Dichotomy of Chasing Attention in 2023

Needing to produce content is somewhat an illusion. How much reach do you actually need to do business? Are you trying to take over the world or are you trying to feed your family? What’s your appetite actually like? I don’t understand the motivation behind posting content for fame. I understand expression through art. In a fair world, it’s the art that gets famous and you’d become famous as a by-product or better yet, not.

It’s always been a way for others, to feel something beyond their little box, not leaving people feeling like they don’t know enough or give the illusion that they’re learning something productive. It’d be interesting to gather usage data and metrics on how a platform is predominantly being used and identify possible correlations to patterns of behavior. The basic marketing funnel framework, to me, runs parallel to the 3 act structure. In a funnel you have awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and conversion. This is a very fluid model and has gone through extensive evolution. But, It’s not far off a story arch. The set-up, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action & resolution. These are essentially the same thing, one is first person the other is third person. We’d generally never watch a movie in first person and, we don’t watch someone complete a marketing funnel.

Why am I bringing this up? The way I feel about producing content is the way I feel about movies or funnels, either I’m watching characters, in their world, take action and I get to be a part of their story or I’m taking action, there is a point to this. The issue is, right now, people are producing content with no point. It sucks. “Little bro’ing” people, with their shallow how-to videos. “Here’s what’s new in AI” dude. Get out of the vanity of what you’re doing, anything can be turned into content and it’s mediocre content. And it shows.

I’d rather watch a 20min video of a guy trying to buy a couch with a proper narrative arch than a 20 min, doom scroll of people pandering about their lives. “Look what happened to me at my gym today”. I’m done, absolutely done.

We need to get better at producing content that merges the soul of film and the tactics of marketing funnels in a way that leads to a climax with a conversion that ultimately goes beyond view count and has meaningful resolutions.