Personal branding looked absurd until social media removed the need for ad budgets

Evidence

Interestingly, Peters was roundly mocked for this at the time; the magazine even published a mea culpa, disavowing the article and its dystopic vision of a world in which office mates compete with one another over brand-name recognition. Would it not be insufferable? The end of collegiality? There was also a more practical problem: it was one thing for world-famous celebrities and entrepreneurs like Jordan and Oprah and Richard Branson to position themselves as their own brands—and quite another for a university student or a middle manager or a laid-off factory worker to do it. Peters had written that individuals now had the same need for visibility as major corporations, which are able to purchase “a full flight of TV and print ads designed to get billions of ‘impressions’ … If you’re brand You, you’ve got the same need for visibility—but no budget to buy it.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 157

Categorization

• QUESTION: Klein implies the technology gap was the only thing making personal branding implausible in 1997 — yet never quite states what made it plausible later. Worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: Early tech insiders found self-branding rhetoric ridiculous yet recognized its pervasiveness. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 426; Advertiser competition freed brands from subsidizing content creators — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 957