Is liquid content a real thing, now or in the future?
I like to keep an eye on what Dmitry Shiskin is saying. The inventor of the user needs framework and until recently CEO of Ringier Media International has a way of cutting through to the heart of an issue.
He was at it again a couple of weeks ago when he posted the following on LinkedIn:
“Everyone keeps saying the next big thing in media and content strategy is ‘liquid content’. But has anyone actually seen it implemented in a meaningful, repeatable way? Or is it still an idea, a destination, a promise?”
It was a pertinent question, especially for us at HBM Advisory as we help publishers move from the experimentation phase of AI to the implementation of AI tools, workflows, services and products at an enterprise level.
The comments below Dmitry’s post were interesting. There was a lot of debate about the term “liquid content”. Many equated it almost exclusively with personalisation, another white whale of digital news. Others suggested better terminology was "adaptive content”. On my travels this week someone offered up “journalism as structured content”.
Personally, I think we should just stick with “liquid content” and I like the definition offered in Nic Newman’s trends report for the Reuters Institute. It described it as: “Content that adapts in real time to the user’s context, location, or interaction – enabled by AI and built from flexible, reusable content blocks.”
The key here being the idea that you break down stories into their constituent parts – the blocks – and reassemble them in the format and at the length and time that suits the user.
More interesting to me were the direct answers to Dmitry’s question about whether there were any examples in the wild. Nobody could come up with any – and that matches the feedback from my subsequent conversations that were inspired by the post.
So why not?
I think part of it is the natural time lag between what you hear at media conferences and what is actually happening on the ground. I’ve done it myself. You’ve been invited to talk at an event and naturally you want to show your organisation and yourself in the best light. So you talk about an experiment you’ve only just started and where the results are very tentative, and well, you might just exaggerate a teeny, weeny bit about how quickly this will change your company’s future.
I’m not criticising anyone who does this. It’s a totally natural tendency and not done in bad faith. But maybe overall we get the impression that some organisations are racing ahead when in reality they are doing the preparatory or experimental work around a new idea or feature.
More important though is the gap between innovation and implementation in many news companies. There are many good ideas building in the background that are not getting in front of customers fast enough. As Sophie Hvitved said on LinkedIn under Dmitry’s post: “Most work that could be labelled of some kind of liquid content today is still innovation at the edges of the existing ecosystem.”
Part of this is the result of overworked dev teams who often struggle to keep up with business as usual work let alone anything new. It’s also the result of a fear of negative customer reaction to anything going out that is not gold standard. And finally it’s a function of senior editorial leadership not engaging as much as they should in the technological revolution going on around them. I get that they are busy people but this is not one to sit out.
So what to do? In terms of liquid content, I think we need to get experiments in front of users as quickly as possible. They are much more forgiving than people think and will value being consulted. Who knows, this could be the innovation that changes media fortunes. The technology is there; it’s not conceptually difficult; it could be a huge product advantage for those doing it.