Taking a Snickers Moment to Consider "Content"

Out of all the nonsense about the Super Bowl ads, a few pearls have surfaced.

One of my faves is this quote in the Sunday Times:

"Super Bowl advertising started as buying ads in the game. Then it became advertising as public relations, and then it became advertising as marketing. Now it's advertising as content, which can be reviewed as good or bad, tasteful or not tasteful, appropriate or inappropriate."

That came from Ed Erhardt, who's president of ESPN/ABC consumer marketing and sales, explaining the recent reluctance of some marketers to enter the fray.

Content indeed, we can all agree as we take a Snickers Moment to contemplate.

Of course, it's content as everything our brains consume is.

And once again, we see these once-solid lines blurring. Content used to mean above-the-commercial fray serious stuff, like books, magazines, and you know, journalism. Now we're starting to recognize that there's a lot of content in the non-serious stuff, including the trivial $2.6 million, 30-second ad. Once again, to those in the journalistic trade, it's going to be a matter of distinguishing the stuff that's meant to edify (interesting verb, isn't it) from stuff that's mean to sell something. Fundamental difference, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

That fundamental difference is getting damaged in two major ways.

Everyone's a content producer; everyone's a publisher, including Snickers, Doritos and, BP. Second, the world's abandoning the nuanced paid circulation/advertising-supported model. In that model, though advertisers paid for 80% of the costs, the readers' quarters matter -- they've been the audience that editors and reporters and writers primarily serve. As we move to a search word/contextual-based/behaviorally tracked ad world, it's one that targets readers who come without barriers, meaning they don't have to pay. Open websites, lots more free dailies and weeklies. Without the audience's financial contribution, them that pay -- the advertisers -- will inevitably exert more and more influence. That's the way money works.

You had to appreciate Stephen Colbert's recent interview with Lou Dobbs (behind an impromptu immigrant-discouraging fence no less). Dobbs' neo-populist cry can be hard to figure. But one point he made stuck with me. We were a Republic, before we were a marketplace, he said, several times several ways. Yes, the market's a great thing he says, and the best economic system yet found. Was it ever intended though to be our democracy, to determine what we hear and what we read, to go beyond what seemed to be a simpler world of making commercial choices?

I sense we're at the beginning of some of these important conversations. In the arena many of us know best -- journalism, the press, whatever you want to call the subset of "media" and "content", the part of it intended to edify -- it's going to come down to money. To get a journalism that is served up without fear or favor, readers may have to pay for it directly, again. Consider the NPR model: excellent journalism can be funded by sources other than advertisers. How soon are we going to engage in the conversations about serious, high-dollar NPR models -- maybe anchored by socially aware foundations -- applied to print/online journalism. We're seeing some local ferment, but we're not seeing the dollars to match.

We can't have the conversation too soon.