This op-ed was written by Luke Jones, Associate Director and Media Lead at Woodrow, and first published in PR Moment.
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I was scrolling through my phone when the British prime minister turned up holding a potato.
He tossed it into the air. “This potato should be much bigger,” he said. “Sadly, it isn’t.”
It’s a strange way to find yourself thinking about the state of farming. But I stopped, and in a few seconds, that small potato explained what farmers are up against more clearly than most speeches manage in Parliament.
I was one of the 36% of Britons who saw Burnham on social media in his first week as Prime Minister. For comparison, 35% watched the England v Argentina game in July.
How is it that a politician is competing with a World Cup semi-final for attention? Woodrow’s first Influence Economy report gives us some of the answers.
Firstly, the feed is the new front page. Secondly, those who make complicated things easy to grasp, on platforms like TikTok, now have more sway over public opinion than institutions, brands or experts.
Perhaps that’s not too surprising? Wait until you follow that logic to its end.
Andrew Tate is trusted by just 0.2% of Britons, yet the British public judges him more influential than the Pope.
Trust and prestige, every single time, gets beat by being understood and accessible. In Britain, experts are trusted by 65% of people yet rank only seventh for influence, while social media, trusted by just 8%, is judged the information source that most shapes public debate.
The pattern crosses the Atlantic. Donald Trump is trusted by 22% of Americans but has more sway than anyone else, with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan close behind, while the more trusted Neil deGrasse Tyson and António Guterres sit at the bottom.
Perhaps this should make our industry reflect on a frank question: do we still understand what good communications looks like?
We’ve built elaborate barometers for trust, tracking it to a decibel point each year. Yet we seem much less interested in the simpler question of whether anybody actually understood what we said.
We spend hours preparing executives to sound polished under studio lights, while sometimes, the people they need to reach are somewhere else entirely.
And press operations still find themselves built around releases, statements and lines to take, only to let the first explanation most people see be a TikTok they didn’t make.
We’ve always known social media is important. But at the launch at our Influence Economy report, when Alan Rusbridger said “social media is the biggest form of media power the world has ever seen”, he wasn’t just talking about its reach, but how it’s changed the rules.
One of those rules is who gets heard. Once, it was editors who got to decide. Normally based on expertise, prestige, and trust. Now, it’s the thumbs that decide, based solely on who can distract them first.
If you want a mass audience, you are now competing with dinner, gossip, sport and the all the subjects with an endless talent for commanding attention.
For politicians, CEOs and major institutions, that means they must relearn a skill their status once did for them: earning attention.
It used to be that a journalist had already chosen them, a programme had booked them, a masthead had told the audience they were worth hearing. Even then, a minister never had to persuade the Today programme to keep listening once the interview had begun. An analyst could get a statement into the FT and chalk it up as a win, regardless of how many readers reached the second paragraph or wandered off after the headline.
Those wins still count for a great deal. Traditional media holds enormous influence and, for some audiences, remains the shortest route to power. The people who write laws, move money and run institutions still read, watch and listen to serious journalism. And they should. It remains one of the few places where powerful claims are tested.
But something has gone wrong when Andrew Tate is judged more influential than the Pope. Power may still sit in small rooms. If the world outside stops believing in the people inside, sooner or later, the walls will stop protecting them.
Attention, though, is a skill that can be learned. And leaders and institutions can earn it without giving up the seriousness that put them in those rooms in the first place. Sometimes, apparently, with a potato.
