Glitch or Kitsch?

In their relentless pursuit of authenticity, marketers are embracing "glitch art," Guy Merrill, senior art director at Getty Images, tells Chief Content Officer.

Marketers are posting crooked photos with arbitrary compositions and shaky videos that look like outtakes.

The errors featured (such as oversaturated colors, lens flares, overexposure and pixelation) are made intentionally or added in post-production.

Marketers like glitch because, by displaying realism, it eradicates the difference between user- and influencer-generated content.

Kitsch, on the other hand, eschews realism.

Well-known examples include those paintings of dogs playing poker; paintings of Elvis on velvet; and everything painted by Thomas Kinkade.

From the German word for garbage, kitsch "appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality," according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

Can you tell the difference?

Make a New Year's Revolution

Next year, instead of a resolution, make a revolution.

Rewrite your "fail script." 

Leave the catastrophes for the nightly newspeople.

Self-talk about rejection predicts both long-term success and long-term failure, psychologists have proven.

Your default fail script goes, "This always happens. It's all my fault. And it's going to ruin everything."

Instead, when you're next rejected—and every time thereafter—tell yourself, "It's temporary. Situational. And not about me."

Novelist James Lee Burke once said, "Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work."

Vive la Revolution!

Marketers, Keep Out

The chief reason Adobe's CMO.com is among the web's best branded content titles is its chief editor, Tim Moran.

When it comes to repulsing over-eager marketers, he's combat hardened, thanks to 20 years' experience as a trade editor.

Moran has kept Adobe's marketers from meddling with the corporate blog—without resorting to hands-off policies.

"We don’t have any official or formal policies about church-and-state," he told Velocity.

"The traditional marketers at Adobe have simply come to realize that CMO.com’s job is not to push brand or sell products—there are many other places for that to be done within and around Adobe. They understand our role as the purveyor of thought leadership and insight and have been quite clever about finding ways to get the Adobe POV across on the site in ways that are perfectly acceptable to our media image."

Adobe bought Moran's blog six years ago because it wanted to become a thought leader.

Moran has made it clear to marketers in the meanwhile thought leadership is different from lead generation, and that the two don't mix.

If you want to understand the difference, check out The CMO's Guide to Brand Journalism, courtesy of Hubspot.

Wintry Discontent

I get terrorists.  

But why does someone who's not politically minded relentlessly bully schoolmates, shoot up a theater, drive a speeding car into a crowd, or hike the price of a life-saving drug 5,500 percent?

Pessimism. A First World problem, if ever there was one.

In The Conquest of Happiness, philosopher Bertrand Russell devotes a chapter to pessimism, a feeling he has little patience for.

Pessimism, he says, "is born of a too easy satisfaction of natural needs."

When too much falls into your lap, struggle, "an essential ingredient of happiness," ends; and, with it, desire.

"The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. 

"If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. 

"He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

Content is Kaput

Many content-crazy marketers have lost their zeal, according to the Content Marketing Institute's 2016 Content Marketing Budgets and Trends.

Institute founder Joe Pulizzi predicts, "Now is when we will witness the greatest content marketing failures of all time."

Their disaffection was predictable.

"Lots of companies bought into the hype and started what they thought was content marketing," Pulizzi says. 

But these companies "either didn't have a strategy or didn't execute it well… or both," and have already moved on, in search of another magic bullet.

Will they ever learn the difference between idea and execution?

In my brief time, I've been told in no uncertain terms that advertising was dead, direct marketing was dead, email marketing was dead, PR was dead, telemarketing was dead, and trade-show marketing was dead.

Now content marketing has joined the angels.

Rest in peace.