Brands, for all intents and purposes, are people. At least in the eyes of the United States Supreme Court and Twitter Dot Com. Their main purpose is to engage consumers at a colloquial social level. This means infiltrating your timelines, news feed, streams and even the platform that was supposed to be the stock market of nudes until all of your friends ruined it by using it to take hungover selfies and announce whatever city they were visiting that weekend. Sick, I had no idea you were in New York City, but that Woody Allen 'Manhattan' really helped me eliminate that you weren't, in fact, at the Las Vegas themed replica hotel.
I know this because I work in advertising. I get paid to think of cool ways for brands to seemingly trick people into watching or reading something in order for their brand to become culturally relevant.
Fire Content™ is a relatively new invention. At its core, it's an advertisement, no different than a Super Bowl commercial or an interstate highway billboard. But because of its attempt to be inserted seamlessly into our social networks, they dropped the sales pitch and stating calling it "Content."
The difference between standard, run of the mill Content and Fire Content™ is the latter's innate ability to garner metrics such as, but not limited to:
-Likes
-Favorites
-Shares
-Retweets
-Screenshots
-Becoming a meme
-Becoming a think piece
-Becoming a thot piece
-Becoming a SNL parody
-Adoption by Black Twitter
-Adoption by Feminist Twitter
-Adoption by White Twitter
Those last three are the holy grail for marketers. Browse any advertising agency's manifesto and you'll stumble upon claims about their ability to influence culture. Brands want to be in your timelines. They want to wish you happy birthday. They want to tell you about National Peanut Butter Ice Cream Day. They want you to share their three-minute "film" about how basketball is played on the streets of the Philippines. They want you to tweet at them so they can spontaneously kidnap you and take you on a cruise ship that sails to a private island of low calorie alcoholic beverages.
I also want those things because it's my job to think of all that shit. When I'm not creating that next level editorial content for the Pins, I'm "brainstorming" all sorts of branded content or how companies can blow literally millions of dollars on films and festivals and film festivals and anything else that is able to be tangibly endorsed. Handing out ponchos to celebrate the arrival of a certain basketball player who "makes it rain"? Done. Fabricating a two-hundred foot sneaker for the Statue of Liberty? Uh, yeah, sure. Shooting a documentary about a dancing painter dressed up as Benjamin Franklin in order to sell soda? Cool, why the fuck not?
Don't get it fucking twisted, creating #content is a fucking battle—an actual international conflict with lives on the line.
You too probably know a lot of people who make this #content with me. You went to high school with them. They were the kids on the JV soccer team who always said they played sports in high school and only when pressed about it reveal, "Well, I didn't play my senior year or my junior year. Also, only half of my sophomore season." You know the people who make this #content because you'll only hear from them during a three week span every December in order to "hang out." Winter solstice is marked by the first text you get from whatever fuccboi/fuccgurl announcing his or her return home.
The truth is that they are all clones. Not in the existential Hans Eijkelboom People of the Twenty-First Century way, but in the actual Star Wars Episode II way. Like, there's a factory producing a clan of Stormtroopers who all moved to Brooklyn to work in advertising agencies/creative boutiques/branding firms/design shops. (An unusual, but interesting byproduct of this cloning is that all of its members are only physically able to dress like it's the year 2011.)
This is the makeup of Content Creators, who make the stuff that infiltrate your timeline. It's alarming because they all listen to the Serial podcast and follow the same blogs and like the same three Wes Anderson movies. Seriously, modern advertising is inspired by three things and three things only:
1. Nike commercials
2. Wes Anderson movies
3. All of the above
Content Clones sit in "open plan offices," scouring your Facebook and Twitter trying to get insights on what "like, real America, not New York City Millennials" are into now. They take screenshots of your status updates and tweets and comments and put them into these things called "decks," which are essentially really fancy PowerPoint presentations. 109% of working in advertising is making these PowerPoint presentations. Again, they are super fancy.
These creators of content huddle into what is seemingly just a conference room, but is actually named "The War Room." Upon entrance, you are greeted with glass writing boards like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Branded cocaine dispensers sit in the middle of the table and a huge radar screen that tracks every NATO airplane in a thousand mile radius is projected onto the wall. Don't get it fucking twisted, creating #content is a fucking battle—an actual international conflict with lives on the line.
Lots of people with different accents speak and you nod in agreement because that's what accents are for: to convince people to sign off on ideas that ultimately have little or nothing to do with their brand. Accents are the reason traveling monks are on an airplane selling whiskey.
And then the client buys the idea. It gets produced and people like you share it and make memes out of it before it is quickly forgotten. Until, of course, the next "film" comes out and shows up on your timeline. And so it goes. Death. Taxes. Fire Branded Content™.
Nickolaus Sugai is a Content Creator Clone living in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter here.
