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This newsletter is stationed at the crossroads of content, technology and marketing. By now, seven months into its launch, it must have become abundantly clear to subscribers that:

(a) content is not what it used to be even 10 years ago

(b) technology has come to play a major role in the creation, distribution and measurement of content.

Content has come to mean many things in the world we live in. This generic word covers many forms and formats. From text to visuals, from marketing to advertising to data. Everything’s about content now.

Today, the word (digital) technology is associated with many business activities such as advertising, marketing and sales. So there’s MarTech, AdTech, and even SalesTech.

The obvious definition of these terms….. when the activities of marketing, sales or advertising get coupled with technology in their planning and execution.

So why not content? There’s no phrase called ‘ConTech’ yet, which is surprising. So this newsletter, ‘All About Content’ and its author take the lead in coining it. Over the coming months, subscribers will find it being used often, here and across various channels like social media.

Which may damn me to content hell by the purists. But let’s face it, one can no longer turn a blind eye to what’s happening around us; content and technology are soulmates today.

There could be a doubt on which is driving which. Is tech driving content, or is it the other way around? For everybody’s sanity, let’s just say tech is used for the creation, distribution and measurement of content, just like in marketing and advertising, and leave it at that.

For comprehension’s sake, the use of digital tech in content can be neatly compartmentalized into two: for the actual creation, and then, its marketing. The first incursion of tech in content creation was when the desktop permeated our lives, pushing the humble typewriter out the window (pun unintended). Once users took a bite of the apple (pun unintended), their hunger grew even more.

We discovered the worlds of alt+ctrl+shift and ‘delete’, and both, the typewriter and the correction fluid pen became obsolete technology.

Since then, the content tech stack has grown. The word processor replaced the one running on mechanical tech. Today, the PC is at the very bottom. You have the Internet, the World Wide Web, digital language correctors, video cameras and video editing tools, image editing tools, smartphones, emails and chat, automated SEO software, websites and blogging platforms, content sharing tools, GIF creation tools, templates, text spinners.…the list is long. Most have slipped in through the backdoor and become permanent members of the ConTech family.

Now visualize this - if the tech is taken out of content suddenly, where would this world be? It literally would bring all creativity and business activities to a halt. The reality of the world we live in today is that content, as almost all other activities of our lives, is now fused irrevocably and inexorably with tech. They may not be conjoined twins but are definitely “brothers from different mothers”. To twist a quote by Shakespeare, “We (did not) came into the world like brother and brother; And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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