Don't build your house on rented ground!

And here I am on substack 😵‍💫

Here’s to new beginnings 🥂

The first step is the hardest. There, that step is done, now push trough.

1. Writing seems inevitable

I’m not new to publishing. I’m not new to sharing thoughts and ideas. I believe it’s the thing I like most. I’ve had 2 decent blogs: one custom build, started some 20 years ago. A marketing blog in English that had quite a following, but I neglected in the end. And then a new one on Tumblr, in Dutch, also on marketing, started some 15 years ago. I liked that platform a lot tbh, it was build for pushing ideas. An idea could be a link to a youtube film, an image as well as a text post you spend a couple of hours on. But when I started my advertising agency (AdSomeNoise) blogging got to the back burner. And when I tried picking things up on Tumblr, it’s lost it’s mojo. (Tumblr’s rise and fall is extreme and worth exploring on it’s own)

After that my writing moved to Facebook, and LinkedIn. Now it’s mostly LinkedIn. I have posts ranging from an audience of a few 10k to over a million. While it’s a good platform to build networks, reach people and share ideas .. I’m still missing something. It’s not a very good publishing platform. I’ve been thinking why this might be, and I believe it’s because it’s not about me. This sounds self-centered, and maybe it is, but I’m missing control. It all seems so random. Stupid shit getting a lot of attention and (in my mind) interesting pieces getting totally ignored. “You have to learn the LinkedIn tricks”, they say, and fair enough, and I know a trick or two, but I don’t like to become too instrumental. Ever wondered why all LinkedIn posts look the same?

I even jumped into podcasting! Since the beginning of the year I pushed out a short episode every day, in Dutch! That’s 202 episodes so far (I misnumbered somewhere). While a great medium it has it’s downsides as well. And of course, I know, an episode per day is too much. I agree. But I’m doing this for myself, building discipline, getting to know the medium. And I also learned if you don’t promote it, like all the time, it won’t get traction. So it’s not getting traction. Next year I’ll do it differently.

I’m not this well equipped .. I also don’t look that handsome. Damn you AI!

And next to all of this I tried more: Twitter, Medium, newsletters from my company and from time to time a publication in a trade magazine. So yes, writing seems inevitable. At least, sharing ideas is. Writing is a means to an end.

2. A paradigm shift

I started working in 2002 and quickly ended up in marketing and advertising. Throughout the nillies the advice I gave to clients was this: don’t build a house on rented ground. Meaning: control your shit. Make sure you have the keys, the contacts, the hosting, the tech, .. But things changed. By the time Facebook hit this position was no longer maintainable. Everyone switched. Carefully curated email list were exchanged for anonymous fans and followers. Link gates (applications in Facebook where you had to like a page to win something) exchanged opt-ins. The best way to get an audience was create one on social media. And you could address this audience for free and super easy, what’s not to like (pun intended). Those were the days.

The “Don’t build on rented ground” mantra was replaced by a new one: “go where your audience is”. This place was social media, more specific: Facebook. And later Instagram. Life was good.

But things changed. Slowly but quickly. To reach the audience you carefull build, you now had to pay. A few euro’s at first, a couple hundreds later and we’re now in the thousands. For some reason we ran with it! Isn’t this ironic? We gave away our audiences and accepted to pay to reach them.

3. Looking for control

Is there a digital circle of life? Will we go back to building on own ground. Or is there something better? Is substack better? I don’t know, let’s find out.

The reason why rented ground has an edge is foremost because of distribution. If you publish on LinkedIn, you will reach people. Maybe not enough, maybe not under you control, but at least there’s something substantial. If I write on an own website, chances are nobody knows. Or I have to promote it on the aforementioned platforms. What exactly do I win?

So maybe Substack is the best of both worlds. A place to write and maintain my own content, and a network to distribute and get traction.

What I really would love is a place to centralize. The blockchain of content so to say. That you can use as a source and publish everywhere, without being penalized (because that’s what platforms do).

4. Hi I’m Steven

As you know by now, I like to write ;-)

I will mostly write about marketing and advertising, because that’s what I like and what I do for a living. I’m currently living in Belgium with my wife and 2 kids. I (co-)founded by own agency AdSomeNoise in 2012, once started as a banner production studio, but now pivoted into what I believe is a blueprint of what a future agency should like like. I love to discuss these topics, so feel free to chip in your thoughts.

They tell me to ask you to subscibe, so I’d like to ask you to subscribe. Or not, whatever you like. You can do so below.

Cheers,
Steven