I blame Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali and the little skinny dude off The Cook and the Chef. These modern day heroes have us discussing the secret to a good celeriac pure and how you simply must use a good shiraz in your red wine jus, because nothing else will do. I’ve been to dinner parties where the host has perfectly slow poached quail eggs for her crispy noodle and asian green salad but couldn’t manage to cook the rice properly.

Potatoes. Read on, I'll explain.

Let’s face it the world would have starved a long time ago if it weren’t for potatoes, rice and pasta. Man cannot live off coconut foam and micro-greens alone.

There is a lesson in this (it’s a stretch I know) for digital marketers currently obsessing with the finer frills of SEO, the engagement rates of their home page take-overs and the eCPM of their performance media buy. We’re forgetting the Internet (and it’s users) need feeding.

Cast your mind back to 2004, the Internet was very hungry. It was fed up with small portions of flash intros, gourmet brochure-ware websites and reductions of one-way communications. We demanded something bigger to chew on.  Comfort food finally came in the form of Blogger, Wikipedia and Co. who, in successfully bringing down the worldwide walled web, encouraged a new breed of chefs cooking up simple meals of content and conversations we could all digest.

It’s been 6 years since this wall came down yet big business is still struggling with getting simple well cooked content (user generated or otherwise) onto the menu. There’s little encouragement from the industry to change our ways. The ‘c’ word rarely gets a mention in agency land, maybe because there’s no award for “Best User Generated Content” or maybe it’s because, like potatoes, it’s hard to charge big dollars for.

All excuses to one side, it is time to put focus back on content. It is content that makes for great SEO, it is content that delivers great user experience and it is content that reduces bounce rates and improves conversion – nothing more complicated than that. So get back to basics, put ‘content strategy’ at the head of your brief and and give it the due time and consideration it needs. Don’t fear you can still add a touch of truffle oil at the end.