{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Content Marketing Trends (2022) - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

In this episode, John and Chris discuss a roundup of the most commonly identified content marketing trends. Which trends are real, actual trends and which trends are simply recycled advice? What are the trends marketers are not paying attention to? Tune in to find out!

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{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Content Marketing Trends (2022)

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Christopher Penn 0:17

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie is currently down with COVID.

She’s getting better though, which is, which is good.

So we’re John’s here to sub in.

And we’re talking about content marketing trends.

So John, when you look out at the landscape of content marketing, and all the stuff that people are doing, what do you see as the content marketing trends that are that are worth paying attention to? What what do you think are the content marketing trends right now of 2022? And as we start into the back half of the year, start thinking about 2023.

John Wall 0:49

Yeah, I mean, you can’t ignore Tiktok.

I mean, that is just the 800 pound gorilla or whatever tired metaphor you want to use for big large thing that is taking up space.

And I, you know, it’s tough, I have a lot of issues with it, and a lot of problems, but you just can’t get away from the fact that there are people that will just sit down and veg for like, three hours just streaming through these videos.

And it’s very, they’ve done a perfect job in making it completely frictionless.

So obviously, Tiktok, at the top of the pile video, in general, completely gaining momentum on a ton of fronts.

Yeah, there’s a ton of stuff going even over the top video, too.

I mean, the fact that we, you know, basically, TV is all on demand streaming services.

So that’s giant.

And yeah, I guess those would be the big three.

And then of course, the explosion in automated content to is also crazy.

It’s complete pandemonium, basically.

Christopher Penn 1:46

It’s interesting, because I was looking at these roundup articles that were written at the beginning of calendar year, everyone’s saying, here are the content marketing trends to pay attention to in 2022, I went through about 40 of these.

And what I found sort of interesting was that there’s not a lot that’s substantially different from year to year, because we’ve looked at these lists from you know, 2019 2022, and so on, and so forth.

But other than the pandemic, being kind of a big deal.

There hasn’t been a ton.

So there, I put them into three buckets, themes, formats, and tactics are sort of the things that we’re looking at some of the themes, these are the major themes that people will call out in their articles.

And this is like Forbes and Hubspot and marketing process.

So a lot of you know, they’re they’re reputable marketing publications.

They’re not like you know, some guys blog.

apathetic comment being more human, what you heard, like last 20 years, add value your contents to add value, build community, improve your customer experience, create great experiences, which is more of a point of interactive, and be inclusive.

And all of those themes, the only one that was relatively new this year, that hadn’t seen in much in previous years, was the inclusivity.

One on, on making sure that our content is accessible, inclusive, folk diversity, focus, etc.

From your point of view, in terms of themes, do these resonate as trends? Or are they so can that essentially they’re the same thing year after year?

John Wall 3:18

There? Well, there’s definitely a Yeah, obviously, it’s kind of just the, the be more human.

I’m surprised transparencies, not at least transparencies fallen off that list, which is good.

But I think the ones that rang to me improve CX, like, I think that is a forgotten one that does need to always be kept in mind that people get too wrapped up in branding and their own internal stuff.

And it’s like, you know, if you’re going through and examining every step of the customer journey that only helps you.

And I do like the inclusive, like, it’s great to see that, you know, given in light of like, all of the, you know, foolishness we’ve seen here in the States and all the craziness going on.

And I yeah, I don’t know, it’s a, it’s a very bizarre thing, but we, you know, we see so many tech companies, you know, stepping up and actually taking a stand on a lot of these big issues.

And, you know, we can argue on that stuff forever.

But it was funny.

Last week, I had been talking with Seth Godin about his carbon Almanac, he’s done this whole project on global warming.

And he was basically saying that we get wrapped up so many times in kind of like fighting with the people in the back row, you know, the bottom 10% that are just never gonna believe in inclusivity and, and fighting with those people, but really, you know, through all these channels, you can kind of see that, you know, the majority does want to go in this direction, and people do want to be included, included, and then it’s, it is there’s a huge tie into product, you know, because if your product is for a certain group of people, you know, helping them be seen and talking to them and their terms and understanding how their lives work.

Like that’s huge that I think there’s huge opportunity there that we you know, we’ve just scratched the surface.

Christopher Penn 4:55

Yeah, totally.

Okay, let’s take a look at some of the format’s now going into The Format section of, of what people think, are trends.

So in we have visual content video in general, which has been the case since 2005, when Google bought YouTube infographics making a resurgence, I guess, after about a decade of, of not being the favorite child, and then short form video, of course Tiktok and its ilk and audio content podcasting, people are still saying it’s the new thing even though it’s been around since 2004.

Live social audio, so clubhouse Twitter spaces, Twitter spaces, I have seen more people toying with, I’m still not convinced there’s a there there yet.

But who knows? Virtual Reality AR.

And this also includes you know, the metaverse as it were.

But AI generated text machines cranking out lots of mediocre content, events virtual live at the end, this new category that the the Vegas renamed hybrid events now was fusion events.

put a new spin on an on a now many years product.

Web three was sort of the big new thing in these lists, you know, NF T’s and their ilk, whether or not you liked them, they are at least newer.

And then interactives, of course, stuff.

So from a formats perspective, anything here that besides NF T’s and Tiktok that that you’ve seen that’s missing from this list of content formats?

John Wall 6:27

Let’s see missing? Yeah, at first, I was thinking kind of gamification stuff, but that would be really more tactics, you know, that’s kind of layering on top of that stuff.

So that one doesn’t really count there.

You know, it’s interested, like not seeing webinars or training, you know, you’d think that that would those two would be on there? Yeah, obviously, no surprise with the short term video thing.

Nf T’s are a weird bucket.

You know, and this is like news to nobody, right? We’ve been talking about the Emperor having no clothes in that segment forever.

I and I guess to give it a little bit of credit, like interesting things can be done if the NF T’s are tied to real world stuff, like we’ve talked about these events where they say, Okay, you buy the thing, and now you get entry to the next five conferences, or you get like you do get something not just the buyer OnStar or buy, you know, some

Christopher Penn 7:25

digital Pokeyman basically,

John Wall 7:27

yeah, right.

It’s It’s again, Beanie Babies.

I’m always joking, right? These lefties are gonna pay for my kids college.

So yeah, a lot of weirdness there.

But otherwise, no, nothing.

I guess video games would be one that I don’t see on there that I would put way up there.

I see.

That might be a tactic to I that’s where you want to draw the line.

But I think that channel of video games is just totally insane.

Christopher Penn 7:50

Yeah, interactive.

Okay.

And then, of course, our bucket of tactics.

We have influencer marketing, user generated content, a B testing of content content analytics, news jacking, which is now what 15 years old.

I think personalization of content repurposing content, data driven storytelling and voice search.

I would say of these, the one it’s interesting personalization.

People talk a lot about that.

But they’re talking about persona based personalization.

So doing better market research and having your content more tailored, as opposed to actual personalization, where you visit a site and the content is tailored just to you.

Not very many companies seem to pull that off.

So from from the tactics perspective, what do you see is the trends that are not on here that should be on here

John Wall 8:42

you know, even I hate to say, but it’s kind of having advertise to drive advertising, driving to your content is a major tactic that you’ve got to have in the mix, you need to buy access to it.

But otherwise, that’s, that’s pretty much it.

I’m trying on that.

You know, if I’d be surprised, I’m surprised there’s not like a thought leadership or some kind you do have influencer marketing.

But really the most tried and true content stuff is just putting out relevant content in your vertical or niche, you know, making the best content in the space that’s kind of the classic and most tried and true tactic because really everything else you know, these are great ways to kind of boost stuff as it goes but without the actual meat in the pipeline.

You’re kind of stuck with you know, if you’re just doing the same top five things you need to know about X’s everybody else you’re not gonna get anywhere.

Christopher Penn 9:38

Yeah, I mean, these things like just having good content.

I mean, I would not fuck it as a trend because if that should be par for the course, if you’re not making decent content, then nothing else really matters.

I had no water.

So there were a few things that I thought were missing here that are worth discussing and you hit you alluded to one of them The front of the Show Values aligned content so cause base content brands taking a stand, etc.

I think that’s that’s both a tactic as well as sort of an overall theme that to your point as, as the environment changes and as our audience changes, when we look at Generation Y and Generation Z they are in general it’s a generalization but they’re in general a lot more values focused.

And they do pay attention to virtual signaling by brands with some level of citizens which is do but they do look at brands that are actually doing what they say so I think that’s one of those things that didn’t make the list that probably should have a second one are the private social media communities I think that’s a miss we’re talking slack discord, etc.

Velvet Rope stuff.

Yeah, velvet rope stuff where somebody’s coming communities are gigantic, like there’s a couple of SEO communities on Discord like a couple 100,000 people in it Now granted, keeping up with general chats like and watching the matrix.

Scrolling by but there’s there’s some fantastic communities, professional communities on these services.

Of course, you know, we’d be remiss if we did not mention the Trust Insights analytics remarketing community, which found 2500 folks now.

Joe polities, the tilt, his content, next generation content community, I think it’s around 500, folks, now, it might be higher than that.

But those communities are definitely growing.

And the third one I was thinking about earlier was looking at the way Netflix has evolved in the last 20 years from your mail you DVDs to stream your the hit movies he wants to creating from whole cloth, you know, new franchises that that people really want, you know, Stranger Things as an example.

And and inheriting and repurposing existing franchises when they bought Lucifer or they bought Cobra Kai, and stuff, so acquiring and then extending franchises.

If you’ve got the budget, or you’ve got the ability to partner up, I think there’s something to be said, for building content franchises that, again, have that sort of uniqueness, you’re not going to get anywhere else, you’re not going to get that specific kind of content from from someone else.

So what are the things that in your marketing, you could turn into an actual franchise, an example from us from our newsletter, we have a column in there right now called data, diaries, which, and the so what live stream these essentially are products, they’re not products, people pay money for it, but they aren’t products and they, we chose to we could invest more in them and turn them into either products or turn them into like headliner, pieces of content headliner is such a franchises where people would tune in just for that thing, and it would stand alone.

John Wall 13:03

Yeah, I can see how that’s, you know, anything you can do on that front, if you can build something where people, you know, spend enough time with a brand that they then end up wanting, you know, asking you to produce more.

That’s that’s a, that’s a homerun that doesn’t get any bigger than that.

Christopher Penn 13:18

Exactly.

I think we think about for example, marketing over coffee, about half the shows or interviews right.

And and that actually turned a good chunk of that into a book, right, B2B marketing sessions was essentially was was that extracted from a lot of the interviews?

John Wall 13:33

You know, that was just a crazy project? Well, that was so confessions was more tactics.

We did the marketing of McAfee playbook, where we had grabbed all the episodes.

And yeah, it’s amazing how so much of the tactical day to day stuff, just you go back about a year and a half, and it’s just useless.

And so a lot of the the interviews give you more evergreen stuff that you can repurpose, but yeah, it’s just that’s just a good example of transmedia, you know, going through having somebody sift through the past year of audio stuff and take the text bytes of that you can get, it’s, it’s tough, it’s a ton of work trolling through all that content to get to the stuff that’s still relevant.

You know, it’s a lot of editorial lift.

And, you know, it pretty much broke even as far as like the the effort it took to make it versus the number of copies sold.

So yeah, that’s a tough one.

I don’t I think that is one of those things where if we diverted the resources to it, and we produce three or four volumes, like it may finally hit that turning point where it becomes an industry trend or book.

But yeah, I don’t know we’ve just kind of done more time into additional audio or other video, you know, we didn’t go down that route just because that project took like two years.

I mean, it was insane.

It’s just take so much time to to sift through and get it into a new format.

Christopher Penn 14:53

The other thing to that you could look at, in terms of trying to hunt down Oh, where maybe the kinds of things that that could become franchises, is looking at your existing content that that you have, and then looking at very granularly, looking at for drop offs, and figuring out where the points that people think are important, and then pulling those out.

So here, for example, this isn’t YouTube, this is one of our more popular videos, from Trust Insights on setting up matomo for WordPress, and YouTube will tell you, here’s your retention rates, right.

So at this point here, about 90 seconds, 30 seconds into the video, that’s what your highest retention rate is, then obviously, there’s a second bump here around minute three.

So if you have the ability on your most popular content to isolate what those moments are, you know, to your point, it’s not just atomization, though, atomization takes apart all the content distributes different pieces, you can take the most popular pieces figure out if they’re strong enough to stand alone, particularly if there’s you repeated segments of some kind, and then bucket that together and say, Okay, well, this is going to be the new thing.

So looking for ideas within your content that you create, because you’re creating a lot of content.

It’s like a venture capital fund, right? 99% of the content you create, it’s probably not going to be a hit.

But every now and again, you’re gonna get that nailed that one or two big lightning strikes, and then figuring out okay, how can we take that lightning strike and and build it into a new franchise? So from that Netflix perspective, I mean, that’s essentially what Netflix is doing.

They’re creating all these series, they’re creating all these original shows.

And yeah, some of them are stinkers.

Don’t work pretty well on some of them like Stranger Things become so much pop culture that that literally there’s a Domino’s created a an app just for season four, it’ll allow you to order pizza with your mind.

Yeah, well,

John Wall 16:53

I’ve seen in the freezer aisle, there’s Stranger Things, chicken nuggets and stuff like that.

I mean, yeah, that’s just everywhere all the time.

And it’s amazing.

When you think about Netflix, how much data they have, people don’t realize, you know, they think oh, well, you can see who’s viewing it.

But no, they can get every user down to the Okay, how many minutes did you go? And knowing that, okay, this is a show where everybody churns through every episode, and does it in a month or whatever.

That’s just, there’s so much more there.

It’s weird.

Even on the music front, too.

I’ve started to see some artists do that releasing music and not putting it in any form for sale.

Like you must stream it from something as the only way to hear it.

Because they always have the data as far as is it being taken? And are people making it through when which tracks are the most popular and all that

Christopher Penn 17:37

stuff? Yep.

It’s interesting.

You mentioned it, because when you look at a lot of the the analytics that people use for content, it’s usually pretty rudimentary, like, Okay, what was their most popular posts and things like that I was reading one of the in one of the content roundups, talking is this piece of content, walking through what makes top ranked content.

And they pulled out all these different stats, like top brand content has an average of x number of words and things.

But at no point, did they do any kind of regression analysis to say like, actually, even though you know, length is longer than these pieces length has no actual correlation to the effectiveness of the piece.

And that’s something that consistently goes missing and content analytics is to say, yeah, here are the factors that actually map to the outcome you care about everything else is just kind of noise.

And I’m not sure why.

Other than just lack of either lack of resources or lack of talent, no one’s doing that.

John Wall 18:42

Yeah.

Well, I mean, part of it is because the content itself is a factor, right? I mean, it’s like, you know, if you have your best video, then you’re just saying, well, that’s the best content.

That’s why it’s there.

But you’d have to have a bigger library to do that, those additional analytics, but yeah, I could see if you have, if you already have a brand, then that would be giant, you know, you’d be able to really see what the heck is affecting, which, you know, which parts of it are doing better, and what formats are more wanted? Yeah, have you heard of anybody doing a B testing on that kind of front? I’ve never heard anybody trying anything along those lines, as far as, you know, releasing multiple versions of something to see how they run.

Christopher Penn 19:18

Other than, you know, ad based stuff, it’s really hard to do that in general, because, you know, and obviously, you know, email split testing, it’s hard to do content split testing, because you don’t have control necessarily over who does what, right.

If you if you put a piece of content up, you’re always going to have some noise from sources that are not part of the campaign.

And you can account for that there are statistical methods for accounting for that, but nobody uses them.

Yeah, it’s just not there yet.

Yeah, or you can do like either uplift modeling or propensity score modeling, which is essentially retroactive AV testing.

To see but even then, it’s really difficult to do that because again, there’s there’s there can be A lot of confounding factors that are difficult to take advantage of it.

That’s one of those cases where there are too many inputs sometimes to build a model that’s statistically relevant.

John Wall 20:12

Yeah, but so when you get a brand that wants to dig into this stuff, like, where do you start? What’s the normal course? You know, where you have at least odds of finding something?

Christopher Penn 20:22

I mean, the first place you would start is does any of your content work period? Right? So a real simple example is taking going into their analytics, and building a content attribution model saying, okay, of the content you’re publishing on your site, does any of it lead to conversion? I’m looking at content efficiency model, like, Okay, how many page views of your blog does it take to net a conversion? If it’s like 10,000? Like, okay, you’re pretty clearly your blog is not working, if it takes you that many views, just net one conversion of anytime.

Those are the I would call those with the low hanging fruits.

Same with your basic source media, multi touch attribution, like, Okay, where is your traffic coming from that leads to conversion, if it’s coming from your pay to play, and there’s no organic search in there, there’s no email in there.

There’s no organic social in there.

And it’s like, okay, contents not standing on its own.

Like, it depends on the maturity of the company, if you’re just getting started, nobody knows who you are.

pay to play is the way to go right to build that audience.

But after a couple of years of pay to play to build that audience, some of it should be coming back organically some of it, some of it if your content is good people like actually, that was really good.

I’m gonna subscribe to your newsletter, whatever.

And if that’s just not happening, then you’ve got some indicators, your contents not very good.

John Wall 21:44

Yeah, right.

Well, and then you get stuck on that treadmill of every quarter, you have to dump the money, because you’re, you’re just never getting the the organic stuff.

That’s where you get the that’s how it scales and how the business model eventually works.

Otherwise, you’re just shoveling cash into the furnace?

Christopher Penn 21:58

Yeah, I mean, over time, it should be like intersecting lines like in the beginning page should be high.

And then over time, it should decline as as you become more effective and unpaid, should be started at zero in the beginning, and then go up over time as the value of your content.

And your ability to retain your audience improves, more and more of your audience should become accustomed to, to hearing from you and want to hear from you.

And, you know, those those two lines should should go in in reverse of each other.

Whether it actually happens or not, you know, a lot of it depends, it depends on the quality of the content.

I mean, it’s it is annoying in a lot of ways that build quality content is listed as a trend.

Because it’s a trend implies something that’s mathematically growing or shrinking over time.

And that’s been the same advice for, you know, 100 years, but it’s there because nobody’s doing it.

John Wall 22:54

Yeah, right.

Well, it’s like those cmo marketing budget numbers, we always see, you know, you said if the CMO beliefs were true, budgets would be doubling every year for the past 50 years.

And of course, what actually happens is different.

Yeah, it’s, and it’s tough to because it’s, you know, there’s the quality or content.

But if you have some other company that’s just doing it, more of it and better.

We’ve seen this before with orcs that just get squashed because somebody is more dedicated to quality content, and they take the oxygen out of the room for him.

Christopher Penn 23:24

Yeah, I mean, you know, Hubspot spent, what 10 years and $100 million on on building inbound marketing.

They basically took Seth Godin has permission based marketing and rebranded it and yeah, to your point just just took all the air out of the room for for his idea.

John Wall 23:40

Yeah, yeah.

And all the other marketing trade rags, you know, it’s amazing to see how their organic traffic is just runaway train.

Christopher Penn 23:48

Yep.

So there’s, there’s something to be said for just creating a lot of it.

So, of upcoming trends, and from from where you sit, and for the people that you’ve talked to, what are the trends that have arisen things that have the potential to be trends, that you’ve heard from people that aren’t on the list, that aren’t big enough yet? To be trends, but maybe are things people should start poking into sooner rather than later?

John Wall 24:14

You know, one thing that I just got pitched recently, and I’m digging into a little bit is, you know, Gen Z, opinions on things.

And you had mentioned that already a little bit them being more value based.

The interesting thing was in vehicle sales, them actually wanting to be more in person, you know, so much of the, you know, millennials and up are into the totally virtual, you know, just have the car be dropped off at my house.

Whereas Gen Z’s are talking about going to dealerships, you know, driving three or four different vehicles getting to meet people like that’s a shift for them.

The whole clicks and bricks transition that we saw through COVID seems to be continuing is especially weird with inflation going the way it is people are cost cutting more.

So again, that’s pushing In them, again, more towards online purchasing.

I don’t know the augmented reality.

I’ve seen some real punches against that recently.

And either Apple reportedly was like, yeah, no, it’s just people don’t want to wear these helmets.

They don’t want to be further isolated from the world, like, it’s just not going to happen.

And again, I totally see a lot of the NFT stuff burning to the ground over the next year.

So, so yeah, I don’t know what will come next.

That’s like the billion dollar question.

I’m not really sure what the heck is the next thing? I think what we’re, what we’re watching is going to be really interesting.

will live, how much will live events rebound? And you know, will it be a full rebound? Will it be partial will have this hybrid stuff? Or fusion stuff? Continue to be hot? And how will the in person stuff go? That’s going to be really interesting to watch.

So yeah, I don’t it’s Yeah, sadly, there’s no, you know, Nothing’s easy.

Everything’s going to be on fire and a disaster, but you know, the new stuff will come around.

But yeah, I have no idea where the heck to plant a flag next.

Christopher Penn 26:05

I there’s some macro things I think can inform some of the stuff particularly about your your level of content, marketing agility, I think it has to be much higher and much faster than it used to be.

So some, some obvious macro things.

Climate change, as you talked about earlier on, is going to continue to have increasingly more dire results, increase and cause more instability.

I was reading an article this morning on if you get a certain like an early Heatwave, when you’re when some plants are flowering, like most seed plants, and blueberries and stuff, it destroys the pollen it actually renders the pollen inert, sort of sterilize it.

And so you end up with essentially very early crop failures.

So things like that create more instability.

And the more instability there is, the less you can mark it with any kind of prediction.

So things like predictive analytics become much more difficult.

We’ve seen this year, you know, if you had a big, you know, q1 end of quarter content campaign, guess what you were completely wiped out by the Ukraine, you know, the invasion of Ukraine, which in part is economics, if you had a big marketing budget spend for the end of q2 will surprise you inflation is it taking a bat to your knee.

But one of the things I think content marketers have to be very aware of is building for both resilience and agility.

Something that the onion does really well back in the day, Baratunde a, Thurston did a great talk on how the onion plants is content.

And for every given, you know, major cultural event coming up, they have like 100 different pieces of content, just headlines usually sketched out.

But they, you know, when something happens, you know, the president falls down a flight of stairs, whatever, instantly, boom, they’ve got four pieces of content ready, just on deck ready to ready to go, the writers just tune it up and push it out the door.

And for things like major events, that’s something that we should be thinking about, we may want to be thinking about banding together with non competitive companies to have sort of a content pool, particularly as talent becomes very, very challenging to find good quality talent.

And it may be an alternative to, to just contracting out to agencies, if you can find a non competing companies and sort of pool your best writers together, you may be able to create stuff in aggregate that’s better than individuals, if companies can figure out how to partner up with each other.

For example, we do that with our friends over at v squared, b squared media as an example, and then when we look at the content technologies is coming out AI based content, the writing is improving.

But there’s a lot happening with visual content right now.

You have some new models, for example, opening eyes dolly to model and its entire family of things is generating very interesting content.

This, you know, for example, there’s one example they showed, where you take a picture of you and you tell it, you know, take this picture, but change me from wearing a t shirt to a suit.

And it can do it with you know, reasonably you can still tell it’s manipulated, but it is it is definitely interesting for I see a lot of potential for that, particularly for advertising, where if you want to be able to programmatically create a million ads, I could take a picture of you and change the logo on your shirt and say, you know, take this picture of John Wall, put an AT and T logo put a you know, att logo as a cartoon, put an ATT logo as you know, on fire or something like that.

And the machines could credibly create that.

So there’s, I think some interesting visual stuff coming up in the next few years as well.

But those would be the big trends that the macro thing is instability.

If you can create A content content marketing plan and a content marketing strategy that is resilient to increasing amounts of instability.

You’re gonna need that and either hybrid front, I think one of the things people are not paying attention to is

Christopher Penn 30:20

if you look at the data and how quickly the SARS cov to viruses, mutating the cycles between variants keep getting shorter and shorter and shorter, right, you had the original COVID, then you had alpha, then then you had delta.

And then you had all Omicron.

And you have like 20 children who have a crime.

And each of these gets shorter and shorter.

Every single time this sweeps through a population, though it was a study in science and science journal about how it creates increasingly severe immune impacts, which means more people who have these things going to be on these things, because their ability to be active and stuff is constrained by essentially severe immune impacts.

And so as we think about what hybrid events look like, we obviously have to continue to be vigilant, but also recognizing that there will be massive population health challenges in the next 20 years, that will change how people consume content.

Because if you’re if your immune system has been basically beaten to death by 12, variants of of COVID, you’ve had over 10 years, you may not be able to be as active and so we may have these the population people for whom consumption of digital content may be their primary format, okay? Because they can’t do anything else.

John Wall 31:42

All right, well, that’s an upbeat message.

For everybody here today, it’s only gonna get worse, folks.

This is rigid, we can’t You can’t lie about it, though.

You know, it’s uh, yeah, we definitely have to be able to respond to this stuff and start thinking about it.

Because, sure, the one thing is there will always be novel solutions to this stuff, you know, to find exactly.

Christopher Penn 32:03

I think that’s where virtual reality, virtual reality is overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term.

I think as the technology improves in you know, we’re thinking about like a 20 year timeframe a 20 year horizon, it will be viable as as an alternative when you look for example, at what the Unreal engine is capable in Unreal Engine five in terms of its cinematic quality stuff, yeah, right now it needs a machine to be tied to a machine because the processing compute power required for it is crazy.

But if you can get that compact, and get it shrunk down over time and be more efficient, or some other alternative, having, you know, cinematic virtual reality experiences instead of kind of a weird Tron, like, stuff today may be worth exploring.

John Wall 32:58

Yeah, get out of the uncanny valley, we’re getting close, but it’s still a little bit in the oddball stuff.

Exactly.

Christopher Penn 33:05

So that’s too early for that it’s too early for that.

So that’s that a content marketing trend, you can be taking advantage of anytime soon, unless your Facebook I guess, or somebody else with billions of dollars in r&d that you can just fling around, but everybody else is worth paying attention to.

And it might not be bad.

Again, if you form sort of these, I guess content marketing guilds with other non competing companies, and you have access to a pool of talent, you may want to look at like a shared development resource, somebody who can work and unreal and create those like deeply interactive, interesting experiences that right now are solely the purview of video games, but I was playing city skyline the other day, which is a sort of a SimCity spiritual successor.

And you can zoom down like into the individual streets and watch people walking around and you know, see the the in game ads and stuff like okay, this is this is their, their I mean, even just billboard advertising in a game like that would be interesting to see from a brand awareness perspective.

So there’s a lot of potential in these virtual environments when they mature.

John Wall 34:10

Oh, yeah, no, it’s gonna be amazing some of this stuff out and to see so many franchises build up in that space, too, you know, I mean, there are entire franchises now that are killing it over there that yeah, that’s a big part of entertainment and how we get our stuff but yeah, hopefully it’ll be something better than having the full helmet strapped to your head and crashing into your furniture because you can’t see what’s going on.

Christopher Penn 34:35

Hopefully, So, alright, so if you’ve got comments or questions or content marketing trends you want to discuss pop on over to our free slack group go to trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, where you and over 2500 other marketers are asking answer each other’s questions every single day.

And wherever it is, you watch or listen to the show.

If this is challenged preferred on we probably have it go to trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, we can pick up the show wherever you Like thanks for tuning in I will talk to you next week

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