If you’re a regular here, you’ll know that I wang on about how poorly content is defined and evolution of the profession.
The muddy waters have turned into a latrine where content has been “democratised” through management wank like T-Shaping and AI. And, of course, content’s biggest enemy, marketing.
Corporates have lost their way in general but given the worrying trend of redundancies in content teams, taking out some big hitters according to my LinkedIn feed, it feels like they’re trying to find their way by decimating the only medium that has any meaning to customers, content.
The reasons I think this is happening is twofold; content has an image problem and social media.
I know it’s fashionable to blame all of societies ills on social media like we’re unconscious automatons who believe everything without giving it a critical thought. So invested are we in our identity and opinions that we’re unbending for fear of admitting we’re wrong. But social media has changed the way we consume content.
EVERYTHING is said and written in the vernacular. We consume so many videos on TikTok with colloquial English and typo-riddled captions, we can’t see or hear it anymore.
The phrase “could of” is now as accepted as the Gen Alpha word-salad of “skibbedi toilet” (no, I don’t know what it means either).
Add to that the amount of times I’ve seen ‘because’ spelt ‘becuase’ or ‘the’ spelt ‘teh’, people just hit send without proofreading.
Gone is the internet snobbery of yester-year where correcting someone’s spelling or grammar was the mic drop to any argument.
Social media is supposed to be live micro-blogging your life. Who’s got time to proofread captions, check it’s accessible, edit copy, etc. as well as editing videos/photos, adding filters, choosing music, etc. all while on the move and probably doing something else.
The only thing that’s sacrificed and eroded is copy.
And that’s something we’ve all got used to.
But are companies held to the same standard as Bella Porch and your local dog-walker? The answer is no.
Under the generic banner of content and with the suffix of design, content is seen as a millstone around speed’s neck and a block in production’s pipe.
Because of that, marketing think they can just write their own content (we can tell this a mile off by the way) and since content design is basically design thinking with a content lens, it’s something that can be merged with UX design.
The reality is the badge of content design has done us dirty.
I get the thinking, copywriters exist in adland – they’re brilliant at writing big impactful taglines for eye-catching TV ads or posters whereas for us who exist in a digital world, there’s A LOT more to it.
It needed a rebrand but simply copying the methodology UX designers have been using for years, stripping copywriting down to its bare bones and repackaging it as revolutionary has had the opposite effect.
The definition by CDL is “Content design is a way of thinking. It's about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect”.
This can be used to define User Experience Designers, SEO, Digital Marketing, Development, Customer Services, Merchandising, Procurement, Business Analysts, Project Management, Data Science, Product Owners… you get the gist.
In Government, it’s essential because it relies on no-frills communication to efficiently and effectively service people who have no other option but to use their services.
For that purpose, it’s poetry because I don’t want to call a civil servant just to get a new passport or pay my tax bill.
As it’s defined on the .gov website, “it allows people to find out what they need to know or do quickly”.
In a commercial environment, this has diminished the understanding and integrity of a discipline that was already misunderstood and marginalised.
Don’t get me wrong, I too converted to the Content Bible movement thinking it would usher in an age where content would be as integral to digital teams as developers. In the seven years since it’s been published, I’ve noticed it gnaw away at content teams who were suddenly empowered to be difficult despite the book essentially telling us the value we add isn’t the thing.
My corporate mantra is “just you’ve got GCSE English, doesn’t mean you can write” but the principles of content design means that it does. And because of that, tone of voice isn’t important anymore.
In a competitive commercial environment where you need personality to cut through the noise and be memorable, you need behavioural science to determine what needs to be said where and how, but none of this is covered in the book.
Now we’re seeing the emergence of conversational design, which recycles copywriting principles like speaking colloquially, being friendly, have one-to-one conversations, etc. Because the Ronseal writing championed by certain movers and shakers has made content homogenous, ineffective and easily reproduced by AI.
It fails to write for conversion, whatever conversion means to that piece of work.
The essence of content design is writing and structuring interactions in a way that influences the reader to think, feel or do something on a page or in a journey based on who they are and the problem they’re solving, helping them moving through the decision journey and make right choices. Sometimes, if you enjoy the dark arts, it can create a problem that only your organisation to solve, like De Beers and the engagement ring.
Of course, there are operational requirements to do this and it can’t be done in a silo. So it’s not really a huge leap from copywriting, it’s just you may be asked to writing something in 10 words or less or you may have to write a long-form article.
Yes, it’s content. But no, it’s not content design. It involves SEO, DEI, content strategy, user experience and content management as well as writing.
And writing is skill that sets us apart from any other discipline in the business.
So that should be the thread that stitches us all together, not design.
