What Silent Bob said

On content and who you're creating it for

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you, the patron king of Failure. I’ve been failing upwards my entire career. Don’t be afraid of it…Failure is success training, I know it sounds like a f*cking cat poster but it’s true. It leads you to the next thing.”

I had the good fortune of seeing Silent Bob headline a marketing event maybe 10 years ago. Why was he there? No idea. But he answered a question with this line, so I was in.

He went on to say: “You create because you want to, not because someone will write you a check.”

For many today, creating is quite literally for a check. “Content” is a euphemism for “sales vehicle.” The entire internet tells you it’s possible to “do work you love and the money will come” (spoiler alert: it will not). Courses abound on “How to Turn Your Art Into Your Job” and “How To Make Money Doing What You Love” and when it doesn’t quite work out your lack of hustle is to blame. We say no thanks.

The only reason content has to “add value” anymore is because it doesn’t convert to sales if it’s not valuable to your prospects.

Modern Marketing has alleged to be about the Customer. To be about permission and giving. And this is mostly true. Tropes like, “Know your customer,” “Figure out what they want,” and “Use their language” reign and advice like, “Reverse engineer your content strategy based on what the customer needs” and “Pick up the phone and talk to your customers” still hold true.

The edict says: Customer first. What does the Customer want and need. What does your audience care about? Talk about that. Make stuff for them. I’ve spent the bulk of my career advocating for these things too. Because they are true.

Still, Kevin Smith got on stage - at a marketing conference - and said, “Do it for yourself first and foremost.”

The battle between content-as-self-expression and content-as-a-sales-tool is as old as the internet itself.

“Anyone who’s tried to outwit the general public and game the system with, ‘No no no my data says this,’ knows it doesn’t work. You can’t guarantee [success],” Smith told the audience.

“[Creation is] masturbatory. Think about pleasing yourself first. In the end, if no one connects with [your content] the way you connect with it, you haven’t wasted your time…The audience of one was satisfied.”

My first reaction to this was that this is a terrible way to think about marketing and a brilliant way to think about art. Knowing where one ends and the other begins is where most of us get stuck.

In the Hollywood-world Smith comes from there’s a clear separation of church and state. Artists create. Marketers sell. Unfortunately for the rest of us without a staff of hundreds and a department devoted to sales, distribution, and promotion, content blurs the line between the two. And most of us are confused as to which camp we fall in. I’m no exception.

The best performing pieces of content I’ve ever created came from the same selfish place Kevin Smith was talking about. I did them for me. They were topics I cared about or rants I wanted to go off on for no justifiable reason other than I felt like it needed to be said. It’s not a strategy I would advise to anyone. Especially since that same approach happens to also be responsible for my worst performing pieces.

It’s hard to put something out there if you’re an artist trying to self-express.

It’s easy to confuse content-as-self-expression with content-as-sales and it’s killing everything that makes our creative work strong. 

What marketers mean when they say, “It’s not about you, it’s about your customers” is “don’t be so self-involved!” In a sales context, you are trying to satisfy a customer or audience need and want. That is very different from following your personal innate and insatiable desire to create something in the world. 

“Selfishly” creating something you believe needs to exist is not actually selfish. It’s a gift. Like a song or a movie. But it doesn’t have a goal the way marketing and sales directed work has a goal (views, conversion, sales, shares, comments, traffic, etc).

The interviewer asked Kevin Smith how he could be so confident. Without missing a beat, Smith clarified:

“It’s not confidence – it’s fear. The fear of ‘If I don’t try this, will I be able to live with myself? Do you think you could live being the guy who didn’t build the thing?’”

We certainly couldn’t.

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