Having made it the bulk of my career, I was sad about the decline of radio.  It wasn’t from a lack of talent who knew how to attract, relate to, entertain, hold, and make an audience want to come back for more.  That was instinct for people like us.  Rather it fell into the hands of a new wave of management that didn’t understand any of those things and refused to trust those who did.  They didn’t get the art of building deep relationships with people you’ve never met.

 

But as a showman, I was excited, because the mandate to entertain and inform was shifting to brands thanks to a numbing exhaustion of advertising and the rise of this thing called content marketing.  Now countless companies would themselves be putting on “shows,” and the demand for great ideas and entertainers would skyrocket.  Everything we entertainers and journalists were trained in, experienced in, and knew deep in our bones how to do was now needed for branded content.  It was going to be a revolution, the dawn of nearly limitless well-funded, crowd-pleasing, hell maybe even experimental media.

 

The ebook I wrote back in 2010 talked about this seismic shift and how what’s old would be new again as brands would be the presenters of programs just as they had with the Texaco Star Theater, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and Kraft Television Theater.  Yes, there would be ads in those shows, but the purpose of the shows would be strictly to entertain and delight a happy audience who would then be present and receptive to ads.  This was going to be great!

 

Boy was I wrong.

 

Not all, but most brands could not be LESS interested in customer-centricity, or entertaining and delighting the public.  They are as locked down in merchandising and advertising as ever, just like dear old dad was in his cool Mad Men suit back in the 60’s.  There’s a rejection of the common sense that if you give the public a show they absolutely adore, maybe even are addicted to, that there’s value in that for a company.  I wonder if the creators of Seinfeld, Friends and Big Bang Theory are broke?  They must be!  Because there’s no ROI in making a show that doesn’t obnoxiously market something throughout it, right?  Those shows weren’t worth doing.

 

Those shows not only worked, they kept working and are STILL working as permanent revenue machines.  Why?  Because they made them.  They at least tried them to see if they would work.

 

Brands however, can’t seem to get past their inward-focused self-parody of corporate culture long enough to make content that isn’t stuffed with pervasive shilling.  There’s no faith in the content, no faith in the public to reward good content.  Let’s call it what it is, it’s just another ad, only bigger and labeled “content” so we can say at the next convention that we’re big on content.

 

There’s nothing wrong with talking about content strategy and technology stacks and key performance metrics and business objectives and distribution and data and personalization and targeting.  All of that is essential to maximize the impact of content.  But too many brands are using endless handwringing and circular discussions about these things to put off actually making something for the public.  I repeat, I do not espouse making content without a strategy.  But nor do I think staying forever mired in the mud regarding the content itself is credible.  None of these other things you’re studying and meeting about matter in the slightest, they never come into play, if you can’t bring yourself to MAKE something.

 

The making is the part brands seem most uncomfortable with.  That’s understandable because they’re not entertainers or journalists, they sell widgets.  They’re far more comfortable trying to make triggering authentic human emotions a technology, data & spreadsheet exercise.  Like our dangerous radio management friends, they’re refusing to accept the art and showmanship instincts required to actually do it.  A brand will agonize 3 years over the entire content ecosystem before it makes a half-hearted, half-funded move.  Meanwhile some 13-year-old dude in Oshkosh does a video in a day and get tens of thousands of views.  The difference?  The kid was seriously committed to making something people would love and that would make them love him.  The brand was…keeping everyone’s meeting calendar full.

 

Blame a recent Curata study for firing me up.  It shows the biggest skills gap in corporate content marketing is content creation at 41%.  What a running kick in the balls.  This would indicate brands really do think making great content people love is critical, and worth it.  I’m not so sure they do.  If they did and were serious about content creation, the phone batteries of writers, producers, artists and filmmakers would be burning hot.  For the most part, companies are working to get by without entertainers and journalists.  And frankly, if all they’re going to allow is ads called by another name, they can.

 

Every brand, for all practical purposes, now has its own magazine, TV station and radio station available to them.  The audience is out there and the spotlight is on.  Are you going to leave your stage empty?  I repeat what I ask in my book…what’s your show?  Don’t talk to me about a one-off video or infographic.  What are you going to consistently, reliably, give people that’s for them, not you, that they’ll make a habit of reading, listening to or watching?  Without a show and the show-people who know how to do it, how serious about content marketing can you possibly be?

Photo: digitalart, freedigitalphotos.net

@mikestiles