Everyone in media is obsessed with “engagement.” Here’s the truth: AI is going to kill it, and we’ll all be better off.
This morning I saw a link to a video titled, “These are the 7 musicians Linda Rondstadt hated.”
I was curious, but only one minute curious. Certainly not sixteen minutes curious.
So I did a workaround. I pointed the “YouTube Transcript Generator” at the video, got the text, uploaded the text to ChatGPT, and asked Hal to tell me who the seven musicians were. Done.
My total investment was about 35 seconds. (In case you care, the seven musicians are Don Henley, Jim Morrison, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Elvis Costello, and Paul Simon. ChatGPT gave me the list plus a quick reason why Linda didn’t like each of these guys.)
That is precisely what’s going to happen to “engagement.”
Two types of content
Let’s divide content consumption into two categories.
The first is immersive. This is the type of content where you do want to be engaged. You want to leave the world for an hour and experience the life of a New York City cop, or find out what Frodo is up to, or enjoy a Brandenburg concerto. You don’t want a quick summary. You want the experience.
The second type of content is transactional. You have a question and you want the answer. Now, dammit.
The end of clickbait
Clickbait is the disreputable (but profitable) practice of teasing the answer, but dragging the poor customer through page after page, slide after slide, minute after minute of “content” — stuffed with ads. This kind of content forces “engagement” on a person who desperately does not want to be engaged.
AI is going to destroy all that, not because everybody will do what I did with the Linda Rondstadt video, but because new tools will do it for you, at the click of a button. You might have a plugin on your web browser that says “summarize this video for me.” (Hey, tech guys. Build that already.)
It’s the same process that happened to search engines. They used to give you a list of pages that might or might not answer your question, and then you had to go check them out for yourself. Now they give you an answer plus a bunch of links if you want to dig in further.
That process will continue. Consumers will be able to get the answer without wading through all the superfluous junk. And thus, AI will be the death of phony, forced engagement.
How will that affect your content strategy? You’d better start thinking now, and if you need help, give me a call.
