Everything is Content (No It Isn’t)

“Content” is media you would pay money to give your attention to, if you had to pay money for it. Everything else in this sphere is essentially advertising. If content is anything that can be placed in a container, why do some containers have “skip” buttons?
“Wheel of Fortune” is CONTENT.
People ACTUALLY WANT to consume content.
The 30-second yogurt spots in between are ADVERTISEMENTS (or “commercial breaks”).
People really DON’T WANT to watch ads.
(UNLESS THEY’RE REALLY GOOD, which is where we advertising types come in. But that still doesn’t make them “content.”)
As to “content marketing,” yes, blog posts and videos can be “branded content” used as inbound marketing assets — for example, a job board website may publish material about “how to get your first internship” or “how to ask for a raise” or “how to transition from military to private contractor” which are things people are searching for, thus bringing the prospect to themselves (the inbound part).
Transversely, a blog titled “Why You Should Choose Monster.Com for your Job Search” would be of value to practically no one; nobody is searching for that information, which makes it just an ad, and therefore not content.
So the sales material, brochures, websites, messaging decks, and actual display, broadcast, direct mail, out of home, or print ads, etc., that we create for our clients are not content; they’re marketing and advertising. In the business, we call the material in these things “copy.”
It’s even written by people called copywriters.
But when we talk about “content” in advertising and marketing, what we mean is something like an episode of “Days of Our Lives” or “Orange is the New Black,” or a fashion or sports or politics podcast, or useful content blog posts like “How to Ask for a Raise” or “The Perfect Pesto Recipe,” or educational or entertaining branded video or live events where everybody tunes in to watch something spectacular in the moment — the good stuff people actually want, which we use to attract prospects to us. (Yeah, we’re still doing interruption marketing on TV because it still works, often better than all the digital wonders we’ve unleashed over the past twenty years.)
And when we talk about “content strategy,” what we mean is a kind of project management document or publishing process that determines what kind of content — blogs or articles or videos, etc., based on topics people actually search for — is going to be produced by who, when, how often, published on which channels, and so on.
Content strategy is more like “media planning for earned/owned media,” if that makes sense. Which means “content strategists” are not generally writers, marketers, or creative or even analytics people—they’re more like project managers focused on making publishing content happen.
Where the line gets really blurred is social media, where status updates and tweets can actually be branded content that people do actually want to consume as light entertainment within the stream they’re exploring, but very, very few brands do it well, and few of their messages are organically amplified. And even “native advertising,” where paid ads with the form and function of social feeds are served, is still called advertising.
Here’s a quick test for telling if something is content or not: If there’s a button that consumers can use to skip it, or a device or method or technology that they can use to jump over it, ignore it, block it, or make it go away, it’s NOT CONTENT; it’s advertising.
