Self appointed digital marketing experts have for years been telling us that ‘Content is King’, and for a while it was. As a result, marketers have flung millions upon millions on the altar of ‘creating content’.
Piles of crap produced en masse with the odd gem well hidden, aiming at leveraging the reach of the web and social platforms, to deliver messages to consumers in a manner that demanded more attention than the ad breaks on TV, without the cost.
Google and Facebook developed a virtual duopoly, and so the dream of cost free reach has been squeezed out of existence.
To get reach you have to pay for it.
Isn’t this what we did when we paid for advertising?
Why pay for content aimed at ‘engaging,’ or some other cliché, if you are going to pay to have it delivered? You may as well make it an ad, that has as its objective generating a sale.
As Facebook and Google, and the other platforms as they evolve continue to squeeze organic reach, Content will morph back to something more like the advertising used in the 20th century to build the huge brands we all still buy.
Call it what it is, don’t be precious, it is Advertising!
Cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist, who continues to express in simple drawings the complexity and hubris of modern marketing. I hope you have a great Christmas Tom.
As for me, I am taking a short break from my (unpaid) adverting disguised as content on this blog, to see if I can catch the elusive bloke in the red suit. Thank you all for reading, sharing and often commenting on my brainfarts, it is a privilege and pleasure to be able to communicate in this way. Have a safe and merry Christmas and i will ‘see” you all in 2019.
