Content is King!" Really? asks Frances Docx
Frances Docx, strategist at 18 Ft & Rising, asks whether current brand 'content' is really cutting through.
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Content is King, wrote Bill Gates in 1996. Readers nodded at the catchy soundbite and ignored the rest of the article. Distracted by whatever was the 1996 answer to Facebook, probably a Tamagotchi.
And so a pattern was forged for production and reception of content everywhere.
Content, if its crap or lengthy or irrelevant or prosaic, is at best ineffective and more often, actively ignored. The argument is that because content is free, companies cannot pay writers enough to develop relevant, cut-through work.
True, except for one important distinction; swathes of shitty content is not just a product of underpaid and underwhelmed legions of McWriters. But rather, they are the symptom of an industry-wide amnesia over the original purpose of commercial content. It has been forgotten that content must engage meaningfully, it must inspire and it must be remarkable.
Brands have fallen asleep, bypassing the crucial questions ‘what and who is content for?’ as if the answers were just a given.
The biggest content mood-killer in this respect is social media. Far from querying why, for example, a soft drink might need a Twitter account, the decision makers at Dr. Pepper HQ appointed some optimistic grad as ‘social media manager’ clapping their hands at a job well done.
Social media is having an existential crisis, by the way. Twitter has a Facebook page and Facebook has a Twitter account and both are regurgitating Instagram and Buzzfeed links.
So, what’s the point? Where do these infinite hyperlinks and absurdist re-directions take us? Ok, so it’s weird and incestuous but the USP of social media is its mass reach, right?
Wrong. According to a tweet (yes, a tweet) from the CEO of Chartbeat, a company which measures site traffic; "we’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." Oh snap.
‘Content’ is a currency no longer accepted by consumers. They have lost respect for it because we have lost respect for it. It has become the lowest common denominator for an outdated and under-inspired marketing strategy. If we’re not ticking the social media box then we’re generating reams of product-centric bullshit, which will only ever be interesting to those within the industry.
An example?
A vacuum cleaner company whose YouTube channel boasts 810 videos all about vacuuming.
Back up. That’s 40.5 hours of watching beige carpets and beslippered housewives demonstrate the lino vs. carpet function…
Assuming that real people give a shit about these things is dangerous.
Content has become simply ‘stuff’ to fill space. The great grinding marketing machine has created an imaginary Tupperware box which it expects to be stuffed with fluffy irrelevant content - just to avoid an awkward silence.
The fluff emerges from an unhealthy bout of naval gazing. Ironically, in the desperate bid for ‘relevance’, we have lost site of the consumer and become product-centric or obsessed with its own channels.
The aim is no longer to do something great or authentic but to be shitting hashtags and ballsdeep in SEO. Or to produce something to fill that Tupperware.
Briefly, let’s think outside of the internet, pre link-bait, and share tactics and get back to real people.
When Manchester Utd’s Alex Ferguson retired in May 2013, Nando’s Manchester restaurants stayed open for an extra five minutes ‘Fergie time’. It’s a homage to Ferguson, to Manchester, to chicken-lovers; not to the deluge of unread link-shares and page-likes.
The Nando’s example is content which hasn’t forgotten that people are at its roots. Content strategy has to ask ‘what do people really want?’ Because without such a strategy the work is irrelevant and the consumer is indifferent.
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