Content. I hate the word.

No.166: Mon 9th?October?2023

Hi, it’s David here.

This week’s School of Athens newsletter is written by Scott Walker, a School of Athens alumni and BeenThere/DoneThat Community Member.

Scott’s newsletter provides us with a refreshing and important reminder of why we created the School of Athens to begin with - to help spark curiosity. And we are lucky enough to be able to utilise the greatest minds to do so.

As always, we are curious to hear what you think.

David Alberts

Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer?at BeenThere/DoneThat

Hi, it’s Scott?here.

Anyone who has worked with me over the past decade has heard my various expressions of disdain for the term.?

Calling the output of writers, musicians, filmmakers, and even the creations of the artisans of branding’s dark arts ‘content’ is like referencing the substance of every meal as just ‘food’. It fills a hole, does a job, nothing more.?

It removes the entertainment, the pleasure, the awe from art.?

And, if that’s the case, then what drives us to push boundaries, create the new and intriguing, break new ground??

This vanilla term has slipped into common usage due to the prevalence of technology and, since qualitative attributes don’t necessarily register on digital architectures, it replaces substantive description with referential convenience. Content is a box that needs to be filled, much like our Social Media platforms, and as a result we create an unfathomable amount of digital landfill, rubbish.?

The POV negates any recognition beyond format and using the same logic would render the entire contents of the Library of Alexandria to be simply ‘data’.?

We talk of content instead of ideas or meaning because we choose to base those conversations on process in lieu of real purpose.?

The rise of ‘content farms’, the premise of which is simple: behavioural modelling allows web sites and other platforms to gauge topics in which visitors are interested, which will then prompt content services to reach out to ‘content creators’ to produce ‘stuff’ on said topics. Sites will then tee-up these prequalified articles and videos (or whatever) along with the targeted ‘relevant’ ads that are based on similar audience research.?

(One of my mantras is; ‘you can be as relevant as hell and still be as boring as fuck!’)?

So, visitors seem happy because the site gives them what they ‘want’, just as sponsors are thrilled to know why the visitors are there in the first place. A perfect win-win exchange? Bollocks! It’s a blueprint for a perpetual motion machine.?

It’s not reasonable to expect audiences to know what they want to know before they know it; conversation isn’t a mass produced do-loop, but rather an amorphous system that requires newness. People need to acquire novel insights, inspiration, aspiration somewhere and somehow, but it won’t ever be through a mechanism that presumes to guess what they’re already seeking.?

Unfortunately, most brands have wholly embraced the content idea.?

When the substance of marketing communications is seen as content, we see the true realisation of form without function, as brands spend money to effectively waste consumers’ time.?

Conversation has value, as does entertainment, humour, and any behaviour that prompts people to prompt any such behaviours in others.?

Content is just a box that appears on PowerPoint presentations between charts about users and metrics; it’s more what than why and most of the latest marketing campaigns value its frequent dissemination over what it qualitatively communicates.?

I’d bet that we could track the decline in corporate reputation and price premiums with the use of the word ‘content’ as a descriptive for what gets created by brands. So, brands create content, the net regurgitates and propagates it, and then content farms respond to it by producing more of the same. This just seems like such a narrow-minded perspective on how people learn, interact, and grow.?

I wonder what would happen if we ALL simply stopped using the word entirely, and instead referenced the substance of our efforts by our qualitative (what we are hoping to communicate) and quantitative purposes (what we want people to do with it)??

Would we create better ads and more tangibly useful social campaigns, or even ‘social’ social campaigns? Ones that people actually share and talk about??

Aren’t we less ‘content creators’ and more ‘sales enablers, or better still ‘growth experts’??

Calling the guts of what we create ‘content’, whether as marketers or artists, imprisons our hopes and limits our worth.?

I hate the word.

Scott Walker

Community Member at BeenThere/DoneThat

Supporting Articles

1. Oscar Question: Do We Want Movies to Be ‘Content’ or Art?

2. Move Over, Content; Creativity Is The New Capital 'C'

3. Content isn’t king, it’s a peasant: Why the c-word is a terrible label for creative work

4.?People Are Spinning Up Low-Effort Content Farms Using AI

We'd love to hear what you thought about this newsletter! Reply in the comments below or reach out to us! To find out more about BeenThere/DoneThat, connect with us on?LinkedIn?or visit our?Website. If you'd like to receive The School of Athens weekly newsletter on every Friday directly to your inbox, subscribe?here. If you'd like to get in touch about working with us or to hear more about what we do, email?[email protected]