SHOCKING NEWS!

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This morning I reeled in horror when I read a press release about how consumers were failing to pay attention to branded content.  I just about dropped my monocle into my breakfast bouillon (luckily it's on a string and only got drenched in bouillon steam).  

Much to my relief, John Webb, a cloud marketing guy in the UK identified the cause of this calamity.  He states that "content marketing was being 'diluted' in quality and warned that marketing as in danger of being taken over by engineers and developers."  The remedy is to hire more "journalists who have been trained to find stories that would resonate with the target audience." 

That geeks have been involved with the creation and look of online efforts is nothing new.  I have been battling the Mr. Potato Head crowd since the late '90s.  The solution, however, isn't to hire more storytellers.  It's more basic than that.  People don't care.  At least the bulk of consumers don't—but more on that at a later time.  First, though, a letter to the Geeks: 

Dear Geeks, 

Please find below an excerpt from a lecture delivered by Robertson Davies at Yale on Feb 21, 1991.  In it, Mr. Davies describes how he found what he could talk about during his segment on writing: 

 

"To return to the aspiring writers of whom I spoke a few minutes ago, and who eagerly seek guidance about how to become writers, where are they to look? Not far, for there are all kinds of books that profess to teach methods of writing, fiction and non- fiction, poetry and the steamiest sort of prose. I bought one such magazine when I was thinking about what I would say to you. From time to time I receive through the mail offers to teach me to write, by some infallible method, but I have never had time to accept them. But in preparation for today I thought I had better find out what these helpful people were offering. The cover of my magazine proclaimed “How to Write Passionate Love Scenes . . . and Still Respect Your Typewriter in the Morning.” Much is suggested in that title. Is the reader to expect that he will not only learn to write passionate love scenes, but that he will himself experience them vicariously? To a certain sort of mind, the prospect is alluring. The imaginative preparation, or foreplay; the turning down of the sheets, so to speak; the actual writing, or deliciously prolonged orgasm; the sense of achievement, of having transformed erotic fantasy into art. And you can do it over and over again, without fatigue or disgust

"I was astonished when I read the article to find it quite sensible; its counsel was, “Don’t overdo things.” But the title, as it appeared on the cover — that was aimed straight at the eager, desirous heart.

"The magazine was full of advice, which may be good. I don’t know because little of it concerned me. I don’t particularly want to know “how to write irresistible nonfiction” nor do I want advice about computers because I do not own one and could not manage it if I did. I don’t worry about collecting from slow-paying magazines. I don’t want to know how to improve my writers’ group, because I shrink from the notion of writers’ groups; I don’t want to master the building block of poetry and don’t believe such a thing exists; nor do I seek “a playful guide to being a Southern writer.” I was grateful that at Christmas nobody gave me the foolishly suggestive “Take an Author to Bed” poster. I am interested that the magazine calls loudly for novels in which “safe sex is eroticised and characters are sensuously — and routinely — conscious of their own and their partners’ health” because this shows that the magazine really has its heart in the right place and wishes to be associated with a “caring community.” Literary aid against AIDS, in fact.

"As a writer, I have my share of intuition, and as I looked through that magazine I had a strong sense of the sort of reader at whom it was aimed: a lonely person, whose youth was slipping away; a reader who will hopefully cut out the coupon that is appended to an advertisement that begins, “You Can Make Up to $9,800 in 24 Hours!” and which describes the literary life as “The Royal Road to Riches”; a reader unsophisticated enough to believe that writers live marvelous social lives, eat and drink very high on the hog, and have access to unlimited, apocalyptic sex. A wistful reader and, I fear, an untalented one.

"It is very sad. People of that sort do not, so far as I know, imagine that they could learn to write music by mastering a few easy tips, or that they could paint pictures that anybody would want. What on earth makes them think that they can be writers? It would be interesting to talk about that."

So,here's the deal: I won't write code and you won't write copy.  Cool with that?