Nobody’s Impressed by Your Comms Report Anymore
Lately, I’ve been questioning my own attention span.
Not because I think technology is “ruining us,” exactly. More because I genuinely cannot remember the last campaign, advertisement, or branded message that clearly persuaded me to do something meaningful. Buy something. Donate. Support a cause. Change my behavior. Change my mind.
I scroll through hundreds of pieces of content every day: news clips, memes, commentary, creator videos, sponsored posts, podcasts, political outrage, brand campaigns, advocacy messaging. Most of it disappears from my brain almost immediately.
And honestly, even the content that does shape my thinking rarely does it instantly.
It happens gradually through repetition, familiarity, emotional reinforcement, and seeing the same narratives repeated across feeds, conversations, podcasts, and social circles over time until certain ideas begin to feel credible or culturally accepted.
That realization stayed with me while conducting graduate research on how advocacy communication campaigns are evaluated within the United Nations system.
The deeper I got into the research, the more I started wondering whether the communications industry may be facing a larger structural problem:
We have become exceptionally good at measuring visibility while becoming far less certain about whether visibility still translates into meaningful influence.
Historically, this made sense. Communications systems were built around distribution channels where visibility and influence were more closely connected. Television advertising was measured through ratings. Print relied on circulation. Outdoor advertising relied on estimated foot traffic and visibility counts. Early digital media introduced clicks, impressions, and engagement metrics as more precise extensions of the same logic.
For decades, the assumption was straightforward: if enough people saw the message, influence would eventually follow.
But because of AI and the industrial-scale acceleration of content production, the bubble around visibility metrics is starting to burst.
Brands are spending enormous amounts on paid distribution, influencer campaigns, digital ads, creator partnerships, and content output while increasingly questioning why all of that visibility is no longer translating as predictably into conversions, trust, loyalty, cultural relevance, or revenue growth.
The modern information environment has exposed how unreliable exposure alone can be as a proxy for persuasion. People are overwhelmed with content, increasingly desensitized to advertising, and more aware than ever that visibility itself can now be artificially amplified through paid media, boosted distribution, influencer spend, algorithmic advantages, engagement pods, or simply buying more exposure outright.
Which means large numbers alone no longer automatically signal genuine influence the way they once did.
Attention is cheap.
Influence is not.
Interestingly, one thing my research also made me reflect on was UNICEF’s long-standing work around Communication for Development (C4D), now more commonly framed as Social and Behavior Change communication.
Because in many ways, C4D already understood years ago what much of the modern communications industry is only now beginning to rediscover:
Exposure alone rarely changes behavior.
For example, vaccine confidence campaigns were often not driven primarily by mass visibility, but by repeated reinforcement through trusted local figures, community engagement, schools, and peer influence over time.
That logic is not actually very different from effective PR work today.
Most people do not suddenly trust a company, public figure, or institution because of one viral campaign or one high-performing post. Trust is usually built gradually through consistency, credibility, third-party validation, repeated exposure, cultural relevance, and sustained narrative reinforcement over time.
In other words, persuasion was never simply a distribution problem.
The irony is that many communications professionals already understand this intuitively.
One of the strongest findings from my research was that practitioners consistently described the outcomes they cared about most as the outcomes institutions struggle hardest to measure formally.
Narrative shifts.
Public trust.
Policy traction.
Changes in framing.
Stakeholder influence.
Long-term attitude change.
The problem is not ignorance.
The problem is that institutional systems often reward visibility metrics anyway because of leadership expectations, reporting structures, donor requirements, campaign deliverables, and pressure to produce immediate measurable results.
Large organizations need metrics that travel cleanly across departments, executive briefings, donor reports, and quarterly reviews. Visibility metrics are administratively convenient because they create the appearance of clarity.
Influence rarely does.
Several practitioners interviewed in the research pointed to the growing mismatch between the long-term nature of advocacy influence and the short-term nature of campaign evaluation cycles.
One respondent summarized it perfectly:
“Evaluation often ends when the campaign ends, even though influence may continue afterward.”
That line captures one of the central contradictions in modern communications measurement.
Organizations often evaluate campaigns as though influence behaves like a short-term transaction rather than a cumulative social process.
But communications influence rarely unfolds neatly. Especially in digital environments shaped by fragmented attention, polarized discourse, content saturation, and declining trust in institutions.
Communications teams today are surrounded by more data than ever before while becoming less certain about whether any of it reflects genuine persuasion.
We know what people clicked.
We know what people watched.
We know what people shared.
But understanding what people actually believed afterward, what they trusted, or whether they carried those narratives into real-world decisions is far more difficult.
And frankly, that is the part that matters most.
My research ultimately reinforced something I think many communications professionals already sense intuitively but rarely articulate openly:
The communications industry has slowly confused measurable activity with meaningful influence.
Not because practitioners are naive.
Not because organizations are incompetent.
But because institutional systems naturally reward simplification, standardization, defensible reporting, and immediate visibility.
The problem is that persuasion has never operated neatly within those conditions.
The real communications challenge today is no longer simply getting people to see something.
It is getting people to absorb it deeply enough that it changes how they understand the world afterward.
And that remains the hardest thing in communications to measure precisely because it is the thing that actually matters.
This article is adapted from graduate capstone research conducted at the New York University School of Professional Studies as part of the Master of Science in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program.
