Content of the week #19: Wes Anderson in the library

The holy grail of advertising is for the right people to see the right advert at the right time. Because being shown irrelevant adverts is annoying as fuck.

The same kind of goes for organic content – ideally you’d reach and be followed by the exact audiences interested in what you do. But we can’t target our content like the big National Lottery hand, we can only broadcast it to the world and hope it finds the right people.

It’s made even more difficult by newer algorithms which choose whether to show your content to people based on how well your content performs.

So there may be people out there who are, say, very interested in researching geneology at Milwaukee Public Library. But if you just post a crappy A5 flyer of how to access geneological records, it will never reach those people because nobody will engage with it.

That’s why we need to interest or entertain people first, so even if you’re not actually super interested in the end-product you’ve still had a good time, watched the whole video and given it a boost in the algorithm – increasing the chances it’ll be seen by people who are interested in the end-product.

This is a roundabout way of saying my content of the week is Milwuakee Public Library‘s Wes Anderson sketch:

We’ve seen Wes Anderson trends before, but most places just had people walking across vaguely symmetrical scenes with whimsical music over the top.

Milwuakee Public Library have gone a step further – setting up a narrative, involving kids and accurately showing what a geneology research journey looks like while still make it fun and funny (“that’s reference only” is particularly good). It’s high effort though. There’s obviously been a brainstorm, there’s a script, there’s costume, scene-dressing and soundtrack.

What I like about it most is the creative approach to what a lot of people might write off as impossible to sell on social media. How do you get people interested in geneological research?

The answer is that we can’t just say that we have these niche services. The people who truly need them will google it anyway. Instead, this content is about convincing people who didn’t realise it was something they wanted in the first place, and they’re convinced because of the reason they’re on social media – by being entertained.

(PS Milwaukee Library also did one of my favourite library posts of all time)