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It seems like every few months, there are new buzzwords in the media industries. When I did a presentation with Brooke Burgess a few months ago with New Media BC, he warned me about “Buckets”. Actually, he told me that if I said “Buckets” in my part of the presentation, that he would eat my soul.

Or something along those lines…

Buckets: Categories of media broken down by consumer segmentation. For example: “Hey, we love your idea. We’ll take it and put in the in the collectable video game inspired Japanese cartoon bucket along with Pokemon and the rest of the ‘mons.” or “I love your show, but our bucket for cheap ‘Lost’ rip-offs is full. There have been a lot this year, check back next year, the bucket might get bigger.”

I had never heard ‘Buckets’ before Brooke warned me, but now, every time I hear it, I cringe. It’s a term used by suits who don’t understand the content, the creator or the consumer. Since they don’t understand why people would enjoy genre work, they put it in buckets.

The suits understand buckets.

And now there is monetizing. I’ve been hearing monetizing for quite a while, but it seems like lately everything is getting monetized.

Monetizing: Discovering ways to make money off of something that hasn’t made money before. This most frequently occurs with content and software. Information that is never manufactured and is most often digitally distributed.

Google was the world’s best search engine. Then with Adwords, it was monetized. Still the world’s best search engine, but now it makes buckets of money (note the ‘proper use of buckets’)

The reason I had these buzzwords is that they take the emotion away from people’s creations (ie: content) leaving behind sterile bland phrases such as: “Let’s drop that content into our kid’s animation bucket to better monetize the material with licensed goods.”

Twenty years ago, it would have been. “Let’s show it on Saturday morning and make some toys.”

Which one is easier to understand? Which one sounds like it comes from people who actually care about what they do? Why can’t people say what they mean?

I guess I shouldn’t complain - before ‘monetized’ caught on, the term most often used to describe making money off of content was ‘exploit’. It’s like the suits aren’t even trying to hide their burning souls.

Of course, I am a bit of a hypocrite myself - I actually prefer the term content to describe media that has been created. Some want to call it art, some call it ‘work’ and some call it ‘product’.

I like ‘content’ - but I hate buckets…

I know - it makes no sense.