Cover shot: Michael Corcoran, from Slice Social Consultancy, laying out the core messaging. Photo: Osker Carmichael.
The pressure to keep feeding social platforms has created a lot of activity and not always much memory. For most brands, the answer is simple; you need better creative solutions.
That was the running theme at Marwick’s recent Out Office Conference, held in Newquay – a day-long event that brought together brand leaders, marketing managers, social gurus and more for a one-day melding of minds around all things marketing and growth. The event was organised by the team at DYSUJO, a house of brands that helps others grow along with them. Here’s a few points around the subject of content.
The Volume Trap
When performance dips, the default response is usually to turn up the output. Post more often. Add another format. Chase the trend. Open a new channel. It looks busy and it feels proactive, but it can also become a very expensive way of saying nothing in particular. At Out of Office, the person behind RyanAir’s social media wizardry, Michael Corcoran, challenged the assumption that visibility is mainly a volume problem. “Platforms benefit from a constant stream of material,” he said. “Brands benefit only when the work creates recognition, preference or action.”
In Real Life Impressions Are Best
Reach, views and engagement are easy to report because they appear instantly on a dashboard. They are much less good at telling us whether anyone remembers the business behind the post. A trend can attract attention while giving most of the cultural value to the platform. A helpful explainer can educate the whole category without giving people a reason to choose the brand that published it. A viral moment can vanish by lunchtime. A more useful question is simple; what memory are we trying to build?
Content Pillars Are Not Ideas
Education, inspiration, people and products may be useful filing labels, but they are not a creative strategy. They tell a team what bucket to fill, not why anyone should care. A stronger approach is to build a small ecosystem of repeatable ideas. One good format, point of view or recurring problem can travel across channels far more effectively than a calendar full of disconnected posts. “An idea system over content pillars every day, especially when resource and budget is lean,” said Michael.
The Feed Is One Behaviour
People now use social platforms to search. They are looking for hotels, restaurants, clothes, tutorials, products and honest opinions. That is a different mindset from passive scrolling and it creates a different content opportunity. “They’re actually searching in these feeds for a hotel, a restaurant, clothes, inspiration or products,” said Michael. Search-led content can be more practical, specific and durable. It just needs to answer the question properly.
Creators Improve Ideas
Creators are often brought in when the campaign is already finished and the only job left is distribution. That wastes a lot of what makes a good creator useful; platform instinct, audience knowledge, tone and production experience. Earlier involvement usually creates stronger work because the creator can shape the idea rather than simply fit themselves into it.
AI Can Remove Friction
AI can help with research, versions, summaries and repetitive production. That is useful. It can also make average content incredibly easy to produce, which means the internet is about to become even fuller of things that are technically fine and completely forgettable. And this is the danger, when ease outweighs creative input, or creatives not leading the drive. The opportunity is to use technology to create more space for judgement and originality, not to flood every channel with faster sameness.
What Better Content Looks Like
A repetitive theme throughout Out Of Office is that better content is not necessarily bigger, glossier or more frequent. It is clearer about who it is for, what it wants to say and why the brand has the right to say it. It has a recognisable shape. It can be found after the day it was posted. It answers real questions. And it leaves some trace of the business in the audience’s mind.
The Marwick Perspective: Useful Beats Generic
AI platforms need clear, specific and verifiable information. Generic claims and repetitive social posts give them very little to work with. Useful answers, case studies, evidence and consistent expertise are much stronger signals.
Marwick’s AI Visibility Tracker can help show whether a brand’s existing content is helping it appear in relevant answers, or whether the business is producing plenty without becoming any easier to find or understand.
