I’ve always had an active and absurd imagination. By active I don’t mean spending more time daydreaming than most people. I mean that I have trouble shutting my imagination off. It’s like constant mind wandering in a very specific narrative way that isn’t unfocused or fragmented, but is only tangentially grounded in reality.

When I was a kid I would shape vast and intricate stories in my head to fall asleep. During waking hours I would augment my surroundings constantly with backstories for places I was in and character attributes for people I saw. Anyone who has ever ridden in a car with me has likely experienced my inability to refrain from speculating about everything we pass. I’m not saying this is a unique or remarkable experience, but I can tell you that mine feels uniquely vibrant.

As I find myself miraculously stumbling around adulthood, I’ve started to realize that not only does adulthood not exist but that the exhilaration of youthful imagination now comes with exhaustion. This has coincided nicely with easy access to unlimited, amazing streams of content. Don’t get me wrong, I love guzzling content. Podcasts, books, articles, videos, snackable videos (lol), infographics, feature length films, shows — all of it. There’s a ton of really inspiring, entertaining and positive content to be consumed. A nice side effect to being constantly plugged in to the content machine, for me, is that when you’re engrossed in someone else’s narrative you get a break from your own. Both in the standard sense of escapism and enjoying the reprieve that reading, watching a movie, scrolling Twitter etc. creates from the imagination.

It occurred to me recently that I’m very rarely ever left to my own devices. Just kidding I’m always on my own devices. What I’m trying to say is that I noticed the pendulum had swung almost entirely away from using my own imagination for anything.

Purity of imagination is something everyone loses to varying degrees as they age. The existential dread that comes with the horrors of the world becoming more clear is enough to dilute even the best of us. That’s fair and reasonable. Not being imaginative at all by choice in some cases feels smoother, but really is tragic and I found fairly detrimental to my mental well being. What I didn’t understand until recently was that beyond being inspiring and spiritually fulfilling, my imagination was a mechanism I’d been using with success to work out problems and exhale stress. Inadvertently, I’d been bottling up stress and exasperation because I was too logged on to clear out excess shittyness through my imagination.

This isn’t some rah-rah critique of social media or call for everyone to live off the grid without technology. I just realized I’m a lot happier and healthier when I look for a better balance between allowing my imagination to frolic, and scrolling the feed.

My take on the next decade is that it’ll be far more important to try and adhere to a core set of principles instead of trying to arrive at a contrived standard of achievement.

Part of imagination for me is loving myself. Allowing myself to occasionally invent worlds where I feel better than reality without detaching from it entirely. Feeling hopeful when not much else is.

CHARLOTTE, NC | What many considered to be a bright spot in an otherwise dreary Tuesday turned out to be something completely different for one agency staffer.

At approximately 1:13 p.m. an all-office email went out that stated there was leftover food from a vendor presentation in the kitchen.

“I was amped,” said Account Manager Dennis Donaldson, “I honestly wasn’t feeling the salad I packed so leftover gourmet sandwiches from (our AdTech vendor) really hit the spot.”

Sr. Project Manager Morgan Donnelly noted that the food was “pretty mediocre unless you have the palate of a 12 year old, like Dennis.” She later emphasized that despite the food’s mediocrity, it was a nice reprieve from the two restaurants within walking distance of the agency.

Kyle Andrews, whose title/job function could not be verified by Premium Jargon due to confusion among the staff regarding “what they actually do here,” tried to remain grounded in reviewing the unexpected free lunch.

“Vendor food isn’t quite on the level of our own client-meeting catering game, but it was pretty good I gotta admit. And hey, free is the best flavor, I always say.”

Premium Jargon later learned that Jr. Strategist Taylor Smith, who was stuck on a 22-person conference call at the time of the initial leftover food email, lost all hope by 1:35 p.m.

“The call was just rolling over scheduled time and no one even asked if anyone had a hard-stop,” Smith said. “I knew I was probably hosed when I saw three or four reply-alls with fist pump/excitement GIFs come through in the first ten minutes.”

After the “wildly unproductive” call wrapped, Smith went to the kitchen to scrounge up whatever standard snack assortment options were left with the highest amount of protein, begrudgingly acknowledging that the vendor food would be long gone.

As Smith fumbled with a handful of snacks, their laptop, Moleskine notebook and phone to try and figure out which conference room their next meeting was in, Creative Director Kylie Gonzalez — who had just returned from a 2.5 hour lunch downtown — earnestly asked, “too late on the lunch food?”

Too Late On The Lunch Food was originally published in Premium Jargon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A recent ill-timed Forbes push notification (and several American light lagers) created the perfect synergy in the mind of Grover Cleveland, Director of Project Management at Nitron & Mulholland. It was reportedly not unlike the docking scene in Interstellar. It was in this moment Cleveland suddenly realized, amidst the familiar chaos of a dive bar happy hour with a bunch of disgruntled Jr. staffers, that the silos they’d been fighting to dismantle for the better part of a decade were very much still intact.

When asked how similar the silos were across all 12 of the agencies Cleveland has worked at, they responded simply, “same wine, different vintage,” and shrugged wistfully.

At press time Cleveland was seen leaving the bar after telling the bartender, “I don’t know, it might just be time to launch that SaaS startup i’ve been talking about.”

In Unfortunate Moment of Clarity, Agency Vet Realizes They’ve Been Trying To Break Down The Same… was originally published in Premium Jargon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But, as it turns out, people are still (in 2018!!!) making assured statements about millennials that often contradict each other. Read on:

The term Millennial, like many incessantly recurring buzzwords, is slightly bullshit.

Does it really make sense to speak in absolutes about a demographic that makes up ~20% of the total population of the United States? I calculated this percentage using data from the most recent census, via census.gov. If you disagree with my math and can prove it, shoot me a note and I’ll buy you brunch.

Common sense would normally indicate that drawing conclusions about such a loosely defined group of folks is at best “pushing it,” and at worst completely ludicrous. There’s simply no way to make an accurate, universally applicable statement about that many people based solely on a 15ish-year age range.

Despite paring a vaguely defined demographic with specific assertions being astoundingly illogical, people still throw millennial around like their favorite curse word. They talk about millennials having specific traits, preferring specific products, lifestyles and opinions.

I come across bizarre content all the time with titles ranging from, “How to Manage Millennials In The Workplace,” “How To Market To Millennials,” “Understanding Millennials: What Makes Them Tick.” This is pretty much the same thing as writing a piece that instructs people on how to sell products to Australians or how to effectively manage Sagittarius’s in the workplace.

I don’t think this lazy habit of over-generalization comes from a desire to marginalize millennials, but I do believe it’s a broader method to make sense of a technology-driven world. In most analyses of millennials, the way technology shapes and controls their environment is key to understanding whatever point is being made about them. This overused, way-too-broad categorization provides a way to add a human layer to discussions of a world where technology and the internet automate our existence. The term “Millennial” is often simply a conduit for a larger discussion on technology and society, but that doesn’t make you sound like any less of a clueless jabroni when you use the term without adding further qualifiers.

Take the time to do a little bit of extra research and dial down your analysis to a more defined group. A good marketer would never advise a client to define their target market solely on age, yet there’s still an absurd amount of “experts” detailing how to get your message to millennials. It’s time to stop referring to millennials when really we mean the way our society functions with a larger portion of its members more frequently relying on technology. It’s not as if this one generation will be the outlier and future generations will revert to a less technology-centric lifestyle.

Watching digital platforms begin to take action against disinformation is fascinating. Facebook is, as of this writing, actively pursuing new ways to analyze trustworthiness of news content (story by @meganrosedickey).

Although most brands and organizations aren’t publishing deliberately false narratives, they need to be aware of how efforts to thwart fake news might affect their content strategy.

Read on for an examination of how Google is tackling fake news + some advice for marketers, publishers and brands on how to bolster content integrity to avoid getting filtered.

A History of Manipulation

Google has long fought against nefarious entities seeking to unnaturally influence its algorithm. In the early days of search, and to a certain extent still, Google struggled to stop black-hat SEOs (and content created to game search engines) from unnaturally boosting their clients’ search visibility.

This manipulation was usually deployed in the pursuit of commercial gain — selling more products and gaining more customers. It was done through a variety of tactics, such as purchasing links, building bogus link wheels and injecting link code into websites without consent. Google has squashed many of these techniques, but some complex tactics have evolved to stay ahead of counter efforts.

Recently, phony news publishers have used similar tactics to amplify disinformation in attempts to make advertising money and influence political campaigns. These dubious publishers’ ability to manipulate algorithms, coupled with partisan politics, is a recipe for undermining Google’s core product and financial longevity. Ensuring the integrity and quality of search results is the foundation of a digital information and advertising business that was the biggest reason Google’s parent company, Alphabet, earned $24.7 billion (+22 percent YoY) in Q1 2017.

If trust in Google’s news results begins to erode, the consequences could quickly spread across its platform, cascading into a loss of use that would undo Google’s dominance: 87 percent market share of search in the United States with an average total of 40 billion searches per month. With market leadership and that much money at stake, it makes sense that Google would invest in squashing fake news.

So, What Are You Going to do About It, Nerd?

Aside from proprietary algorithm tweaks designed to degrade relevancy of low-quality sites in the news niche, the biggest thing Google is doing to bolster the integrity of results is rolling out fact-check citations in search results.

This allows information-watchdog websites, such as Snopes and others, to use newly accepted code markup via Schema.org to define and summarize fact-checking content. Google outlines what it considers to be valid fact-checking, but it is important to note that simply using schema markup will not guarantee fact-checking designation in search results.

While this added SERP (search engine results page) nuance doesn’t directly stop fake news, it does help present results in a more thoughtful and analytical way. Google doubled down on its position empowering searchers to make more-informed decisions in the official blog post announcing this rollout:

“This information won’t be available for every search result, and there may be search result pages where different publishers checked the same claim and reached different conclusions. These fact checks are not Google’s and are presented so people can make more informed judgements. Even though differing conclusions may be presented, we think it’s still helpful for people to understand the degree of consensus around a particular claim and have clear information on which sources agree.”

This language, and the overall fact-check feature strategy, is carefully chosen to both insulate Google from culpability for flaws in fact-check accuracy and dampen the narrative of being a privacy-violating overlord that monopolizes digital information access.

Most organizations creating content online aren’t in the business of fact-checking and won’t need to worry about implementing this particular schema markup. But it’s still important to consider the impact of evolutions in how your audiences discover, consume and analyze your content.

What Content Creators Should Do

The first and most obvious course is to hold the content you create to high quality standards — mitigating the risk of losing search relevancy or being hit with a “FALSE” fact-check label.

Even with this safeguard in place, it’s important to consider any potential authenticity ramifications based on digital context. Consider this example from Huffington Post:

A story about Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and classroom globes was posted on a section of huffingtonpost.com that clearly houses satirical stories, but this isn’t apparent from the search results page. The story’s narrative gained so much traction, Snopes debunked it.

What this means is that though the story is clearly marked as satire, Huffington Post’s credibility in search results in this case is damaged.

Should Google’s fact-checking results be better able to understand this type of situation? Absolutely. But the onus should be on publishers to think about how content will appear in channels like search, and how that might affect audience perception of their brand.

Strategies for Maintaining and Improving Credibility

Here are some tangible steps for content creators to take to ensure they’re ahead of the game when it comes to fake-news filtering:

1. Pay close attention to the updates Google, Facebook and other distribution platforms make. Apply these updates to content strategy in a real way. Test whether specific updates affect how your content is framed. It’s not enough to say “We use data insights to fuel content production” on your website or in pitch decks. Actually do it. Invest in dedicating team members to content framing and distribution strategy. Hold them accountable for measuring and reporting on how platform updates and reactionary tests affect content (or not). Be open to allowing that to guide updates to the content ideation and production process.
2. Consider how your content might be inadvertently lumped into, or labeled as, nonfactual content before publishing. Does your editorial process include honest evaluation of truth? Are you in a situation where it might be advantageous to stretch truth in pursuit of marketing KPIs? If so, think about balancing potential long-term credibility erosion with quick wins.
3. Understand the underlying technical aspects of the content you create. Schema and other forms of open-graph markup play a role in how your audience perceives and consumes content. The basic message of your content, whether it’s video, text or audio, is important. But so is the technical foundation on which it’s built and distributed. If you don’t invest in technical analysis, your original message might become distorted and you could miss out on opportunities to expand its reach. One way to accomplish this is to use Google’s fetching tool to examine how search spiders understand your content. Other crucial tools include the Google structured data tester and markup tools for Facebook and Twitter that will help analyze how content displays on these channels.
4. Set standards for information sourcing. Where and how you link offsite has search authority implications, and it affects editorial credibility. Do you evaluate sourcing from websites you assume to be credible? It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming a piece of information in a publication you trust is well-sourced, but before you cite something, go two (or more) layers deep to evaluate how the information was derived.