Context is King for Online Content

By David Eedle |

Back in the old days (by which my children mean BC, ‘before children’) I was manager of a regional performing arts centre for a couple of years. A key part of my job was managing all the marketing for the venue. And because the staff and resource was small, that usually meant I was literally doing everything, writing media releases, designing press advertisements, writing newspapers, giving radio interviews and, on one memorable occasion the day before a show that we’d sold precisely 10 tickets for, standing in the local shopping mall handing out flyers receiving a strong dose of reality, that the reason we’d sold ten tickets (out of 250) was because no-one was interested in the show, however fabulous we thought it.

The theatre placed a fair amount of advertising with the local newspaper, including a weekly calendar of events that chewed up quite a few column centimetres, plus display advertising for all the current and coming events. Quite often touring productions would have their own display advertising artwork pre-prepared, all we need to do was strip in our venue name and contacts. And just for the old hands, the artwork arrived as bromides (does anyone still use these?), bear in mind this was the early 1990s so we handled very little electronic artwork, although I seem to recall the newspaper starting to accept PDF artwork by email about that time.

But often the bromides were the wrong column width, or too much of the information was incorrect, so we’d need to prepare our own artwork. Of course I could have outsourced to our contract designer but that all cost money and time, so usually we’d give it a go, literally cutting and pasting – no, really, not pressing CTRL-C, I mean cutting pictures out with a craft knife, printing up some text, then gluing it all down to a display advertisement template page.

Once we had a decent layout, my next step was always to test the advertisement in the newspaper. By which I mean I would open the daily newspaper to the page where I was planning to run the advert, and glue a photocopy in place, over the top of some other ad. I wanted to see how our ad would look, surrounded as it was by all the other ads, stories, images and so forth. Did the ad ‘pop’ off the page, did it attract attention, was it different to the other ads? Obviously different sections in the newspaper would elicit a different response – early news, sport, art and culture and so on, each had its own type of content, its own characteristics, so an advertisement that worked well on a sports page might not translate so well to a property page. Hence it was important to check the ad against the potential page content it would be competing with for attention. We wanted to see the context in which the advert would appear.

Joshua Bell, one of the world's finest classical musicians, made $32 busking on a $3.5m violin

In 2007 The Washington Post conducted a fascinating experiment. They arranged for Joshua Bell, possibly one of the finest classical musicians in the world, to busk in a train station in Washington for three quarters of an hour. Bell has played to standing ovations around the world, he’s young, handsome and compelling to watch on stage. Bell took a cab the three blocks from his hotel to the station, not because he’s lazy, but because it was necessary to protect his violin, a ‘Strad’ made in 1712 during what’s considered Antonio Stradivari’s golden period, and worth a rumoured $3.5 million.

The newspaper did some research with local music experts. They asked the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra what he thought would happen if one of the world’s greatest musicians played some of the most remarkable classicial music pieces on one of the world’s finest instruments in a subway. The MD responded that he thought:

“out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.”

He also guessed Bell would make $150.

He was wrong.

Bell made $32. Almost nobody stopped at all. Many didn’t even notice. Watch the video and read the Post’s article, it’s instructive.

As a respected art curator said, when told the story,

“we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.”

The curator gave his own example, of taking a $5 million picture from Washington’s National Gallery, and hanging it in a restaurant with a price tag of $150. It would be completely out of place, and probably wouldn’t sell.

It’s like running into people in the wrong place. By which I mean, where your previously relationship or dealings with them did not include the surrounds in which you subsequently meet. For example, I’ve been writing this post on a flight from Australia to San Francisco. I’m on United, but flew Qantas up from Melbourne to Sydney to catch the United connection. Across the aisle from me on the Qantas flight was a man who started waving and smiling. Took my synapses several snaps before they started to connect, it was a great guy who I did some work with a few years ago. We gesticulated and discovered we were both heading for San Fran, albeit different flights. Or the other day, Fiona and I were walking into the shopping centre lift with our children when one of the women exiting smiled and said ‘hi’. She had to remind us she was one of the staff from our youngest child’s day care centre – we see her all the time there. But in a shopping mall lift she was out of place, our minds had none of the usual indicators in the surroundings, activity or time or day to prompt the fact we know the woman. Instead we felt mildly embarrassed.

When you create online content at the foremost of your mind must be the context in which the content will be published, for example, in what formats will the content be viewed? Web, mobile, e-book? What audience – young, old, local, foreign, expert, beginner?

Try an exercise:

Take one of your existing online articles, and re-write it for:

The free newspaper given out to commuters at rush hour. These giveaways are light weight, short form, hurridly produced each day, designed for quick easy bites of information.
A major broadsheet newspaper, like the Washington Post, where long form, investigative pieces are normal, and the audience often has time and intellectual grounding to digest complex concepts
A gossip website like PerezHilton.com or tmz.com

What style would you use? What forms of language, sentence structure and article length? Try printing the piece out and doing what we did all those years ago, and place it on the newspaper page. How does it fit the context of the published environment?

It’s oft been said that ‘content is king’. But actually ‘Context is king’.

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