What is CIQ?

At Content is Queen, we believe we are currently in a transformational period for

  • Content (the creative product)
  • Media (the channel that distributes the creative product
  • Advertising/Subscriptions (The way the creative product is paid for)

This transformational period is analagous to the advent of movies, TV or radio. It is, a Lord-of-the-Rings style “turning of the tides” with content at its core. Hence, “Content is Queen.”

Many times in this blog, I will simply use the shorthand, “CIQ.” In other words, I will call something a “CIQ phenomenon.” A CIQ phenomenon has one or more of the following three essences:

  1. Cats Marrying Dogs
  2. Groundlings Revolt
  3. Birth/Death Throes

Cats Marrying Dogs

In the movie Ghostbusters Bill Murray describes the coming apocalypse as, “Rivers and seas boiling! … The dead rising from the grave! … Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together!”

At the turning of the tide, this kind of thing happens. In the media and content world, it looks like this: publishers buying ad agecies, publishers becoming agents, agents becoming publishers, and so forth.

Groundlings Revolt

Shakespeare always put fun stuff such as bawdy humor in his plays for the “groundlings,” that group of disenfranchised people who couldn’t afford the box seats.

Call it user-generated content, the long tail, blogs, niche sites, whatever you will. The democratization of content and the ability to monetize that democratized content is a CIQ phenomenon.

Birth/Death Throes

One of the key tenants of CIQ is the idea of emergence. Something new is in the process of coming to be. In that process, other things are dying.

For example, the iPod has killed the the album and replaced it with personal playlists. Webisodes, audio books, ebooks, YouTube video, viral content. All of these things are being birthed. Or perhaps, they are small petri-dish experiments on the way to something bigger. As for death: traditional newspapers are struggling, the three big networks are struggling, movie houses… the list goes on.

The headlines we choose, raise our CIQ antenna because they have one or more of the three qualities above. The articles and commentary go into depth on these topics.

Anna Murray

Anna Murray is the president of the e*media division of tmg-e*media, inc., a technology and new-media consultancy based in New York. She has worked in interactive media for Fortune 500 brands and publishers. She is a frequent speaker at gatherings like Ad:Tech, and a writer for publications such as Marketing Sherpa.

She can be reached at anna@tmg-emedia.com

A list of Anna’s publications…