Now is the winter of my discontent
November 04 2014 4:09 PM
As you might expect from someone in my position as a Client Manager, I try to keep up as much as possible with the latest industry news and trends, and I do a lot of this through subscribing to relevant blogs and newsletters.
The other day, one of these newsletters (from Contently) gave me this map – tenuously linked to Game of Thrones – which jumped on a bandwagon that departed over six months ago. It felt about as timely as me publishing a piece entitled the “Content Marketing World Cup”, based on this summer’s football tournament, rather than the upcoming 2015 Indoor Hockey World Cup – although I’m sure there’s a piece there just waiting to be written.
I felt slightly disappointed by this, as it pretty much went against everything the map’s creators rail against and added absolutely no value to my understanding of the content marketing marketplace.
I genuinely love Game of Thrones, but I fail to see what this gives me in terms of thought leadership. It might be ‘fun’ but what’s the link between Twitter and the land of Essos, or a couple of client logos in “Brand Publisher’s Landing”? It doesn’t increase my day-to-day industry knowledge. Give me Daenerys and King’s Landing (but especially Daenerys) any day.
This, to me, shouts out “content crime”, something that B2B Marketing magazine feel pretty strongly about. The article that introduces the map rightly has a bit of a dig at this image from Lumascape, but really this new collection of logos isn’t much better other than being a bit prettier.
In a world where it’s easy for content to be drowned out by better messaging from competitors, it’s imperative to be spot on with the content you put out – don’t make them angry – or you quickly lose your audience. I’ll forgive Contently this once, because they usually send out interesting, relevant and timely pieces, but amongst my bursting inbox it would be easy for me to press delete without opening their emails in future if they lose my support.
Winter is coming. Keep me warm. But don’t get me overheated, or I will be discontent.
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