Say Anything

I’ve said before that I hate the word “content.” It’s just so general, so unexciting, so blah. And I never want MY good work to be thought of as just “content.” And I don’t like how streaming services see my favorite shows like The Last of Us and The Penguin and Cobra Kai as just “content.”

It’s a bad word and we need to do better.When you think of marketing as just more “content,” that is bad too. Your marketing needs to delight, intrigue and positively impact your audiences or (as I say in my book Just Stop It) DO NOT SEND IT OUT.

That’s always a choice to just be quiet, silent and say—nothing.When marketers start to think of our great work as just “content” then pretty much any crap will do. And that includes AI-generated crap, which is literally devoid of value and anyone remotely familiar with the platforms could just hop right on and self-serve their own equally horrific content crap-sicle. —Yummy.

When you go looking for synonyms for “content” it’s tough because it’s such a stupid word, it has a double meaning — con-tent as in satisfied and then also the stuff thing.

When you look for “contents” as in the stuff in the box which content sorta means you get “capacity” and “cargo” and “shipment” and “stuffing” “freight” and “packing”. Whoohoo — I’ve always wanted my work compared to shipping materials.We need a better word to describe the good stuff — the great memes, posts, blogs, videos, podcasts, streaming shows, clips, movies and the stuff we want.

And we can still use content for all of the leftovers —bad marketing, AI-generated just about anything and just garbage. To me, content means garbage. And I’m content with that. (See what I did there?)  In marketing, we don’t just want to fill the box with just ANYTHING, right? Any words, photos and videos we just had lying around and made with AI in less than 10 seconds. (Because that is the metric that now matters to some people). We want our stuff to be the good stuff.

Because when our WPVs (words, pictures and videos) are SMOKIN’ good, then the audience benefits AND the brand benefits. And the marketing carousel keeps spinning around and around in a lovely relationship.  Is the classic 80’s movie Say Anything just content too? To some maybe, but to me, I learned about romantic failure and reconciliation from Lloyd Dobbler (played brilliantly by John Cusack) and that piece of “content.” It was important to me and probably to lot of other Gen Xers in the crowd, right?

“She gave me a pen. I gave her my heart…and she gave me a pen.”

That is NOT content. It’s MUCH more.

What are YOU giving your customers? Just Anything? AI-generated garbage’? What does that say about YOU and YOUR brand when you do that? Let’s do better. Let’s bring value with our WPVs and let’s connect like the humans do (—or did).