Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Ever since the commercial Internet emerged, content has been at the center.  Bill Gates, quite famously, declared that content is king and called it the “killer app” of the Internet age.  Inspired, media executives and internet entrepreneurs alike sought to marry content and distribution to create the perfect business model.

The problem is, as I’ve noted before, that content is crap.  Nobody walks out of a great movie and says, “Wow! That was some great content.”  Nobody listens to content on their way to work in the morning.  We never call anything we like “content,” the term is a mere fantasy in the minds of business planners.

That, in essence, is why despite the predictions of digital pundits, the TV industry has continued to prosper.  Through a series of disruptions—cable, DVD and now streaming video—programing has continued to evolve.  Now, with the cable business model starting to unravel, we can expect an explosion of creative energy that will usher in a new golden age of TV....

It’s a stark verdict from a prominent source. “There are hundreds of thousands of people who were trained and mentored, and studied classical marketing, and they got good at it,” says Clark Kokich, chairman of digital agency Razorfish.

Unfortunately, the world has changed – and that education is no longer relevant. “If your self-worth and your confidence is based on you being an expert, you’re in deep trouble, because there aren’t any experts,” says Kokich, author of Do or Die: Surviving and Thriving in a World Where the Old Ways of Marketing Aren’t Getting It Done. “Sure, there are experts in some fields. Someone may be really good in SEO or in mobile. But there aren’t any experts in making this transition.”...

[Interesting premise but no solutions energing yet ~ Jeff]