Brainrot Is Bad For Business

Brainrot is the buzzword of the moment. It’s the diagnosis for our dwindling attention spans and fading capacity for critical thinking. Hot takes are on the rise, and nuance evaporates into the noise. TikTok and Reels, or any kind of short form video really, are the biggest culprits. That smooth seamless scroll is almost irresistible. Between sticky hooks and trending formats dished out by an algorithm that claims to know you better than you know yourself, grabbing and holding attention is harder (and more important) than ever. But the rise of the ‘attention economy’ has shifted our creative work away from artistry and storytelling, to metric-driven content at best, or ai slop at worst. The headline is in: Brainrot is bad for business, and we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves.

Here’s the challenge: with everything so readily at our fingertips, there’s no friction left to stop the scroll. Algorithms have made it all too easy to passively consume. We move from one video to the next, barely registering, and rarely remembering, what we’ve seen. I’ve felt it myself, caught in an endless doomscroll, retaining nothing of what I’ve seen. This becomes especially problematic when you’re a creative being asked to create campaigns and content that’s ‘scroll stopping’, and you only have thirty seconds to do it. We’ve trained our audiences (and ourselves)to indulge their attention spans with shorter and shorter content that says less and less. How can we honestly expect audiences to engage and pay attention when we’re struggling with the same thing?

At one point in time, social media really was a portal for discovery. There was more curation to the content you consumed, and you consumed it more intentionally. I grew up watching hour long Zoella vlogs with rapt attention, tuning in week after week, and now I watch everything at 2x speed. The landscape of social media is ever changing, and the shift to an attention economy that demands constant entertainment is having a radical effect not only on the way we consume as audiences, but how we as creatives, brands, and agencies respond to demand. A recent MiDA report found that music artist discovery on TikTok doesn’t translate to fandom and wider catalogue appreciation as you might expect. It’s attention versus discovery, audiences are being trained to focus on surface level enjoyment without digging any deeper. We would rather listen to the same 15 seconds of a song on a viral TikTok trend, than deep dive into the full album concept and discography of an artist. Discovery takes effort and everything about being on the internet right now is designed to make effort feel unnecessary.

What’s really interesting is the slowly turning tide of the conversation on brainrot, attention spans and creative curiosity. Despite appearances people are crying out for something with substance. They’re critiquing the algorithm and de-influencing each other from trends, or creating curriculums to recapture their love for learning and discovery. Audiences don’t lack appetite for meaningful content, they lack the attention environment required to find it. The success of platforms like Letterboxd and Substack speak to this craving for connection and community – two things tricky to find when you’re stuck in a doomscroll cycle. There is a growing hunger for slower, more thoughtful content, but when there is so much noise in the social sphere, it seems pointless trying to cut through. Especially when the 15 second TikTok it took you five minutes to film would probably rake in the views better than the episodic shorts series you’ve been dying to make.

So what do we do as brands and creatives? Well, so far we largely churn out the same stuff as everyone else. And I don’t blame us, oftentimes it works! The right brand, the right trend, it can and does resonate. But creatively, it can be draining to be shackled to trend chasing when what we all want – creative, brand and audience – is to make content that actually means something. I don’t think as audiences we want to be gobbling up hundreds of thirty-second videos, with screen time through the roof and the same viral jingle stuck on loop in our head. What we crave is good, quality storytelling. But we’ve gotten so good at pavoloving our brains with little dopamine treats in the form of TikToks, that we’re struggling to pay attention when someone does do something different.

Which means we have to change tack. Fast, cheap virality is in many ways more profitable, but long-term brand equity is still driven by good storytelling. Audiences want to see clever originality, something unexpected, or at the very least intentional. The 'It’s Always Burberry Weather: Postcards from London' campaign is an excellent example of this. There’s surprise in the cultural touch points, see: Olivia Colman serving Lucky Blue Smith fish and chips. There is a clear prioritisation of story over product, baking in narrative depth and working within the confines of our limited attention span. Of course, not everyone has a Burberry budget, but what we can take away is that it is possible to create short form content that leverages story and surprise across different media touch points.

Or take the incredible activation from Ramp, live streaming Kevin from The Office doing expense reports for six hours to make a point that using Ramp would be faster. It’s brave, it’s memorable and it’s really clever. The stunt was designed for shareability and surprise, it was designed for social. It’s storytelling, but it hasn’t compromised on creative integrity.

So, where do we go from here? Well, we don’t abandon short-form content entirely. But we have to start shifting our focus towards prioritising narrative over noise. Brainrot is real and we all need to find a way to rehabilitate our attention spans (myself included) so we have more control over where we spend our energy. The answer to brainrot isn’t even necessarily longer content, just content with friction. Content where it is clear that intention, craft and curiosity have been part of the creative process. It must ask for something from the audience, and give something back.

Right now our audiences are just skimming the surface, starved for storytelling and hungry for something with substance. Playing by the algorithm’s rules to win attention can only get us so far. What we need to do next is make work worth paying attention to.