Fame isn’t what it used to be. As our cultural landscape becomes at once more crowded and fragmented, we’re witnessing a phenomenon I call fameflation. Like economic inflation, where the cost of goods rises over time, fameflation represents the escalating ‘cost’ of attracting attention and building recognition. It affects marketers, brand managers, and anyone looking to build an audience.
The mechanics of fameflation
Fameflation is the unavoidable result of our over-saturated informational environment. Because barriers to creating and distributing media have evaporated, there are more individuals and brands vying for attention than ever. In this landscape, the cost of achieving and maintaining fame rises, continually. That cost comes in numerous forms — we’ll explore three of them below.
1. The rising cost of ads
For brands, becoming famous is easier when you’ve got a big ad budget, but those budgets aren’t stretching as far as they used to. Advertising is getting more expensive in both digital and traditional media. Google’s cost-per-click rose 19% last year and the cost of a thousand watches of a TV ad has risen by 41% since 2019.
2. The rising mental cost of pursuing fame
Whether you’re trying to build a newsletter audience, grow on LinkedIn, become TikTok famous, or dominate YouTube, there’s an ever-present incentive to pump out more content, more often. TikTok recommends posting one to four times per day, for example. And last summer, MrBeast (the biggest YouTuber on the planet) said:
Clearly, there’s a psychological toll to playing the frequency game. The constant pressure to produce content, chase metrics, and manage our online selves can easily lead to burnout and a sense of inner alienation. As the philosopher Joshua Halberstam wrote in his 1984 essay Fame (21 years before YouTube launched):
The active pursuit of fame requires real expenditures of time, effort and determination — all resources we have in limited supply. In choosing to channel one’s energies toward the attainment of fame, other, more important values must be abandoned.
3. The rising cultural cost of the outrage-industrial complex
Our media environment incentivises outrageousness. Just look at how successfully Donald Trump monopolises the news or how self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate amassed billions of views on TikTok.
This dynamic plays out in more subtle ways every time a deliberately divisive piece of content is rewarded with outsized reach. Fame increasingly seems to mean aligning yourself with a particular worldview and embracing controversy. The potential cost to your reputation and livelihood is obvious — things haven’t turned out well for the likes of Tate or the US conspiracy nut Alex Jones. More insidiously, though, we all bear the costs of living in an atmosphere of perpetual shock and horror.
Is fame really what you want?
Maybe we’re thinking about fame all wrong. Whilst it’s perhaps easier than ever to gain some level of recognition, achieving broad, lasting fame is neither a realistic or relevant goal for many (never mind the psychic side-effects). We’re now in an era of fragmented fame, where individuals or brands might be extremely well-known within niche communities but totally unknown to everyone else. As Lysette Jones writes, ‘outside of big brands with big budgets, those wanting to grow won’t be able to rely as heavily on TV and brand building will take more creativity, bravery, and patience than ever before.’
While it’s harder in today’s messy media universe to achieve household-name fame, there’s also potential for cultivating deep connections with multiple audience segments. As Zoe Scaman observed recently, ‘some brands are engaging with wildly varied audiences and subcultures… from the outside, these combinations don’t make sense, but from the inside, they feel fully realised.’
Rethinking what it means to be known
These days, becoming internet-famous is a more common aspiration for young people than becoming a teacher or a vet; 2019 research from Statista suggests that ‘social media influencer’ and ‘YouTuber’ are two of the top five most sought-after careers for 11-16-year-olds in the UK. And with Goldman Sachs predicting the creator economy could be worth half a trillion dollars by 2027, why shouldn’t they be hungry for a piece of the pie?
Well, the reality is that less than half a percent of YouTube creators earn a full-time income from the platform. Similarly, most brands, in most categories, will never be in the mega-famous top 1%; they’ll never be equally recognisable to your next-door neighbour, your nail technician, and your nan. We’ve been seduced by an ‘unrealistic expectation of virality’, in Matt Klein’s words.
Of course, broad, mass-appeal fame still has significant value for those that have the budget and the resilience to pursue it. But the fragmentation of media and audiences offers alternative paths to success, away from the endless treadmill of making it big. For many brands and individuals, focussing on specific communities might be more fruitful than chasing universal recognition in an increasingly costly and fragmented world.
Featured image: Karolina Kaboompics / Pexels
