The square
The digital public square is the primary place for meaning formation and negotiation in a Post-Truth world. It’s an always-on environment with its own infrastructure, players, and ways of amplifying its output. We’ve been migrating to it for two decades, seduced by the convenience of carrying the world in our pockets, engaged by interaction and novelty at every step.
Like the public agoras of old, the digital public squares of our time are not perfect spaces either. Meaning is negotiated upstream among third parties before audiences input. Advertisers groom the space to favour some behaviours over others. We know this well as branding and marketing folk. Our work adorns the public space for the benefit of the brands we represent. It’s Times Square, but online.
If you operate in countries where outlets are legally permitted to adopt overt political biases and endorse specific parties (the UK and the US are such by law), the picture of a digital public square where the positions of what we’re meant to stand for are pre-drawn for us before we enter the chat more clearly comes into view.
You expect a level of alignment between media and politics to begin with. It’s how you build an overall sense of credibility, and structure. What should be more relevant is the extent to which the media swing Left/Right, signifying that the issues we publicly aim to resolve or fight against are amplified along expected political lines by the outlets we consume, with limited independence or nuance.
There’s not much point in professing one’s truth in the digital public square. Right over there, on the other fence, under the shining lights of the messages that they agree with, is the other side that thinks their truth is right, too, and that won’t budge. Anyone falling outside the lines seems quieted or congregating in spaces where they can listen and still be heard.
It’s interesting how the digital public square is split in two camps only, perfectly aligned across the issues on the spectrum, unable to adopt an opposing view. Where are the conservatives who endorse immigration? The liberals tough on welfare? The traditionalists who don’t want to ban abortion, the pro-life feminists?
It’s the irony of Post-Truth, a version of our world where purportedly every perspective is simultaneously right and all perspectives are equal. It doesn’t seem to encourage nuance, and you must fit within set parameters to belong. If you hold a differing opinion, you need to find another spot. You haven’t got much agency here.
When I first thought of Babel 2.0, I explored the foundations of Post-Truth to understand what makes it so appealing. Several months on, at the risk of drawing an early conclusion, Post-Truth appears to be one of the biggest epistemological cons ever. Instead of delivering perfect legitimacy across all claims, it codes positions for strife instead.
The agency
Calling out that meaning is pre-embedded upstream in the digital public square should not be a challenge. The challenge should be in asking if we’re happy with this quo and how we can assert more agency over it.
There’s a level of noise that comes with the digital public square which we should take as given in our connected world. This means accepting the pluses of connectivity, while becoming more astute in calling out its drawbacks:
- equating its verbal deluge and megaphone with substance (entities that shout the loudest aren’t necessarily the most valuable or insightful)
- conflating the digital public square with the reality and complexity of the analogue world
- (for organisations), mistaking the gunk of the digital public square for culture, assuming an association and correlation with one’s brands, and placing this gunk at the centre of brand positioning and messaging just because it’s pervasive or popular
Easy to write, difficult to do. Our interaction with the digital public square is fuelled by ongoing information and catchy formats, distorted by bots and AI, fed to the point where it’s primevally addictive. To tilt the scales, it would serve us to engage with sources of information from both sides of the aisle, critically identify the issues discussed and their nuances instead of arguing over perspectives publicly.
Organisationally, there is a need to listen carefully to the environment and the discussions in the digital public square, a craft enabled by media monitoring and social listening. Understand what truly matters and get ahead of relevant issues; not everything in circulation is of strategic relevance. Community, social media management and PR are useful tools allowing organisations to deploy an active, human voice, countering the digital public square with their own agency instead of simply mirroring its behaviours and requests and accepting the blows it can sometimes deal.
Organisations and brands have been under pressure to shape themselves in line with the principle of “every perspective is simultaneously right and all perspectives are equal”. This creates tension with their primary role, i.e., doing business in line with their own mission, and catering to their own audiences.
Given the need for organisational performance and brand differentiation, their contribution to Post-Truth seems best done on terms that reflect organisational and brand DNA rather than through mutation to a different version of themselves. Contrary to the square, this doesn’t make organisations and brands unprincipled. It makes them “authentic” (ironically a Post-Truth requirement), and less performative.
The brands
When I started Babel 2.0, I thought about the vitriol that brands experience when they seem to be getting it wrong. Looking into American Eagle, Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Target, the coverage and reactions to their faux pas perfectly reflect the power lines pre-drawn in the digital public square. These brands were faulted from the start for being too political/not political enough, too nationalist/not nationalist enough, too diverse/not diverse enough.
Very few people talked about the objective brand planning errors they made to get into that position: doing away with distinctive assets (Cracker Barrel), targeting commercial growth without attuning new segments to core audiences, ignoring decade-long memory structures to cater to external currents (BudLight, Target). There are also instances where the ire of the square is deserved and brands showed themselves insensitive (Sanex).
This would suggest the square is able to detect when brands get it wrong and courtroom them publicly. However, the square has rarely given the correct verdict, and it’s never held the instruments to fix the problem.
Those instruments belong to brand planning. I would suggest the reason the brands above experienced the ire of the square is because they abandoned their own identity and logic, giving in to the logic of the square instead. While the digital public square did set the trap (of seemingly setting the terms), these brands faulted once they misread cultural participation for strategic legitimacy.
I call this “the miscarriage of brand planning”, letting go of strategic judgement before the work we do enters the square. I’ve always admired how grand civil engineering works have stood the test of time. I like to think it’s because engineers didn’t abandon the craft and logic of their discipline and built robustly. Perhaps that should be the case for brand planning, a reinstitution of its sovereignty as a discipline, where culture informs and doesn’t dictate, and coherence with what brands represent is more important than being culturally relevant. A return to a discipline that has always been smartest when it’s kept it simple.
I believe the most important question in branding indeed starts with “Why? But this doesn’t always lead to purpose. A decade ago, the “Why?” led to “Why do we do what we do?”. In my mind, it has most recently become: “Why should this brand care about this external issue? What proof is there to back this strategy?”
This doesn’t mean it’s ok for brands to be culturally blind. They’ve always needed a fine understanding of their environment for their messages to land. Under this approach, however, brand planning retains origination instead of giving in to appease culture, even if there’s a risk of having silence interpreted as counterculture and practising restraint isn’t as straightforward as issuing a response.
Planning mediates between brands and their release into the digital public square. It’s by construct the main vehicle brands have to generate meaning upstream. When every discipline leads with its own frameworks, why should branding be ashamed of putting planning first?
Out of the brands recently courtroomed in the digital public square, American Eagle is the only one whose share price has increased steadily since the July 2025 campaign, more than doubling from $10.56 on 23 July (launch date) to $26.74 on 16 Jan, signalling market confidence. American Eagle is also the only brand that openly defended its work, reminding everyone that it’s in the business of selling jeans.
So, next time we think that democracy and social justice rest on the shoulders of a pair of jeans or any other branded product, let’s breathe in and remember:
“It’s just a brand, standing in front of a customer, asking him to buy it.”
Irina Gheorghe 
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