An Ostrich in the Pocket is Always Better Flossed

Prepping for the course, I was playing around with ways to illustrate how AI Overviews interpret prompts and people-please to the point of invention and, knowing Google’s AIO really does like to present explanations, I opted for questions around meanings. My first request was to ask it for the meaning of my made up phrase - ‘many badgers under the moon brings light to the night’. I was gifted a detailed excursion into Celtic folklore - which you can see in the screenshot - before the conclusion: “Therefore, the phrase likely implies that even in difficult or obscure situations, collective wisdom and diligent effort can provide clarity and a positive path forward.” This had me chuckling for hours and, on telling the family, everyone started to play.

Best at the game was No.2 Son, Dave, who came up with ‘an ostrich in the pocket is always better flossed’, ‘a salmon in the dark is twice the fish that you are’ and his final offering ‘a marshmallow squished is better than a wish’.

Again - humour me and browse the results in the screenshots and you’ll see I was guided to consider Dave’s marshmallow saying as one which ‘provides a valuable lesson in turning aspirations into actionable reality’.

Move over Tony Robbins.

Ostriches and badgers may seem like harmless entertainment but the game reveals a deeper and more ominous shift taking place within our information environment. When a large language model confidently interprets fabricated sayings as if they were ancient wisdom, it exposes the ease with which nonsense can be elevated to meaning.

This is the front door to slopaganda, the slurry of low-value, machine-generated content that accumulates in the public sphere and begins, little by little, to warp collective understanding.

Slopaganda does not need intent. It does not require a malicious actor or a coordinated campaign. It simply emerges from volume, from repetition, from unfiltered generation and from the belief that pattern is a proxy for truth. Once a phrase appears, no matter how absurd, it may be picked up, reshaped, mashed with something else, or simply resurfaced in a different context. When a model has seen something once, it becomes something that can appear again. The seeds settle. The soil is fertile. A new tendril of misinformation begins to grow.

This is how nonsense becomes narrative. A phrase that never existed before can, through automated interpretation and repetition, gain a sheen of legitimacy. A made-up line can acquire cultural weight simply because the system attempts to interpret it and will continue to do so as long as it remains statistically available. And because these models draw from vast reservoirs of text stored in the dark cells of data centres, even fleeting content can sit dormant until a future prompt brings it back to the surface. What feels harmless can, through repetition, become part of the informational compost from which future errors grow.

Dave’s ostrich could yet take flight.

This is the danger. Slopaganda bypasses the old gatekeepers. It occupies the grey zone between seriousness and satire, between error and interpretation. It spreads because it requires no verification and no editorial oversight. It spreads because the machine will always try to explain whatever is placed before it. And as the volume increases, people begin to lose the ability to distinguish authentic insight from machine-generated sludge.

For practitioners this creates an additional burden. Our work has always been about maintaining trust, yet we now contend with a rising tide of synthetic content that looks plausible, feels authoritative and is presented with the same structural confidence as genuine expertise.

The work of provenance, once a background responsibility, has become central. We must be able to show where content originated, how it was created and whether it has been altered. We must be able to verify the chain of custody for every asset we use.

We must ensure that our organisations remain rooted in authenticity even as the information landscape becomes increasingly unstable.This requires a shift in how we practice. We must move from simple content production to stewardship of information integrity. That includes using provenance tools, maintaining transparent records and embedding verifiable origins into our own material. It means marking what we create, labelling synthetic elements and ensuring our organisations do not inadvertently contribute to the slop that is overwhelming the public sphere.

Slopaganda thrives when provenance is absent. It weakens when provenance is visible. The more practitioners adopt clear, transparent methods of declaring how content is made and what it contains, the more resilient the public narrative becomes.

We cannot prevent slopaganda entirely, but we can create pockets of clarity in a noisy landscape. We can ensure our organisations remain trusted sources in a world where trust is as scarce as truth.

This is the next frontier of public relations. Not chasing algorithmic favour, nor optimising content for machines but safeguarding truth from dilution. Holding space for clarity. Maintaining the integrity of the information chain when everything around it is slipping into a grey, frictionless blur.

For most of the late twentieth century, marketers told themselves a comforting story. Growth was normal, jobs would more or less be there, and a steadily rising middle class would keep buying. The task was to build brands, engineer desire and push people down a funnel towards purchase.

Visibility, reach and clever persuasion would do the rest.That world has gone.We are living in a decade defined by risk, chaos and uncertainty not aspiration and ease. The OECD’s Risks that Matter survey, drawing on more than 27,000 people in 27 countries, finds citizens deeply anxious about their finances, their health and their wider social security, with worries about the future outweighing almost everything else. The Edelman Trust Barometer describes a “crisis of grievance”, with majorities in many countries convinced that government and business serve the wealthy and leave everyone else to fend for themselves.

Alongside that, displacement and dislocation are no longer marginal stories. By mid-2025 more than 120 million people had been forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict and violence, nearly twice as many as a decade ago, with climate-driven disasters adding tens of millions more to the total. People cross seas in fragile boats, are pushed from one country to another, or move within their own borders in search of work, safety or a liveable climate. Even those who never leave their town live with the knowledge that the ground beneath them is less solid than it used to be.In that context, the old language of “consumers” and “target audiences” sounds threadbare.

What we actually have is a frugal majority – a cross-generational, cross-border population trying to hold together some kind of life in the midst of economic strain, political fracture and environmental crisis. If we want to understand search, visibility and influence in this decade, we need to start there, not with yesterday’s models of brand worship and celebrity reach.

The first thing to recognise is that the frugal majority is not a youth trend. It is a structural condition. Deloitte’s global Gen Z and Millennial surveys have tracked these younger cohorts for over a decade and the story is consistent. They are grappling with financial insecurity, high stress and climate anxiety and they are acutely aware that their economic prospects do not match the promises they grew up with. At the same time, OECD data shows high levels of worry about old-age income, healthcare costs and care in later life among older adults, who have seen the supposed guarantees of post-war social contracts erode.  

Behaviourally, the convergence is striking. Consumer trackers from McKinsey, Deloitte and others describe a world in which value seeking has become pervasive. Shoppers across income bands and age groups are trading down brands, delaying purchases and cutting discretionary spending, while still spending when something feels genuinely worth it. PwC’s analysis of Gen Z transaction data shows them cutting overall spend, especially on discretionary categories, even as marketers still talk about their long-run spending power.  

Underneath the labels, there is a shared money mindset: be careful, make things last, squeeze value from every pound, dollar or yuan, and do not assume that next year will be easier than this one.

A recent snapshot of US attitudes towards frugality, for example, finds people across generations describing themselves as frugal and treating thrift as a virtue rather than an embarrassment. That picture is echoed in survey work elsewhere, where older and higher-income respondents are just as likely as younger and lower-income groups to say they hunt for deals, buy on promotion and worry about making ends meet.

So while marketing discourse continues to slice the world into Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers, everyday life is telling another story. Across those supposed divides, people are budgeting more tightly, scrutinising prices, choosing practical over showy and trying to reduce risk.

The frugal majority is not a niche - it is the centre.

It is easy – and politically convenient – to cast generations as opponents. Young people are portrayed as entitled and feckless or as radical threats. Older people are painted as selfish hoarders of assets and privilege. There are material differences in assets and power and they matter. But if you listen for what people are afraid of, you find shared themes.Younger people talk about insecure work, unaffordable housing and the real possibility - increasingly a reality - that they will never achieve the living standards their parents managed. Older people worry that their savings and pensions, if they have them, will not stretch, that social care will be unaffordable, that they will become a burden on families who are already struggling or who they are still trying to support. Both look at their children or grandchildren and doubt that the next generation will be better off – a view now held by the majority of respondents in many rich countries, including here in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Think of younger adults and older adults as being on opposite river banks. On one bank, twenty-somethings in insecure work, living with parents or in precarious rentals, watching prices rise faster than pay - if they have a job at all. On the other bank, older people looking at shrinking incomes, rising health and care costs and the prospect of long, under-funded later-lives, trying to keep their adult children afloat in uncertainty. Between them, a fast flow of anxiety about jobs, homes and safety.

So what I think we need to connect the banks is a Bailey Bridge – the temporary military bridge dropped into place when normal routes are destroyed and communities disconnected. Our Bailey Bridge is made from shared experience and shared concerns. On both sides of the bank, frugality is in full swing. Both are inclined to use digital tools to search for deals, compare prices and read reviews. Both now find that AI-mediated search and recommendation systems sit between them and almost every choice they make. Studies of AI search habits show people of all ages adapting to conversational queries and AI summaries, even if the younger cohorts move first.

The Bailey Bridge is also made from shared displacement. Those in small boats crossing the Channel, the millions forced to flee Sudan or Palestine, the workers moving within India, China or the United States from one region to another in search of work – they are at the hard edge of the same forces that unsettle those who never cross a border.

When jobs feel temporary, when rents and mortgages can jump without warning, when climate shocks wipe out livelihoods, everyone becomes a little more like a refugee in their own life, trying to travel light, dodge discrimination and keep options open.

If we look through that lens, polarisation stops being an inevitable state of nature and starts to look like a deliberate political project – one that takes two banks shaped by the same flood and convinces each side that the other is the enemy, not the water.Search, AI and the thinning of visibilityInto this environment steps a new mediation layer.

Search is no longer just blue links on a page. Google’s AI Overviews and similar tools now sit at the top of search results, summarising the web into neat paragraphs. Independent analyses across 2024 and 2025 show click-through rates on the top organic result falling by a third or more when an AI overview appears, with some news sites reporting drops in traffic of up to 70 or 80 per cent for affected queries. Complaints and lawsuits from publishers and platforms allege that these AI layers use their content to answer questions while diverting traffic and revenue.

At the same time, people are starting journeys not with brand names but with prompts: “find me the cheapest reliable washing machine that will last ten years”, “show me the safest second-hand car I can afford on this budget”, “what is the lowest-cost way to feed a family of four healthily this week”. AI search guides them through options, surfaces reviews, weighs price against quality and filters away anything that looks risky or irrelevant.

For the frugal majority, AI is less a toy than a survival tool. For brands and businesses still locked into an old visibility mindset, AI is treated as simply another channel to optimise. Hence the pitch for “AI-optimised content”, “AIO strategies” and the rest. The assumption is that if you can get yourself into the summary, you win. What this misses is the basic point that the frugal majority is not short of things to look at. They are short of money, time, energy and trust. A search layer that compresses options makes them more, not less, selective. The question is no longer “how can we be seen” but “why would a stressed, budget-constrained, sceptical human – possibly advised by an equally sceptical AI assistant – allocate any of their scarce resources to us?”

From grievance to solidarity

The Edelman Trust Barometer’s language of “descent into grievance” is accurate but incomplete. People are angry, yes. Many believe that violence is the only way to achieve change. But they are also tired, over-worked, under-paid and locked out of opportunity. They have been told for years that they are “consumers” whose job is to keep buying then blamed when the system built on their spending begins to crack.

If we continue to approach them as eyeballs to capture through SEO, GEO, AIO or the next acronym (my head keeps defaulting to e-i-e-i-o) we feed that grievance. We reinforce the sense that their role is to be measured, targeted and monetised not listened to and worked with.

We also deepen generational divides, because generational labels are one of the easiest (and laziest) tools available to those who want to keep people arguing horizontally rather than looking up.

The alternative sits with the frugal majority itself. When you accept that a twenty-two-year-old gig worker, a forty-five-year-old single parent and a seventy-year-old pensioner have more in common economically than the labels imply, you can start to design communication and practice that builds bridges rather than trenches. You can use the Bailey Bridge - acknowledge shared fears, recognise shared frugality and treat AI-mediated search not as a slot machine you game for visibility but as an infrastructure where you must show genuine value, fairness and care if you want to be surfaced and chosen.

For public relations, communication and any organisation that claims to serve people, this means changing stance. Less shouting for attention, more work at the relational level under constraint. Less obsession with reach, more focus on whether you are relieving any of the risk, exhaustion and exclusion people face. Less reliance on generational caricature, more attention to the ways in which younger and older people are already standing on the same fragile bridge, trying not to fall into the water.

Wake up, in other words. The world has changed.

The frugal majority is not a market segment to be mined. It is the lived reality of most of the people we claim to work for. If there is a route out of polarisation and grievance, it will not be found in another visibility hack. It will be built from the recognition that across age groups and borders, people are already joined by a shared experience of risk and a shared commitment to making limited resources go as far as they can. The work now is to meet them on the bank and help strengthen the bridge.

And remember in those moments when you need comfort and solace - an ostrich in the pocket is always better flossed and many badgers under the moon brings light to the night.