Now is the winter of our dis-content: A glossary for the times we live in

Do you confuse your branded storytelling with your sponsored content? Are you disruptive or merely a dial-mover? How old is too old to be millennial? If these questions keep you up at night then you clearly aren’t on the right sedative. For the rest us, I’ve been mulling over some of the phrases that have been buzzing around our jargon-infested ecosystem. Feel free to curate your own semantic experiences – we are immersed in this shit, whether we like it or not.

Content: n. Stuff. To paraphrase a corporate cliché the contents of content is content. While it’s great if your audience actually gives a damn, what matters most is the non-stop churn. “Cut-through” content “drives everything” yet its destination remains unknown. Like a car speeding towards a precipice great content can take you over the edge. Remember, there’s no going back.

Experience required
People want brand experiences because they stopped having them by themselves. Experience needs to be “immersive” because no one gets out anymore. Storytelling needs to be experiential because we don’t have time for books. To be millennial is to be in pursuit of a constant rush of experiences, platformed for the world of augmented reality.

Words that you can’t escape
• Disruptive: like what came before but with a cooler screen
• Influencers: you follow them but you don’t know why
• Integrated: way of marking up existing platform without changing anything
• Curated: give us all your data in exchange for a week’s free trial
• Creativity: anything but
• Authenticity: anything written in serif font