The Delusionals: 2024's Online Marketing Circus in Close-Up

If you think SEO spam looks bad from the outside, you should see it from the inside...

Capitalism's approach to finding talent is roughly like trying to select a romantic partner by touring the neighbourhood in a blindfold and earplugs, soliciting formally-declared sexual histories and then submitting a marriage proposal to the community member who has previously had the most sex. And then wondering why the relationship doesn't work. It really is that dumb.

What's the hardest job in the world? Brain surgeon? Astronaut? Spinal Tap tribute act? If you've recently worked in the field of online promotion, you'll probably at this point be yelling out a fourth contender...

CONTENT MARKETER!!!

Actually, if you have talent, empathy and a sense of humour, content marketing per se is not difficult at all. What's difficult is fulfilling a content marketing brief that was collectively devised by every delusional moron who ever discovered the phrase.

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The bad news?

The vast majority of content marketing briefs are... Yep, you guessed - devised by every delusional moron who ever discovered the phrase. That's every delusional moron. All of them. Let me explain...

PLANS CONCEIVED BY MORONS

Morons have but one idea in the entire course of their existence, if that. And assuming they do have an idea, it's invariably not very bright. I'm being polite. When I say "not very bright", I mean "thick as pigshit", obviously. But the thing is, you need more than one idea to form a complex plan. So what morons do, is copy the rest of their ideas. And because stupidity appeals to morons, they copy their ideas from people whose stupidity is equal to their own. Hence, plans conceived by morons, are conceived collectively, by every moron. Not just one.

Worse, because every moron adopts the same collectively-conceived plan, the plan spreads like peanut butter at a squirrels' tea party. To use a rather more corporate phrase, it becomes an industry standard. Which is exactly what's happened in the sphere of content marketing. Which, in turn, is why content marketing has become one of the four hardest jobs in the world.

And you cannot, as appointed Content Marketer, persuade the moron who handed you your job description, that the outcome of fulfilling its demented requirements will be considerably worse than doing nothing. Why not? Because their stupidity is accompanied by delusion. That is, their greed will not accommodate the scientific fact that the public do not wish to be droned at by the cyber version of a telesales assault. That the public will, indeed, block such annoyances at the first opportunity.

The Content Marketer, then, is tasked with achieving wild and unprecedented success, using a "strategy" which all evidence confirms will fail 100% of the time. As I said, tough job.

You've doubtless been seeing the painful outcome of modern content marketing from the outside. Now it's time to hop the fence and find out why the visible face of today's Internet has all the creative merit of a donkey's dinner.

PROBLEM 1: DELUSIONAL BRANDS THINK THAT THE BEST PLACE TO FIND CREATIVE TALENT IS A JOB BOARD

I realise I may well be commencing this section to the odd soft echo of:

"...You mean that's NOT where we go to hire a content-marketer?"

And for the benefit of issuing parties, that's right. The minority of brands who actually understand content marketing do not hire their creatives via job boards. They have a much simpler system. They headhunt. Well, I say "headhunt"; they don't even have to hunt. There's talent everywhere. So brands who understand content marketing simply hire their "template". That is, they:

• Spot an entertaining creator on yonder Interwebz who will appeal to their desired consumer-base.
• Message that person a job offer.

And?... And nothing. That's it.

What, the hirers don't embark on a six-week marathon holding four rounds of knockout interviews like some corporate incarnation of the World Cup? They don't hire a temp to sift through 750 job applications and then waste 86 hours of management salary eliminating all but one of the remainder?

Nope. And even if they did, the chances of them finding anyone who fits their ideals as well as their actual template are virtually nil. In hiring their actual template they need no proof. They've seen all they need to see. There's no need for tests. Their template is demonstrably capable, and does not need to prove themselves "manageable", because they're already doing what the employer wants them to do. There's also a clear and visible record of their enthusiasm and commitment. So it's only a matter of making an acceptable offer.

Ah, but what about references, though?...

Where's the need for references? Content-marketing roles are hardly a hotbed of crime opportunities, and if the employee works remotely, they don't even need to go near the office. People do this freelance. It's a zero-reference, zero interview job.

Wouldn't want a quitter though, right? Have to check past employment to ensure the new hire won't quit after two weeks... Here's a better idea: just treat them like a human being. Almost 100% of employees will remain loyal to an employer when they genuinely feel valued. And even if they do quit, in this case the hiring process was so simple and economical that there's really nothing ventured.

So in the content-creation market, hiring "the template" is the obvious resort for anyone who, even just marginally, uses their brain. Unfortunately, the majority of capitalists don't use their brains. Not even marginally. Ever. They hear the phrase "content marketing", and immediately initiate a management meeting, which runs something like this...

"Hmm, 'content marketing', duh... Duh, marketing... Duh, selling... Duh, telesales but on the internet... Duh, LITERALLY CHASING THE PUBLIC ROUND THE INTERNET SHOUTING THE NAMES OF OUR PRODUCTS!... Duh, Google search... Duh, JOB BOARDS!!!... Duh, HIRE 'CONTENT MARKETING' PERSON ON JOB BOARD!... Umm, lots of adverts... Duh, COPY ONE!... Brilliant! We are now in the fast lane..."

Brace yourself. Here comes the ad...

The punchline? That's not eight jobs. That's one job. The company is expecting to hire one person, who meets all of those requirements. At minimum wage. Even though an experienced website developer alone is worth upwards of £60K a year. Oh, and the candidate...

I used the word "delusionals" with considerable justification. Any person seasoned in all of those fields and proven as a successful marketer is the Holy Grail.

They will long since have been headhunted for a six-figure role with a company that serves them seafood platter, with caviar, on a literal silver plate, for free, during their ninety-minute paid lunch break. So, is said person going to cast aside their six-figures, penthouse view and £125 per day dining subsidy, unheadhunt themselves, and pop off to some low-end toilet roll vendor who wants twelve hours of ceaseless graft out of them for less than the cost of their lunch? Or nah?

That's a nah.

The spectacle of SMEs expecting to hire creators with flash track records for minimum wage is comparable to that of incels expecting to find partners on an "extra-marital hookup site".

So what actually happens is that our power-crazed bog roll supplier is roundly avoided by anyone who knows anything at all about building a Web presence. Along with anyone who possesses an iota of self-respect, obviously. Instead, the hopeful and uncompromisingly ambitious Battywipe Plus is beset by bullshitters who can just about lift a telephone receiver, pick up a camera, and generate a 40% accurate product description with the help of ChatGPT. The most convincing proponent of whom they hire.

The brand's attempt to "dominate the market" commences.

And quickly hits the hydraulic and eminently bouncy buffers at Content Marketing Central. So Battywipe Plus does what every other delusional brand with an inept digital marketer does. It resorts to spamming. "Fire up the CRM, guys! Let's make spam!"

Which doesn't work. And why would it? When has spamming ever worked?

So they sack the clown they hired and go back to the job boards. But this time, they're using their brains less than they were the previous time. Which, given that they weren't using them at all the previous time, is some accomplishment. We have to give capitalists credit where it's due.

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PROBLEM 2: IT'S NOT THE QUANTITY...

This time, they want someone who can not only do eight separate people's jobs and cite at least three examples of a time when their content turned a tinpot SME into a globally-dominant market-leader... But can also produce about five times the output that any previous creator has ever produced in the entire history of cyberspace. Because one lump of mindless shit a day proved useless. And we're talking about CAPITALISTS. With capitalist brains. And capitalist brains don't think:

"Hey, quality matters, so let's start making our content less mindless, and invest more time in ideas."

They instead think:

"Hey, let's increase the quantity of our mindless shit to ten lumps a day rather than just one! Yep, GENIUS! Let's do that! What could possibly go wrong?"

There are companies on this Earth who have tasked marketing copywriters with producing 60,000 words per week. Over a standard five days, that is 12,000 words per day. Imagine the sheer pointlessness of the output. I saw an example, and I can tell you that they might as well have hired monkeys with typewriters for all the use it was.

In an environment where one great idea, contained within one Web page, can draw millions of visits per week, an obsession with quantity really is delusion at its height. An encapsulation of what capitalist greed does when you fail to temper it with common sense. And when it comes to the realm of creativity, very few capitalists display anything approaching common sense.

The demands for quantity are everywhere.

"Hi, I'm a content creator who can produce eight lumps of mindless shit a day."

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PROBLEM 3: JOB BOARD EXPERT SYNDROME

AKA...

Capitalists think that what they've learned on job boards in the space of four days gives them a better grasp of content marketing than creators who've been active in the field for a decade.

"Actually Sir, word processors aren't really a good fit with Web technology. It's better to use purpose-built generators because they maintain clean code and observe Web Standards."

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PROBLEM 4: WORSHIP OF VIOLENT CORPORATE THUGS WHO LITERALLY HATE THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE

I honestly don't think we're that far away from organised prayer sessions.

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PROBLEM 5: THEY THINK SOCIAL MEDIA IS A SHOPPING PRECINCT

They do! And they don't know the difference between impressions and conversions.

If you vomit enough robot-spew onto a social network, and pay the nice, not at all psychopathic management enough ad fees, you will get lots and lots and lots of impressions. I should explain here, for the benefit of capitalists, that the 'Social Media Manager' you hired to pump a tidal wave of "fiercely original content" onto every timeline-driven platform in the world, is in fact using AI tools, which create robot-spew™ - a zero-value commodity you could have produced yourself. For nothing. Sorry to burst the bubble.

But yes, I admit, your 'Social Media Manager's painstakingly scheduled chatbot-sick will pass before the eyes of hundreds of thousands - millions even - of potential customers. Loosely speaking, that is. Potential as in, Australian lawyer who may, at some point in her life, randomly travel to central England, suffer an engine failure and purchase a car part from your autocentre, which she just happened to recall from the Facebook ad she spent all of 0.16 seconds looking at three years earlier.

But realistically, how many of those "potential customers" are going to buy your shit? Bearing in mind that precisely no one goes to social media to do the shopping, and precisely everyone is perpetually surrounded by a machine-gun-fire of what's known in non-delusional marketing circles as better shit than yours™.

Broadly, Social Media Marketing doesn't work. It can't work. Well, it can under certain conditions, but those conditions are highly prohibitive for SMEs, and they don't include pumping out a feed full of robot-spew whilst foaming-at-the-mouth with desperation to packshot your entire warehouse stock.

It works for people who get the public™ to spam the timelines on their behalf, because that defeats the horrendously awful economy of a digital treadmill - which is what all timeline-based platforms are. And it works for those who thieve their content from a large collective of talented people, because that does exactly the same thing. There's no investment in theft. So thieves don't spend four hours producing stuff that has a shelf-life of just three. They don't have to worry about economy at all, because as soon as the shelf-life expires, they can just nick something else.

The problem is, if you want the public to spam the timelines on your behalf, you have to create something they actually like - which, alas, does not include lumps of mindless shit. And if you're intending to nick your content from people with actual talent, you'd better make sure you've got the company wallet ready, because creators and their representatives tend to go after brands with head office addresses and phone numbers for compensation, in ways they don't, and indeed can't, go after anonymous scrotes.

And even if you manage to mitigate that, you'll still need to find some way to convert the attention into cash, against the pathological wishes of the platform boss, who is using every weapon in the Silicon Valley arsenal to funnel any attention you manage to garner into his own wallet.

It is virtually impossible to convince novice SMEs that trying to fight the woeful economy of social media without external support, an innovative gameplan, and a content creator they didn't hire based primarily on his/her experience of Microsoft Office, is futile. They will plod around unsuccessfully pumping an increasing volume of worthless crap onto an increasing number of platforms, for as long as it takes them to see that no one gives a flying stuff and the sales figures are not gonna budge. They have no faith in creatives, so they have to learn the lesson the hard way. But that doesn't save the poor sods who have to suffer their twenty lumps of bot-sick a day in the meantime.

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SUMMING UP

Capitalism is obsessed with success. And it prioritises that commodity, completely out of context, to the exclusion of all else. Even when that runs against the path of common sense. In the main, capitalism's approach to finding talent is roughly like trying to select a romantic partner by touring the neighbourhood in a blindfold and earplugs, soliciting formally-declared sexual histories and then submitting a marriage proposal to the community member who has previously had the most sex. And then wondering why the relationship doesn't work. It really is that dumb.

Just look out for someone who makes you happy, treat them well, and give them the space to be the person who lit up your horizon.

If every brand did that, they'd have more success, less stress, better public regard, vastly more pride in their image, and the Web would be a far more tolerable place.

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