All across your social feed, you’re seeing countries running Super Bowl-level media campaigns.

This goes by many names: soft power, nation branding, national narratives.

Failing companies regularly pivot to marketing, and these days, countries are often no different.

Russia's selling itself as a based Christian empire while their churches sit empty. America's promising a manufacturing renaissance while factories halt construction and we kick out the labor we need. El Salvador's pushing Bitcoin City while their economy runs on remittances.

How We Got Here

Global interdependence lit the fuse after WW2, and the internet strapped a rocket to it.

As Ben Thompson puts it, the web made distribution free and global, which means everyone is publishing to everyone, all the time. “Free distribution provided by the Internet is not an exclusive.”

Like office politics, even though some countries surely don’t want to play this game of self-promotion, they’re stuck in it. They have to compete for the most finite resource in the world: attention.

In an attention economy where politics is spectacle, truth becomes (let’s be polite) pliable. Now every tinpot dictator has a Twitter/X account. Every failing state can hire a PR firm. Every economic disaster can be rebranded as a "transition period."

Before the internet, you needed actual achievements to project power in the nation branding games - functioning ports, working factories, fed citizens. Now you can distract scrutiny with a good social media manager and some useful idiots to retweet your propaganda.

So the right question isn’t “who has the best tagline?”; it’s really whose media campaign survives contact with reality?

The Marketing: Post-2024 vibe-shift! America is back! Traditional values! Less government spending! Energy dominance!

The Reality:

Verdict: Less “we’re so back” and more “we’re doing some reps but still not beach-ready.” No matter how many Truth Social posts claim victory, our economy’s growth is increasingly dependent on AI, healthcare and Labubu now.

The Marketing: A conservative superpower! Christian values! Anti-woke bastion! The masculine alternative to the decadent West!

The Reality:

Verdict: Russia remains what John McCain called it: “a gas station masquerading as a country. It’s kleptocracy. It’s corruption.” Despite all the chest-thumping, Russia continues to be a monoculture brand built on imperialism, empty churches, authoritarianism, and oil. This is despite Russia actually being a multiethnic, multi-lingual country! However, the Russians have managed to master at least one thing - attracting useful idiots. In the 60s, it was the far-left idealizing Russia as a communist utopia. But now, it’s the far-right obsessing over Putin's "traditionalism."

Which is how we’ve been ending up with stories like this:

My Russian friend told me once about how “voting" works in her hometown: her dad's boss called him in, told him who to vote for, and made it clear he'd be fired if he didn't comply. But sure, tell me more about those based trad values, man.

The Marketing: Law-and-order miracle! Bitcoin beacon! The Singapore of Central America! Cool dictator with backwards cap!

The Reality:

He literally went around (1) jailing people that looked like this below, (2) with no due process, (3) and is holding them in prison indefinitely. And.. it worked. For now.

But, the economy: still pretty... poor. And making Bitcoin as a legal tender hasn’t really turned the tides. SURPRISE. We’re talking about a small economy that mainly relies on exporting cheap commodities and low-value goods. Modest increases in tourism can’t spin that around, either.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Bukele from bragging on X when he’s having a good day in the crypto market, like some degenerate Gen-Z gambler.

You may not be able to read much of this graph below, but I’ll give you a hint - it’s not showing them building and exporting super advanced technology and goods..

Verdict: Safer streets, but basically same poverty. Now they’ve got a (currently) popular president who just eliminated terms, meaning, he can run as many times as he wants. AND, he continuously jails journalists he doesn’t like. No bueno!!!

The Marketing: …………….. uhhh.. there isn’t any..???

The Reality:

“Now the show’s still on, but the theatre’s crumbling. I was back recently, and what startled me wasn’t the decline — decline is rarely news in modern Britain — but how everyone seemed to wear it like an old coat. London today feels like The Rolling Stones: still charging premium prices, still belting out the old hits, but slower on its feet and haunted in the eyes. It used to be a low-rise Manhattan. Now it’s mid-tier America with delusions of grandeur.” - Brian McDonald

In our age of shameless national flexing, there's something almost admirable about Britain's resigned shrug at its own decline… Almost.

Dan Porter, a professor and founder of sports network Overtime, tells this story: he asks students to memorize everything blue they see in the classroom. Then he has them close their eyes. But then he asks, “what is something red you saw?”

No one can answer.

Nation-branding works the same way. Look at our Bitcoin! (Ignore the poverty). Look at our traditional values! (Ignore the alcoholism). Look at our vibe shift! (Ignore the pauses in business investment).

You can flood the feed with blue: sportswashing, grandiose ribbon-cuttings, shorts and reels. But red is what governs real life: rule of law, enforceable contracts, bribe-resistant bureaucracy, power that stays on, trains that arrive, factories that ship.

The business world loves saying “you just have a marketing problem.” But countries aren't companies. You can't A/B test your way out of poverty or corrupt institutions.

Slogans don’t pour concrete.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice}