Why we need The Static in our industry

Our industry didn't just walk away from printed products; it walked away from committing to ideas and words worth printing. What an opportunity!

“They used to say you have to be consistent, you have to be simple. You can be consistently dull and simply shit, though.

“What I'm really poking at is there is such an opportunity to matter. How dare we waste that opportunity being invisible or being normal or being familiar?”

Nils Leonard, the co-founder and creative director of Uncommon Creative Studio, said that at Global’s Outdoor Upfronts on Tuesday. He was talking about poster ads, or billboards, but he just as easily could have been talking about written journalism.

That might seem strange: comparing a huge roadside poster with a wall of text. But bear with me.

As I wrote about earlier this week, the whole panoply of quality media content is under pressure from an ecosystem that has become too dependent on Big Tech platforms for reach.

Who cares about content?

That means that, to play the online content game, you have to deploy tricks to suit the algorithm, such as:

• ensuring headlines are hyper aggressive or annoyingly cryptic, depending on what type of clickbait works best

• being prolific with content volume, which usually means dipping into the well of ‘greatest hits’ rather than take a chance on coming up with something original or risky

• use engagement-hacking techniques, such as tacitly (or explicitly) agree to comment with another creator’s mundane posts so they will return the favour

The result? A wall of online content that is, as Leonard puts it, “consistently dull and simply shit”.

And now we have AI chatbots to help us create even more consistently dull and simple shit, at scale.

This scourge infiltrated B2B media long ago. Journalists who write about the creative industries – the ones who should be able to see this bullshit for what it is and raise the alarm – are, sadly, as complicit as anyone.

Myself included.

How much time have I wasted thinking up clever Tweets, or the ‘right way’ to respond to someone criticising my work on LinkedIn? There was a very short period, years ago, when I was active on Instagram, despite my distaste for the performative guff that shows up there. I tried to be all subversive by posting the most boring pictures I could surface from my boring life “here’s me at the office, making coffee”. Not only was it unpopular, it actually annoyed people, so much so that I shut it down within weeks.

I shudder to think how many books or investigative pieces I could have written in that time. Or, at least, could have tried to write and fail.

Permanence matters

Look, I appreciate the networking opportunities of social media and the ease of publishing of Substack (where, for all its faults, lets me have ownership of my audience in a way that social media never would).

But we’ve run the various experiments of digital publishing over the years to conclude, without doubt, that content for screens will never match the experience of reading on a physical, printed product.

There are various reasons.

One: apps and websites commodify content

We’ve moved from a world of media products to media parts, or from consuming meals to grazing on snacks.

Can you even name three journals, magazines, or news brands that you regularly read from cover to cover in online form? It’s extremely difficult because of the online content game: there’s always more content to push, more ad inventory to cram in, and more data to collect.

This is a disaster for written journalism. The stories we write are strengthened by being read within a product of multiple content pieces of varying shapes, intensities and emotions. Stick with it, and patterns begin to emerge. You feel what an editor feels through their decisions, whether it was the design, the order, or the length and variety of the articles.

In other words, the print product enables you to see between and across ‘content’, instead of seeing content through the same 4-inch or 10-inch screen every day.

Two: permanence raises the stakes

Let’s face it, I could edit this article at any point and you’re very unlikely to know.

I did this within a couple of hours of publishing this week’s earlier piece, because I had made a couple of bone-headed spelling mistakes. Embarrassing, but easily fixable.

Compare this to the hours of painstaking copy proofing that went on when I worked at Campaign (when it was still a monthly, let a lone a weekly, magazine), or during my local newspaper days. Everyone, not just the editor and subeditors, would carefully check for literal and factual errors, because we all wanted to avoid the dreaded phone call or email the next day that informed us of mess-up.

Because if you can’t even spell properly or know your basic facts, why should anyone trust you to handle sensitive topics or exclusive news properly?

I’ve never been brave enough to have a tattoo because what design could I possible commit to that I’d be prepared to have on my body for the rest of my life?

Compare that to the throwaway opinions and poorly written, poorly researched guff that adorns online publications with painful regularity?

How dare we, as journalists, waste our time and your time without striving to create content that matters so much that it would be etched in stone if it were feasible?

Why I’m supporting The Static

Very soon I’ll be supporting a new, print-only publication called The Static.

The Static is a colour tabloid for the advertising, design and media industries, launching on 11 September. It’s built by people who’ve spent their careers surrounded by exactly the kind of shit content I’ve just spent several paragraphs complaining about — and have decided to do something about it, instead of just writing newsletters about it, like me.

Claire Foss, a communications strategist and journalist who’s worked at or written for Haymarket, William Reed, the BBC and Channel 4, is founding and publishing it. Phoebe Willison, the designer behind The Skinny, is building its look.

The launch illustration is a play on VW’s “Lemon” ad, drawn by Thea Bryant, whose client list includes Adidas, Team GB and Amnesty International. That’s not a random flex; it’s the point. A magazine for people who make things beautifully for a living should look like it was made by people who make things beautifully.

I’ll be running the media and broadcast coverage. Tom Banks, formerly of Design Week and The Drum, is running design and advertising. Emily Gosling, who’s written for Creative Review, Design Week and It’s Nice That, is running the Life section — the human stuff behind the job titles.

Here’s the part that matters most: The Static is print-only.

No Instagram. No free version drip-fed onto a website or Substack to chase pageviews. Just an infrequent email to tell subscribers what’s coming, and a limited rack circulation that puts physical copies directly into creative industry offices and hubs from day one, with no algorithm standing between the work and the reader.

And it won’t run press releases. Press releases were never meant to be copied and pasted to the extent that they are now by online, high-volume content merchants. Press officers use to expect journalists to ring them after receiving press releases and ask questions and request interviews to get original quotes.

We just took it for granted that we’d want our work to be original, distinctive and built on human interaction. Are we really prepared to give up on that in the pursuit of just producing ‘more’?

How dare we waste the opportunity to matter by being invisible, normal, familiar.

A print publication you can hold, that costs money to produce, that can’t be quietly edited at midnight to fix a typo no one noticed… that’s about as far from invisible as content gets.

Yes, it’s a gamble. It’s a big bet that permanence still beats reach. I happen to think it’s the right one. And I suspect many of you who care about the creative industries think so, too.

Subscriptions and ad bookings are open now, ahead of the September launch issue. Find out more at thestatic.co.uk, or email claire@thestatic.co.uk.

If you’re interested in writing for The Static, or have ideas for features, opinion and analysis, email omar@thestatic.co.uk.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

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