The Battle For Eyeballs

The Hotpot | By Lisanne

10.4

The traditional way of doing marketing used to be the battle for “eyeballs”; this model of interruption. You buy the Super Bowl spot because everyone is looking at the same thing.

But today, attention is a bit more of a fragmented archipelago of micro-cultures. Brand infiltration is a response to the fact that there is no longer a “main stage.”

On the surface, infiltration is just “showing up where the people are.” It’s the brand sponsoring the podcast you love or the meme that looks suspiciously like a shoe ad.

But the moment a brand is recognized as “marketing,” the infiltration has failed.

Take Burger King’s 2020 Twitch campaign: they used $5 donations to trigger text-to-speech bots that shouted “Order a Whopper for only $5!” over live streams with popular gamers and variety streamers. However, Burger King wasn’t invited to the stream; they were party crashers taking airtime from creators and their protective fanbases.

This move wasn’t received well, because Burger King hijacked a tool meant for fan support and used it to bypass the community’s rules for a win.

Excellent brand infiltration isn’t about mimicking the culture, using slang, or aggressively interrupting the audience.

The insight most brands miss is that we don’t need to be “relatable” to be invited in. All we need is to be useful or interesting.

It’s when a tool (like Discord for gamers or Figma for designers) becomes so essential to the conversation that we can’t have the conversation without the brand.

This raises an interesting ethical and creative tension:

Can a brand ever truly be a peer, or is the profit motive an invisible wall that always keeps them on the outside?

Curious to see more reflections like this? Click through to see the rest of the series on entrepreneurship. I’d love to hear what resonates with you.