Double down on quality
My personal guide to creating good content
A few weeks ago, I was at a job interview and the recruiter asked me:
- How do you balance the need for fast output with quality?
- There’s no balance, I replied. In the age of AI, we need to double down on quality.
I think my answer may have cost me the job. 🫠
And it’s not the first time this has happened. A while back, a CEO I respect told me:
- Gabriela, I love the attention your team puts into creating things, but it takes too long. We should make content like people make sausages. We need to become sausage makers.
He wasn’t wrong.
Social media rewards frequency and engagement. If we want to stay top of mind, we have to produce, produce, produce...entertain, entertain, entertain. But I’ve always felt uncomfortable with that idea.
Sausages are easy to make and tasty. But do we really want to live in a world where we’re fed sausages all day? That’s not the kind of work I want to be remembered for. And it’s certainly not how I think brands build a competitive advantage in the long run.
A few years have gone by, and now we know that sausages aren’t great for our health and spending too much time scrolling and consuming short-form content isn’t either.
So, when the recruiter asked me to go deeper, I told him:
- AI has made it possible to produce content faster, cheaper and at an almost infinite scale. But just because we can produce more, does that mean we should? Brands are feeding people content every day. What kind of food are we serving? I believe we need to be more selective about what we publish. We shouldn’t create more. We should create better.
I could tell from his expression that this wasn’t the answer he was expecting.
But I stand by it.
I think about content the way I think about food. I learned this from my friend Roger Casas-Alatriste.
There’s junk food and there’s nourishing food. Junk food is crunchy, fatty and delicious. But an hour later, you feel terrible. A bit like spending three hours mindlessly scrolling.
So, whenever I work with clients to create content, there’s a check list we always go through:
Are we adding value?
Is what we're making worth remembering?
Does it make people smarter?
Is it entertaining?
Does it reflect what we believe in?
If we answer yes to two or more, we publish. If we don't, we go back to the drawing board.
So if you’re a brand with a small budget, my advice is this:
Don’t spend it all feeding the algorithm.
Don’t fill your channels with AI slop just because you can.
Choose to nourish, not just fill up.
Be intentional.
Create things that are good for your audience, good for your brand, and good for the world you want to help create.
The best food doesn't just nourish the person eating it. It considers the soil, the farmers, the animals, the ecosystems and the communities behind it.
The best brands should think the same way.