How Content Marketing Helps You Pick Up Girls

In an excruciatingly boring, overly-long “homage” to Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign, the International Content Marketing Summit is out with a video that tells us the way to get a girl is through targeted conversation rather than a numbers-based, “spray and pray” approach. Now, on the surface, this approach aligns well with real life. After all, walking up to every single girl and asking her for sex is far less likely to get anyone any sex. Taking the time to get to know each other through conversation at least begins the process of determining whether or not, ahem, further engagement makes sense.

Of course, the whole notion of this campaign is idiotic. It leads us to believe that brands want to hook up with consumers in a way that guys want to hook up with girls. And by hook up, you know exactly what we mean. It’s not a mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s a selfish, self-centered, one-sided arrangement in which the guy/brand gets immediate gratification and the girl/consumer is duped into submission.

This is not to argue content marketing is a sleazy form of marketing. Quite to the contrary. Done right, it can be very successful and mutually beneficial. But that’s not really what this video is describing. Its creators have turned content marketing into a pick up line joke and that doesn’t do the practice of content marketing any favors.