Nobody’s Content With Content

The concept of content has everyone confused—or, at least, contemplative.

The concept of content has everyone confused—or, at least, contemplative.

First, we have a post from our EMEA team by Dan Brotzel, content director of Sticky Content, in which he says: “Do we, perhaps, need a new way of talking about the various things we want to refer to when we say ‘content’? Content can mean so many things to marketers these days. It covers email newsletters and videos; podcasts and white papers; tweets, memes, and Vines. It can also mean error messages and T&Cs; printed leave-behinds and branded magazines; forum chatter and text messages. All created artefacts, true, but content is now also often taken to mean live experiences such as speaking events, webinars, and even the conversations that happen across the Genius Bar in the Apple Store or between customers and service agents.”

“Do We Need A New Word For ‘Content’?” is the title of this piece. One reader chimed in, Edward S. Winfrey, who suggested via Facebook that he had “heard the term ‘Lexical Strategy’ a few times.” Not sure that exactly trips from the tongue, but it’s interesting thinking.

From the recent move by Tribune Publishing, it certainly appears that corporate media behemoths are thinking about all this content stuff, too. From the company’s release: “Tribune Publishing Co. today announced that the Company will change its name to tronc, Inc., a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels. tronc, or tribune online content, captures the essence of the Company’s mission. tronc pools the Company’s leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60 million monthly users.”

No, this is not an Onion.com bit. It really is tronc, it really stands for “tribune online content,” and it really starts with a lowercase t, even, according to tronc copy editors, at the beginning of a sentence (something, I might add, that would drive our copy poobah, Gayle Kesten, to drink). One might suggest that this is over thinking content, but let’s hope it works for them.

We here at CMO.com think a lot about content, too. In essence—at least by default and definition—we are a content marketing site for Adobe. However much we strive for independence and perform, to the best of our abilities, as a pure-play media site—tronc-ish, if you will—our raison d’etre is intimately connected to the Adobe Global Marketing Organization. So is our budget; we are not a P&L, and we take no paid advertising. The content-connected words I like to use for what we do is “brand as publisher,” which, to me, separates what we produce from what comes out of the marketing department, itself—much of which Brotzel listed above. That might be a false distinction. I’m not sure.

So perhaps he is right. It sure does sound like we need some new words to define and describe all of the various types of content that’s produced today by businesses all over the world. Maybe we need to “frolic and play the Eskimo way,” and come up with 100 different words for content, the way it is said Eskimos have 100 words for snow. Of course, there is no such thing as one Eskimo language, and, in fact, Eskimo is really a loose, old-fashioned term for the Inuit and Yupik people—but the thought holds. The idea that something is so important and endemic to the culture that the vocabulary must describe every nuance of it is one that we who watch content flutter, like aqilokoq from the sky, completely understand.