We’re in our optimization era: Increasingly connected, efficient, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, incapable of giving anything our full attention. But I don’t want to be optimized anymore. Algorithms predict what we’ll watch, AI generates what we’ll read, and marketing systems are built specifically to remove friction from discovery to purchase. Feeds blur together, and messages feel interchangeable. Connection—the thing marketing is supposed to create—has become exponentially harder to achieve.
We need to bring the friction back, and that doesn’t come from obsessing over scale. Connection isn’t about reaching everyone at once; it’s about showing up meaningfully in the communities that matter most. “Chasing the fandom and not the random,” as Julia Alexander recently said on The Grill Room.
A FOCUS ON TRUST
The brands breaking through today aren’t optimizing for volume; they’re building networks of trust. One audience, one voice, and one relationship at a time. Scale, as it turns out, is the byproduct of connection, not the strategy.
The industry’s current obsession with scaling connection misses the point. When brands treat connection like a growth metric, it’s a sign the audience has become abstract. You earn connection at the individual level when the right brand leverages the right voice for the right audience—the same way relationships work in real life.
Instead of gobbling up creators or cycling through the same handful on repeat, a more networked, web-like approach to casting and partnerships is the smarter way to grow brand trust. And that is, of course, how you reach more audiences and earn broad awareness, which is, well, the good kind of scale.
Brands like Loewe and Jacquemus, two luxury fashion brands, are prime examples of this approach. Each pursued very specific strategies, leveraging creators and creatives with genuine connections to their respective brands. Each followed their north star, holding steady on a clearly defined path, which eventually earned the attention every brand craves right now. Regardless of revenue (booming at Loewe, not so much at Jacquemus), these brands are some of the most commonly referenced; they’re cultural juggernauts.
WHO MATTERS MORE THAN HOW MANY
Twenty years ago, there were a handful of publications in which you’d publish an ad or seed a story to capture specific eyeballs. WWD for fashion, or The Wall Street Journal for business or opinion. Today, when Instagram and Substack are the new front page, it could take thousands of voices to reach the same number of people. It could, of course, take just one. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, but it’s the who that matters. Not the how many.
The question should not be how to scale a connection, but how to slow down enough to actually create one in the first place. Today’s winning brands aren’t flooding the feed; they’re intentionally engaging their specific audience(s). They understand that they earn through relevance, care, and a little bit of friction. The brands that dare to be deliberate, to stand out, are the ones that actually connect, and the ones we remember.
Josh Rosenberg is the cofounder and CEO of Day One Agency.