The Biggest Shift in Media and Marketing of Our Lifetimes

This article is a summary of Episode 40 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

We are in the middle of the biggest shift in media and marketing of our lifetimes right now. And there's a lot going into that — from AI, to splintering information silos and social media completely being transformed, to a complete shift in our relationships with digital experiences and trust and lack of trust in institutions. Things are kind of crazy right now.

A couple things that are especially salient in this — the 2024 election for President in America and how much media had an influence on that election, and specifically podcasts. And the second is Twitter — formerly known as Twitter, now X — and the splintering of that, and frankly the complete dumpster fire that platform has become regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on, I think you can agree that it’s a dumpster fire. And the refugee crisis where people are moving to Blue Sky right now in droves in search of a new home that is healthier.

And these are just a couple of examples. If we start to talk about AI and AI-generated content, the list goes on and on.

Frankly, the experience of being a parent here is informing our business thinking because we're having to navigate and talk about these things with young kids. And in some ways we don't feel totally prepared. This is all happening so fast. Nevertheless, it's our job to understand how this is going to change our businesses and the impact that social impact organizations seek. We're figuring this out on the fly.

The Attention Economy and the Trust Crisis

The thing we've really been thinking about is — beyond our own personal concerns as humans, as parents, and as people who care a lot about our future in society — what are the implications of this rapidly changing landscape for social impact organizations that really need to leverage media and technology in order to capture attention, to turn that attention into action, to mobilize their communities, when everything is becoming less and less combined in a way that makes sense?

One example of this is that, back in the day, everyone got their information from a few key newspapers and a few key TV channels. And there was some kind of shared sense of reality for the most part because most people were getting their news and their understanding of the world through these channels. And that's just not true at all anymore.

If you talk about how people are getting their news, how people are shaping their beliefs about reality — especially as more and more people are consuming information digitally and largely through social media and largely through individual influencers over institutions — this is a completely different landscape. And we have to be careful in the social impact space to figure out how to navigate that in a way that is ethical, in a way that is constructive, in a way that is effective. And oftentimes those three pillars do not go well together at all. You can be very effective but not be ethical at all. And that's largely what we see out there. You can be ethical but not very constructive or effective. This is kinda tough.

One of our framing beliefs that we've been talking about for a long time is this concept of the attention economy. The attention economy basically posits that it used to be true that information was scarce, especially before the internet. A lot of people had access to information that other people didn't have access to. And now the interesting irony here is that the promise of the internet was that everyone would have free-flowing access to information and it would make the world a better place. And what we're starting to see is that hasn't quite penciled out the way we hoped it would. Now we have an overabundance of information and not enough skill about how to make sense of all that information. Our information processing centers in our brains are just overstimulated. We're getting way too much information from way too many sources.

We're expected to try and figure this out now on an individual level, especially if you don't trust mainstream media or institutions to do that for you — which more and more people aren't. That is a challenge for social impact organizations, especially when one of the main things we're trying to do is build trust and credibility.

There's a really interesting tension here between this kind of reckoning away from digital information and institutions. 

But if that's true, then how come podcasts and digital media continue to have such an important role in shaping our beliefs and our experiences in this world?

Shrinking Your Sphere of Attention

One reaction to the world as it is, is to shrink your sphere of attention and align your attention with where your ability to make impact overlaps. For years, we were paying attention to national politics and international politics and being really invested personally in those stories. Over the years — partly confounded by becoming a parent — attention has gotten really shrunk down to the size of what we can actually touch and influence. That means focusing mostly on local and regional politics and local and regional decision-making. On a personal level, that has really worked.

The question becomes: Does it make sense for a social impact organization to equally become focused and get smaller, in a way, and really only address the things that we have the ability to address?

Does Your Organization Need a Take on Everything?

If you're a social impact leader, you have to think about this from your perspective. Maybe one way of saying this is: Do you need to have an opinion or a stance or a message for every big culture war issue out there or every breaking news story? Does your organization need to have a take on that? We think the answer is; No. We've all gone way too far on that in the last few years where there was this social pressure that every organization needed to have a take on every cultural issue out there.

This has been largely, in our opinion, kind of not always accurately framed under this guise of woke politics and the woke mind virus that everyone likes to talk about. And there was some ammo that everyone gave that narrative that is somewhat valid. At the same time, what we saw happen is that everyone felt the need to weigh in on every issue in the world, whether or not it had anything to do with the purpose of their organization.

This is tricky. Because if, generally, we are doing social impact work and we want to create progress for society, and we want to create a more just and equitable world — which a lot of social impact leaders want to do — there's a natural inclination to feel the need to take part in those conversations. So if you're doing climate justice work, for example, and there's issues around gender equality and you understand how those issues intersect, well, shouldn't you have a take on gender equality if you're doing climate justice work? 

Some organizations believe very strongly that that's true, and they have a solid point of view there. But that's just one example. And we saw people reach way, way further than that and kind of have a take on everything. It was largely because there was this cultural upswell of everyone's got to have a take on every social issue out there.

There is conflict here. This idea of becoming ultra hyper-relevant to the lives and the attention of the people we serve. On one hand, we don't want to comment on everything happening in the world because most social impact organizations have such a narrow impact mission. On the other hand, we know that our audience cares about these things and we want to reflect their values and their care in how we speak.

That’s the conflict. Can you both be relevant to your audience and not discuss the things that they care about most at the same time?

Action Over Performance

Does this come down to actual action over some kind of performative action or virtue signaling? If you are going to have a take on something and make a claim about something, in our opinion it kind of has to have two backing elements for that to be true. 

1. It does have to have some kind of logical relevance to the work that you're doing, and you need to be able to defend that. 
2. You have to be able to support that statement or that communication with authentic action in the real world. 

If neither of those things are true, then it really is kind of just performative.

Does an organization have the ability to act meaningfully towards the particular issue or the particular conversation? Do you have something valuable to add or can you advance our impact or our mission by becoming involved in that conversation in some way? And if the answer is no, you might be inclined to step away. You're not going to talk about that.

Now, a counterpoint to consider: When it comes to making big cultural shifts, even just speaking truth about something — when you don't have a solution and maybe it isn't necessarily relevant — that kind of power in numbers and message and cultural change is valid too. There are some advocacy-focused organizations that are trying to drum up support from a broad coalition, even if they're not directly a bullseye fit for the mission, but that have enough value alignment and ethical alignment who become allies. 

So that’s the counterpoint to this. And it is squishy, it's hard. Sometimes we feel like we have a clear answer to this and a clear point of view on it. And then a week later, we'll start to question that a little bit too.

The Heat of Staying Silent

One example: the Seymour Center took a little heat for not commenting on the results of the 2024 presidential election from an official standpoint. The local community went about 70% Harris, 30% Trump. Some colleagues who are in similar positions at other science centers and other aquariums did put out statements, and the Seymour Center chose not to. As the Executive Director, Jonathan took some heat for that, and the heat died down pretty quickly. But it was a moment of asking: who does this matter to and does commenting on this help deliver impact?

Ultimately the answer felt like, No. But the counter-argument is that it could have been meaningful to building momentum, building community, building a groundswell that may have brought more support to the organization or more attention. We can see those arguments.

We need to have some grace here around an executive director making that choice and not having a picket line in front of their offices. We can see how Jonathan could have gone the other way. There's some obvious relevance to the track record of Trump and his cabinet and his appointees and his general politics and climate action, which is obviously a huge mission for the Seymour Center. There's an argument to be made that commenting could have and maybe even should have happened. But if all we do is call out culture around organizations and leaders not doing that for whatever reasons they chose to, should we be boycotting them now? Of course not.

As a culture and as a society, we need to be a little bit less reactive around all of this. And that reactivity seems to be directly correlated with how integrated internet culture is in our lives. The more we are terminally online versus just talking to each other as people in the real world, the more that complete lack of grace and empathy and nuance happens.

How do you make those calls? And how do you know when to stand up for an issue and when not to? Because if you comment and have a take on everything, then it starts to become more performative. And then when you do want to put your voice in the mix, it's not as loud, it's not as clear, it's not as meaningful.

Authenticity Washing

Another thing we've been thinking about a lot that feels relevant to this is a new term we're calling authenticity washing. We've heard of greenwashing. We wrote an article probably eight years ago now about causewashing. And now we're talking about authenticity washing.

This is coming out of this new cultural drumbeat around authenticity. We've been part of this drumbeat, and authenticity is the answer right now in all of this noise and all of this inauthenticity. But now the question is: is that even becoming a new form of performative marketing?

We see this in the rise of fake vulnerability where people are sharing more about their personal lives as professionals, as a way to be more human. There's a good inclination there. There's something to that idea. But when it gets taken too far to the point where people are basically exposing more of themselves than is healthy.

Have you ever met someone before where you don't know them very well and they start sharing extremely personal information really quickly? That can be uncomfortable, right? And sometimes this might be a result of trauma or some kind of mental health issue, so we're not here to judge those people. But that experience is really uncomfortable on the receiving end. And that can be true too if you are doing this kind of authenticity, vulnerability play to a point that is just not necessary and too much.

Most things come down to a balance, but sometimes your audience can see through that fake authenticity where you're trying to be authentic, which is kind of an ironic act, right? Because if you're trying to be authentic, you're actually not being authentic in the first place.

The Pendulum Swings Toward Results and Excellence

What's the reciprocal to authenticity? What's the opposite? The way the pendulum is going to swing on this probably has to do with results and excellence. There's already evidence of this in conversations with funders where really the conversation goes straight towards: I just need to know: what are your results? I don't care what you look like online. WI just need to know the results. Are you being excellent? Are you delivering excellence in terms of your impact?

Frankly, we don’t hate that. There probably is some balance here. Excellence or results might not be the reciprocal to authenticity, but it's at least the direction the arrow is pointing in the last six months or so.

And as much as we believe in the power of brand, the power of marketing and being strong with communications and having a clear digital presence — and we continue to believe that is only going to become more important — that's going to need to be balanced by actual results and real-world actions and real relationships. There's a lot of talk right now about this shift from a broadcasting model to a relationship-building model as it relates to marketing. That's the seed of this entire conversation, but we have to look at the entire landscape to be able to assess broadcasting and relationship building. It's not just this dichotomy. It exists in this very rapidly changing media landscape that’s bigger than ever before.

The Power of Individual Influencers and the Loss of Local News

Where this lands... We don’t know. Even thinking about how much power individual influencers are having in terms of how people construct their own views around reality and beliefs. It's almost like we've given up — as a culture — on local news. Maybe because it doesn’t exist. We know of an organization locally here in Santa Cruz who's trying to really rebuild the local news scene that's been deconstructed and defunded. They're called Lookout, and they're based here in Santa Cruz, and they're spreading to other cities and municipalities across California and Oregon. 

Shout out, Lookout Santa Cruz — an amazing example of local news. We’re big fans.

All that to say, in lieu of that in most communities — and because of this distrust happening with mainstream media — people are forming their opinions based on random podcast bros. Hopefully not only us — and please listen to us, be fans of us, but also take it with a grain of salt because we're sharing our experiences and there are other perspectives out there that you should be listening to as well. So if you're a social impact leader or organization, how does this influence how you show up in the world and as a brand? It's an open question.

Showing Up as the Best Version of Ourselves

We vacillate between personal feelings and our professional hat in this discussion. But as a professional, the answer becomes a little bit more clear in terms of how to show up: where is our ability to connect with people and where does that happen and where does that exist? And are we showing up to those conversations and those relationships as the best version of ourselves?

We've talked in the about reasons why people might be motivated to do social impact work. Our gut reaction here is to go to those things even more strongly. Why are we here? Why are we doing this work? Why are we showing up to work? And if we can live that in just the relationships that we're having with people we serve, that's the absolute best way that we can be authentic without authenticity washing.

Fall in Love with the Problem

That brings to mind this phrase: fall in love with the problem. That really is the core of this kind of work — and the core of what powers a lot of social impact organizations and leaders is that they do really fall in love with the problem for one reason or another. And sometimes they might lose sight of that problem or the scope of that problem might increase, and that's just a misstep that can be corrected. But getting really clear about falling in love with that problem — and then a lot of this becomes noise.

With that said, you can't just opt out of the way that current culture is working. You can't just not have a brand or a digital presence or not show up on social media or have your own newsletter and navigate the way that we largely communicate these days. Even if you are interacting in real life with a lot of your constituents or your donors or your funders and building those relationships, all of those real-life interactions are now happening on top of the context of culture more broadly — which is largely shaping our beliefs and experiences and what matters and what doesn't matter through these digital channels. You have to be able to hold both at the same time.

What If You Disappeared from the Internet?

Thought experiment from Jonathan: 

What if the Seymour Center completely disappeared from online presence? And it was a statement — strangely enough, this idea comes from REI. You may remember when they did Opt Outside and closed for Black Friday. It was a deliberate, in-your-face rejection of that particular value. We think they've stopped doing that and are opening on Black Friday again, but it was a moment and it captured their audience's attention. What would it look like to completely divest from the internet, so to speak?

Here's a reflection of that: How did that story spread? On the internet. So did they actually even accomplish that? And was that just for the memes and the clicks and to go viral? And listen, we like RE. They're a good brand and it was a smart campaign. But if we're being real, the message was right. But the message spread through the exact medium they were boycotting that day.

That’s what we mean when we say that the internet is not going away. Digital communications are not going away. And we hope that we — as a culture — can take this moment to rethink how we can actually integrate this powerful technology into our lives in a more constructive, skillful, healthy way. Because that's not how it's working right now.

It's ironic to say this as an organization that largely builds work digitally and loves that. We have a deep love for the internet. Many of us grew up on it. It is amazing. And it's kind of sad to see the bastardized version it has become, thinking back to the early days where it felt like this exciting thing that could make the world better, and now it feels like this runaway beast — that is slowly, or maybe quickly, killing us all.

The hope is that we can reign that beast in and use it more constructively again, because it really can be incredible and continues to be incredible. There are so many organizations that the internet has allowed us to help and connect with them that otherwise we never would have been able to. And so it cuts both ways.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.