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Marketing — Why Snackable Content Is Really Junk Content
It should be banned before we all get braindead
When I asked my digital-marketing friend what were her thoughts on one of my Facebook pages, she said:
Your posts are way too long; you must make them snackable.
I loathed the word immediately. My brain and stomach hurt just at the sound of it.
‘Snackable content’ is constructed as a marketing analogy to snack food. Jay Fuchs defines it as a:
straightforward, short-form, easily digestible content that lends itself to being passively consumed and shared on social media.
In this quote above, the word content appears contradictory to every other. I don’t think content is straightforward and easily digestible, and it should certainly not “lend itself to being passively consumed.” In any case, not the content I want to see and not the content I want my children and people I care for to see.
It sounds more junk content than snackable to me.
You could argue that content doesn’t have to be complicated and long, quoting the 17th-century French poet Boileau: “Whatever we conceive well we express clearly, and words flow with ease.”
You could argue that it all depends on the nature of the content, that snackable content can be high-quality.
Sure, healthy snacks exist, but they’re a minority of the huge amounts of snacks sold and consumed. This partially explains why in ‘2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults was 42.4%’.
And, as obesity is associated with serious health risks, I argue snackable content is associated with serious mental health risks and should be banned.
Why ‘snackable content’ should be banned?
Noam Chomsky isn’t known to be a proponent of marketing:
Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren’t — individuals focused solely on themselves, maximizing their…
