You’ve seen the complaints:

"LinkedIn organic reach is down again."

"The algorithm is broken."

“Zero-click search will kill our traffic.”

"No one sees anything anymore unless it’s viral or unhinged."

“Brand discovery is impossible today.”

Here’s the truth: Algos gonna algo.

Fifteen years ago, Dutch navigational technology company TomTom released an outdoor billboard that perfectly captured the irony of traffic complaints.

It said: “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”

The same goes for algorithms. People love to blame the algorithms (and the platforms that power them) for feeding us junk or throttling brand reach.

But let’s be honest: Algorithms are a mirror. They’re not screwing with us. They are us — our clicks, our habits, and our twitchy little dopamine loops fed back to us at scale.

Platforms don’t shape the desire for ideas. People do.

Brand discovery today is less of a signal vs. noise challenge. The way people discover new ideas to follow, new brands to engage with, and new signals worth tuning into is undergoing a complete rewiring.

Audiences aren’t sitting around waiting to hear from you. They’re curating and filtering whether or not they’re aware of it.

They’re opting into tighter, more intentional circles, choosing resonance over reach.

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And they’re not just choosing what they see — they’re choosing who gets seen.

At a cultural level, this fragmentation into self-sorted circles feels like a bug — something that isolates more than it connects.

But for content and marketing teams, it’s the playing field we’re on. And it’s on us to learn the new physics of gathering attention.

From mass choir to improvised jam

Not long ago, brand discovery was more predictable. Marketers didn’t have to find audiences — they knew exactly where they were.

Everyone watched the same shows, listened to the same radio stations, and flipped through the same magazines.

For a while, people even went to the same few trade shows, surfed the same websites, searched the same keywords, and subscribed to the same email lists.

Marketers only had to find the best way to insert their messages into the most popular gathering places.

The math was easy. How much of your target audience uses this platform vs. that one? Then, how many times do you have to insert your message to get them to pay attention and become your owned audience? (We even called the request to do that an “insertion order.”)

That world is disappearing.

Mass channels were once shared commons — places where diverse perspectives collided and audiences encountered a range of ideas.

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Today, mass channels have become ideological arenas — optimized to reinforce beliefs or engagement rather than expand them.

Attention and discovery, once centralized commodities, have fractured into self-selected attention ecosystems.

Some are massive (like YouTube or a TV network), and some are niche (like a Reddit thread). But they all operate on the same principle: confirmation and resonance over diversity and surprise.

Discovery hasn’t died. It’s just gone hyperlocal.

In this new era, how loud you are doesn’t matter as much. What matters more is whether you’re playing something an audience wants to hear — in the room where they are, when they want to hear it.

Mass reach is fading. The future of brand discovery feels more like jazz. Improvised. Responsive. Audience-aware. You don’t show up with a setlist of popular hits. You show up ready to listen — and earn your place in the jam.

To do this right, stop chasing audience growth and start cultivating what I call audience gravity.

You don’t need more reach — you need more gravity

In the age of zero-click search, social media platforms as walled gardens, and AI-generated answers, you have to create a bigger value content footprint.

You have to deliver the complete value in all these places:

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Oh, and don’t even think of including a link to your owned properties, or you’ll fall afoul of the platform algorithm.

This is where audience gravity comes into play.

Audience gravity isn’t about reach — it’s about pull. It’s the magnetism you build when you consistently show up in all those specific arenas with value, in the right context, without demanding an immediate return.

It’s what happens when people start seeking you out across platforms, conversations, and communities because your presence makes their room better.

You’re no longer building one big audience — you’re trying to get invited into multiple audiences.

And if you can do this well — you show up consistently providing signal instead of noise — something bigger starts to happen: you start creating this gravitational pull to your own brand experiences.

In a layered, interconnected web of siloed communities, creators, and moments, you want your message to do more than show up — you want to make it belong.

Attention and trust are earned one room at a time

If you work for a small or not well-known brand, your job is to infiltrate multiple audiences.

Find the subcultures, the newsletters, the creators, and the forums. Deliver high-context signals inside the filtered ideological arenas. Earn trust in places where trust still means something.

That means showing up differently than just injecting your mass-media message. You have to read the room. Play slower. Listen first.

Once you’ve been invited into more than one, start weaving those wins together audience by audience and story by story. Stitch those siloed communities into a fabric that generates the gravity to expand your brand’s relevance room by room.

This “bottom-up” approach isn’t just about attracting diverse audiences with different messaging. You also need to build connective tissue between the pockets of trust you’ve earned: a unifying story, a shared identity, something greater than the sum of its parts.

For example, I worked with a small SaaS company breaking into the crowded martech market without the luxury of brand recognition. Instead of pushing one awareness idea across many platforms, they’re infiltrating contextual audiences within these platforms.

Together, we identified high-signal communities where their early adopters gather, including:

Rather than pushing the same message everywhere, they show up differently in each space to engage in conversations, co-create content with trusted insiders, build influencer relationships, and deliver narratives tailored to each audience’s language, pain points, and worldview.

But these efforts aren’t disconnected. Every contextual thread ties back to a central story.

They’re starting to stitch these wins together to create a flexible, connected fabric of stories that resonate across rooms without flattening the context that makes each one work for each audience.

This approach isn’t easy. It takes patience, time, and a focus on creating trusted moments within each of these communities.

Relevance is rebuilt room by room

What if you work for a brand that’s already well-known? That comes with challenges, too.

Familiarity doesn’t guarantee relevance anymore. Just because people in specific communities know the brand name doesn’t mean they want to hear what your brand wants to say (just ask Budweiser).

At a known brand, the job is fragmentation with intention.

That might mean launching sub-brands, building audience-specific content hubs, or crafting narrative extensions. Each of these options allow your core brand to show up differently in different rooms with modular ideas and stories tuned to context.

That might look something like this:

Each project operates as a kind of content sidecar — connected to the master brand but optimized for different ecosystems.

You don’t abandon your brand voice. You expand its vocabulary.

When done well, this top-down approach is like being a headline act that knows how to read the room before stepping on stage. You don’t open with your hits. You open with what makes sense here.

You’re not building audiences — you’re joining multiple

Regardless of whether you’re known or unknown, the new goal is to earn your trusted place within many communities to create that audience gravity.

And that changes everything about discovery.

These audiences aren’t waiting for your content. They’re already in a conversation. They're already in a community. Already connected around shared identity, values, or needs.

You don’t get to interrupt that. You have to be invited into it.

This means you must:

But even here, the job isn’t done.

Even if you're joining multiple communities, earning trust in fragmented circles, and creating gravity in a few, you need a way to weave those circles together. You need something that transcends the context into which you were adopted.

That’s the real art: creating a narrative strong enough to carry across rooms and create pull without flattening your uniqueness.

Brand marketing no longer follows the pop group setlist — finding a mass audience and playing your hits.

It’s a jam session where your brand is invited to play. You don’t control the stage. You don’t know who’s listening. You don’t always get a rehearsal.

But if you’ve done the work to train your ear and tune your signal, you’ll find the groove.

Once audience gravity takes hold, it’ll be your turn to lead.

It’s your jam. Play it well.

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