Social Soup warns brands are ‘renting attention’ as community shift accelerates

Social Soup has warned brands they are “renting attention” through paid media while consumers increasingly look for communities they can actively participate in.

Speaking at the agency’s Influence Upfronts event in Sydney, founder and CEO Sharyn Smith said brands are entering an “efficiency race” in paid media, where optimisation is becoming easier to replicate and AI will eventually flatten parts of the performance marketing advantage.

“If you are playing just the paid game, you're probably going to lose,” Smith said.

“Paid is basically renting attention. We’re spending more and more to reach people that trust us less and less.”

Smith said creativity and community are becoming critical differentiators for brands as media spend becomes more concentrated across major digital platforms and the mechanics of optimisation become less distinctive.

SEE MORE: Creators reject brand deals that don’t ring true

The event, titled The Community Shift, focused on how brands can move beyond one-off creator campaigns and build deeper ecosystems around trust, participation and real-world connection.

Amelia Rowley, founder of She Runs Club, said the shift is being driven by people’s desire to be involved in communities, not just exposed to content.

“We are moving into a new era where people are craving participation over passive consumption,” Rowley said.

Rowley said community should not be treated as another marketing label or content format.

“Community isn't just reading a blog. It’s not just a buzzword, it’s a feeling,” she said. “It actually thrives and exists without you having to be in it. It’s an ecosystem of people who continue to connect.”

She Runs Club is now extending that model into travel, with She Travels launching later this year. The group has already completed its first trip to Japan, with another planned for Sri Lanka in November.

Rowley said brands that build long-term relationships with communities can create advocacy that lasts beyond campaign activity.

“If you’ve got hundreds of women showing up in person over a specific time period, touching your product and getting to experience it in real life, that is going to have so much impact in their recommendations to their friends,” she said.

She said the strongest brand partnerships are built around genuine value exchange, rather than simply paying for access to an audience.

“I lean into it like it was a friendship,” Rowley said. “It’s getting to know one another and how we can build.”

Social Soup’s new community research, based on a survey of 895 Australians, found 43% of people are joining more communities than they were two years ago.

The biggest drivers include mental health, adult friendships, life changes, deeper hobbies, accountability around fitness goals and a backlash against digital saturation.

Smith said the findings reflect a broader shift in how Australians are seeking connection, with communities increasingly built around shared interests, life stages and in-person participation.

The research found community is rarely purely digital. Forty-six per cent of respondents said community exists in person only, while 51% said it exists across both in-person and online spaces. Just 3% said community was online only.

The commercial implications are significant. The research found 56% of respondents often receive product recommendations from their communities, while 91% have bought something recommended by a community. Thirty-one per cent said community recommendations are “just how I buy now”.

But Smith said many brands are still failing to build real community, despite using the language heavily in loyalty programs, welcome emails and social media copy. Only 14% of women said they felt part of a brand’s community. Among men, that figure dropped to 5%.

Smith said too many brands mistake transactions for belonging.

“Community is everywhere right now. Brands want it badly. It shows up in welcome emails, Instagram bios, loyalty program copy,” she said. “But we’re community washing.”

Smith said brands need to treat community as a participation model, not a communications wrapper.

She pointed to organic social, creator collaboration, real-world experiences, public feedback loops and earned-first content as key parts of what Social Soup calls its “community flywheel”.

The model asks brands to build owned channels and social spaces with genuine utility, collaborate with creators and community leaders, create ways for people to participate, ask for feedback publicly and amplify content and behaviour that is already working.

Smith said organic social is becoming more important again because it shows brands what people actually want to watch, share and talk about before paid media is used to scale it.

“Let’s find out what people want to watch and then put paid behind it,” she said.

The agency pointed to examples including Mecca, Carman’s, Woolworths’ Bunch, ANZ and Fate as brands people identified as doing community well.

Smith said the strongest brands understand the communities their customers already belong to, rather than trying to manufacture belonging from scratch.

She cited Mecca’s Beauty Pit Stop activation around Formula One as an example of a brand participating in a community moment rather than simply buying media around it.

The upfronts follow earlier Social Soup research showing 51% of Australian creators have walked away from brand deals they felt were inauthentic, rising to 66% among creators with more than 10,000 followers.

Together, the findings point to a sharper warning for brands: influence is becoming harder to buy through reach alone. The opportunity is to build trust through creators, communities and real participation over time.

Images supplied by Event View.