In this op-ed, Lisa Portolan, managing director of Horizon Communication Group, reflects on her time speaking at the All About Women summit in Sydney and why physical, tangible interactions with media and technology are here to stay.
Earlier in the year, my daughter made herself a flip phone.
Not a real one, but a cardboard version fashioned from aluminium foil, sticky tape and whatever else she could find.
Apparently, it’s a trend at school: the girls in her year are all doing it. I assumed it was a protest against smartphones and parental lectures about screen time.
It wasn’t. It was aesthetic.
The phone wasn’t meant to work; it symbolised an era when technology did less but felt more charming.
When I described my old Sony Ericsson flip phone and its monochrome texts, she was delighted.
The fatigue of frictionless life
For years, the marketing industry treated digital as an unstoppable force. More platforms, more data, more reach, more optimisation. Everything measurable and trackable. Then COVID accelerated the trend to its logical extreme, conferences moved to Zoom, festivals became livestreams, and cultural life migrated almost entirely into screens.
Post that period, we talked a lot about the “return of the physical world”.
But if we’re honest, much of it sounded like wishful thinking. The assumption was that convenience and low cost would ultimately win. Why commute to an event when you could watch it online? Why buy physical media when you could watch or read it for free online?
Yet something interesting has happened in the years since. Instead of digital convenience eliminating physical experiences, it seems to have intensified the appetite for them. The shift is subtle, but increasingly visible. Vinyl records continue to grow even as streaming dominates listening. Film cameras and magazines are reappearing in younger hands, and perhaps most interestingly for our industry, live events are thriving again.
Not as an alternative to digital, but as something fundamentally different from it.
A sold-out room feels different
Earlier this month, I spoke at All About Women at the Sydney Opera House.
The session sold out – around 500 people in the room. The experience of being there revealed something digital platforms rarely capture.
The conversation didn’t end when the panel finished.
It spilled into the foyer, into the queues for coffee, into conversations with strangers sitting nearby. People approached speakers afterwards with questions they hadn’t wanted to ask publicly and continued debating the ideas with people they’d just met. Later that evening the discussion continued across group chats, LinkedIn posts and follow-up articles. In other words, the event generated a halo of activity that extended well beyond the physical space.
This is the paradox of physical gatherings: they often produce more ongoing conversation than purely digital experiences. A livestream might attract more total viewers, but it rarely generates the same intensity of engagement.
When you’re physically present, you’re invested. You’ve made time, travelled somewhere, sat in a room with hundreds of other people. The experience has weight.
The value of shared attention
Part of what’s happening here is the return of shared experience. Digital environments are defined by abundance: infinite content, scrolling and notifications, with attention fragmented across dozens of stimuli at once.
Physical events work differently. There is one room, one stage, one conversation, and for a moment, everyone is focused on the same thing.
It’s a feeling that used to be common in media – like when everyone watched the same movie on a Friday night and talked about it the next day – but is now increasingly rare.
In a live setting, you can feel the crowd develop its own momentum; you hear when an idea collectively lands, when a room laughs together, when a murmur of disagreement spreads. That shared attention creates space for nuance and complexity that often disappears online, where groupthink and the loudest voices tend to flatten conversation.
In a physical room, people listen longer, react in real time and allow ideas to unfold. It’s a dynamic that digital platforms, for all their reach, still struggle to replicate.
A generational shift toward the tangible
This renewed appetite for physical experiences also reflects a broader cultural shift among younger audiences.
For Gen Z, digital life isn’t exciting or novel – it’s simply the environment they grew up in, with phones and social media always present.
Increasingly, there are signs of fatigue. Even before Australia’s recent restrictions on social media access for under-16s, many younger people were already posting less and stepping back from the constant performance of online life.
In that context, physical media and events hold a different appeal: they are finite, intentional and resistant to the endless optimisation of the algorithm.
A vinyl record demands attention, a live event requires you to show up, listen and participate – and then it ends.
In a culture built on infinite scroll and autoplay, that sense of completion has become surprisingly attractive.
What this means for media and marketing
For marketers and media organisations, the implications are significant.
For two decades, we’ve assumed digital reach equals cultural impact, but physical experiences complicate that idea.
A room of 500 genuinely engaged people can spark more meaningful conversation than a post seen by 500,000 passive scrollers, with ripple effects that extend into articles, discussions and collaborations.
Physical media works similarly – magazines, vinyl records and live events carry a sense of intention that digital formats often lack.
Digital isn’t disappearing, but the balance may be shifting.
After years of total optimisation, we’re rediscovering the value of presence, attention and experiences that can’t be endlessly scrolled.
