Hey folks, Pratham here

Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, where we pull apart the strange ideas that quietly run business today.

607 people in line. Some had been waiting since 7pm the night before.

They were buying $250 jackets for a movie called Marty Supreme.

The movie doesn't come out until Christmas. Nobody has seen it yet.

Those jackets are now reselling for $1,075 on eBay. Tom Brady wore one. So did Kylie Jenner.

A24 turned a table tennis film into a cultural moment before anyone could judge whether it was good.

Here's my problem with that.
What if it's not a gimmick? What if it's the new default?

The uncomfortable truth I want to prove today:
Companies that neglect product but master attention grow faster than companies that build exceptional products but lack cultural presence.

That shouldn't be true. But it is.

Paradox much? Let's dig in.

A Masters’ Union alum is raising from another Masters’ Union alum. Surreal to see the community thriving!

Stepping outside the classroom/office with the team for a meal with one agenda: no work!

Humans didn't suddenly lose the ability to focus. Usually the environment becomes impossibly crowded.

Research from the Technical University of Denmark shows collective attention shrinking because more content gets produced than any population can consume.

In 2013, a Twitter hashtag stayed in the top 50 for 17.5 hours.

By 2016 = 11.9 hours.

The pattern held across books, movies, Google searches, and scientific papers because the supply exploded.

Marketing estimates put daily brand exposures at 6,000–10,000, triple the early 2000s. 

Lumen Research found only 9% of digital ads get more than one second of attention. On TikTok, 71% of users decide within three seconds whether to keep watching.

Attention is now atomized into micro-moments.

Product quality no longer determines who gets noticed. Content does.

We were taught great products win. Build something people want. Iterate. Ship. Let quality speak.

That story is now a fairy tale.

Customer acquisition costs surged 222% over the past decade. 912 million people use ad blockers.

Your product could be exceptional. Nobody will know.

Meanwhile, attention compounds.

One smart push notification becomes a meme, becomes a WhatsApp forward, becomes a news story.

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising while generating 3x more leads.

Ogilvy's 2025 research put it plainly, “Today, simply pushing content into the world is akin to a whisper in a hurricane.”

The brands winning today aren't the ones with the tightest grip on their message.

They're the ones willing to surrender control entirely.

Participation creates distribution, and distribution creates growth.

And participation only happens when you stop polishing and start entertaining.

Zomato turned push notifications into jokes. "Akansha is on leave. So today, I'm asking you to order lunch. – Shefali, marketing team."

That notification went viral with 117,600+ views as strangers joked about lunch dates with imaginary employees.
CEO Deepinder Goyal went undercover as a delivery boy in October. Posted about it on Instagram. 86,000 likes. The criticism became part of the conversation. The conversation became the marketing.

Investment: a copywriter with a sense of humor.

Return: 45% higher order frequency. 60% higher retention. Revenue hit ₹20,243 crore in FY25. 67% YoY growth.

Humour as growth engine.

Stanley went from $73 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023. A 10x jump.

The product? A century-old steel tumbler. The change was TikTok color drops and influencer aesthetics.

#StanleyTumbler hit 700 million views.

Engineering advantage replaced by aesthetic advantage.

Shein surpassed H&M's revenue in 2023. #sheinhaul became the most-viewed fashion hashtag on TikTok. They captured 18% of global fast fashion market share.

They won not by designing better, but by uploading faster.

Duolingo went from 40 million monthly users in 2021 to 116.7 million by Q4 2024.

Same curriculum.

A 23-year-old named Zaria Parvez turned their dormant TikTok into unhinged owl content. She joined as a social media coordinator. Within two years, daily active users nearly quadrupled.

The owl became impossible to ignore. That was the whole point.

The campaign holds a Guinness World Record for longevity.

1% spend. Industry-leading awareness. For sixty years.

The weaker product wins because it becomes the stronger cultural artifact.

Winner = Content-first. Attention compounds at a pace product improvements can’t match.

For CeraVe's 2024 Super Bowl campaign, Ogilvy manufactured a fake conspiracy that actor Michael Cera created the brand.

15.4 billion earned impressions before the commercial aired. 450+ influencers joined organically. +25% sales lift.

The product held steady. The conversation moved. The sale moved with it.

Ogilvy calls this "Earned-First Creativity": "It's about setting little fires everywhere, and inviting people to feed the flames."

Investors chase attention signals because attention looks like traction. Traction looks like product-market fit. Even when the product is weak.

When a brand goes viral, the assumption is that the product must be working. Even when it isn't. That's how weak products get funded on the strength of storytelling alone.

The pattern: vision over product, brand theatre over governance, story over financial reality.

Attention is a multiplier. For good products, it compounds growth.

For weak ones, it accelerates collapse.

We live in an economy where content is the product, and the product is delivery infrastructure for the content.

Companies that internalise this idea step out of the race entirely and redraw the field itself.

If founders learn they can grow faster by entertaining than by improving, and markets keep rewarding awareness over outcomes, then the paradox stops being about companies at all. It becomes about us.

We claim we want great products. Yet the brands we follow, share and celebrate perform better on our feeds than in our hands.

This is a Goodhart’s-law moment. Once attention becomes the KPI, its value begins to decay, and the paradox only intensifies.

So I’m curious! Are startups spending on attention because it works, or because they’re afraid the product won’t survive silence?

Waiting to hear your thoughts.

Until next week, 
Pratham