The C word

Come on, you know the word I’m thinking of.

Content. Don’t you just hate that word. It’s so, er, flat and useless.

It sounds like stuff you just pour in without rhyme or reason. It certainly doesn’t sound like something you seek out. (‘Hey, read any good content lately?’ ‘Did you see that content Friday night!’ ‘Man, this content sounds amazing!!’)

Calling our stories and pictures and jokes and anecdotes and songs and movies and narratives and lines and paintings and photos and all the ways in which we express ourselves simply content ultimately cheapens and commodifies their effect.

And if content wasn’t bad enough, branded content is twice as terrible. Maybe brand content is a little less irksome.

A good many firms are starting side shops dedicated to creating brand content optimized for sharing on Facebook and other social platforms - and doing it at the pace of news and memes, not advertising or design.

That’s kind of the exciting part. Shifting advertising and marketing from campaign thinking to more of a publishing mindset.

An article by Paula Bernstein details a new studio dedicated to creating brand content designed for social sharing.

Traditional advertising campaigns take a long time to produce, making it next to impossible to keep up with the lightning-fast pace of pop culture.

But with real-time brand content production, marketers can immediately jump on timely trends in order to drive engagement.

It’s more creative newsroom than design firm. Think short, typically image-driven posts produced and approved on the fly. One or two iterations at most. Made in hours not weeks.

It’s more editorial in nature than the classic grueling creative process. With fewer revisions and fewer rounds of approval.

It’s more about the speed of culture.

Ahhh, yes, that other c word.