Why the best platforms want you to look up

For two decades, social platforms have been building the most successful attention-capture machines in the history of media. This March, 12 jurors in Los Angeles decided those machines had crossed a line.

The court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing platforms that were intentionally addictive. Legal observers are calling it social media’s tobacco moment, with around 4000 similar claims queued up behind it. Engagement, the metric platforms built themselves around for a decade, is now evidence against them in court.

While the legal battle plays out in US courts, the commercial fallout is already arriving on the desks of Australian marketers.

Even without the courtroom drama, time on screen has slipped from a headline metric to a soft signal on briefs. Clients want to know what people did with their time, not just how much of it they spent. Platforms are now competing on whether they help people connect, belong and do something off the app.

Pinterest wants you to put the phone down

Pinterest’s ‘How Did They Do It’ campaign, the first major work under new CMO Claudine Cheever, splices old home-movie clips from the 1950s to the ’80s with children today scrolling their feeds. A young narrator wonders aloud how people lived without posting about it. The pitch lands somewhere between scolding and inviting: close the app and go and do something.

Pinterest has been telling this story for a while. The new campaign makes it impossible to miss. As Cheever frames it, most platforms compete for time inside other people’s lives. Pinterest is competing for time inside yours. If a session ends with a booked holiday or a kicked-off renovation, the platform counts that as a win.

Arsenal joined the group chat

Platforms aren’t the only ones rewriting how they show up. The world’s biggest legacy brands are following them there. Take football, of all places. Arsenal’s new global partnership with Meta, utilising WhatsApp and Facebook, is built around the communal celebration that follows a goal and the conversations that carry it across the rest of the week.

WhatsApp group chats are where supporters debate team selection at 2am, send reaction memes and turn injuries into custom stickers. Facebook groups are where they organise local watch parties and find other fans in their suburb. Arsenal isn’t trying to drag fans into a branded environment. The club is showing up inside the rooms where the fandom already lives.

Brands belong inside a community when they’re useful to what’s already happening there, not by mining it for attention. For younger audiences who spot algorithmic manipulation from a mile away, showing up as a peer is a way in.

What this means for brands

If platforms are getting useful, brands need to follow. The instinct is to find ways to insert yourself into the conversation. The brands doing this well do the opposite. They make themselves useful enough that the conversation invites them in. Three principles tend to guide that work:

Host, don’t headline

The brands that build communities act more like party hosts than star performers. They make space for the conversation instead of being the conversation. Look at Rare Beauty. Its entire mission can be summed up in a single line: ‘Makeup made to feel good in’. The product is real, but the community sits one layer up, around the idea that you don’t need to fix anything about yourself to look good. When you’re that clear, the community can tell you mean it.

Start with the connection, not the product

Begin with what your audience already cares about, not what’s on your shelf. Australian brands like Frank Body and Who Gives A Crap built their audiences on confidence and sustainability. The product pitch came second.

Be useful at one job, not present at everything

Pinterest doesn’t try to be a messaging app. WhatsApp doesn’t try to be a content feed. Brands work the same way. The ones that try to be everything to everyone end up being useful to no one.

The loyalty paradox

The paradox runs through everything here. Platforms that help you put your phone down earn more of your loyalty when you pick it up again. Brands that serve a community without trying to own it become part of how that community sees itself.

Anyone can make content. What’s harder to access, and is therefore more valuable, are the ‘dark social’ rooms where people actually talk about it. Group chats. DM threads. Smaller private communities.

Dark social is where the conversation has gone. Algorithms can’t surface it, and brands can’t measure it. But it’s where decisions get made, because the people in those rooms already trust each other.

This is where the dopamine loop runs out of road. You can’t engineer addictiveness inside a private chat. The loyalty paradox runs the other way: the brands useful enough to get pulled into those conversations are the ones that earn lasting trust.

The most important conversation about your brand is happening where your analytics can’t follow.

Liz Croughan is the senior story strategist at Bread Agency

Image: Cottonbro Studio, Pexels