Rethinking creative production: Content and Experience developers

Time to say good bye to the writers, journalists, illustrators, art-directors, and editors. We believe we need to move away from the tool-based jobs in journalism and advertising towards roles based on developing great content and experiences.

The media we can publish on are changing faster and faster with new technology, and with that the expectations of the users.

This is becoming an increasingly significant problem for the editorial industry, as they are usually superb at creating great content, but traditionally weak at crafting the experiences the users require.

On the other side of this problem is the advertising industry that is usually really good at creating solid experiences that connect to users, yet they are often lacking in solid content.

For both industries, what users crave today is something in the middle, where the content and the experience fit them.

Sorry advertising, we don’t buy your empty messages anymore

I’ll just go ahead here and taste that feeling, once that we figure out what that means.

Today, the traditional brand-building advertising doesn’t work anymore. Showing us a picture of a beautiful person holding a product has gotten so normal for everyone that it no longer convinces us to see a product as part of our life.

It has even gotten so bad that people increasingly block ads on every page on the internet or pay monthly fees for television on demand to get past them.

Meanwhile, advertising agencies seem obsessed with giving each other awards when creating beautiful, hip and trendy artworks, great experiences that look great in their portfolios.

But when you look past the experience, there is usually little value added to the life of the user.

Here we don’t see any experience either… And is that kid really happy or just content?

Users increasingly need this practical value. The rise of content marketing illustrates that consumers will like your product if you add value to their lives.

Sorry editorial, we can’t use your antiquated media anymore

Some very useful applications for newspapers. A medium for art.

On the other end, you’ve got editorial organisations who — since the first newspapers arose in the 17th century — are specialised in producing solid content. Content as in finding stories, asking the right questions, gathering data and putting their efforts in excellent writing.

News organisations, magazines and a lot of blogs are really good at just that.

However, making use of User Experience or UX design techniques to tell a story in journalism is still in its infancy and often gets underestimated.

It might feel a bit weird to most journalists, yet they can learn a lot from advertising and design agencies when it comes to creating a whole experience and how to convey a message to a big audience.

Quality in journalism and only trying to be the new inspiring “creative” Art Director both have their strengths, but real value for both the sender and the receivers lies in the middle.

What you make is more than content

When people talk about content they usually mean the whole creative work, e.g. a blog post, a YouTube video or a webcomic etcetera. Yet the content is just it’s contents, the concepts and relationships that make up the story.

The other essential part of creating things is it’s delivery, its communication, or in short it’s experience.

Content is not about choosing text, illustration, infographics, photography, video, audio or data visualisations, these are tools that you can use, as a developer, to tell your story the best way possible. You use these tools to create a user experience.

Content and Experience both need a high level of attention in creating an effective creative work.

We propose a holistic approach of producing creative works, both for the news- and advertising industry.

We propose no longer siloing the producers of the creative works in their tools, but splitting up their responsibilities according to creating the content and the experience.

You need Content and Experience Developers

Rather than searching for the ultimate creative super hero we believe you need Content Developers and Experience Developers. Both for creating creative works for businesses and/or news publications.

The Content Developer does everything they can to make sure every creative work has the content it needs to achieve its goals.

Activities include:

• Researching, collecting data and interviewing to find out what all the parts of a story could be.
• Mapping out these stories and structures and forming them into content.
• Researching what kind of stories the users would need to achieve their goals.
• Doing user research to find out what stories need to be told.

The Experience Developer does everything they can to make sure every creative work has the form that it needs to achieve its goals.

Activities include:

• Finding out what medium and tools fit the goals of the post best.
• Doing user research to find out which forms work well and which don’t.
• Writing, drawing, photographing, filming or whatever else can make up the creative work.
• Using analytics to fine tune creative works to the behaviour of users.
• Understanding what social media need what approach and how they can be used to generate inbound traffic.

Since writing this article we’ve moved on from New Atoms, however if you are interested in this and would like to know more, feel free to shoot me an email at boris@vanhoytema.com.

Image credits by Wes Dickinson, Wade Rockett, Suzette, RBerteig, Gabe Rosiak