Content is a funny word when you actually stop and think about it. Was anyone saying it the way we say it now back in 2015? Someone once said content is king, decades ago now, back when the internet was still mostly text. Nobody had a job title with the word "content" in it. There was no such thing as a content creator then. Now it's an industry worth somewhere north of a couple of hundred billion dollars a year, depending on who's counting. Funny how a throwaway line about the web turned into an entire economy.
I wrestled over using Content Is King. Not because it's not a clever line to open a blog with, but because after fifteen-plus years of educating and building courses, and a few years of using AI properly rather than just talking about it, I keep landing back on the same point. All the design. The flow. The slick build. The avatar on screen. None of it is the thing. It's the wrapping, and content. CONTENT is the KING.
It's style over substance, dressed up to look finished. And I've built that. I've done it, and nearly watched it break a project too.
The one I got wrong
Early on, a client said to me, "just put it in ChatGPT and make it work." I did the flow myself and it was genuinely good. But the fee, the timeline and the ambition of the client didn't leave room to write the content properly, so what came out was weak. That's style over substance, and my name was on it. Looking back I probably should have stopped the project there and then, but I didn't, I was still starting out, still trying to prove myself, and I don't think that was the wrong call to make at the time. I'd make a different one now. Because the experience taught me something that's stuck ever since: no matter what tool's involved, the content is what decides whether the whole thing works.
Which is also, by the way, exactly how this post got written. It went through AI, every post on this site does now, I've said so already and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it isn't AI's post and it isn't mine either.
That's the whole argument, really, wrapped up in one line I didn't even plan to write down.
So these days when a client says the same line, tongue in cheek, we laugh, and then we recorrect, properly this time. The first thing I do is remind them what we're actually both trying to get to. That's value creation, out loud. This isn't a course for the sake of a course, it's something that genuinely has to work for the people sitting through it. It's human. It's learner centric. And then comes the nudge. And it has to be assertive, not a lecture, but confident: "We can do that, but I know, because I've seen it, that we need to work together on the content and make sure it's fit for purpose." Direct enough to land, soft enough that nobody feels told off.
Do both of those, create the value first, then nudge assertively toward it, and you're not just talking about value anymore. You're shaping it, and putting yourself in a position to actually deliver it. A brilliant client, Dean Cooper from the Elite Practitioner Club, taught me this.
The one that could have gone very wrong
I've had projects where the opposite has happened. I recently worked on a project with several universities, across different countries. The production was straightforward, nothing flashy, the odd branching scenario, a few interactive case studies and avatar bookends. But the content had to be exactly right, because the actual goal was students from Animal Sciences, Human Medicine and Environmental Sciences learning to understand each other's fields well enough to work together.
Same trap as before, style over substance, just with far higher stakes this time. Get the content wrong there and it doesn't just underperform, it falls apart, and the whole project comes unstuck. The point was substance, and content was the most important factor. People from different subjects, universities, and even countries needing to work together to solve health issues in the field. This is important for their future careers and any collaborative working through their life, so teaching them the importance was key, not some flashy scenario problem solver, or some drag-and-drop builder. Yes, they have a place, but they weren't the goal.
So, am I onto something?
Does AI make content more important than ever, or does it just give weak content somewhere better to hide? I'm not going to answer that one cleanly, and I don't think I should. That's the whole point of content in the first place. It's supposed to make you think, not just tell you what to think. If I handed you my answer wrapped up neatly, I'd have done exactly the thing this whole post has been arguing against, style, finished off, substance skipped. So sit with the question instead. Wherever you land, you'll have done more thinking about it than most of what gets published on the topic, mine included some days.
If you want to talk about what "good content" actually means for your learners, not just what it looks like on a slide, get in touch. Email me or grab 30 minutes, or just take a look at what else we're doing at exceleratelearning.co.uk.
