It Takes a Stunt to Make a Trend

On July 1, two people climbed to the tip of the Empire State Building's antenna, 1,454 feet above Manhattan, and unfurled a black banner that read, "when the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace."¹ They had bought observatory tickets the night before, hidden in a maintenance room until the building closed, and waited there overnight to make the climb.² One of them got down on one knee. It was reckless, it was romantic, and it was, for a few hours, the most talked-about thing on the internet. By the time police brought them down and charged them with burglary and reckless endangerment, the moment already belonged to somebody else.¹

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None of it was spontaneous. The whole thing was planned like a heist and staged for exactly the reaction it got. And it belonged to the brands.

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Within hours, the banner was no longer a message. It was a blank template. Canva enlarged it to advertise its resize tool. Cisco swapped the text for the oldest joke in tech support. Duolingo turned it into a language lesson. Dozens of companies filled the same empty banner with the same move, keeping the frame and discarding the meaning.³ Two people had risked their lives to say something about love and power, and corporate America converted it into ad inventory before their arraignment.

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Nobody kept the message. The machine kept the attention, and then it sold it.

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The machine doesn't care what the moment was about

This is the part worth being honest about, including for us. The machine that strip-mined that banner is the same one every company operates inside, Chambiar included. It doesn't care whether a moment is a proposal, a tragedy, an election, or a product launch. It cares that people are looking, and it converts the looking into product. The message is interchangeable. The attention is the asset.

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We've built an entire economy on that conversion. The average person now sees somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day, up from around 500 in the 1970s.⁴ Americans spend roughly 13 hours a day engaging with media of some kind.⁵ And most of it slides right off. Research on ad attention found that about 85% of online ads fail to hold a person's focus for even 2.5 seconds.⁶ The volume keeps climbing, the returns keep shrinking, and so the machine does the only thing it knows how to do. It gets louder.

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Why did it take a stunt?

Here's the question underneath the memes. Why did it take two people nearly dying on the side of a skyscraper to make anyone feel something?

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Because we're saturated. When a person is hit with thousands of messages a day, an ordinary message, a good message, a true message, doesn't stand a chance. Only the extreme registers. The bar to break through keeps rising, so what breaks through keeps getting crazier. It isn't that the audience got shallow. It's that the signal got buried, and the only thing that surfaces now is spectacle.

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That's a statement about how we consume media. It's also, almost exactly, a statement about how we work as a society. Because the person scrolling past those 10,000 ads isn't a different species from the person getting interrupted every two minutes at a desk. It's the same overwhelmed mind, on both sides of the screen. We spend the day too fragmented to think, then go home too fried to feel, which is exactly why nothing but a stunt lands. And the numbness we take home is the same numbness we carry back to work the next morning. It feeds itself.

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The same overwhelm is inside your workday

The flood has work labels on it, too. Microsoft's 2025 research found employees are interrupted every two minutes, up to 275 times a day, and that 80% say they don't have the time or energy to do their job well.⁷ Knowledge workers spend around 60% of the day on "work about work," the pinging and chasing and switching that surrounds the job instead of being the job.⁸

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In that kind of noise, the quiet, valuable work, the judgment call, the catch, the fix that prevented a fire, doesn't register. It's the true message on the banner, and it gets buried the same way. So people do at work exactly what the machine does in the feed. They get louder. More updates, more meetings, more visible motion, the office version of climbing the building, because a stunt is the only thing that gets noticed. The villain here isn't the person posting the fourth status update of the day, and it isn't the couple on the antenna. It's a system that made spectacle the price of being seen.

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The way out isn't a better stunt. It's a system that can see the real work without the show.

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What does a coordination layer do?

A coordination layer is the connective software that keeps your tools, people, and decisions in sync without anyone chasing status, so contribution surfaces on its own instead of going to whoever performs loudest. That's the role Chambiar plays, and it's how the real work gets seen without a spectacle.

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"We taught people to perform their work, because performing is the only thing that gets seen," says Kyrie Rogers, CEO of Chambiar. "The fix isn't to shout louder. It's a system that sees the real thing."

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You worked all day, and the honest question is what actually moved forward. Most tools can't answer it. That's what the Chambiar team has built the Work Receipt to show, a free, two-minute look at where your week really went. And when the system captures what you did instead of how loudly you announced it, you can stop performing work and get back to doing it. That's what gets reclaimed: the contribution underneath the performance, and the attention to notice it when it isn't screaming for you.

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Less time climbing the building. More time on the work that was the point. That's Reclaim Meaningful Work, and it's the whole reason Chambiar exists.

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Sources

¹ PBS / AP, "An audacious climb turned into a marriage proposal. The couple was soon arrested," July 2026. pbs.org

² CNN, "How the Empire State Building climbers pulled off their death-defying stunt," July 3, 2026. cnn.com

³ Marketing-Interactive, "Brands scale the viral Empire State Building proposal with cheeky trendjacks," July 2026. marketing-interactive.com

⁴ Lunio, "How many ads do we see a day in 2025?" lunio.ai

⁵ McKinsey, "The attention equation: Winning the right battles for consumer attention," 2025. mckinsey.com

⁶ Amplified Intelligence, via Digitalist Hub, 2025. digitalisthub.com

⁷ Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index, "Breaking down the infinite workday." microsoft.com

⁸ Asana, Anatomy of Work Index. asana.com