There are two great lies being told over and over again in the world of digital marketing. In the B2B space especially, where they now seem to be textbook best practice, these malignant pieces of nonsense have wormed their way so deeply into the brains and souls of experts and novices alike that I’m not sure they can be removed without surgery, medication, group therapy, and ceremonial bathing. Nevertheless, we must try, because they are really causing trouble, creating boatloads of unwatchable videos, unlistenable podcasts, and boring presentations that do nothing to achieve the goals of their creators.
They are:
“Every businessperson should be a content creator”
“Content is content, the medium doesn’t matter.”
Like with so many untruths, the basis for these seem logical enough: Yes, if done well, content marketing really works. People will remember the insightful article you wrote long after the cold email you sent them, those educational videos will tell them more about your brand identity than a thousand elevator pitches, and if they are avidly consuming your podcast every week, yours is absolutely going to be the first name they think of when they require the services you provide. And yes, making media is time consuming and resource intensive, so why not squeeze every bit of value out of it that you can?
So, the prevailing wisdom tells us, jump to it! Buy some gear and start recording yourself right now! And when you do, think cross-channel immediately: don’t just make a podcast, also video record it. Then take that video and chop it up into reels, and repurpose the transcript into blog posts. When you have enough of these blog posts, throw them into AI and turn them into a book, then reconfigure that book into a series of webinars. By doing all this, you are “meeting your audience where they are”, giving them the opportunity to find you on whatever platform they happen to be browsing at that moment, and consume your content in whatever format they find most convenient.
According to most ardent disciples of this philosophy, something is more-or-less worthless unless it is also taken apart and made into something else — preferably three things, which can then also be made into three other things each. Making a thing with the goal of just making that thing you’re making, it seems, is a waste of time.
The problem here, of course, is that things that are different are not the same. Video, audio, writing, public speaking, and curriculum development are entirely different things. They work differently, use different creative language, have different goals, and require different techniques and skills. In the pre-digital media age, no one would have assumed that being a good radio host would mean you’re also a good filmmaker which would mean you can also write insightful articles which also means you can teach a class. So why do we now tell people that the best way to do one of these things is to do all of them? Even crazier is the idea that everyone, regardless of talent, training, and inclination, can, and should, do all of these things all at once.
I saw a LinkedIn post the other day where a media consultant, with complete earnestness, encouraged self-produced podcasters to compare themselves to ESPN. “They don’t just make television”, he said, “they make television shows and radio and documentaries and podcasts and reels. It’s all just ESPN. So why are you limiting yourself to one medium?” Why, indeed? Well, to start with, the word “they” in that paragraph is doing some heavy lifting when compared to the “you” a couple of sentences later. ESPN’s “they” is tens of thousands of the world’s most talented and highly-trained filmmakers, writers, producers, performers, graphic artists, and technicians, each working on very small sections of that output at a very high level. The TV show and the radio show and the podcast and the documentary and the instagram reels are not made by the same people, and none of those people also have a different full-time job. Many, many CEOs and entrepreneurs from the past have written books but almost all of them had the good sense to hire ghost writers. Some have hosted TV shows, but all of those were professionally produced, allowing them to show up, hit their mark, read the lines someone wrote for them, and leave. Now, grab a camera and get to it—you are now not just a consultant, doctor, lawyer, accountant, auto mechanic, cupcake baker, or whatever, you now also run your own media network, completely produced by and also starring you. It’s easy!
I actually like the idea of looking to ESPN for inspiration for self-produced B2B content, so long as we realize we are probably looking with a powerful pair of binoculars. If we do, we’ll learn a different lesson. They built what is now a 360º media empire in careful stages, by slowly adding new kinds of output that logically flowed from what they were already doing, each time assembling a world-class team around that new product. And at each of these stages, they really innovated—the first 24-hour all-sports TV network, then news shows with a radically novel format and tone (Sportscenter, NBA Countdown), then a genre-defining series of documentaries (30 for 30), and so on. This is the furthest thing from jumping feet first into ten different media streams at once by repurposing the same piece of content over and over.
But why in the world would you be comparing yourself to ESPN, you might very well be asking? You’re a consultant, doctor, lawyer, accountant, auto mechanic, cupcake baker, or whatever, not a media network. Well, once you start publishing content, you are a kind of media network, with a media network’s concerns, primarily finding and holding viewership. There are a limited amount of hours in the day, and so when you ask someone to listen to your podcast or watch your webinar, you are, in a very real way, asking them to do that instead of watching Sportscenter. You are not just competing for audience hours with the content created by the other consultant, doctor, lawyer, accountant, auto mechanic, cupcake baker, or whatever across town, but with all the other content that your customers might want to consume, full stop.
Daunting, but don’t despair. Content marketing works, and your consultancy, practice, firm, garage, bakery, or whatever will absolutely benefit from a great blog, an engaging podcast, or an exciting series of videos. But please remember, dear reader, that anyone who tells you that creating a successful multi-platform content feed is easy and/or simple is lying to you. This is hard work and not everyone is good at it. No one is good at all of it. Even the people who seem to be good at all of it – Steven Bartlett immediately comes to mind – have huge teams behind them helping them look so good.
So where do these weird ideas come from? What is the source of these pervasive lies? One is just good old fashioned flim-flam. There is a whole industry of “experts” out there who want you to believe that you can create a multimedia empire for your personal brand with the easy push of a button. The catch, of course, is that they want to sell you the button. Creating good media is fundamentally a creative problem, not a technical one, and no piece of software is going to take the place of the challenges of coming up with an interesting concept and writing good scripts. These take both talent and hard work, and there’s no way around that.
There seems to be something deeper and weirder going on here, though — something that has to do with a very particular way that a vocal subset of people who work in technology look at the world. There is a fervent, almost religious, desire amongst a certain breed of young futurists to bring the consciousness of humans and computers as close together as possible. They want to do this by not only making computers think and behave more like people, but also to make people think and behave more like computers. They idolize the speed with which computers can access information and the efficient dispassion they can use to apply this information to solving problems. These are the same crew who do things like proudly wear the same clothing every day and for every activity, so as to save the time and expense of shopping for clothes. They espouse things like “food hacking”: attempting to negate the inefficiencies of cooking and eating meals by creating one-step superfood smoothies that supposedly contain a full day’s nutritional needs. Of course these guys want to make media production and consumption more efficient. To them, people obviously use media to train themselves the way an AI model would. They choose between the presentation data that is encoded in sound waves or photons or printed letters based on which one of these they can most speedily interface with at that particular moment and/or whichever interface method their particular biological hardware seems to have an affinity for.
I would counter this by saying that I don’t believe that maximizing efficient transfer of data is the only, or even primary, reason that humans choose what media to consume, any more than efficient ingestion of essential nutrients is the only, or primary, reason they choose what food to eat, or efficient preservation of heat energy is the only, or even primary, reason they choose what clothes to wear. Humans consume media to be inspired, or amused, or shocked, or surprised, or excited. We consume media because we enjoy it. And the things we enjoy about watching a movie and reading a book and listening to the radio are different from each other. They tickle different parts of the brain, delight and surprise in different ways. Creating each of these is a different craft, and mastering each of them takes time and dedication. By ignoring this and creating an undifferentiated content slurry, there is no way you are going to make podcasts that work as podcasts, videos that work as videos, and articles that work as articles, and so there is no way that any of these outputs will be as successful as you had hoped at finding and inspiring an audience.
The real path to branded content success is to choose one medium—video, audio, writing, or public speaking—and do it really, really well. If you truly have the wind in your sails to do it yourself, then study, practice, hire professionals to help you along, and prepare to be patient while your skills as a practitioner of that medium catch up to the desires of the audience. You can do it, but it won’t be easy. Or, if you make the perfectly reasonable decision that you’d rather just be a consultant, doctor, lawyer, accountant, auto mechanic, cupcake baker, or whatever, hire professionals to do it for you. Vet them thoroughly, make them present you with a plan that makes sense, and get out of the way and let them do it. They don’t need you to tell them how to make a web series any more than you need them to tell you how to bake cupcakes. Give it sufficient time to generate real metrics and then review them together, and make adjustments as necessary. If it really doesn’t work, fire them and move on to a different idea. This is how the senior management of ESPN works in relation to the production department. Then, when that media stream is up and buzzing — building an audience and generating real results — start thinking about how to expand into other media in ways that build on that success.
Make media that people really want to consume, and they will meet you where you are.