Are you working in an ultraprocessed content factory?

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.

— Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist)

It’s never been easier to produce content that looks good.

A few prompts, a few clicks, and you have something that (on the surface) is publishable.

But most of it has the same problem.

It’s ultraprocessed.

Ultraprocessed content: a definition

Content that is engineered to be consumed quickly. Designed to tick the right boxes. Built from combing through millions of articles, boiling them down, crushing them into infinitesimally small tokenised bits, mashing them together, then squirting them out into new words and sentences for your mild, fleeting dopamine spike.

It might look good on the surface, but it doesn’t nourish anyone. It doesn’t stay with your readers and customers. It doesn’t mean much of anything to anyone.

And that’s why, despite producing more than ever, it’s getting harder to be remembered.

We’re not running out of content ideas. We’re not even struggling to execute on ideas so much any more. We’re drowning in what’s been produced — and most of it leaves absolutely no mark.

Provide nutrition in a world of ultraprocessed content

Average thoughts, average practices, and formulaic structures.

Scroll through any feed. Open your inbox. Most of what you see isn’t bad. In fact, it’s often technically excellent, but it rarely leaves a mark.

It has similar impact for me as eating an ultraprocessed nutrition bar. A quick hit that immediately wears off. Unsustaining. Forgettable.

No wonder it’s getting harder to be noticed and remembered.

As the volume of content has exploded, attention has done the opposite. It’s more fragmented, more fleeting, more selective than ever.

You can (ultra) produce all the content you want, but if you don’t share and articulate an opinion, the chances are it’s going to get lost.

We’re in a world where “good enough” is abundant. Where competent, acceptably-written, inoffensively-designed content is the baseline, not the differentiator.

And when everything looks OK, the bar to stand out gets a lot higher.

Understand the appetite of your audience

I believe there are essentially three paths available right now for producing good content:

• You have a genuinely interesting opinion on something.
• You have a unique, owned dataset that you can pull insights and news from.
• You can create work that is truly, noticeably, of a higher quality bar than what is possible with AI.
• It’s great if you can have all three, but let’s assume you have just one: an opinion.

Your opinion is one of the few things that will make your content stick.

Your job is to take your opinion and translate it into something people care about. To distill it down and make it clear — to you first, and then your audience.

This is the hard work now.

Some questions that might be worth asking:

• In your space, do you actually have an opinion?
• What do you believe that most people are overlooking?
• Does your team or organisation align with that opinion?
• Is that opinion really an opinion or is it just common sense?
• Do your customers and prospects know what your opinion is?

You have the kitchen, now work on the recipe

AI has accelerated the production of content into the stratosphere.

But it isn’t accelerating taste, judgment, or the ability to decide what’s worth saying in the first place. Those things still take time and come from people. That’s on you.

The natural temptation is to keep up, publish more, faster, across more channels. That may not be completely wrong, but it’s worthless unless you also take a moment to slow down enough to find something interesting to say.

Because in a world where the default is ultraprocessed content, your opinion might be the only nutrition your audience gets.

James

Co-founder, EcoSend

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