Not all marketing assets are content. And I've been in the content game since before "content" was a thing.
But in all that time, I've never exactly been able to define what content is, at least not in the
marketing sense of the word.
I have tried from time to time, largely out of curiosity. But until now I've never landed on a
definition I really like. And I've never stuck with trying to find a better definition for long.
Because the world doesn't care. It's never seemed important to my job. And my clients (and
previously my employers) have never seemed to consider it important to their jobs.
And the marketing world at large doesn't seem to care that much either, about formal definitions
for content or for a lot of other terms, such as
demand generation or
thought leadership.
But Dave Trott recently
published a scathing article illustrating this very fact, that the
advertising/marketing world doesn't care about content sufficiently to define it. But he seems to
care. And perhaps so should we.
But there's a problem.
Content Has Various Meanings
Bill Gates famously said "content is king." But I'm guessing the content he was referring to wasn't
exactly the same thing that marketers often mean when they talk about content. Because if marketing
content were king, I'd be rich.
Instead, I believe Gates was referring to what could be called media content, which I would define
(I couldn't find a satisfying definition online) as information, narrative, argument, advice,
performance, expression, or event, presented in a media format.
But we also have brand or marketing content. Which, in the orthodox sense of these words, are not
simple extensions of the definition I just gave.
Brand and marketing content, as concepts, came about in the wake of
social media and SEO. We had
true online channels for the first time and we wanted to fill them with something.
Namely something besides conventional advertising, because people generally won't follow you,
subscribe to you, or join your email list if they think all you're going to do is advertise to them
(unless discounts are involved).
Or perhaps I should say people won't follow you if they think all you'll do is explicitly advertise
to them. And so brand and marketing content were born.
What Is Brand Content?
Brand content, or branded content, is a type of implicit advertising. And if you're wondering what
implicit advertising is, it's advertising that pretends to be something else. Native advertising is
implicit. So are brand sponsorships.
Branded content is brand-sourced media content (as defined previously) that either embodies the
brand, mentions the brand, or talks about the brand (or the company) but doesn't explicitly try to
sell the brand.
However, it does implicitly sell the brand, either by presenting it as something so valuable you
can afford to blow a ton of money on some human-interest story a once-respectable news organization
produced, or by presenting your brand, its qualities, its activities, and its history as a topic
worthy of discussion.
What Is Marketing Content?
Content marketing was originally imagined as a way to turn your brand into an industry authority or
news source. We did this because we really thought we could be media companies, though now we're
mostly in it for the SEO.
But this notion of marketing content as something impartial, as something that doesn't explicitly
market or sell, as something more akin to journalism, has lingered.
In that sense, the orthodox definition of marketing content is information, narrative, argument,
advice, performance, expression, or event that implicitly serves a marketing goal, served in a
media format.
Whitepapers, e-books, listicles, bylines, and most blog articles fit this definition.
Something like a product page doesn't fit this definition and yet it's still content, because
another definition of content is "anything that fills a media channel." Leaving me free to refer
to it as such without being a hypocrite (many forms of advertising and
copywriting fit this
definition as well).
So how do we untangle this? We don't.
We just have to accept that content has multiple definitions, explicitly referring to or
implying more than one thing, sometimes simultaneously. Just like the word "engagement" can
explicitly refer to or imply love, war, or social media, sometimes simultaneously.
And we'll have to be content with that.
