Content, We Have a Problem

I didn’t start my professional career as a formally trained marketer. My degrees are in musical theater and medieval studies. I sang and danced my way through my 20s and first learned marketing through a curriculum of online courses, business coaching, HubSpot certifications, and the LinkedIn feed.

But I have always been a writer. So, when I started writing for clients, I approached it from a very basic premise: you write things so people will read them.

Sounds simple enough. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that some approaches to modern marketing didn’t treat writing as something to be read.

These approaches talked about content instead. Content was putting enough keywords on a web page to rank higher in search results. Content was using email as a vehicle for someone to click a button, to go to a website, so you could cookie them and retarget them with ads. Content was all about taking the next action, and so rarely about the thing itself.

Content, that word which should inherently mean something of substance, became merely a container. A placeholder. An empty space where the ideas were generic and the words to convey those ideas didn’t much matter.

I…didn’t get it.

Or, I got it, but I didn’t understand it. Why spend all this time creating a facsimile of something with substance that really says nothing at all?

Substance Makes a Comeback

I was delighted (but also found it ironic) when the idea of content having actual content in it became popular again a few years ago.

Now we use phrases like “zero-click content,” and we say, “newsletters are so back.” It’s en vogue and, somehow, revolutionary to imagine that putting fewer barriers between your content and your reader would be a net positive. That the thing you create is worthy of a reader’s attention. That you’re doing more than building an elaborate, 1,500-word signpost pointing to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

Except…creating something that a reader cares about, something worthy of their attention, takes time and resources. It requires everything from business thinking to proofreading. And that sounds hard to people. (Spoiler: it is.) There’s a longing to find a shortcut. Companies want a way to “unlock content at scale,” and AI presents the seemingly perfect solution.

The Elephant in the Conference Room: AI

Here’s where I stop and say: of course, I use AI. We use AI tools every single day in my business to improve our workflows, facilitate ideation, and build processes (probably my favorite application).

AI is extremely good at producing content that seems fine when you skim it but doesn’t pass the “close read” test. If you parse the language to figure out what exactly it’s saying, it’s often not much at all. There’s hardly any there there.

The content is forgettable. Obvious. Overly general. It doesn’t stick with you. It doesn’t linger. It doesn’t make you think. And I believe the reason is ultimately this:

Content that is made with little effort makes little impact.

I find it telling that much of the marketing around AI still seems to focus on sellers rather than buyers. It’s about how to find your prospects faster, how to create content more efficiently, and how to get more work done with fewer people. Grand claims about whether all these benefits to sellers are somehow transferred to their audiences are harder to find.

My hunch is that audiences feel the lack of effort. (Not-so-fun fact: only 15% of key decision-makers say the overall quality of thought leadership they read is very good or excellent.)

Audiences see companies producing more content, but they don’t necessarily receive more value from it. All that happens is they’re inundated with more noise: decently structured content that rarely provides anything beyond surface-level substance. And audiences know, intuitively, that content without substance doesn’t respect their time, their intelligence, or their humanity.

You Can’t Outsource Caring

The problem isn’t AI tools. It’s the desire to outsource caring enough about another person to create something meaningful for them. Yes, that requires a certain level of effort. Certainly more than dumping a prompt into ChatGPT and asking it to output an email or an article or a LinkedIn post. But putting in effort doesn’t have to mean doing everything the hard way.

There are ways to still operate efficiently (including using AI tools) while spending more time on the aspects of content that matter. The critical thinking that helps sharpen a half-formed idea. Appropriate attention to the words that are written to express that idea. A deeper understanding of the audience those words are written for. Better insights from an expert who can speak from a vast wealth of experience about the specifics that no LLM can conjure up.

I’m all for improving productivity, but not at the expense of diminished purpose. And for me, the first purpose of content is the same as it has always been: to get people to read what you write.

Words have the power to make a lasting impression on their readers, to leave a mark that outlasts the length of any sales cycle. But we can only hope to earn that attention if we create content with the care it deserves.