Marketing Monday Written by Jon for June 29th

"The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb."

Those words are from Marshall McLuhan, spoken during a 1969 interview that he gave to Playboy magazine. It is just now dawning on me that the fact that McLuhan said this in Playboy magazine is more than a little ironic, but leaving that aside I'd say his point is both hyperbolic and directionally true.

We severely underestimate the impact that media formats have on our epistemology.

Don't worry though, I'm not here to talk about epistemology, which is a good thing because I'm not even sure what that word means. Nope, I'm here to talk about short-form video – Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, et al. – and, more specifically, I want to talk about one kind of short-form video content that seems to be becoming more and more popular as our society draws to a close.

I call it Algorithm Bait™.

Here's my definition.

I know that's confusing. Here's what it looks like in practice:

All of those screenshots are really small and you probably can't read any of the captions, so I'll type out what a few of them say:

"now you're filming yourself drinking a cup of coffee"

"hypothetically if you watched this twice, you'd be the reason my little song potentially blew up"

"it's crazy that people will sit through a 10 minute influencer video but won't stick around for 32 seconds to help me convince my parents that this music thing might actually work out"

And here's the link to that last one if you wanna see what the format looks like when it's actually playing on Instagram.

You get the idea, hopefully.

In all of these posts, the algorithm and the hook are basically the same thing. The content has collapsed into the format. Marshall McLuhan was a prophet: The medium has become, quite literally, the message.

I don't like it. (You probably guessed that.) But also, if you're making this sort of content:

I get it.

I'm not trying to shame you or judge you. I have personally made (and truthfully, still often make) this sort of content myself. Because it works, at least kind of.

Algorithm Bait™ can drive likes and views and numbers that you otherwise would not get. This is why people keep chucking it back out into the ocean of content, hoping for bites. In a sea of content where we're all shouting to be heard above the din of everyone else shouting to be heard, each of us will take any little nibble of engagement we can get.

But also, of course:

Algorithm Bait™ sucks. Nobody really likes to make it. Nobody really likes to watch it. At its best it feels like a necessary evil, a means to an end, a crappy unpaid internship with a mean boss you can grit your teeth and bear for a summer so maybe later you can get a job you almost like. In itself, Algorithm Bait™ is not useful or fun or creative, and even the people who are doing it successfully would mostly rather be doing something else. (I put myself in this group, minus the "doing it successfully" part.)

Oh, and on top of that – it doesn't really work.

Because it optimizes for the shell of the content, not the content itself. You could put any song in the world under a caption like "hypothetically if you watched this twice, you'd be the reason my little song potentially blew up" – heavy metal, lo-fi jazz, two minutes of silence, take your pick, doesn't matter. The music isn't the point, and in fact it's superfluous.

Who wants their music to be superfluous? Who wants an audience from that?

Here's my advice, and feel free to take it with a grain of salt since it's coming from a hypocrite:

Do something else.

Do your thing. Say your thing. Make your art. Make it as good as you can, as beautiful as you can, and, yes, as well-fitted to social media platforms as you can – but make it yours. Don't regurgitate the husk of the algorithm.

For instance:

Here is Ethan French doing his thing, making a song with the sort of prodigious talent that always leaves me awestruck and insecure.

Here is Dorothea Taylor doing her thing, absolutely jamming on the drums on a dock while looking like your favorite grandma, the one who'd let you get ice cream after mini golf, no questions asked.

Here is Ian McConnell doing his thing, being wildly funny and catchy while sounding like what Kermit the Frog would sound like if he were a low-key super talented singer.

Here is Tom (yes, that Tom), doing his thing, writing lyrics that'll cut your heart into little pieces of paper mache.

Here's Toshiki Soejima doing his thing, burning incense and nurturing a succulent guitar tone that I'm pretty sure was the entire inspiration for the lyrics to "Bubbly" by Colbie Caillat.

Here is Lumi doing their thing, singing harmonies that make people's souls levitate out of their bodies into the Spirit World from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

You could not swap out any of these pieces of content with another piece of content and keep the same shell. The shell in these posts is just a container for the content, and the content – the thing – is the whole point.

Wouldn't you rather build an audience around your thing than around the algorithm?

I expect the answer is yes.

But I also expect that maybe you're worried you don't have a thing, or that you feel you kind of have a thing but it's the same as everyone else's thing, only worse. Same. The longer I scroll on Instagram, the more crushed I am by the weight of humanity's empty mindlessness and our terrifying genius.

Cut that out and do what you can.

You can do something, and even if your thing isn't the best thing in the world (whatever that means), nobody else can do it your way. There is no one alive who is you-er than you, said Doctor Suess, and like always he was right. Be yourself is still great advice, even though it's laughably trite and laughably hard to live out, especially on the internet.

Laugh about your thing. Then go do it anyway.

– Jon

Jon Anderson Founder @ Two Story Media Surprisingly Good @ Being a Hater

🫆 100% Human Guarantee I wrote this, not AI. Today's random photo: A stream. Tbh I haven't taken any pictures since I've been back from Colorado. I should probably get on that for next week.

P.S. – I didn't write anything super useful in last week's newsletter; I just sent an announcement (that is now outdated) and a poem. But if for some reason you'd still like to read it, you can here.