Greetings from Brooklyn, where punk is dead:
Happy April Foolz Day, where Spotify tried to prank us by filling our Discover Weekly with Enya songs but the jokes on them because we are not ashamed to admit that here at LHCHQ we LOVE Enya.
In other exciting news - we won an Oscar for best foreign film! Which is NOT an April Fool’s joke. Although by “we”, we mean the very talented and spectacular Darya Zhuk, who happens to be married to our talented and spectacular VP of Content Guy Cimbalo. And by “Oscar” we mean “Russian Oscar” but it’s basically the same thing with a much cooler statuette. We don’t know exactly what Darya said because her acceptance speech is in Russian, but we’re told that she made sure to credit Guy, which has all of us breathing a sigh of relief.
On to the (non Oscar-winning) #content:
Everyone's a content creator
When Charles the Dog is isn’t in the office, LHC hires a guy who comes to his house to take him out for a walk in the afternoon. This has been going on for years, as he (Charlie) has not bothered to learn how to use a human toilet (yet). Recently, we hired a new dog walker, Joel, who not only takes him to the park to play with his homies, but also provides us with a thoughtfully curated series of photos and texts detailing the experience. He does this every day, for all of the members of the dog walking posse (shouts to Louie, Ziggy, and Jamal).
Joel’s job has basically been transformed. It’s not enough that he walks the dogs and picks up their poop -- he’s also expected to be a multimedia content creator. This is not a phenomenon that’s limited to dog walkers. Each week, our nephew’s parents get a detailed summary of what he’s been up to that week from his preschool teacher, not to mention a never-ending series of photos and texts from his nanny detailing his exploits and his outfits when he’s not in school.
This extends out to lots more service industry gigs -- think about chefs who are on the hook for good photos on the Yelp page, or bartenders who need to write absurd descriptions of the cocktails they come up with. This isn’t influencer culture at play -- it’s really the idea that digital content creation is a necessary professional skill set now, like knowing how to use a computer or how to tie a tie.
There are a few different trends at play: the rise of helicopter parenting, the ubiquity of social media, and the rise of the gig economy to name a few. And it’s certainly made life more pleasant for those of us lucky enough to be on the receiving end of all this great content. But sometimes we wonder if we're taking this a little too far. Wouldn’t it be better if teachers spent less time making content for thirsty parents, and more time, like, teaching?
Things are happening
April Fools day media pranks almost always suck. But we have to admit this LA Times send-up of NYC foodie culture is pretty spot on.
Our friends at Contently pulled off a very epic content marketing summit last week, and even though they didn’t invite us to give our keynote presentation What Marketers Can Learn from Listening to Enya, we still think you should read their recap of what went down.
Publishers report that the margins on branded content are getting tighter. While we’d love to report that this is because content creators are getting paid more, surprise: it is not.
From Vox, some very thoughtful predictions on what streaming services will look like in the future. Tl;dr – they’ll look very familiar to cable subscribers.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg identifies four areas where he thinks the internet needs new rules.
A man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them fake invoices bills, which is illegal but also just about as good a business model as you can possibly imagine.
Killed by Google, a virtual graveyard of all the products Google’s sunset (sunsetted? sunsat?) over the years.
What We're Listening To
We’re sailing away with Enya. Are you?