Fast Content vs Slow Content
With the prevalence of content marketing, the indication that your campaign was successful is judged on two things
- How long someone watched it (why is 4.8% OK?)
- How many people shared it
We’re having a hard time trying to get people to watch content, you can tell by looking at the data of engagement rates.
8 second attention spans seems to have become justifications to make ever faster pieces of content, faster product shots, shoe-horning products into shorter and shorter pieces of content-detritus that if consumed, are hardly every remembered.
Although, on the face of it, it seems a logical progression — if people are watching less, let’s make it faster and punchier, right?
The danger becomes that if your brand isn’t fuelling the extreme sports world, it looks stupid when it acts fast, like the Clover Field of shit content
When a consumer is deciding how to entertain themselves, they are making a simple decision, do they want to watch your 1 minute long video about your brand wrapped in a paper thin story or to watch Game of Thrones…
The onus is on you to create something that actual adds something to the person day, a feeling, an idea or a laugh.
That’s where we come to the idea of Slow Content.
Slow Content is content that is savoured, poured over, enjoyed & remembered.
Films are Slow Content
Books are Slow Content
Real Life is Slow Content
Slow Content isn’t about meandering story, it’s about having a plot rather than a just a strategy, story cannot be told on strategy alone.
Add a plot to create tension, magic, thrill and desire (words lost in modern marketing and advertising) — we have to make content that is slow and can be enjoyed over.
I can ask you which films you’ve loved and you’d give me great answers but, if I asked you what content you’d watched, you’d tell me about a cat video rather than a video that grabbed you.
Yes, it’s a unique media that lends itself to cat videos and micro experiences, I imagine dumping countless drips of dopamine with every video clicked.
That doesn’t mean we should look for the shortest route to making something more lickable — Van Dam on Truck was a fluke, he could of done the splits on a couple of Pukka Pies and it would of been as awesome
We should be looking at a newer, more fertile ground of longer, more textured experiences in the digital world. It’s our responsibility to drive things forward, not tack newer gizmo’s on newer gizmos and hope people are suddenly going to come.
What is the sunday paper of digital journalism?
What is the opportunity in online learning?
What happens when a brand becomes human?
Don’t try to be a part of the conversation, but make yourself worth having a conversation about. HBR Aug 14.
Everything points to people wanting deeper more meaningful experiences, technology can transcend analogue and digital creatives are the people in the driving seat.
Imagine if we made stuff like that, that took a while, could be held, smelt and enjoyed. But, for some reason, we don’t.
Let’s make stuff people want, a simple concept that the tech start-up world has at its heart, Y Combinator’s recent How To Start A Startup really drills into that concept and you’d be wise to watch and then try to draw parallels between theirs and our world
The agency?
Moving forward, agencies should be built around an ideal of being mirrored reflections of the world around them — employ journalists, bloggers & content makers and start outputting for themselves as well as their clients.
That way they can truly have an understanding of the people that they are selling stuff to and have a more authentic point of view, because, with the rampant buying of views and share by agencies, we’re at risk of being exposed as snake oil men.
Don’t make excuses.
There’s lots of different ways of putting stuff out on, test it, work on it and make your creativity better using data…seriously. If it doesn’t work, learn from and iterate, change, pivot — whatever — just keeping questioning and answering
Come to Meat & Bones, we’re going to try out some stuff and make projects that are just creativity for creativity’s sake.
We’re interested in making cool stuff with cool people so drop us a line and let’s collaborate.
