We are moving from the TV generation to the ‘feed me generation’, who are getting drips of content from different devices in different ways than we were traditionally used to. Shorter content, for shorter attention spans.
These formats now demand that marketers rethink their approach to creativity and creative people are now more aware of the constraints they operate within. In someways this may be the end of sophisticated advertising, the audience has become more accustomed to a rabbit form of content, hook – lines – and clickthrough.
Marketers must shift their thinking to take account of the fact that a growing tranche of consumers are filtering their lives via the walled gardens of their social-media feed. Michael Litman, founder of micro-content agency Burst, believes that brands need to adopt a new screening process when it comes to content.
AI is for people who aren’t creative or marketers
There are shifts in consumption habits, of course, but no ‘one-size fits all’ rules of engagement for content marketers. AI is in abubble, taking the spotlight into 2025 to auto-produce static and mundane content.
Despite this advances of AI, a creative team will be tasked with more than creating a solitary Facebook post, or the tweet, they will become powerhouses in creating the layout that AI will then use to create a cataclysm of AI generated content. An evolution from pencils to command lines, that will probably still go through 78 drafts. Even the greatest Oulipian artists would struggle to express themselves by emoji anymore, it will be a an emoji made by AI.
In the process-driven world of social media, questions remain as to whether consumers are being stripped of their ability to meaningfully decide whether they want to see particular content. When the drive is compulsive, the ability to self-censor is lacking. Moreover, popularity on social platforms is perhaps not the ultimate arbiter of relevance and success for brands, but just underlines the fundamentally fleeting nature of attention spans.
Creativity will always outperform AI generated content
A growing number of brands are employing analytics to better understand how to capitalise on those passion points. With increased automation, brands have a greater depth of knowledge about what content people will be drawn to and can create a better profile of their consumers. She believes this development has created an insatiable demand for more content.
However, some believe that brands have been guilty of chasing metrics, such as shares or ‘likes’, rather than investing in the often more difficult task of driving deeper engagement. There are those who share instead of reading content, in effect, becoming curators, not consumers. On a broadcast network such as Twitter, what you are seen to be, rather than what you do, is sacrosanct.
And some have gone as far as saying we’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.
So what does the future of content marketing look like?
The future may seem uncertain for the newbies in marketing, but marketeers and content creators have been through these types of tests before. And they won’t be worried, as an industry we know creative content marketing cannot be replaced by number crunching machines.
Sure, they can follow instructions, but beautifully crafted content will thrive, in spite of the constraints presented by smartphones or social networks. Simply because it offers users something greater than the traditional transaction between brand and consumer. Something, that, at its best, can live beyond the constraints of any given format and take on a life of its own in our imaginations.
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