Content with an Agenda

I remember reading an article 10 or so years ago that predicted there would be no such thing as mass commercial messaging by 2050. By then, the author surmised, our marketing and sales engines would be running completely on word-of-mouth. Your friends would be the only source of news about new products and trends. I don't think we are so far off considering the current state of the "influencer community". People make a living being paid to be professionally likable and share pre-fabricated opinions. What I think is more interesting, is another form of advertising which is much stronger and claims longer-lasting influence than the transient influencer community: content with an agenda.

I recently watched "Follow This", a Netflix documentary about the daily life of journalists at BuzzFeed. It was excellently produced and covered a series of highly relevant topics. It also had a soundly leftist bias. Fine, all content carries bias and we ought to always be consuming content with this in mind. What struck me was the agenda of the documentary. BuzzFeed, the inventor of the listicle, was trying to establish itself as a credible news source.

This type of content goes way beyond product placement. Content with an agenda is a collaboration between the message architect and the content creator with an explicit purpose in mind.

Now, I am a marketer so I don't necessarily think this method of content production is a negative thing, it is just something we need to be aware of. Communication is only 10% message, the rest is packaging. Entertaining content with a built-in agenda is packaging at its best. In the end, content with an agenda is just communication at its best. We all learn from it.