Over the past week I’ve been munching on the difference and tension between spreadsheet-led and creative-led content marketing. We have a tendency towards the former as the core of our sector is about cataloguing objects neat and tidy or performance schedules, and it’s taken all of us a while to get used to the more chaotic and organic nature of social media.

But we still need some sort of plan, and we need the checks and balances of strategy and audience development to stop us being Everything For Everyone.

Yet I have to remind myself that we’re organic meatsacks. We weren’t born with innate knowledge of matrices and Excel. The common thread of humanity is a love of performance, stories and humour (and sticking each other with pointy sticks and gods and fornication).

Spreadsheets don’t create compelling content, but content without direction and bounds is counterproductive. But the balance needs tipping on the creative side I think.

Content of this week

I’m excited to announce that I chatted to the National Trust’s Danyele Higgins about how they do content in a Big and Important organisation a couple of days ago, but that’s coming next week.

Instead this week I’ve seen this good stuff:

• Always been a big fan of Tate’s JFFI (Just Fucking Film It) approach. It’s really hard to make flat images of 3D artworks and objects interesting sometimes. So just film walking around it instead. I’ve always had a thing for Epstein too because his Lucifer greeted me to BMAG since I was a kid, and what’s more metal than SATAN being the first thing you see in a museum.

• A reminder that starting your video with ‘where did people clap cheeks in the 1700s’ will make a lot of people pause swiping.

• Most people don’t care about your staff profiles. But this is an effective way of making their stories more relevant. So start with the eye-grabbing fact or stat, not ‘Hello I’m Steve and I’m the butt wiper at the museum of butts’.

• The Jet2 Holiday thing has been going crazy the past couple of weeks. I’m not going to link to anything, but the time to jump on that ship is rapidly passing.

The bullet point bit

• Supercool and Digital Carbon Online measured the carbon footprint of 66 cultural websites and we DID NOT do well. Mainly because we have lots of images and videos. But their report gives us a benchmark and tips on how we can DO BETTER.

• The AMA and Make Sense Of It are co-designing an AI marketing platform called Goose with the help of four cultural organisations. It sounds like it’ll be a kind of assistant/chatbot and it will launch in Autumn 2025. It should help the many smaller organisations who can’t afford marketing expertise, but I’m waiting to see what the dataset was, its scope and where it sits on the Evil-Or-Good-o-meter.

• There’s a chance TikTok will launch a US-only version of the app to get around Trump’s repeatedly-delayed ban. If they do, that’ll stave the world of US content and I can’t tell if that kills the app or saves the app.

• Nothing else has happened. Go visit zombo.com

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮 what I’m playing

I redownloaded Rimworld, a game where you try and keep people alive on a hostile planet. It’s often described as a story generator rather than a game as, while you can nudge them along by telling them what to do and build, a lot of the events are random, and your little people will do irrational things depending on their traits, events and whether their son just got eaten by an alien cave spider which forces them into a pyromaniac frenzy which burns down your entire base.

📖 what I’m reading

nothing because I am a worm

🐕 Keith

Here he is