirely.

What changed is technology.

Technology Does Not Just Create Products. It Creates New Scarcity.

This is the mechanism behind the proliferation.

Every significant technological shift reveals or manufactures a new form of scarcity. And wherever genuine scarcity exists, a marketplace forms. When a marketplace has enough structure and volume, it earns the name “economy.”

The internet made distribution essentially free. What became scarce in its wake was attention. Platforms, publishers, and advertisers organized themselves around capturing and trading that attention, pricing it in CPMs and optimizing for it algorithmically. The attention economy is not a metaphor. It has pricing, arbitrage, supply and demand curves, and dominant players who have accumulated extraordinary power by mastering it.

The rise of social platforms and creator tools made it possible for individuals to build audiences and monetize them directly. What became scarce then was authentic relationships between a creator and an audience that trusted them. The creator economy formed around this, with its own infrastructure, revenue models, and market dynamics.

Now, AI systems are advancing to the point where they can reason, synthesize, and recommend at scale. The scarce resource shifting here is not information itself, but the ability to act on it well, fast, and repeatedly. The intelligence economy is forming around this new hierarchy, even if the name is still settling.

The pattern holds. New technology. New scarcity. New economy.

These Are Not Layers. They Are Nodes.

This is where most of the popular discourse goes wrong.

When people frame these economies as sequential, the attention economy giving way to the creator economy giving way to the intelligence economy, they impose a timeline that does not exist. The financial economy did not go dormant when the attention economy arrived. The attention economy is not winding down because AI is ascendant. They are all running simultaneously, influencing each other in every direction, with no clean hierarchy between them.

A better way to see this is as a network of nodes, each one an economy organized around its own scarce resource, each one connected to the others, each one growing or contracting based on technological relevance and commercial activity at any given moment.

The creator economy node is being reshaped right now, squeezed by platform dependency and AI-generated supply pressure. The intelligence economy node is expanding rapidly as capital and attention flood into it. The financial economy, the oldest node in the network, absorbs and amplifies everything that happens around it.

Nodes do not replace each other. They coexist, influence each other, and change in size. What looks like one economy “replacing” another is usually just a node gaining enough mass to become visible in the cultural conversation for the first time.

This matters because it changes the question worth asking. Not “which economy is next” but “which node is underbuilt, undervalued, and underconnected to the rest of the network.”

The Most Connected Node

Across every economy in this network, people are being modeled as targets. Viewers. Users. Subscribers. Decision-makers optimized for conversion.

What they are not being modeled as are participants.

Participation is something categorically different from attention and consumption. It is the active investment of a person’s identity, effort, creativity, or voice in something beyond themselves. It cannot be automated at scale or manufactured without consent. It is the most human signal in the network.

And it has been present inside every other economy without being named as a resource.

When open source communities built Linux, that was participation. When fans organized around a sports team and created a culture the founders never imagined, that was participation. When a brand ran a campaign that invited people in rather than broadcasting messages at them, and the results outperformed everything else in the media plan, that was participation.

The Participation Economy Was Always There

The Participation Economy is not emerging. It has existed as long as humanity, because participation is how humans are wired. Every durable cultural institution, religion, sport, craft, tribe, runs on participation. Not audience, or viewership, but active involvement.

What is changing is that the tools for participation are becoming frictionless, and its commercial infrastructure is finally being built.

AI removes skill barriers. A person who could not code, design, compose, or distribute now can. Platforms have removed distribution barriers. What once required a publisher, label, or network can now happen from a phone. Communities have removed coordination barriers. Groups that once required geography, budgets, or institutions can now organize around ideas at the speed of a conversation.

The cost of participation is collapsing toward zero. The scale of participation is expanding toward everyone.

What makes the participation node distinctive in this network is that it connects to all of the others. Every other economy runs at a higher level of value when participation is active inside it. Attention deepens when it becomes participation. The creator economy becomes durable when audiences participate rather than consume. The intelligence economy becomes meaningful when humans are using it rather than being used by it. Participation is not the next economy. It is the most connected one, and it is only now gaining the commercial infrastructure to match its actual scale.

What This Means

AI will commoditize information. Agents will optimize decisions. The intelligence node will keep growing until those capabilities are table stakes, and then it will stabilize like every economy before it.

The proliferation will continue. Every new technology will surface a new scarcity, attract participants, and generate mechanisms for exchange. And another economy will earn its name. The network of nodes will keep growing.

Over time, some nodes will rise and plateau. Some will be absorbed into larger ones. The intelligence economy is ascending now with capital flooding in and attention following close behind. Give it a decade, and it will be as legible and as assumed as the financial economy, the new infrastructure everyone builds on top of, without calling it by name.

What no technology can manufacture is the will to participate. The choice to invest effort, voice, identity, creativity in something that exists beyond the self. That capacity is not scarce because of any technological constraint. It is scarce because it is irreducibly human. And it has been present, unnamed, inside every economy that has ever mattered.

That is the only node no one can automate.

Think about a friend who only ever asks for things.

They might be magnetic. Wildly popular, endlessly charming, genuinely exciting to be around. On the surface the relationship feels valuable. But every interaction follows the same pattern: they need something. Your time, your attention, your recommendation, your money, your presence at their event. They rarely ask how you are, and when they do they never seem to actually care. They don’t remember anything you told them last time. They’re not exactly using you … it’s subtler than that. They just never involve you, never invite you in, never make you feel like your presence changes anything for them.

You probably still reach out, spend time with them. Habit is powerful. But you know exactly what they are.

And you would never go to bat for them.

There’s a conceptual twin of this personality type, and in software development it’s called technical debt. When developers choose the fast solution over the right one, they accrue debt. The code works for now, but the shortcut taken in year one becomes the constraint that limits options in year three. The hack shipped to meet a deadline becomes the legacy system that consumes resources for years. The insidious part is that technical debt doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates silently, compounding in the background, until the day the cost of fixing it exceeds the cost of everything built on top of it.

Every brand also carries a version of this. I call it extraction debt.

Extraction debt doesn’t show up until the moment your brand needs to cash in on trust it never earned.

It’s the accumulated cost of every question you didn’t ask, every voice you didn’t invite, every relationship you treated as a transaction. It doesn’t show up on any balance sheet. It doesn’t announce itself in any dashboard. But it compounds silently, in the background, in the slowly eroding expectations of the people you’re supposed to be serving.

The Seduction of Extraction

The extractive model persists because it’s controllable, and control feels like strategy.

A campaign has a brief. The brief gets approved. The creative gets reviewed. The media plan gets optimized. A transaction happens. The data justifies the spend. Every variable is accounted for, every stakeholder has signed off, and if it underperforms there’s a process to point to.

In this model, everyone involved can justify their role, too. The strategist built the framework. The planner bought the media. The analyst measured the results. The whole machine runs cleanly and produces a predictable return: reach, impressions, conversions. Numbers that make sense in a quarterly report. Nobody gets fired for work that follows the rules.

Participation doesn’t offer this. The output is messier. You can’t map every variable in advance. When something unpredictable emerges from genuine community engagement, and it will, there’s no approved process to blame. So brands keep choosing extraction. Not because it’s working better. Because it’s defensible.

Control masquerades as strategy. Predictable ROI masquerades as effectiveness.

In nature, we know what sustained extraction produces: depleted soil, collapsed fisheries, exhausted resources. The same dynamic runs through customer relationships, just more slowly, with less visible damage, until the damage is severe. You can extract attention, extract data, extract purchase behavior for years while the underlying relationship quietly hollows out.

Everything looks fine on the dashboard. Underneath the dashboard, the extraction debt is compounding.

The Debt Inventory

The debt isn’t abstract. It accumulates in specific, recognizable ways.

Every time a customer writes something, positive or negative, and receives no acknowledgment, they recalibrate their expectations downward. Do it long enough and they stop writing entirely. The debt is a silent audience that has disengaged because engagement was never reciprocated.

Every time you ask for feedback and nothing visibly changes, you teach customers that, in the realm of your brand, participation is theater. They spent social capital on a brand that didn’t value their input. The debt you incur for that exchange is a population of customers who will never participate again because they’ve already learned that nothing happens when they do.

Think of a brand that ran a viral UGC contest, collected thousands of user stories, then went silent. No reposts, no thank yous, no follow-ups. Months later, when they needed advocates during a crisis, their inbox was empty. That’s extraction debt arriving as earned-media bankruptcy.

Then there’s the untended community. Most brands built a social presence because everyone else was doing it, accruing an audience without ever deciding what that audience was for. With no participation strategy, the community becomes a cost center by default: generating work, absorbing resources, generating no clear return. It looks like overhead because it was never designed to be anything else.

Meanwhile, the customers who love what you make are finding each other anyway, in forums and groups and subreddits, building their own narratives about you without you in the room. That’s the real debt. Not the budget line. A parallel universe where your story is being written, and you’re not holding the pen.

When the Bill Arrives

The debt doesn’t take fifteen years to hurt you. It takes fifteen years to become terminal.

It waits for the moment a new CMO decides this is the year the brand finally builds community. For the product launch that needs real advocates, not paid ones. For the cultural moment that calls for something authentic; a genuine invitation extended to people who have been broadcast at for years. The team builds something open. Something honest. They mean it this time.

And the response is silence.

Not hostility. Something harder to fix: indifference. Customers who were never invited to participate have simply stopped expecting to be asked. Each extractive year quietly recalibrates what the audience believes about you. Not consciously, but structurally. Early on, the damage is survivable. A campaign underperforms, a launch falls flat, the brief gets adjusted and the spend goes up. But the expectation doesn’t reset. It compounds.

By the time fifteen years have passed, an entire generation of customers has grown up knowing your brand as nothing but a broadcast. And they didn’t decide not to trust you. They simply never had a reason to start.

That’s when the bill becomes terminal. Not because recovery is impossible, but because the cost of recovery now exceeds the will of any single leadership team to pay it. Turnarounds require years of unrewarded effort on the part of the brand before any metric moves. Boards lose patience. CMOs get replaced. The new brief arrives: drive growth now. And the cycle continues.

The silence in the room, when the team finally tries something real, is not a campaign problem. It’s the accumulated sound of a relationship that was never built.

Paying It Down

The best time to stop accruing extraction debt was ten years ago. The second-best time is today.

Not because a new campaign fixes everything. Because the debt compounds daily, and every day of continued extraction raises the eventual cost of repair.

Stop the bleeding first. Answer the comments. Acknowledge feedback even when you can’t act on it. You cannot begin depositing into a relationship you’re still actively withdrawing from.

Then start small. One real conversation is worth more than a thousand pieces of broadcast content. Find a hundred customers who want to talk and actually talk to them. The scale comes later. The trust has to come first.

Measure what you’ve been ignoring. Your dashboards measure extraction: reach, impressions, conversion rates. None of that tells you whether the relationship is healthy. Start tracking the ratio of how often you ask customers to do something for you, versus how often you ask them to tell you something about their own experiences or opinions or needs. What you measure is what you manage, and right now most brands are managing extraction without knowing it.

Accept the timeline. Extraction debt took years to accrue, and it’ll take years to pay off. Any strategy that requires visible ROI in ninety days isn’t paying down debt. It’s refinancing it.

What Kind of Friend Do You Want to Be?

Here’s the thing about that friend who only ever asks for things: they’re not happy with the dynamic you share either.

The relationship they’ve built is wide and shallow. Lots of people know them. Nobody really knows them. Their world is wide but weightless. They have reach but no resonance. When something goes wrong, nobody shows up. When they need real advocacy, they discover the difference between an audience and a community.

The brands that pay down extraction debt aren’t just fixing a business problem. They’re making a conscious decision about the kind of relationship they actually want to have with people. Whether they want customers who tolerate them or people who genuinely care what happens to them. Whether they want transactions or trust.

The friend who asks how you are and means it. Who remembers what you said last time. Who makes you feel like your presence changes something. That’s who you go to bat for.

That’s the brand worth building.

Every brand carries extraction debt. The only variable is whether you’re willing to stop adding to it. Today. Not in the next planning cycle, not after the next CMO arrives to inherit the silence.

The friend who only asks doesn’t get to be surprised when no one shows up. Neither do you.

In 1996, a guy in Topeka built a website dedicated entirely to his hamster. It had a visitor counter, a MIDI file that auto-played when you landed on the page, and a guestbook where strangers left messages like “cool hamster.” It served no commercial purpose. It solved no problem. It was glorious.

That same year, a web ring connected fourteen sites about medieval swordcraft. Someone built a page that was just a single animated GIF of a dancing baby on a black background. Another person created a choose-your-own-adventure story using nothing but hyperlinks. The internet was a playground with no supervisor and no business model, and people were building things for the purest reason imaginable: because they suddenly could.

We forget this. We talk about the internet now like it was always destined to become Google and Amazon and Meta. But before the compression came, there was this extraordinary window of creative anarchy. Regular people, many of whom had no technical background beyond a library book on HTML, were putting pieces of themselves online for the first time in human history. The web was personal, strange, sometimes ugly, and completely alive.

Then it got tidied up. Platforms emerged. The wild web was organized into feeds and search results and walled gardens. The energy didn’t disappear, but it got channeled. Consolidated. Monetized. The hamster site went dark. Facebook became a verb.

The App Store Gold Rush

Apple launched the App Store in July 2008, and the whole cycle restarted.

Suddenly, anyone with an idea and a developer could put software on millions of phones. And what did people build? A flashlight app (your phone’s screen just turned white). An app called “I Am Rich” that cost $999.99 and did absolutely nothing except prove you’d spent $999.99. An app called “Yo” that lets you send the word “Yo” to your friends. That’s it. That was the whole app. It raised $1.5 million in venture funding.

People made apps that turned your phone into a virtual lighter. Apps that made fart sounds. Apps that let you pop bubble wrap on your screen forever. A developer created “Hold On,” a game where you just held your finger on the screen for as long as possible. Someone built “Nothing,” which was, true to its name, an app that did nothing at all.

It was absurd. It was wonderful. It was humans doing what humans always do when you hand them a new creative tool: playing with it like kids who just discovered finger paint.

And then, just like the web before it, it compressed. The app economy matured. Investors wanted unit economics. Users settled into their 30 essential apps. The average person uses about 30 apps a month, but spends nearly all their time in the same handful. The playground became a strip mall.

We’re Standing at the Edge of Wave Three

Right now, something is shifting again. AI-assisted building tools, no-code platforms, and what people are calling “vibe coding” have dropped the barrier to creation to its lowest point ever.

I know because I just lived it. A few weeks ago, I built an app. Not a mockup. Not a prototype. A functioning application. I’m a strategist, not an engineer. I’ve never written production code in my life. But I sat down with an AI coding tool, described what I wanted, iterated on it conversationally, and had something working in a weekend. I posted about the experience on LinkedIn, and the response was immediate and intense. People were fascinated, skeptical, curious, excited, and nervous.

That reaction told me everything. We’re in the opening minutes of the experimental phase again. And if history is any guide, what comes next is going to be beautifully weird.

The Width of the Wave

Each cycle has expanded the creator pool dramatically.

The early web required you to learn HTML. You had to understand file structures, FTP uploads, and maybe some rudimentary CSS. The creator pool was millions.

The app era required a developer, or the resources to hire one, plus knowledge of platform guidelines, app store submissions, and software architecture. The creator pool was smaller than it looked, but it produced more polished output.

This wave? The barrier to entry is an idea and the ability to describe it in plain language. The creator pool is, for the first time, essentially everyone with access to robust AI tools.

Think about what that means for the experimental phase. When a few million people had access to web publishing tools, we got hamster fan sites and dancing baby GIFs. When a few hundred thousand developers had access to app distribution, we got Yo and iFart and Hold On. When billions of people have access to AI-powered building tools?

The volume of weird, creative, pointless, personal, passionate, bizarre, delightful things about to come into existence is hard to fathom. We’re going to see apps built for an audience of one. Tools that solve problems so specific they border on absurd. Creative experiments that make the dancing baby look conservative. Someone is going to build a fully functional app for tracking how many times their cat sits in a specific chair, and it’s going to be perfect, and it’s going to matter to exactly one person, and that’s going to be enough.

The Fun Part

The experimental phase is the fun part. Every time. And we keep forgetting that.

We’re so conditioned to evaluate new technology through the lens of scale, monetization, and disruption that we skip past the actual magic: the moment when people pick up a new tool and start making things that nobody asked for. The phase when voluntary participation is feral and hilarious.

Nobody asked for a hamster website. Nobody asked for an app that just says “Yo.” Nobody asked for the weird little vibe-coded passion projects that are starting to pop up everywhere right now. They exist because creation is a fundamental human impulse, and when you lower the barrier, that impulse floods through the gap.

This is what I keep coming back to in my work on participation. We talk about engagement, about users, about audiences. But what actually drives people is the desire to make something. To put a piece of themselves into the world. To participate in the act of creation, not just the consumption of what others have created.

Every technology wave proves this. Give people tools, and they don’t sit around calculating ROI. They build hamster shrines and fart apps and things that make their friends laugh. The commercial layer always comes later. The first instinct is always play.

But Will It Compress the Same Way?

This is the question I find most interesting. Because twice now, we’ve watched a creative explosion get consolidated into a handful of dominant platforms. The wild web became Big Tech’s internet. The app gold rush became the App Store duopoly. The pattern suggests that this wave will compress too, with a few AI-powered platforms absorbing all that chaotic creative energy into tidy, monetizable channels.

Maybe. But I think something different might happen this time.

In previous waves, the compression was driven by distribution. You needed Google to be found on the web. You needed the App Store to reach mobile users. Distribution was the bottleneck, and whoever controlled it controlled the wave.

But when AI makes building trivially easy, distribution changes shape. You don’t necessarily need a platform to reach people when you can build something tailored for a specific community, a specific need, a specific group of twelve people who care about the same obscure thing you do. The organizing layer might not be a corporation. It might be communities themselves, curating and sharing and building on each other’s creations.

If that happens, the next phase will look less like consolidation and more like coordination. Less like five companies winning and more like thousands of communities thriving. The energy doesn’t get funneled up into platforms. It gets distributed across networks of people who are all participating together.

I don’t know if that’s what will happen. But for the first time in three waves, the conditions exist for it. And that alone makes this moment worth paying very close attention to.

For Now, Enjoy the Weird

We’re in the opening act. The dancing baby era of AI-powered creation. A few years from now, we’ll look back at this period the way we look back at GeoCities and the App Store gold rush: with nostalgia for the chaos, the playfulness, the willingness to build something just to see if you could.

So if you’ve been curious about vibe coding, or no-code tools, or building something with AI that nobody asked you to build, now is the time. Not because it’ll scale. Not because it’ll make money. Because the experimental phase is the best phase, and we only get to live through it once per wave.

Go build your hamster site.

A quick ask: Have you vibe-coded something? Built an app, a tool, a weird little experiment using AI or no-code tools? I want to see it. Reply to this post or drop me a note with what you made, why you made it, and how it felt to make it. I’m collecting stories from the experimental phase in real time, and the weirder the better. Future issues of The Participation Exchange will feature the best submissions. Show me your hamster sites.

Listen to how fans talk after a game and you'll notice a quirk of grammar…"We won." "We got robbed." "We need to fix our defense." "We're going all the way this year."

We. Not "they"—the athletes who actually played. Not "the team"—the organization that employs those athletes. We. First person plural. As if the person in the jersey, watching from a barstool three thousand miles from the stadium, had personally contributed to the outcome.

This is ridiculous. And it's one of the most important things happening in modern life.

The Tribalism We Can't Escape

Humans spent 99% of their evolutionary history in small tribal bands of fifty to a hundred people. Survival depended on the group. Your tribe was your identity, your protection, your purpose. The neurological wiring that made tribal belonging feel essential was genetically selected for over hundreds of thousands of years.

Then we invented agriculture, cities, nations, globalization. The tribal bands dissolved. We became individuals in mass society, anonymous, atomized, disconnected from the small groups that our brains had evolved to need. But the wiring didn't change. The brain that needed tribal belonging in the Pleistocene still needs it now. It's looking for a band to join, a group to identify with, a "we" to be part of. The need is so deep it feels like hunger.

Sports feed this hunger.

When you become a fan, a real fan, not a casual observer, you're joining a tribe. You're adopting its colors, learning its history, pitting yourself against its enemies. You're participating in something larger than yourself that persists across time. Something that gives you a "we" to belong to.

The jersey isn't clothing. It's a tribal marker. It says: these are my people. This is who I am. The face paint, the chants, the rituals … these are tribal technologies, adapted for stadium scale. We haven't outgrown tribalism. We've just found new tribes.

Participation Without Production

What makes sports fandom genuinely interesting as participation: the fans don't play.

This seems like disqualification. How can you be a participant if you're not on the field? How can you claim "we won" when your contribution was drinking beer and yelling at a screen?

But participation has never required direct action. It requires investment, identity, and exchange.

Investment: Real fans invest. Time, hours watching games, following news, analyzing stats. Money, tickets, merchandise, subscriptions, travel. Emotion, the mood swings tied to wins and losses, the genuine grief when seasons end badly. The investment is real, even if it doesn't influence outcomes.

Identity: The team becomes part of how you understand yourself. "I'm a Cubs fan" isn't a statement about entertainment preferences. It's an identity claim, like "I'm a Catholic" or "I'm a New Yorker." The team's story becomes your story. Its history becomes your history. Its rivals become your rivals.

Exchange: This is the part that's easy to miss. Fandom looks like one-way consumption, the fan receives entertainment and gives money. But the exchange is richer. Fans give attention, which creates value for broadcasters and sponsors. Fans give atmosphere, the roar of the stadium, the energy that players feed on. Fans give continuity, carrying the team's identity across generations, through ownership changes and stadium moves. The team needs the fans as surely as the fans need the team.

This is participation without playing. And it might be the purest form of participation there is: contribution without any expectation of direct reward.

What sports reveal here is not an exception. It's a blueprint for how any brand can create genuine participation.

Meaning Needs Structure

Something is happening in modern life that sociologists call the "meaning crisis." Traditional sources of meaning like religion, community, and stable employment have weakened. People are freer than ever to construct their own identities, but freedom without structure produces anxiety. The question "what is my life about?" haunts people in ways it didn't when the answers were provided by tradition.

Sports step into this vacuum.

A team gives you a narrative to follow. A season gives you a rhythm: anticipation, competition, resolution. A championship gives you a telos, a goal, something to hope for that structures time. The off-season gives you fallow, a rest before the cycle begins again.

For people struggling to find purpose, and there are many, a sports team can provide it. Not as a substitute for "real" meaning, but as a genuine source of it. The community around the team, the rituals of fandom, the emotional arc of the season: these are meaning-making structures as legitimate as any other. They create real belonging, inspire real enthusiasm, and offer those who are lost a simple and reliable compass.

I've seen people dismissed for caring too much about sports. "It's just a game," is a common refrain for nonbelievers balking at the passion expressed by genuine fans. But it's not just a game. It's tribalism, identity, community, narrative, purpose. It's a participation architecture that meets deep human needs. The dismissal says more about the dismisser's failure to understand human nature than about the fan's priorities.

And when you need to see this instinct made visible, made physical, just buy a ticket and show up.

The Stadium as Participation Architecture

Walk into a stadium during a big game.

Eighty thousand people, synchronized. The wave rolling around the bowl. The chants echoing off concrete. The roar when something happens, a roar that no individual creates but that everyone contributes to. The experience of being part of something massive, something that exceeds any individual's capacity to produce.

This is collective effervescence, sociologist Émile Durkheim's term for the heightened emotional state that emerges when people gather for shared rituals. The energy in the stadium isn't the sum of individual energies; it's an emergent property that belongs to no one and affects everyone.

Sports stadiums are designed to amplify this. The bowl shape focuses attention and reflects sound. The seating puts strangers in physical proximity, breaking down barriers through shared experience. The rituals, seventh-inning stretch, fight songs, coordinated chants, give the crowd ways to participate together.

Every architectural choice is a participation choice. The stadium is a machine for manufacturing collective experience.

And it works on television, too. Diminished, mediated, but still present. The fan watching alone at home is hearing the crowd, feeding off their energy, participating vicariously in the collective effervescence. The watch party brings it closer: a small tribe gathered to share the experience, synchronized with the larger tribe in the stadium, synchronized with other watch parties across the city and the country.

The participation scales. From the individual at home to the sports bar to the stadium to the distributed global tribe. Different intensities of the same phenomenon. Watch the Swifties who've turned NFL stadiums into hybrid concert venues, or the World Cup crowds that transform entire cities into collective viewing parties. The architecture adapts, but the participation remains.

And for some, bringing a wager into the mix cranks that intensity up even more.

Fantasy and Gambling: Participation Layers

Although the essential components have remained the same for centuries, something changed in sports fandom over the last few decades.

Fantasy leagues turned fans into pseudo-managers. League members are deeply invested in building their teams, making decisions, competing against friends. The individual stake in participation deepened. Individual player performance across the league now has direct, monetary impact. Games between teams that would otherwise be meaningless suddenly matter. Members check stats daily, analyzing matchups, investing attention at a level that pure fandom never required.

Sports betting did something similar. The casual fan has no financial stake. The betting fan has skin in the game. The participation becomes literally invested: money on the line, attention sharpened, outcomes mattering in a new way.

These are additional participation layers built on top of the base layer of fandom. They don't replace the core of tribal belonging; they intensify it. They give existing fans more ways to engage, more decisions to make, more identity to express.

The leagues understand this. They've embraced fantasy and gambling because they create stickier fans. A fantasy player can't quit mid-season because their team needs them. A bettor watches games they wouldn't ordinarily care about. The participation architecture expands, and the tribe grows more engaged.

What makes fandom truly tribal, though, isn't how deep you go. It's whether it outlives you.

The Generational Transfer

Fandom is inherited.

Not genetically, culturally. The parent who takes a child to their first game. The grandfather who explains the history. The ritual of Sunday football, the pilgrimage to the ballpark, the stories of great moments witnessed and suffering endured.

This is participation across generations. The tribe persists because its members reproduce and bring their offspring into the fold. Each generation receives the tradition and passes it forward. The team that's been in a family for three generations isn't just a preference. It's an inheritance, a sacred trust, a connection to ancestors.

I've watched children at their first games, overwhelmed by the scale, the noise, the spectacle. They don't understand what's happening on the field. But on a gut level they understand something more important: this matters to the adults who brought them, that they're being initiated into something significant, that they're becoming part of a "we."

The moment of inheritance is a participation moment. The parent is participating by transmitting. The child is participating by receiving. The team is participating by being worth transmitting. The culture is participating by providing structures that enable transmission.

Brands that last multiple generations understand this. They're not just acquiring customers, they're becoming part of family identity. Something passed down, something that connects past and future. The sports team is the ultimate example of multi-generational brand participation.

The Local and the Universal

Sports fandom has a geography.

The local team is different from the national team, is different from the bandwagon team. Each represents a different kind of tribal belonging.

The local team ties you to place. Chicago Cubs fans aren't just baseball fans. They're Chicagoans, participating in a particular city's identity. The team is the place made manifest. Rooting for them is rooting for home, even if you've moved away, even if you've never lived there, even if the connection is tenuous.

The national team ties you to nation. When the World Cup arrives, tribal allegiances shift. The club rivalries suspend and the country unifies. The participation becomes patriotic, charged with a different kind of meaning. For a month, the nation itself becomes the tribe.

The bandwagon team, the one you chose because they were winning, because you liked a player, because the brand appealed to you, has a different character. Less rooted, more chosen. The participation is still real but it's elected, not inherited or geographic. This is a more modern version of tribalism: identity as consumer choice.

Each kind of fandom is legitimate. Each meets the tribal need in a different but equally genuine way. The point isn't which is best, the point is that the need is so strong that people find multiple ways to meet it, layering local and national and chosen affiliations into complex identity structures.

The Primal Exchange

Sports viewership reveals something essential about participation: it doesn't require production.

Fans don't make anything. They don't play. They don't directly influence outcomes. And yet their participation is real, because participation is about exchange, not output.

The fan exchanges attention, emotion, identity, time, money. The team exchanges entertainment, narrative, community, meaning. Neither could exist without the other. The relationship is symbiotic, not extractive.

This is the model for all participatory brands. Not "what can we get customers to produce?" but "what exchange are we creating?" The fan produces nothing but their own fandom. And that's enough. Because the exchange is real, the investment is real, and the identity created is real.

When someone says "we won," they're not confused. They're expressing a truth that transactional thinking can't capture. They participated. They invested. They suffered and hoped and showed up, game after game, season after season. The victory belongs to them because they're part of the tribe that achieved it.

We won.

And that "we" is the whole point.

The most magnetic brands today aren’t fueled by campaigns. They’re emerging as full-blown worlds. This constitutes a fundamental shift in what brands actually do and how value gets created.

To understand this shift, start with what changes when you stop thinking in campaigns. Campaigns are finite: they have launch dates and end dates, creative assets with shelf lives, media budgets that get depleted. Worlds are continuous: they provide ongoing infrastructure where people show up, contribute, connect, and create value together. Campaigns broadcast messages outward, hoping for response. Worlds create spaces inward, inviting contribution.

Your Brand Is a World With its Own Physics.

Think of your brand as a world, not a message. Every world needs rules that make it recognizable: gravity, language, aesthetics, values. These aren’t constraints; they’re what make the world a world rather than formless space. The world has physics (values, tone, aesthetics) and rituals that make it recognizable and distinct. Your job isn’t to micromanage every detail. It’s to maintain integrity of the core physics while giving people tools to live in that world, to build their own stories within it, to make it theirs through inhabitation.

Nike doesn’t just sell shoes. It creates a context where people can understand themselves as athletes, regardless of their skill level or competitive accomplishments. The world’s physics say that movement matters, that pushing yourself counts, that your body is capable of more than you think. Within that world, a morning jogger and an Olympic marathoner are both athletes, just exploring different territories of the same landscape.

Red Bull doesn’t just sell energy drinks. It creates permission to live without boundaries, to attempt the extraordinary, to see limits as invitations rather than barriers. The world’s physics say that human potential is meant to be tested, that creativity thrives at edges, that the impossible is just the not-yet-accomplished.

These aren’t products. They’re participatory mythologies. Permission structures for identity. Contexts for meaning-making that people choose to inhabit because the worlds offer something more valuable than functional benefits … they offer ways of understanding who you are and who you might become. When you enter Nike’s world, you’re not buying footwear; you’re claiming an identity. When you enter Red Bull’s world, you’re not purchasing caffeine; you’re accepting an invitation to see yourself differently.

This is closer to how language itself works. No one controls English, yet it remains recognizable across continents, contexts, and centuries. It has grammar, patterns, norms—but infinite variation in expression. The most participatory brands operate similarly: stable in the center, adaptive at the edges.

According to research by Sarasvuo, Rindell, and Kovalchuk in the Journal of Business Research, brand co-creation happens through “intentional interaction between or among two or more parties that influences a brand.” The operative word is “intentional.” Meaning is made deliberately, through active exchange, not absorbed passively through repeated exposure. The world’s physics—those stable values and aesthetics at the center—create the conditions for that intentional interaction while the adaptive edges allow for infinite variation in how people inhabit and express the brand.

Worlds create infrastructure for this intentional interaction. They provide tools for creation, spaces for gathering, mechanisms for recognition, paths for progression from observer to contributor to co-creator. They don’t control what gets built; they enable what communities choose to build.

Inhabitants, Not Audiences

The broadcast era convinced us that brands could control their meaning by controlling their messages. Perfect the thirty-second spot, buy enough media weight, repeat the tagline often enough, and audiences would internalize what you intended.

But that was always fiction. Even at the height of Madison Avenue’s golden age, meaning was being negotiated in living rooms, debated around water coolers, reinterpreted through cultural lenses the brand never anticipated. The control was illusory. We just couldn’t see the audience’s side of the conversation.

People don’t consume brands now. They create them, share them, and fundamentally shape what they mean. This is a recognition of how meaning actually works … and always has worked, even when infrastructure made that process invisible. No matter what the ad industry told itself, audiences were never passive recipients dutifully absorbing carefully crafted messages. They were always active interpreters, meaning-makers, collaborators in constructing what brands represented in their lives. The difference now is that worlds make this collaboration explicit, intentional, and scaled.

Where campaigns treat audiences as targets to be moved through predetermined stages toward conversion, worlds recognize them as inhabitants who shape meaning through voluntary contribution. In a campaign, you’re trying to change someone’s mind or drive a purchase. In a world, you’re creating conditions where people contribute because participation itself is intrinsically rewarding. The motivation shifts from external persuasion to internal satisfaction.

And when people shape a world, they feel it’s theirs. The labor creates the love.

This isn’t just sentiment, it’s psychology. The IKEA effect shows that people value things more when they’ve participated in creating them, even when the participation is as minimal as assembling flat-pack furniture with an Allen wrench. The time spent, the choices made, the creative energy expended all become inseparable from the object itself.

Research shows that value co-creation behaviors directly strengthen customer loyalty and brand equity. Participatory engagement fuels word-of-mouth and purchase intent because people advocate more passionately for things they’ve helped build. Your community isn’t just an audience to market to. They’re a resource to learn from, a creative engine to tap into, a collective intelligence that sees opportunities your team misses. Their distributed creativity, operating across thousands of different contexts and needs, generates innovation at a scale and specificity that centralized teams simply cannot match.

The World-Builder’s Dilemma

When brands operate as worlds rather than campaigns, they immediately confront a tension that campaign-based marketing never had to face. Campaigns maintain control through their finite nature: The creative is locked, the message is approved, the media buy is scheduled, and nothing deviates from the plan. Worlds, by contrast, invite unpredictability the moment they open their infrastructure to participation.

Open your world too much? It dissolves into incoherence. A shapeless cloud of conflicting interpretations where nothing means anything anymore because everything is permitted. Control it too tightly? You suffocate the very creativity that makes participation valuable in the first place. You end up with a world that feels like a disguised campaign: the appearance of openness with the reality of constraint.

Scholars call this the “brand identity co-creation dilemma.” It’s real, and it doesn’t have an easy resolution. When brands build platforms that invite genuine participation, they gain authenticity, engagement, and advocacy that can’t be manufactured through traditional marketing. But they also risk fragmentation, dilution, and loss of coherent meaning when too many voices pull the brand in too many directions simultaneously. The platform provides the stage, but who decides what story gets told there?

The answer isn’t a formula. It’s a sensibility: build scaffolding, not walls. Give people the grammar of your brand world, then let them speak their own dialect. Learn to live with the tension, to navigate with judgment and courage, to balance through constant recalibration.

Yerba Madre learned this when their community started calling the product “Yerbs,” which is a pet name that emerged organically from people who’d made the brand theirs. The instinct to correct it, to reassert the “proper” name, would have been the campaign-era response. Instead, they embraced it as evidence that people weren’t just drinking a beverage; they were inhabiting a world. A world already rich with its own language, and a lexicon rooted in the plant’s sacred origins that gave people the grammar to build upon. “Yerbs” wasn’t dilution it was actually dialect.

The tension between structure and freedom never fully resolves, and that’s precisely the point. Brands that thrive as worlds don’t eliminate this tension, they learn to navigate it with increasing sophistication, developing institutional muscle memory for when to hold firm and when to flex.

What World-Building Requires

If “brand” used to mean logo and tagline, today it means infrastructure for expression. You’re building a context where people show up with ideas, knowing both what’s possible and what makes it recognizably yours. The scaffolding isn’t abstract; it’s built from specific, intentional elements that create the grammar people need to participate meaningfully.

A clear scaffold. This is your stable center. The core grammar that makes your world recognizable and distinct. You need a world identifiable enough that people know when they’re inside it. Without this clarity, your world becomes formless. All edges, no center.

User-driven creation. Scaffolding only matters if people can actually build upon it. Threadless lets users design the products that get manufactured and sold. Spotify gives users tools to become curators themselves, with the most successful user-generated playlists attracting millions of followers. This requires trusting your community to have taste and valuable perspectives.

Connection and community. People don’t connect with points. They connect with each other. Peloton’s world succeeds not because of the bike but because riders form teams and develop genuine friendships through shared struggle. When you build infrastructure for people to connect with each other rather than just transact with you, you transform customers into community members.

Curation loops. Participation needs to be visible to be meaningful—both to the contributor who wants recognition and to the observer who’s deciding whether to contribute next. GoPro curates and celebrates user-generated footage, turning customers into filmmakers whose best shots get featured in brand channels.

Layered access. Not everyone wants to participate at the same intensity, and your world needs to honor that reality. Different levels of involvement for different levels of interest. Not everyone wants to be a creator. Some want to curate. Some want to comment. Some want to witness. Red Bull’s Flugtag exemplifies this: teams invest months building flying machines, spectators attend live events, millions watch content online, and countless others share clips on social media. Each layer is valuable, and each layer feeds the others.

When these elements align, they create the conditions where the tension between openness and coherence becomes productive: the world has enough structure to remain recognizable, enough freedom to enable genuine creativity, and enough infrastructure to turn individual participation into collective momentum.

The Bottom Line

Consistency once meant control. Now it means coherence amid variation.

The most powerful brands will invite participation without losing themselves, turning audiences into collaborators, fans into storytellers, consumption into creation.

Because when people see themselves as belonging inside a brand’s world, they don’t just buy the product. They live the brand. They defend it. They contribute to it. They make it theirs.

The future of brands is participatory because the future of meaning is participatory. Meaning was never delivered from above. It emerges from contribution. The brands that understand this will build durable and alluring worlds for their people to enjoy. The ones that don’t will keep renting attention until they can’t afford it anymore.

Sources

Sarasvuo, S., Rindell, A., & Kovalchuk, M. (2022). “Toward a conceptual understanding of co-creation in branding.” Journal of Business Research, 139, 543-563.

Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453-460.

For 300,000 years, humans survived by participating. We hunted in groups, raised children collectively, built shelters together, and passed knowledge through shared story and song. Participation wasn’t a marketing strategy. It was the operating system that kept us alive.

Then, for about a century, we forgot.

Mass media taught us to sit still. Broadcast technology made us audiences. Advertising trained us to receive messages, not create them. For a few generations, participation became something you did on weekends—if at all.

But something has shifted. And if you’re reading this, you’ve probably felt it too.

Three billion people now play video games. They’ve logged thousands of hours in worlds where their choices matter, where they shape outcomes, where passive observation isn’t even an option. Billions more have grown up on platforms designed around contribution—duets, remixes, replies, stitches. They’ve never known a media environment where they couldn’t talk back.

These aren’t just new behaviors. They’re the old behaviors, finally given room to breathe.

Technology didn’t create our instinct for participation. It uncaged it. And now we have entire generations who expect—as a baseline—that the experiences they engage with will respond to their input. That’s not entitlement. That’s 300,000 years of wiring reasserting itself after a brief interruption.

This creates a profound challenge for anyone trying to build a brand, lead an organization, or create something that matters. The playbook that worked for decades—craft a message, buy distribution, measure who received it—that playbook is failing. Not because it was wrong for its time, but because the people it was designed for no longer exist.

The people who exist now are participants. And they’re waiting for you to invite them in.

What This Publication Is

I’ve spent thirty years in advertising watching this shift take shape—first as a whisper, then as a pattern, now as an undeniable force. And I’ll be honest: I’ve never been more excited to share what I’m seeing.

The Participation Exchange is a weekly exploration of what happens when brands stop broadcasting and start inviting. We’ll examine the shift from passive consumption to active contribution—why it’s happening, how to navigate it, and what it means for the future of marketing, media, and human connection.

Some weeks we’ll make the argument: the strategic and philosophical case for participation as the defining framework of modern brand-building.

Some weeks we’ll show the proof: research, data, and evidence that participation drives outcomes traditional marketing can’t match.

Some weeks we’ll catch participation in action: brands, campaigns, and communities doing this work in the real world, with lessons worth learning.

And some weeks we’ll simply survey the landscape: what’s happening, what’s emerging, and what it might mean.

Throughout, we’ll return to a central conviction: participation isn’t a tactic. It’s a recognition of what humans have always needed and what technology has finally made scalable. The brands that understand this will build communities. The ones that don’t will build campaigns that vanish the moment they stop paying for them.

An Invitation

This publication is, fittingly, an invitation to participate. Subscribe if these ideas resonate. Reply if they provoke. Share if they’re useful. Push back if they’re wrong.

We don’t do passive here. We hope you won’t either.

Welcome to The Participation Exchange.

For anyone following news of the ad industry, 2025 was defined by upheaval. (And maybe just a dash of panic.) As we enter 2026, that transformation shows no signs of slowing. But amid all the unnerving stories of AI takeovers, holding company mergers, and agency brand retirements, we’ve been tracking something else: a fundamental shift in how brands and people relate to each other.

If you’re paying attention at all, you can already feel it: the fatigue with passive content, the death of “audience” as a meaningful concept, the collapse of linear storytelling under the weight of infinite remix. The old ways of operating have started to feel equally onerous to creatives and consumers alike. We believe what will replace them isn’t another “era of community” or “wave of creator marketing.” It’s something more foundational.

Participation is becoming the modern brand’s core operating system.

The Signal Shift

The change started quietly. Algorithms began rewarding agency over passivity. Remixes, duets, stitches, replies … actions rather than attention. Platforms discovered through relentless investigation that participatory features won A/B tests again and again, and brands adjusted accordingly. The metrics stopped tracking who watched and started tracking who built.

This pattern emerged first in gaming, then social media, then everywhere at once. And the numbers told an unexpected story. The game developers watched their metrics intently to see exactly how long people played and whether they came back. Single-player games saw users play once, maybe twice, then vanish. But multiplayer games, games with user-generated content, games where players shaped the experience themselves ... those kept people coming back for hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours. Other platforms followed suit when they realized the value of engaging people for longer, richer, collaborative experiences.

​These companies weren’t reading evolutionary psychology or studying tribal behavior. They were optimizing for engagement metrics: time spent, daily active users, retention curves. But what they accidentally unearthed was a 300,000-year-old truth: humans are wired for participation, not consumption.

As more brands acknowledge this truth, passive content will become invisible. The signal that matters is participation. Brands that don’t adjust will simply vanish from algorithmic distribution.

From Owner to Steward

The architecture of branding is mutating in response. For a century, brands hired agencies to create messages, purchased media to distribute them, and measured how many people received them. The creative authority flowed one direction: from institutions to individuals. Now 3.4 billion people play video games globally. Billions more have practiced participatory behaviors daily on TikTok, Discord, YouTube. They’ve become fluent in progression systems, co-creation mechanics, and community governance.

This creates an uncomfortable truth for brands: you can no longer hand audiences a finished message and expect applause. They’ve spent thousands of hours learning to shape and modify the experiences they engage with. When you give them something polished and complete, something that says this is done, just consume it, their instinct isn’t admiration, it’s disinterest. Because closed systems violate everything their experience has taught them about how engagement works.

This shift requires a fundamental reframing of the brand’s role. The brands adapting fastest have stopped seeing themselves as sole authors of their meaning. Instead, they’ve become stewards: caretakers of something the community itself has helped build through thousands of hours and collaborative effort.

Stewardship matters because the power dynamic has reversed. In 2026, the audience doesn’t want to join the conversation. That’s not enough. They want to write the next line themselves. And if you don’t invite them to do so, they’ll find a brand who will.

From Voice to Protocol

What we’re watching is the replacement of “brand voice” with “brand protocol.”

Instead of messaging, there are frameworks. Instead of storytelling, there’s platform design. Instead of campaigns, there are feedback structures: living, evolving ecosystems where the audience is the author, the algorithm is the editor, and the brand is the infrastructure keeping the whole thing from collapsing.

The old model was extractive: extract attention through interruption, extract brand recall through repetition. The new model is additive: add value to communities, add platforms for contribution, add models that make participation possible.

Under these new rules, content stops being something brands push out and becomes scaffolding they build for others to climb.

A post, a sound, a filter … each is an unfinished sentence waiting for the crowd to complete it. This changes everything about what brands create. Brands that once “told stories” now must shift to building participatory canvases: modular worlds that can be lived in, remixed, extended, and rebuilt by the people who inhabit them.

This is a fundamentally different competency than traditional brand management has required.

Traditional brand managers were trained to protect consistency, maintain control, ensure every execution matched the brand book. The new competency is facilitation: creating conditions where communities can shape experiences, designing rules that enable emergence rather than prescribing outcomes. You can’t hire for this by looking for people who’ve perfected campaigns. You need people who understand how systems behave when you relinquish control.

Protocol, not voice, is now the primary expression of brand identity. The rules you’ll establish that enable others to build, cementing trust through transparency rather than polish. Those that master this shift will become the cult brands of the new era.

The Threshold

2026 isn’t another “trend year.” It’s a threshold moment. Each individual change was significant, but their simultaneous maturity creates a transformation in kind, not merely in scale.

Brands will stop asking people to “join the conversation” and start recognizing that the conversation is the brand. Algorithms will demand participation. Communities will cohere through it. AI will accelerate it. Measurement will depend on it. Ethics will define it.

This convergence makes the shift permanent. People can’t unlearn their preference for user-generated content and mutual value creation any more than they can unknow how to swipe a screen. The neural pathways are already formed. Their expectation that experiences should respond to their input is now brain architecture.

And what’s hardwired in the brain becomes a moat around the brands that satisfy it first. Participation compounds uniquely for each brand. Your community, your contributors, your co-creators ... these can’t be copied even if competitors mimic your strategy. The people, the relationships, the shared history, and the voluntary time already invested belong to you specifically. Time is the glue that solidifies tribal belonging, and once someone has invested those irreplaceable hours, the bonds become irreversible.

The brands that design for participation from the ground up will build something durable. The ones that keep optimizing for impressions will drift toward irrelevance.

What This Means Now

The infrastructure has arrived. The barriers have fallen. The time for philosophical debate is past, and the time for implementation has arrived. As participation becomes the marketing operating system of the future, you can begin planning for the transformation by:

Auditing for participatory potential. Look at your current brand architecture. How much of it enables participation? How much of it assumes passive consumption?

Building infrastructure before campaigns. Create the spaces, tools, and interfaces that enable contribution. The campaign can wait. The infrastructure can’t.

Developing governance frameworks. How will you handle community conflicts? Attribution disputes? Content moderation? These questions need answers before you scale participation.

Shifting measurement. Start tracking contribution metrics alongside traditional reach metrics. Build the internal understanding that different math applies.

Training for different work. The skills required for participatory brand management differ from traditional brand management. The learning curve is significant.

Participation has become the environment in which all strategies operate. The brands building infrastructure now will accumulate communities, relationships, and shared history that late movers will never catch. In part because the window for building this equity is closing: Gen Z and Gen Alpha are forming their brand relationships today. The brands they connect with in their teens and twenties will enjoy loyalty that’s extremely difficult for competitors to break.

But that loyalty must be earned through participation, not purchased through persuasion. Every quarter you wait, communities are forming around your competitors. Every month of delay means relationships building elsewhere that could have been yours.

The only question left is whether you’ll build while there’s still time, or explain later why you waited.

Sources

1. Platform algorithm research: Analysis of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts ranking signals, 2023-2024 platform documentation and creator guidance.

2. Gartner (2024). Predictions on AI agents and participatory platform evolution.

3. Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press. Foundational text on participatory culture and the shift from audience to participant