If someone told me three years ago that soon there will be a brand-new breed (here’s a tongue twister) of content creators in four years (that’s right, I’m talking about the breed we will witness in 2022, I am foreshadowing for next year). I would have probably answered: Yes, I think people who leave things in random locations at the supermarket should be arrested. Sorry, I kind of lost track of my thought with all the self-interruption. But I would also say: There is no way on earth!
Before I dive deep, a fair warning, if you’re one of the people who thinks that it’s cool to hate on “Tik-Tok” just because you never even tried to get on the app to see what it’s about and think that everything new should be made fun of. Here’s my advice, flip the page now. This article will mention “Tik-Tok” more than a watch does in 60 seconds … if it’s analog … because digital watches … don’t.
2020 happened to the world and people were forced back into their caves but this time, and unlike the great Ice Age where your diet Pepsi stays at a perfect freezing temperature all day, we still had a way to communicate: le smart telephone.
And so, it happens, that phone had an app that is so loose, so fast paced and so engaging that people decided to dump their mini-interests, mini-talents, mini-knowledge on it and people were so bored on the other end, that they stuck around to watch it.
On the surface, it looks like the same story of any content creator. They have an interest, they share it with the world and so it happens, people of the same interest find them and follow them. But this is different. It’s uber-different!
The conventional creators we know are all, myself included, what I like to call nowadays “Broad-ators” (not my brightest attempt at moshing broad and creators together). There is something about how we were raised and shaped that made us believe that more is better and that your skillset should be an endless list of stuff that you know how to do no matter where your level lies in each and every one of those skills.
But … again … these people are different.
These people are the “yo-yo players”, the “excel-hacks guy”, the “look-at-all-these-weird-websites-I-found guy”, the “photoshop-tricks guy”, the “one-joke-that landed guy”. I know, it sounds repetitive to be known for one thing … but believe me, the moment you see these Micro-ators (don’t ask) fighting their own reflexes at falling into repetition under the same umbrella, you will be fascinated. You can literally watch them propel through that space with fresh and new ideas at executing and delivering their content that is still essentially about that one thing they know, love or want to share.
What is even more fascinating is seeing these Micro-ators (I almost never back down from my mistakes) cross-pollinate their content, like when a dancer issues a new challenge that goes viral and we see different specialty channels try to incorporate some creative iteration or variation of that same challenge but in a different universe that is their content page.
Soon enough, mark my words … seriously go get a marker and mark these following words with a half dried up yellow neon marker so you can revisit it in a year: The future of content is micro-ating (I won’t apologize) and not because short form content is becoming the trend, and not because of attention spans.
It is in my opinion, probably, due to the fact that what happened in 2020 made us realize how much we miss the details about our own lives. So maybe, just maybe, by micro-ating and consuming it, we are trying to make sure we never make that mistake again.
I don’t see it stopping soon and I hope it doesn’t. And you bet I will be speaking about “Tik-Tok” soon … it’s a matter of time before I tick to talk about it again or … Tick-Talk. Okay … now I am sorry.
George Tarabay is a marketing expert Filmmaker/Comedian/Podcaster. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud @GeorgeTarabay. Photo by Vera Gorbunova on Unsplash.
