A tale of three cities

Content is not like baking; there isn’t a fool-proof recipe that will work every time

Throughout my career, I have been involved in the development phase of creating content. I don’t mean the interviews and research that go into a written feature or the questions for a video series. What I mean is those meetings with people who do not have a relationship with the industry being covered and are never engaged with the day-to-day activities of creating content for a daily, weekly, or monthly publication (do those still exist?). These are the sessions where the management types grill us editorial types with questions on how we will create content that will cause readers to engage with the offerings, buy a subscription, or persuade advertisers to open their wallets.

Search engine optimisation techniques and data on what articles get read and to what extent are discussed. (Quiz break: what percentage of an article do you need to read to qualify it as a “quality read”? Answers on a postcard, please.)

This isn’t unique to an editorial setting. I was once involved in a fruitless media relations campaign with a large UK bank. They were looking to me and my team to create a media story that would “get covered by the BBC”. Those were their exact words.

I was naive when I answered with a plan. I explained that the “story” I proposed would be interesting to the media based on my experience as a journalist who has covered banks for decades.

“Will this be covered by the BBC?,” they asked.

I responded that this story would interest much of the media, including the BBC.

“No,” they reiterated. “This needs to be covered by the BBC. Can you guarantee that?”

Explanations that journalists from many media outlets, including the BBC, would be pitched to cover this story, but no one can “guarantee” that an independent media company will cover a bank press release, fell on deaf ears.

The project fell apart because my team could not guarantee thatthey would, I don’t know … bribe, strongarm, kidnap?, “a BBC journalist” who would favorably cover this story.

I often tell people, as I examine how financial services is being disrupted and transformed by digital technologies that if you want to discuss how business models have neen fucked by technology, talk to a journalist. I have empathy for those whose jobs are on the line over whether an editorial team is producing content with more than 60% “quality reads”. (Be kind, please scroll to the bottom of that online article.)

However, the search for “quality” and what determines whether it will find an audience can be contextual and subjective. Let me tell you my tale of three cities to explain what I mean.

A few years ago, I gave several keynote speeches around the world. (Yes, I am available for more than moderation ;-) ). One talk I often gave was called “Fintech as a mindset.” It was a bit of a rundown on the history and evolution of fintech, how I view innovation, and the current state of the market. I gave this speech in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Dublin.

I opened each talk with a small fact about the city to ingratiate myself with the audience.

Helsinki was my best performance. Copenhagen worked. Dublin greeted me like I dropped a lead balloon on the stage and stormed off.

The Finns drink a lot of coffee. They are usually at the top of the list for global coffee consumption per capita. I also like coffee. (The past few years, I’ve stopped at two cups, no more than three, and never in the afternoon.) I opened my talk by finding common ground with my audience over our shared appreciation for brewed beans. The room laughed warmly. In fact, the audience laughed at all my little jokes, leaned forward for my pauses, and nodded in agreement at my analysis.

After the speech, an audience member approached me and said, “I could have listened to you all day.” Several people offered to fetch me a cup of coffee. They gave me a gift: a platter from Royal Copenhagen that I still use today. I ended up at the bar of my hotel with a few members of the organisation who hired me, and I experienced a pleasant evening.

A few weeks later, I gave the same keynote talk in Copenhagen. Instead of coffee, I mentioned hygge culture and that back home in the UK, my husband thinks I am crazy for filling the house with fairy lights and candles. I felt comfortable knowing that not many people would see that as odd in Denmark.

The audience was engaged, not to the extent they were in Helsinki, but they listened and asked interesting questions. They followed my analysis, smiled, and nodded in the right places. I also had quite a few people come up to me, concerned that my husband thought I was “crazy” and asking if I needed any assistance. I appreciated the offers of help and filed away the notion that some people interpret saying your husband thinks you are crazy slightly differently than you intended.

Then I arrive in Dublin. I was feeling cocky. I thought I knew the Irish. I grew up in Boston in the US. Half my family can trace its ancestry to Ireland. I got engaged to my husband (who isn’t planning to call the men in the white coats any time soon) in Dublin. I take much of my presentation style from my father, who spent 40 years as a school teacher. I’m light on statistics and charts, and lean heavily on stories, narratives, and metaphors to get my point across.

In my head, my regional fact for Liz’s ‘What day is it? It must be Dublin’ world tour would be that the Irish are known as storytellers.

I started my talk by saying how happy I was to be in the Emerald Isle because “I tell stories,” and this country appreciates stories.

I smiled. No one smiled back.

A man in the front row folded his arms before his chest. Someone in the back coughed. If it were the Old West, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a tumbleweed rolled across the stage.

I made a point about how banks are in the business of money, but don’t actually own the money. (I was trying to compare it to that slide many of us have seen often about how Uber is the world’s largest taxi company, that doesn’t own the taxis … yadda yadda yadda).

Three people got up and left.

I talked about my mother’s experience working at a bank in the 1960s and how her career ended because I exist. (I usually do a slight curtsey at this point, the man at the front, who had previously folded his arms, actually rolled his eyes.)

Two people asked me for a specific slide listing companies that made up the fintech universe. When I used it, it was outdated and deliberately blurry. Its spot in my talk was only there to highlight how fragmented and expansive the marketplace for financial technology innovation was becoming. The explanation that the slide was just a tool to make a larger point, not the definitive list of every existing fintech company, was poorly received.

As I walked off stage, I wasn’t offered any china platters or offers of coffee (or numbers for domestic abuse charities). The organiser asked if I was OK with calling for my own taxi. I returned to my hotel, looked for pizza on Google Maps, and wondered what went wrong.

The same speech, with minor changes, elicited three different reactions. Why? Was it the quality of the content? Was it my delivery, the venue, or my allotted time on the agenda?

Maybe I just need to live with the fact that the people of Finland align with my humour, the Danes are concerned for my safety, and, unfortunately, on one day, I found myself in a room full of old, Irish men who weren’t in any way interested in hearing anything an American woman had to say about fintech, banking, and innovation.

These are differences to consider when you find yourself in rooms deciding what makes quality content and how to produce offerings that people will engage with. In this age of artificial intelligence, which is steadily learning to create art, blog posts, and incredibly bland selfie “action figures” to post on LinkedIn, the concept of hard-coding what is “quality” and what is not becomes more complicated.

And I mean it: Please scroll down to the bottom of online articles. Many underpaid and overworked reporters and editors will significantly appreciate the action.

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In honour of the country that seems to ‘get me’, there could only be one musical finale.