The Return of ‘Push’ Content

The following is an extract from Content Marketing Strategy.

In the earliest days of the internet, content was simply discovered through whatever platform the user happened to use. For example, if you signed on through America Online (AOL) you would see whatever AOL had available. That content was technically delivered over the internet, but it was pushed to you based on whatever the platform thought was most important. It sounds almost ridiculous now, but if you made it out of your walled garden of AOL to the wildly unorganized World Wide Web, you could use a new kind of program called a “browser” to “surf the web.” You would just browse web pages, and hopefully something interesting would attract your attention.

Similarly, the internet’s first popular search engine, Yahoo, was simply a directory of websites that Yahoo had indexed. You were not truly searching the internet but rather the limited content that Yahoo had gotten around to trying to organize.

All that changed quickly once Google entered the picture.

Over the last two decades, we’ve seen an unfathomable amount of content added to the internet. By some estimates we now add 2.5 quintillion bytes of data to the internet every single day. That number is so large that it defies our ability to comprehend it. Searchable content has become the defining interface to just about everything.

However, in 2023, almost exactly 25 years since Google brought its search platform online, we have reached another milestone in the way we consume content. There is now so much content available, and so much competition for those top spots, that even search has become inefficient.

Content discovery is changing the way we interact with digital content. New research, as detailed in Search Engine Journal (SEJ), shows that 30% of search users are now “forced to redo their search queries in order to find what they’re looking for.” Audiences have become increasingly frustrated with the results from Google and other search engines. But why?

It’s because businesses have spent the last decade producing more and more content designed to rank higher against search queries. This led Google to attempt to put more and more information (the actual answers) on the search results page itself. This means that the most “popular answer” is often the one given at the top of a search result, and this leads to bad answers to smart questions.

Interestingly, this conclusion is wrong. The “wrong” results are an early indicator of Google attempting to provide better answers than the vast quantity of “SEO-optimized” content is providing. Google is trying to understand not what you asked for, but what you really want.

Here’s an example: you ask Google for the number of calories in a loaf of bread and it returns the nutritional information for a slice of bread. That isn’t because Google doesn’t know the number of calories in a loaf of bread; it’s because Google knows (from its exceedingly large set of behavioral data) that you’re much more likely to want to know the total calories in a slice, not a loaf.

This is content discovery version 2.0—much smarter than when the web first started.

Content discovery will be an increasingly important aspect of how audiences consume content. TikTok is the first platform wholly designed around this evolution in a meaningful way. Algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms are now so powerful that, combined with the data generated from the huge amount of time we spend online, content we want is being pushed to us before we even know we want it.

This is beginning to happen in entertainment; for example, Netflix recommends programs to us based on our viewing habits, and Amazon suggests books (and other products) based on our purchase and browsing history.

Further, newer AI-focused technologies are now automatically creating content for us. Technologies such as ChatGPT, Dall-E2 and Stable Diffusion are now not only providing platforms to generate original content based on queries, they are incorporated into search to push confident answers to queries instead of options of destinations. Right now, those answers are just as “bad” and incorrect as the search engines are.

Businesses will begin to deal with this as well. As the customer journey evolves into more targeted, personalized experiences at all stages, marketers will need to evolve into creating advanced content displays to help anticipate customers’ needs and deliver the value they want before they even know they want it.

You might think it means we have to develop yet more content.

It’s true. But, here’s the thing. In this case, creating more won’t be enough.

For the last several years, businesses have been trying to react to this pressure for “more content” by building in-house content studios or content marketing teams. In many cases, businesses even call these teams “content factories.” The Association of National Advertisers released research in 2018 that noted that “the explosive growth of in-house agencies is one of the most significant trends in the advertising and marketing industry today.” They noted that 78% of companies have an in-house agency and that content marketing is offered by 75% of those in-house agencies.

Brands feel as though they can scale to the need for “more” simply by building a function to support the production of more words, pictures, video, audio, etc. But it’s not working. Why?

This gets me to something I call Robert’s Content Law: The need for more content assets increases in direct proportion to the increase in the number of resources solely allocated to creating more assets.

In other words, trying to build the capability to always deliver “more” content immediately sets us off on the wrong foot. Businesses cannot ever scale to a total of “more” because “more” will always be needed. Rather, brands must begin to operate like a strategic media company and build an activity around the question of “how much is enough?”

That’s a different activity—and one that can create a competitive advantage, because it implicitly asks the question that starts to force us to plan and prioritize: “Enough of what?”.