The ROI of POV

The safest thing to do with your content is be agreeable. State the conventional wisdom. Avoid the controversial framing. Stay in the middle of the road where nobody can accuse you of being wrong.

The safest thing is also the most expensive.

Agreeable content has a ceiling. The ceiling is fine: decent traffic, acceptable engagement, respectable open rates. You will never be embarrassed by agreeable content. You will also never be talked about. Nobody shares the thing they already knew. Nobody emails a friend to say: you have to read this, it said exactly what everyone else said.

Point of view content — content that takes an actual position, names the thing that isn’t being named, and is willing to be wrong in public — has a different risk profile and a different return profile. The risk is being disagreed with. The return is being remembered.

What Point of View Actually Is

Point of view is not the same as being provocative for its own sake. Contrarianism is a pose; it’s as uncomplicated as agreement and just as cheap. Real point of view is the natural result of knowing your subject well enough to have a specific opinion about it that you can defend.

The difference: a contrarian says everyone else is wrong. A person with a point of view says I’ve been thinking about this specific thing, and here’s what I actually think, which may not be what you expected me to think, and here’s why.

sounding like everyone else is usually a point-of-view problem, not a writing problem. The writing is fine. The perspective is borrowed. When there’s no one home with an actual opinion, the content takes the shape of whatever the category says content is supposed to say, and the category already has enough of that.

The Mechanism

Point of view content earns returns through a specific mechanism, and understanding the mechanism is useful.

When someone reads a piece that has a clear, defensible position, they do one of two things: they agree loudly, or they push back. Both responses are commercially valuable. The person who agrees loudly shares it. The person who pushes back comments, sends it to their team with a “thoughts?” note, or writes a response. Either way, the piece extends beyond its original reach because it provoked a response worth having.

Agreeable content provokes no such response. It is read and filed. Sometimes it is bookmarked. Mostly it is forgotten at a rate that no amount of SEO optimization can fully compensate for.

Point of View at Scale

The practical challenge is that point of view is harder to produce at volume than agreeable content. It requires someone in the operation who has opinions and the authority to put them in the work — which is a different kind of editorial leadership than quality control or SEO management.

The brands that stand out in any category are the ones where you know, even before you read the headline, that this piece is going to have a perspective you won’t find in the generic version. That’s not an accident. It’s the result of a specific decision, made at the leadership level, that the content operation will say things rather than mention them.

The Trade

You are trading the comfort of being uncontroversial for the compound interest of being distinctive. The short-term returns look worse. A piece that takes a position will have more people who didn’t like it. It will get pushback. It may occasionally generate a response you have to respond to.

What it will not generate is the quiet, invisible cost of being ignored — which is what a brand voice without a strategy produces over time, reliably, at scale.

This post is part of the Clifton Creative guide to fractional editorial leadership.

The question is not whether to have a point of view. You already have one. The question is whether you’re letting it into the work. Part of what makes it so hard to maintain is what platforms do to editorial judgment when you let them set the terms — the pressure to optimize for what performs on a given platform gradually crowds out the perspective that makes the work worth reading.

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Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call