Stop Calling It Content

Somewhere around 2014, the English language quietly performed a merger.

A novel became content. A photograph became content. A diagram a designer worked on for three weeks became content. A six-second clip of someone's cat became content. The director's commentary on the new Scorsese is content. So is the thirteenth post in a LinkedIn carousel about "5 lessons from my coffee order."

We built one word to hold all of it. Then we wondered why nothing felt like anything.

I run a marketing agency. I am not innocent here. I have used the word "content" in client decks, calendars, and contracts. I have hired content strategists and discussed content velocity. I have, in one particularly low moment, said the phrase "snackable content" into a microphone. The word is useful in a load-bearing way. It refers to "the stuff that fills the slot," and modern marketing has many slots.

But useful and good are different categories. The word "content" is useful the way a five-gallon bucket is useful. It will hold almost anything. It tells you nothing about what's inside.

Here's what I think happened.

For a long time, we had specific words. You wrote an essay. You took photos. You shot a film. You made an album. You drew a comic. The word told the reader what kind of attention to bring, and it told the maker what kind of standard to meet. An essay had to be at least essay-shaped. A song had to clear a song-shaped bar.

Then the platforms arrived. Platforms don't care what kind of thing you made. They care about three numbers: how long someone looked at it, whether it brought back another someone, and whether it can be measured against the next one in the feed. The platforms needed a word that meant "any object that can be ranked this way." The word they reached for was content.

This was an enormously efficient piece of vocabulary. It also turned out to be expensive. When you call your novel content, you have started to think of it as content. You will write it slightly differently. You will compress it. You will sand off the strange part. You will optimize the opening. The novel becomes, slowly, more bucket-shaped.

Stop using it as the default.

I don't think the answer is to ban the word. The answer is to stop using it as the default.

When my team plans a campaign, we have started writing the actual nouns on the calendar. Not "blog content." A 1,400-word essay about a thing we know better than anyone else. Not "video content." A four-minute walkthrough where the founder shows you something with her hands. Not "social content." A photo of the warehouse on Tuesday, with one true sentence under it.

The exercise sounds twee until you try it. The minute you write down what the thing actually is, two things happen. One, you notice how many slots on your calendar were filled with something you couldn't describe. Two, you start to want the thing to be good, because you can no longer hide it inside a category.

There's a related move that I think about a lot. A friend who runs a small studio refuses to use the word "deliverable." She says you don't deliver a logo, you make one. The logo is a thing somebody made. "Deliverable" is the box it shipped in. She is not wrong about this, and her studio's work is, not coincidentally, better than most.

Words shape what we make. We knew this before. We can know it again.

A modest proposal.

For one week, try replacing "content" with the actual noun. The blog post. The photograph. The instructional video. The press release. The case study. Watch what happens to your standards. Watch what happens to your calendar. Watch the writers on your team sit up a little straighter when you ask them for a 1,200-word essay instead of "a piece of content for the blog channel."

You will not change the industry. The platforms will keep using the word. Your CMS will keep using the word. The vendor pitching you SEO services will use it forty-three times in one slide. That's fine. That's their problem.

You don't have to call it that.