Content and media are weird words. They are the antonymic binary stars that all our industries circle around, feeding of the energy they pump out into culture.
They don't really exist without each other. Even in the very specific sense in which we use the words, they are both defined by what they are not.
A medium is a vector for content.
Content is that which is mediated.
Without a medium, there is no content.
Without content, you have no media.
Content might be king [or even possibly a kaiser] but all that really means, and has ever meant, is that people like stuff more than the absence of stuff.
Less facetiously, people like ideas. We live off them. We literally define ourselves by our ability to have and to hold them. But with ideas we hit another semantic issue - there is no other word in philosophy that has quite as many different flavours to it.
I don't mean big ideas, innate ideas, platonic ideas or anything like that. Let's just say stuff in your head. The desired result from any communication interaction. I have stuff in my head, I want to put it in yours.
Content/media is a way to do that over time and space and to many heads all at once.
Stories are one of the oldest ways of doing that. Stories survive because they are either entertaining [man's life is ugly, brutish and short, and we tend to like anything that takes our mind off that] but also because they are useful.
Originally that useful meant 'and lo did ugggg eat of the purple bush and verily did he die' [I'm doubt that australopithecus used a bad Shakespearean register but you get the point] but later that came to be useful in the sense of telling us something about ourselves.
We are meaning seeking creatures. We think and therefore we wonder. And wondering very quickly leads us to some big [so far] unanswerable questions that underly existential despair.
So we craft myths that place us in a larger setting, and thus give us the sense that our lives have meaning.
John Lennon said "reality leaves a lot to the imagination" and stories help resolve the contradiction between the different kinds of human experience, physical and mental, providing our lives with a metanarrative that helps us explain ourselves to ourselves.
Brands have a similar cultural function, that allows us create and manipulate meaning in the commercial culture we operate within. As science overtook myth as the dominant paradigm for understanding the world, the importance of myths in our culture began to fade, leaving a gap we capitalists began to unconsciously fill with commercial icons, that became the myths that are brands.
Western culture is the child of logos [the opposite of mythos in Hellenistic tradition, it represents science and fact]. Without myths to provide context and meaning, we created our own around the newly powerful forces of consumerism.
Logos led us to logos.
Myths are stories that can be told in innumerable different ways without losing their core meaning. Just like brands. And right now we are learning some new ways of telling the same stories, updating the form to adjust for the current climate, which is the way it has always happened.
So, perhaps, if we can't work out how to tell these stories in a relevant way, we'll die.
Or, as an industry, we'll evolve.
Just like during the Cambrian explosion, lots of new kinds of brand meme carriers are going to try and find a niche to inhabit.
And lots of new kinds of agency will be born and some will die.
But some will survive and thrive.
