The Attention Economy and Brands · Part Five
A brand team can make an excellent campaign and still have a problem with the everyday communication around it. The product page makes a different promise, customer service uses a different tone, or a store account borrows a joke that undermines the association the campaign was meant to build.
That is the question this series has led me to. Alongside creating important work, how does a brand team help many people produce work that belongs to the same brand?
I think editing is a useful way to describe part of the answer. It means choosing, connecting, clarifying and setting standards. It should not mean reducing the team to a final approval gate.
1. Campaigns end; their effects need not
A campaign has a schedule. That does not mean its effects disappear when the schedule ends. It can leave recognition, associations and reasons to consider a product. Whether it does so effectively is a question to evaluate, not a reason to dismiss campaigns as a category.
The problem comes when the campaign is treated as the whole of brand management. The rest of the customer’s experience continues, and it can support or contradict what the campaign established.
Nor can the relative importance of a campaign and daily content be decided by counting pieces. Three widely seen films may matter more than hundreds of minor posts. A single poorly judged post may also attract disproportionate attention. Volume is not a measure of influence.
A brand team therefore needs to consider both important creative investments and the wider pattern of communication. Production and editorial responsibility can reinforce each other: the campaign supplies an idea, and everyday work makes that idea recognisable and credible in use.
Figure 1. Campaigns and everyday touchpoints contribute together. Editorial standards support coherence, while customer feedback informs future decisions.
2. Give creative judgment something to work with
“A feel for the internet” and “on-brand” do not have to be opposites. A team can understand a platform’s conventions while making deliberate choices about which ones suit its purpose.
As the Dove case suggested, you borrow the format, you inherit the subtext. A useful review asks what the format assumes, who it positions as admirable or ridiculous, and whether the product should carry those meanings.
A stable persona can help by giving creators a reference point. It cannot guarantee a good judgment in every context, and not every brand needs a mascot or an exaggerated character. Clear associations, a recognisable voice and concrete examples may be more useful than a personality label nobody can apply.
The editorial task is to make that guidance usable. Show what a good adaptation looks like, where the boundaries sit and when a creator should ask for another view. Leave room for invention inside that framework.
3. Put responsibility close to publication
A statement of brand values is not enough if the people publishing daily content cannot translate it into a decision. Editorial responsibility needs to reach the workflow.
That can mean a short brief describing the job of the content, examples of acceptable claims, clear publishing permissions and an escalation route for unfamiliar or sensitive ideas. Different types of material can receive different levels of review.
The point is not to make every caption travel through the same long chain. It is to decide which choices can be delegated and which need a second judgment. Then check whether those arrangements work in practice.
Measures matter too. If the only visible success is immediate engagement, other consequences are easier to overlook. Teams should know both the response they are trying to generate and the brand association they are trying to leave. A lively post can be useful; attention alone does not establish that it did the intended job.
4. Use the touchpoints you already operate
For a small business, packaging, product information, customer service and delivery communication can be practical places to improve consistency. They already exist, so improving them may require less additional media spending than buying another exposure.
They are not free. Better information, design and service take work, and a delivery message is not automatically receiving deeper attention than a feed post. Their value depends on what the customer needs at that moment.
They also reach a different audience from acquisition activity. Packaging mainly reaches people who have bought; a clear product page helps people already considering the offer. These touchpoints can improve an experience without solving the problem of being discovered.
Company stage should guide the balance. A new business may need awareness and immediate sales. An established one may need to make its existing promise more consistent across channels. Neither should be told that every communication must do every job.
For a company worried about next month’s payroll, my advice is modest: look for improvements within the actions that keep the business running. Make the promise clear, avoid avoidable contradictions and deliver what the customer has been led to expect. Then evaluate where additional investment is worthwhile.
5. Editing is an ongoing responsibility
The department’s contribution should include the work it creates and the quality of the decisions it helps others make. That is why editing is a useful part of the job description, though it cannot replace strategy, creativity or evidence of effectiveness.
The Dove incident does not prove that no system had been built. It shows why a stated process has to work at the point of publication. The budget discussion shows why a team needs evidence for its contribution. The attention discussion shows why the response a platform rewards may not be the whole outcome a brand wants.
A brand is shaped through campaigns, products, service and the interpretations people bring to them. The team cannot control every interpretation. It can make its own choices clearer and more consistent, and learn when those choices fail.
That is the responsibility I would put alongside production: helping each piece of work contribute to a coherent promise, without assuming that coherence requires every piece to look or sound the same.
Final piece in the series on the attention economy and brands.
About this essay
These recommendations draw on the preceding four essays and are proposals for brand teams to test in practice.
