It was on the 3rd of Jan­u­ary 1996 that Bill Gates pub­lished his essay enti­tled ‘Con­tent is King’, out­lin­ing his thoughts on how the future of con­tent and adver­tis­ing would devel­op on the inter­net. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing read, and always inter­est­ing to go back and ret­ro­spec­tive­ly look at vision­ary essays such as these.

Amongst oth­er things, the essay also reveals that con­tent has been ‘king’ for twen­ty years now.

Per­haps there was a time when brands might have pre­ferred to focus their online invest­ment on adver­tis­ing rather than con­tent mar­ket­ing, but today we’re at a point where there is so much con­tent being cre­at­ed that some are begin­ning to ask ques­tions about whether the scales have tipped, and brands are pro­duc­ing too much con­tent for audi­ences to rea­son­ably con­sume and engage with.

“One of the excit­ing things about the Inter­net is that any­one with a PC and a modem can pub­lish what­ev­er con­tent they can cre­ate. In a sense, the Inter­net is the mul­ti­me­dia equiv­a­lent of the pho­to­copi­er. It allows mate­r­i­al to be dupli­cat­ed at low cost, no mat­ter the size of the audi­ence.”

- Bill Gates

It might be dra­mat­ic to say we are at a tip­ping point, but mar­keters are feel­ing the pres­sure to do more and more to make their con­tent stand out and be effec­tive. It begs a fur­ther ques­tion, how is the nature of con­tent chang­ing?

‘10x’ and mixed media content

Per­haps as a result of this, many brands are try­ing to do ‘less but bet­ter’. In fact there’s a grow­ing per­cep­tion in the indus­try that excep­tion­al or “10x” con­tent is what brands real­ly need now. As mar­keters in the indus­try, you’ll hear phras­es such as ‘one excel­lent piece of con­tent a month is bet­ter than four mediocre ones’ — and to a large extent, this is prob­a­bly true.

10x con­tent, how­ev­er, by nature can nev­er be the main cog in brand­ed con­tent oper­a­tions. Inevitably, it requires a great deal of resource (finan­cial, intel­lec­tu­al, and logis­ti­cal) to pro­duce, and in the com­pet­i­tive dig­i­tal land­scape, brands will always need to push the bound­aries of min­i­mum viable to achieve the results they need — ensur­ing equal­ly, that they pro­duce a few exam­ples of 10x con­tent each year as a kind of ‘pre­mi­um con­tent’.

Where we may see changes to reg­u­lar brand­ed con­tent out­put, are on the plat­forms on which they choose to pub­lish, and in the for­mats they choose to use. Name­ly, the brand­ed chan­nels we can expect on plat­forms such as Snapchat, Insta­gram, and even­tu­al­ly, inevitably, new and emerg­ing apps such as (yes) Poké­mon Go.

Inci­den­tal­ly, if there’s one take­away for me from the Poke­mon Go phe­nom­e­non, it’s that the app has shown us that the con­tent of the future is unlike­ly to be restrict­ed sole­ly to prose, images, or even mul­ti­me­dia audio and video, but to a much more immer­sive expe­ri­ence of mixed dig­i­tal media.

Future challenges in measuring content

One of the mea­sure­ment prob­lems that can arise from a demand­ing mixed media con­tent world is that mar­keters can become over­ly focused on plat­form-spe­cif­ic met­rics and KPIs. If you con­sid­er, for exam­ple, how SEOs approach met­rics for web and writ­ten con­tent, it’s clear how mea­sure­ment is often spe­cif­ic to the ‘page-based’ nature of the for­mat. (It may not be an exhaus­tive list but typ­i­cal­ly the oft-most cit­ed met­rics for page-based, writ­ten con­tent include: time on page, time on site, bounce rate, social shares and engage­ment, or CTR from the page to deep­er pages.)

If indeed the pre­ferred means of con­tent in con­sump­tion in the future is via a num­ber of dis­parate apps, it’s nat­ur­al that unique met­rics will be imple­ment­ed to mea­sure suc­cess across vary­ing plat­forms. In this regard, shares and engage­ments may be rel­e­vant for Insta­gram, but ‘time spent play­ing’ may be more rel­e­vant for an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty game.

And the prob­lem with here is not that mul­ti­ple plat­forms nec­es­sar­i­ly imply mul­ti­ple met­rics and KPIs, but that the nat­ur­al ten­den­cy is to focus on these, and in the process lose sight of actu­al brand goals and objec­tives.

It occurs to me that this is a cross-plat­form man­i­fes­ta­tion of a prob­lem a col­league, Jonathan Alder­son, iden­ti­fied (in the con­text of Google Ana­lyt­ics):

All too often, we start with the met­rics, jus­ti­fy­ing or con­nect­ing them to over­ar­ch­ing objec­tives as an after­thought. It’s a con­se­quence of the tools and ana­lyt­ics plat­forms we have at our dis­pos­al, cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where­in it can be tempt­ing to ‘chase’ KPIs.

The chal­lenge in mea­sur­ing the effec­tive­ness of con­tent, as con­tent evolves and spi­ral out­wards into mul­ti­ple plat­forms and points of engage­ment, will be con­sol­i­dat­ing indi­vid­ual met­rics with over­all brand con­tent goals; to deter­mine exact­ly what the con­tent arm of a busi­ness exists to achieve, and to con­nect the met­rics used to adjudge that to wider brand objec­tives, rather than the oth­er way around.