Why Top-Down Rules

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are continuing to power through all!

So here's Lnk Agency's quick, snackable digi-culture trend brief for the week to continue to help you better navigate the New Era. Here's what to watch:

Leaderful Moves

As I mentioned last week, I started using the term Leaderful a couple of years ago to signify how in the Information/Tech Era, everyone is his or her own media company thanks to digital platforms. Armed with a growing sense of "voice," the convergence of the two is creating very intriguing power shifts.

While some of our competitors continue to insist even as late as last week that voting is the only way forward for 18-24/34 ( our specialty demo), and that this demo talks about brands they don't like but never actually does anything about it, our tracking sees the play as much, much bigger. While voting is important, this segment also understands that voting does not necessarily:

1) get Aunt Jemima taken off the box as a symbol of social change which is then followed by a major corporate set aside of social/economic justice. Nah, this happens by creating a major movement on social media and leveraging TikTok.

2) get at the heart of a candidate's rally before the vote can take place by, if it is true, pulling off one of the biggest upsets in fake digital RSVPs ever to upset the balance of power.

Top-down authority is being challenged with each moment, and in some other intriguing ways.

Track this: as we watch media undergo all types of changes, the ad game as we currently know it, will shift. The latest indication of this is Facebook slightly hedging with civil rights organizations about applying pressure through ad boycotts because FB has so many other streams of revenue that such actions might not make much of an impact. We might just be entering into a new era where tech companies, as all companies, are actually much more beholden to collective individual voice over legacy organizations and brands because that's where the new power hierarchy is beginning to be. It has been moving this way for a bit, but now, it's accelerated.  

There's a changing of the guard happening. This means that your D2C game needs to be even tighter and in new ways that truly bring your consumers, fans, constituents, etc into your fold. Think: some leverage of User Gen Content 3.0 in an amplified way as the ad arena will continue to be jostled and look even more deeply to the individual to get onto the right radars...or maybe just even stay out of hot water or usurped (see GIF)

Use our Influence Insights here to deepen your digital content strategy in your communication plans, for sure.

Please feel free to share this link if you think any of these trend tips could be helpful.

Lnk Agency is about making sure you know what's new and what's next so you can better connect with and/or understand people and hit your goals.