The past few months, I have been seeing a pattern that has started showing up on my social platform feeds.
The same video appears across platforms. Same people, same action, same outcome. Yet, it somehow manages to live three completely different lives.
On Instagram, it stays refreshingly uncomplicated. Someone slips, someone laughs, a dog does something adorable. You watch it, maybe send it to a friend with a “this is you” message, and move on. Nobody feels compelled to discover deeper meaning in a man losing balance.
On Facebook, it becomes mildly emotional. Someone tags school friends, someone says “this was so us”, and for a brief moment it turns into a nostalgia pit stop before everyone goes back to whatever they were doing.
And then… somewhere along the way, it becomes something else on Linkedin.
A simple fall becomes a lesson in resilience.
A missed step becomes a masterclass in handling failure.
A random act of help becomes “what true leadership looks like”.
This is the point when one starts feeling slightly sorry for the people in the video. They woke up, went about their day, and by evening, they’ve unknowingly contributed to management thinking.
This isn’t about platforms as much as it is about us.
We seem to have developed a habit. Almost a reflex.
We don’t just watch content anymore. We feel the need to interpret it, elevate it and extract meaning from it… whether it exists or not.
And the more you scroll, the more you realise something else.
A lot of these “lessons” are beautifully written… and completely interchangeable.
Remove the video, the caption still works.
Swap the caption with another post, it still works.
Change the context, it still works.
Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question.
Are we really deriving insight from content…
or are we just very good at attaching ready-made insight to anything we see?
For marketers, this is where it stops being interesting and starts becoming familiar.
And this is exactly what brands have been doing for a while.
Take the same product. Add a different context. Attach a different meaning.
Suddenly it is about purpose. Or resilience. Or community. Or something else that sounds important. 😊
Nothing wrong with that. Except… when everyone does it, everything starts sounding the same.
Different campaigns. Same emotion.
Different brands. Same message.
Different stories. Same conclusion.
And when everything starts sounding the same, attention quietly drops. Not because the content is bad, but because nothing feels distinct enough to remember.
We have quietly moved from creating content, to contextualising content, to now reinterpreting content at scale.
The original moment is no longer the hero.
The meaning we assign to it is.
And today, with technology, it takes very little effort to generate multiple perspectives on the same piece of content. One version can be funny, another emotional, a third insightful, and a fourth that sounds like it is being spewed out by one of the Marketing Gurus in a leadership workshop with watered down tea.
Which is, of course efficient.
But it also creates a certain sameness.
Because when everyone is drawing from similar patterns of meaning, the outputs begin to resemble each other. Different words, same lesson. Different situations, same takeaway.
You scroll, you nod, and after a point, everything starts sounding familiar.
For marketers, this changes the game.
If everyone can create content, and everyone can reinterpret it, then simply adding a lesson is no longer differentiation. That space is already crowded.
The real edge will come from what is harder to manufacture.
A point of view that is specific.
An observation that feels earned, not assembled.
A voice that sounds like a person, not a format.
And occasionally, the ability to resist the urge to over-explain.
Every piece of content does not need to become a philosophy. Sometimes a fall is just a fall. Sometimes a moment is just a moment.
And ironically, in a world where one is trying to make everything mean something, simplicity might stand out the most.
Which brings us back to that original video.
A person slips.
A dog reacts.
Someone helps.
What it means, increasingly, depends less on what happened… and more on who is telling the story.
For those of us in marketing, that is both an opportunity and a warning.
While it has never been easier to add meaning, it has also never been easier to manufacture meaning.
And in that world, the brands that will stand out will not be the ones adding more lessons…
but the ones saying something that doesn’t feel like it came from the same template as everything else.
(Views are personal)
