When facts aren't enough

Analysts and journalists have long been tasked with consolidating the facts and presenting their findings to readers in ways that the audience can understand. But if modern discourse teaches us anything, it’s that context can be manipulated to mislead an audience just as egregiously as facts can be twisted into falsehoods.

HubSpot found that the average length of a successful YouTube video is only 24 to 90 seconds. An honest reporter will see that as a challenge, and an opportunity to deliver a concise but effective message. Manipulators, on the other hand, see that as an opportunity to mislead—by including factual information but fabricating or obfuscating its context.

Of course, taking facts out of context to embellish messaging is nothing new—just look at 20th-century advertising. What’s changed is the legitimization of this practice at institutions directly tasked with doing the opposite.

Case in Point: Politics

You don’t need to pick sides in today’s political discourse to understand the importance of context. We’ve seen firsthand how Americans tuning in to different content from the same event can walk away with opposing understandings of its significance.

What we’re beginning to understand is just how high the stakes have become when this digression takes place at scale. And whether you’re a marketer or a journalist, you can’t put the onus on your audience to get the message straight.

When Determining the Truth, the Onus Increasingly Falls on Audiences

Consumers fall in all different categories, and each absorbs content differently. But while this has always been the case, the content landscape is evolving. Not only are there new types of content, but new dimensions to content consumption that can eliminate the value of an honest message and exacerbate the damage from a dishonest one.

For example, plenty of consumers get their news only from videos, and only from a single channel—but absorb lots of content from that one producer. Others may consume different content formats across multiple channels, arming themselves with contextual information to make sense of the facts (and falsehoods) they absorb in all of them.

But more often than not, consumers don’t have the resources or the time to discern fact from fiction. The New York Times recently found that nearly half of Americans believe “it’s difficult to know whether the information they encounter is true”; in any case, who can say those that do “know” are correct? As determining the truth increasingly falls on regular people, those people as a whole simply aren’t prepared.

It’s a positive societal development that disseminating information is an opportunity available to anyone. But it’s become more important than ever that consumers’ “content diet” be managed the same way consumers manage their food diet—through an end-to-end understanding of how it’s produced.

It’s Your Job to Empower Your Audience

Both disseminators and consumers have limited opportunities to convey and absorb facts in honest contexts. The traditional model, where most Americans get all their information from a handful of trustworthy sources, is no longer sustainable. Honest reporters can no longer count on their audiences to take their claims at face value, either. Instead, information needs to be increasingly connected and layered. That means supporting claims with other contextually relevant sources, often in real time.

If you’re creating a narrative for consumers based on facts and contexts you understand to be true, your goal should not be to dictate; your goal should be to deliver your audience to the level of understanding you yourself have achieved. More importantly, you need to arm them with enough contextual information, so they feel confident about their conclusions.

In this sense, the challenge is not to speak louder or capture a larger audience for the truth to succeed—the challenge is to empower the audience you have with the resources to disseminate themselves. Marketers do this with third-party reviews, case studies, and success reports, which lend credence to their claims because they come from unbiased sources.

Back to That 24 to 90-Second Video

It’s not enough to barrage your audience with the type of information that you know they will be happy to consume. You have to show how that information exists in context and what sources are available to back it up other than your own insistence.

With that in mind, you may be able to do more with that 24 to 90-second video than you first thought.