Is anyone paying attention still?
Good Trouble for the Week of 5.30.25
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way - Keanu Reeves
This week:
Award season starts with D&AD and Clio announcements. But while the industry recognizes its work, did the public?
Meanwhile, AI is coming for all of us. Google’s Veo 3 announced. Mary Meeker makes her first trend report in 6 years. Oh and unemployment could hit 20% in the next 5 years, but we also may cure cancer.
It’s award season for the ad industry, in case you haven’t checked your LinkedIn feed lately. But amid all of the backslapping and ‘we couldn’t have done this without [ ]’ accolades, one has to wonder
Is anyone paying attention anymore?
Because at the same time the industry is applauding itself, a new study calls into question whether any of this is breaking through to people at all.
We’re living in an era of endless scrolls and fleeting attention, where people bounce between platforms without stopping long enough to connect. It’s not just Gen Z – swiping, skipping, and scrolling past ads is now everyone’s default. - Dr. Karen Nelson-FieldPerhaps this is why the most highly awarded campaign is one where the industry targeted itself:
Spotify’s ‘Spreadbeats’ continues its awards run, topping ADC and One Show
But what about the rest of these campaigns?
Would they pass the Jeff Goodby cab driver test?
“When you get into a taxi and tell the driver that you’re in advertising, and they ask whether you’ve done anything they might be familiar with, what have you got to say?”The answer is likely (statistically) no.
85% of digital ads get less than 2.5 seconds of attention.
75% of technically viewable ads are served to people who aren’t paying attention
Source: Hacking the Attention Economy by VCCP and Dr. Karen Nelson-Field
Much of the content (advertising or ad-supported) delivered to you today is done algorithmically, based on predictive appeal.
Even what constitutes ‘news’ has become generally filtered this way, as habits have shifted from direct source to social feeds.
As a consequence, the very idea of a shared cultural experience (monoculture) that can be universally understood feels impossible to achieve anymore.
We’re living in an era of endless scrolls and fleeting attention, where people bounce between platforms without stopping long enough to connect. It’s not just Gen Z – swiping, skipping, and scrolling past ads is now everyone’s default. - Dr. Karen Nelson-FieldWhich makes it all the harder to break out and shift a meaningful number of people to act/change.
This is by no means exhaustive, but here are a few recently awarded works that managed to create positive change.
Stand Outs
While it’s not mentioned in the film or the case write-up, the reason why Black-owned is important for the community is because it helps keep money IN THE COMMUNITY.
Blacks have an estimated $1.3 trillion gross national income, but only two percent is recirculated in the Black community.
One study on the racial wealth gap calculated that a dollar circulates six hours in the Black community, 20 days in the Jewish community and 30 days in the Asian community.
This is year 5 of the Google initiative, originally born in 2020 to uplift Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Including resources for black-owned businesses like Google's Black-owned business attribute and the ByBlack Platform powered by the U.S. Black Chambers, Inc., to help people find your company on Black-owned Friday and beyond.
Buying second-hand is better for the environment (extended product lifecycle), yet these are still taxed as if they’re new. Effectively a double tax, or more. So IKEA created a SHT (second-hand tax) discount to cover the sales tax and incentivize people to buy used.
Even getting the Canadian government to consider eliminating the tax altogether.
How do you demonstrate commitment to everyday low prices? You put them on the packaging. German discount grocer Penny changed its in-house packaging to reflect the prices to demonstrate its commitment to affordability. Particularly brave when every other retailer is using inflation as an excuse to raise prices.
Not a fan of the idea name. But like the heart behind it.
Believing that electricity is the key to achieving a CO₂-neutral world, EDF designed the first-ever 100% electric Olympic flame. This radical innovation replaced the traditional gas-fueled flame with a clean, carbon-free alternative, delivering powerful symbolism for a new era of sustainability.
"Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs." - Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
WILL THERE BE ANYONE LEFT TO ‘PAY ATTENTION’?
AI & JOB LOSS
Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath (Axios)
AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years
Ominous - Steve Bannon says AI job-killing, which gets virtually no attention now, will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.
It may already be hitting new graduates:
Educated but unemployed, a rising reality for US college grads (Oxford Economics)
Some are turning to the very tech that led to their job loss:
Glaberson has since founded her own startup with an AI angle, part of a larger pattern heard again and again. People who have been affected by AI job cuts are leaning into AI as a response.And there may be some retrenchment:
Duolingo CEO walks back ‘AI-first’ memo (PR Daily)
Duolingo managed to squander the years of goodwill it built up with its audience—even those who never used the app
Klarna’s AI replaced 700 workers. It now wants some of them back to improve customer service (The Independent)
'Labor-focused' | Starbucks CEO orders more hiring & less automation to curb sales slump (HR Grapevine)
“Once you’ve had DoorDash (DASH) delivered by someone whose job you helped eliminate… feels bad, man.”
GOOGLE VEO3
Case in point
NBC Leads Move To Pull Viral Chinese Paraglider Video Over Concerns It Was AI Generated (Deadline)
A dramatic video described as showing a Chinese paraglider surviving an unplanned 8,500m (27,000 ft) ascent and subzero temperatures has been pulled from a number of news sites over concerns that it may be AI generated.
Not after thousands of news organizations worldwide posted the video, including the UK’s BBC, France’s TF1 as well as The Guardian and The New York Times.
AI is our space race and the people we’re discussing, especially China, are highly capable… there’s very few secrets. And there’s just progress. And you want to make sure that you’re never behind.
The reality is AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership – and not vice-versa. - BondCap 2025 Trend Report A.I.
Also,
“Imagine, for a moment, how different your next week would look if there was no internet [...]. In the next decade or two, imagining a world without AI will likely feel the same,” -Mary MeekerMary Meeker, founder and general partner at VC firm Bond and once known as the Queen of the Internet, has just released her first trend report since 2019. The subject (obviously) is Artificial Intelligence
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report , the word “unprecedented” (appeared) on 51 of those pages.It’s not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change (Techcrunch)
ChatGPT is now the 5th most visited website (Similarweb)
AI is so good at producing the expected that it's accidentally creating a market for the genuinely unexpected. Which means the future belongs to people willing to be professionally weird. Not quirky or "disruptive," but genuinely committed to their own strange obsessions.Evidence of a Life Lived: The Final Human Signature (essay by MediaMonks Creative JoRoan Lazaro)
6% - the jobless rate for recent college graduates in April (higher than the general average 4%) -Oxford Economics
Other Headlines:
Once upon a time, a wealthy widow who was a citizen of two neighboring countries hired craftsmen to raise a stately, turreted building of gray granite and stained glass windows...But the widow’s most important, and perhaps unusual, request was that the building sit exactly on the nations’ common border. During the Biden years, Trump liked to say that “the world is laughing at us.” Now it really is.The bully gets punched in the nose (Washington Post)
More and more Americans are summoning the courage to fight back against President Donald Trump.
“I miss getting a sense of what the people in my office are excited about. Now that I’m in senior management, it’s been tougher to know what the more junior members of my team really like about their work, or what they don’t like about their work. I feel like I’m missing out on that more emotional side of the job,” Unhappy Hour People used to relish getting sloshed with their colleagues after work. What happened? (Slate)
Non-alcoholic beer projected to overtake ale as the second-largest beer category worldwide this year (CNBC), projected to grow 8% annually through ‘29
Just because a guy’s sober doesn’t mean his aim is that much better…
New urinal designs could prevent up to 265,000 gallons of urine from spilling onto the floor each day (LiveScience)
Thousands of gallons of ill-aimed pee could be spared from lavatory floors thanks to a new urinal design, scientists say.
When you age, the part of the brain that helps control impulses — the "salience network" — changes. So at a certain point, your brain won't naturally "inhibit that desire to sit on the sofa".For years, sustainability was pitched to companies with one main promise: “It’s good for the planet, and even better for your bottom line.”… But here’s the problem: it also reduced sustainability to a strategy, not a principle.It made care for people and the planet somewhat conditional on “results”Many said: “Yes, we’ll do better—as long as it pays.” and business as usual continued…We need to stop “selling” sustainability like it’s a business hack. (by Izabela Szeliga Erşahin via Linkedin) argues we’ve only been taught to see value in financial terms.
They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster. - Vinton Cerf, American internet pioneer
More recent work:
“As a culture, we’ve been conditioned to try and escape the reality of aging, drawn instead to the search for eternal youth. But the truth is, aging is inevitable, and getting older is a gift. When we’re fortunate enough to do it in good health, our later years can be some of the most meaningful. - Doug Sweeny, Chief Marketing Officer at Oura.Oura ring’s new campaign is a quiet rebellion against perfectionism, and a celebration of presence, intention, and the clarity that comes from knowing yourself better with every passing year.
Switzerland shows off its hospitality (and natural charms) through its tiniest guests. Hotels for bees and other critters right next to the adult size ones.
RX Bar takes its ‘No BS’ promise to Linkedin. The new BSFeedFilter.com plugin blocks posts with over-used BS words and replaces it with this:
Statistically speaking, the world doesn’t end that often - Brian Rogers, former T. Rowe Price Chairman and CEO