The attention economy rewards the loudest voice. The answer economy rewards the most useful one.
By Sarah Clifford, Acting Joint Head of Creative, and Head of Strategy
In the attention economy, the loudest voice usually wins. Shock, outrage and humour travel further and faster than anything careful or considered, and governments, campaigners and hostile states have all learned to play by those rules. We have written before about how governments are adapting to this environment. But something is shifting. Audiences still give their attention to whoever entertains them. Increasingly, they give their trust to whoever answers their questions.
Emotion has always been the communicator's most powerful tool, but what happens when it becomes the only one? Responding to an age of historically low public trust, a new approach to digital communications is showing that trust can be earned by doing something deceptively simple: answering the question.
Pathos and the race for attention
Aristotle identified three modes of persuasion:
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ethos, the credibility of the speaker;
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logos, the logic of the argument; and
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pathos, the appeal to emotion.
Of the three, pathos has always done the heavy lifting. Anyone who watched daytime television a decade ago will remember the charity adverts: a malnourished donkey, a mournful soundtrack, a phone number on screen. They worked because they made us feel something before we had time to think.
The attention economy has turned that insight into an industry. As the economist Herbert Simon observed, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. When attention is the scarce resource, platforms reward whatever captures it, and the emotional palette has widened far beyond sympathy. Shock, outrage and humour all do the same job.
Geopolitics has taken this to its extreme. Early in the war with Iran, the White House released a video cutting American football tackles together with footage of missile strikes. Iran responded with AI-generated Lego animations mocking the President. The group behind them claims 900 million views across platforms, and Iranian government accounts saw a thirtyfold rise in views and likes in the first 50 days of the conflict.
That is extraordinary reach. But look at what it delivers: no answers, no explanation, nothing an audience could act on. Only soundbites and a rush of emotion, whether shock, humour, outrage or empathy. Attention is taken, and nothing is given back.
The radical act of answering
For much of the last decade, this space was dominated by Donald Trump. Now a wave of public figures is responding with their own brand and approach, and what sets the most effective apart is almost radical. They answer the question.
Closer to home, the UK's new Prime Minister appears to have learned this lesson. Andy Burnham's communications are digital first, and they are reaching audiences government often struggles to engage: in August, More in Common found more than half of 18 to 24 year-olds had seen his content.
The most instructive example is his recent appearance on LADbible's 'Agree to Disagree'. The prompt: playing music out loud on public transport should be illegal. Burnham strongly agreed. The young woman opposite him strongly disagreed. He asked whether it never annoyed her. She replied that it was equally annoying when nobody talks to each other at all.
His response is worth studying. He said "That's a fair point", explored her idea with her, used it to help her consider how other passengers might feel, and negotiated towards common ground: a shared ambition to promote a "culture of encounter". He conceded ground without abandoning his position, and days later his government announced its campaign against noisy passengers. Listening and answering are not the same as agreeing.
The clip is light-hearted and cut for social media, but it is the door, not the room. It draws viewers to the full episode on YouTube, where the same format tackles whether it is harder to get a job now and whether it is increasingly unsafe to be a girl in the UK. When nearly one million young people are not in education, employment or training, being seen to listen to them is not a soft skill. It is strategy.
He is not the only one. In New York, when the City Council approved an 18 per cent pay rise for senior officials, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked whether he would take his. He said no, and said plainly that nobody in the city believes the mayor is underpaid. In one line he answered the question his audience was really asking, which was whether he was in this for himself, and turned a potential charge of hypocrisy into evidence of his priorities.
You do not need to share either man's politics to see the pattern. Both use the formats and tone of social media to earn attention. Both then spend that attention on an answer.
Where trust is built
Part of my role at BFBS Creative is training senior spokespeople from the FCDO, NATO, UK government departments and allied governments to deliver strategic communications under pressure. The principle I return to every time is simple. Your key message is not just what you want to say. It is the meeting point between what you want to say and what your audience needs to hear from you.
Spokespeople often resist this. Their instinct, shaped by clearance processes and the fear of a misstep, is to protect the line. But a line that ignores the audience's question protects no one. It tells people their concerns are an inconvenience, and they notice.
This is why answering the question matters. Every direct answer is a small deposit of credibility, and over time those deposits build ethos, the mode of persuasion the attention economy neglects. Pathos may win the moment. Ethos wins the relationship.
The attention economy is being held to account
Audiences have not stopped responding to pathos, and communicators should not stop using it. But the rules are changing. People can now get a direct answer to almost any question in seconds, and they are less willing to accept anything less from the institutions and leaders who serve them. The communicators who build lasting trust will treat attention as the start of a conversation, not the end of one.
So before you publish your next post, brief your next spokesperson or sign off your next campaign, ask one question: what question does this answer for my audience? If you cannot name one, you are competing for attention. If you can, you are building trust.