Content of the week #12: potty-mouthed art

‘You don’t have to be funny’, is something I used to regularly scream when I worked at The MERL.

When you see something funny do well, it’s natural to think that if you were just a bit funnier then the Likes will come rolling in. But the advice ‘be funny’ or ‘talk like yourself’ only really work if it fits your organisation.

The Auschwitz Memorial should not be funny. And even talking like a person is heavily dependent on the person in question.

Anyway, my content of the week this week is someone being funny and talking like a person.

Mattie Olivier goes by his own name on TikTok and as thefineartcollective on Instagram.

What drew me into Mattie’s videos is quite simple (as always, because I have a monkey brain). Firstly the narration surprised me by calling Pieter Bruegel a ‘fucking lunatic’ within the first few seconds, and secondly the simple but effective transitions and edits kept my goldfish attention.

This video follows the rule of ‘Just because your audience want to learn things doesn’t mean they want a boring lecture’. This video tells you a lot about Bruegel and his painting The Harvesters without ever talking down, always finding time to point our surprising details, and explaining things in terms anyone can understand.

In fact, it has the air of a friend who knows a lot about art taking you on a personal tour of a gallery. And for a lot of people who know fuck all about art history this is the perfect pitch.

What is really interesting about Mattie, though, is that the RP British voice used in his videos isn’t his own – he’s actually Canadian. If you go back through his profile you can see he used to film himself and use his own accent, before hitting on his current formula of focusing on the paintings and using a British accent.

It probably says a lot that people only started paying attention when the posh man started talking.

I’m not suggesting that you put your voices through an AI filter, nor that you try and be funny or talk like a person (see introduction above). But if those things reflect who you are as an organisation, then maybe ditch the dry lectures and give it a go.

And if things aren’t working, then maybe you need to reinvent yourself.

What else I’m thinking about

Someone I hugely respect sent me a message recently where they said ‘I make it up as I go along tbf’.

Whenever a place does well online it often looks effortless. We all then think how we can replicate it, sometimes by doing carbon copies of the content that does well.

But pretty much all of the places that do well started at rock bottom. They tried different things. Some of those did well, some of them bombed. Then they kept trying, kept pursuing the things that seemed to work even a little well – they keep making it up as they go along because none of us can lay a path to guaranteed success for content. We just use our experience and our ideas to keep making stuff up that hopefully keeps the numbers ticking.