The Boomer Death Content Farm

In 2010, at the dawn of a bull market for Boomer-oriented media, Rea McNamara got a job making anarchic web content for ZoomerMedia, a company aimed at an audience of Canadians over 45. It took some unexpected turns.

When I started working as a Content Editor at ZoomerMedia in September 2010, I was relieved to finally have a full-time media job. It seemed like a fairly straightforward gig: updating a couple websites and managing Twitter and Facebook profiles for a demographically-driven media company.

After a couple unpaid internships, freelancing, and columnist stints at an alt weekly and Metro, I took great pleasure in finally having “Editor” in my LinkedIn job title. The novelty of a secure $35,000 annual salary, however, quickly wore off when I soon realized it barely covered my monthly rent and living expenses.

Further, there were a few red flags: the offer emailed from my future boss included the caveat that, “although the position is called Content Editor, a large part of the workload will be SEO and marketing related,” and one of the websites I would update was a social network built using Ning, an online community platform. Here I thought I’d be rubbing shoulders with the media disrupters who helmed the company. Instead, I was essentially a community moderator, even maintaining a couple of fake user accounts to effectively monitor engagement. My office cubicle was located in the de facto IT department, alongside developers and online sales reps. This was not the glamorous media gig I had expected it to be.

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At the time, ZoomerMedia was a still relatively new multi-media company in Toronto targeting Canadians older than forty-five — an age gap the company termed “Zoomers.” (The tagline remains “Boomers with Zip!”) Its properties included their flagship lifestyle glossy Zoomer Magazine, radio and TV stations, as well as shows and conferences. The founder, Moses Znaimer, is a Canadian television pioneer; he co-founded Toronto’s local television station CityTV, which established the “studio-less environment” later adopted by live TV programs like Good Morning America.

My early weeks at Zoomer revealed there wasn’t much of a playbook for my work. My job was a newly created role, focusing on organic online community growth. This form of social engagement was largely untested; there were days where my greatest accomplishment was posting on the Zoomer Facebook community page. The previous content editor, who trained me, resigned less than a week after I started. She had been there for two years; eventually, I would see her exit as an omen. But I was so grateful to have a full-time role — especially coming at the tail end of the Great Recession — and working in the midst of media innovators.

It wasn’t just Znaimer I was working with: Suzanne Boyd, Zoomer Magazine’s editor-in-chief, was the founder of Suede Magazine, a short-lived but highly lauded multicultural fashion publication launched by Time and Essence. Even though I barely registered on Boyd’s radar at Zoomer, I coveted Suede during my university years. When I eventually worked in fashion, she was one of the few women of color in power I could look up to in the very white Canadian media landscape.

Then there was McLean Greaves, ZoomerMedia’s VP of Interactive Content, to whom I reported directly. His Canadian media calling card was his work as the executive producer of CBC’s Emmy-nominated variety show ZeD, the early aughts series that was a pre-YouTube pioneer in broadcasting user-generated content. A Gen Xer who toiled in New York’s 1990s urban dot-com scene, he made his name establishing Cafe los Negros, which was Black Twitter before Black Twitter.

As expected, McLean created an anything-goes content ethos at Zoomer, especially if it was traffic-generating. I’d interview superfans of Gordon Lightfoot outside one of his Massey Hall concerts, or produce a lunchtime flash mob of opera singer Peter Potts singing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” in Toronto’s Union Station. Our biggest hit was a widely-shared supercut of grandparents discovering Photo Booth. I’d spent a morning with cats attempting to produce a video about how cute and fluffy they were, or an afternoon photoshopping Leonard Cohen’s head into various Where’s Waldo?-esque scenarios within international tulip fields, captioned with passages about Montréal in the spring from his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.

McLean was a mentor, but he could also drive me nuts. He would send me 3 AM emails barking for updates, but then would send a Dirty Harry/Rain Man mashup Reddit macro and ask, “Why can’t we do more of that?” We got to surf club, in the net art sense — combing through the detritus of the culture and aesthetics of the internet — as long as we made it Boomer.

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The early 2010s were a bull market for Boomer-oriented content. Boomers were joining Facebook and Twitter in record numbers; despite this shift, social content was still mostly geared towards millennials. Few had recognized yet that an audience known for circulating chain emails in Comic Sans might also want dumb memes that speak to their generational bent on the network sites they had recently joined.

At the beginning, it was so easy. My first few months on the job largely involved finding relevant user-uploaded YouTube clips in the video section of our website and circulating them on our Facebook page. This would include the requisite dog, cat, and baby clickbait, as well as more obscure offerings like 1940s musical clips, a 1960s video of Marlon Brando performing a Tahitian dance, or a country garden montage from Audrey Hepburn’s Gardens of the World 1990s documentary series. Eventually, an editorial calendar took shape, familiar to any media professional who had to toil on the content farming frontlines: writing content around Google trending topics or creating memes that could have been spawned by Reddit. When Tim Horton’s introduced new cup sizes, I wrote an explainer about it. We deliberately spun out commenter fodder, and I’d learn about how our users, most of whom were older than sixty-five, thought McDonald’s truly had the best coffee, or had a love-hate relationship with Jane Fonda. (Jane’s 1980s workouts inspired Goop-level scorn and envy.)

We also had to walk the line between crafting content that spoke to our audience but still brought in external traffic. There was a period when my coworker Steph — my co-conspirator and work wife, who brought much-needed technical savvy to our content mill — would create GIF sets for a post that we would then link to in a conveniently related subreddit. For example, on Black Dog Awareness Day, Steph made GIFs from YouTube clips of playful black dogs, which we dropped in a dog-related subreddit and saw the expected boost to our monthly visitor numbers. However, this wasn’t a durable strategy: Reddit’s moderators were pretty quick at catching link spamming, so our sham accounts would go stealth by participating in multiple AMAs before submitting one of our links for traffic.

Eventually, we needed to build a strategy that would more steadily keep our monthly pageviews afloat. This was when I learned that death, inevitably, was a consistent high-performing subject with an older audience. I couldn’t go wrong in generating social content on assisted suicide or producing memorials for a recently-passed celebrity who was significant to Boomers.

The death content farm, as I dryly called it — it was probably seven months in, when Elizabeth Taylor died, that the gallows humor had kicked in — became one of our evergreens. It had range. When musician Gerry Rafferty died during the previous fall, we fired off a quick summation of his legacy and let a clip of “Baker Street” do the rest. For a bigger name like Miss Taylor, we had to outpace dozens of other outlets covering her death, which resulted in a post where we cropped out and blew up 25 pictures to show just her violet eyes.

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By 2011, ZoomerMedia’s increasing reliance on memorial content collided with the challenges media publishers were beginning to face with social networks. When Facebook algorithms changed later that year — with the introduction of the News Feed and “Top Stories” — our page stopped being a reliable traffic-driver, since Facebook was actively trying to make us buy ads. We went from publishing a weekly newsletter curating user-generated content to biweekly to tri-weekly in the span of four months. Suddenly, our knack for incubating high-performing video content was gone. I recall a supercut we produced of babies laughing at fails — usually a no-brainer formula for success — underperforming our expectations. (This was probably due in part to the video lurching towards a dystopian ending where babies were no longer laughing at their parents or cute animals falling down, but volcanic fires and car crashes.)

Increasingly, as we began to understand that creating original video in-house took more resources than we had, our monthly editorial planning shifted around events that seemed to be harbingers of death, the press conference appearance of a skeletal politician or a CEO’s resignation. This was the case for Jack Layton and Steve Jobs.

Layton, then the Leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party as well as Leader of the Opposition, was a politician who was responsible for promoting democratic socialism when Canada’s Prime Minister was Stephen Harper, an anti-science conservative who prevented climate change scientists from releasing their government-funded research. In comparison, Layton had been an urban cyclist advocate during his time on the Toronto City Council and active in early AIDS awareness. When he led the NDP to become the Opposition in the May 2011 Federal Election, it was the first time in the party’s history. The shock and grief at Layton’s unexpected death only months later at the age of 61 crossed party lines, leading to the spontaneous organization of public vigils across cities in Canada.

As a politician, Layton was a boon for Zoomer’s death content. His family posthumously released a letter he wrote two days before his death, and we immediately reproduced key lines from it — “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair” — as inspirational quote macros that were widely shared in the outpouring of genuine grief that was happening online. I was surprised to see one of those macros shared on Tumblr, my then-platform of choice as a millennial.

Our swiftness channeling the grief at Layton’s death into things that people could share online to express their feelings more succinctly than their own words wasn’t necessarily God’s work, but something akin to that. He was a charismatic Canadian public figure unlikely to be properly eulogized in American media. He also came with countercultural cred and was a relatively young Boomer, and the public mourning surrounding his death by his peers had an aura of identification. As schlocky as the image macros were, we felt a bit like online death doulas, working to give our users worthwhile memorial content for their feeds.

My grandmother had died shortly after I started working at ZoomerMedia, and going to Trinidad for the funeral was out of the question: I was only two weeks into the job and unsure whether I would qualify for bereavement leave, especially since I was still on probation. So I didn’t go. My Zoomer death doula work coincided then with seeing how my grandmother’s death affected my family, especially my own mother — a first-generation Canadian Boomer born in St. James, Port of Spain — and I realized how initial declarations online barely covered the full scope of the grieving process, especially for older people, and the extent to which our society still refuses to consider death and illness as a part of life.

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The fixation on making a celebrity’s death into social media content unfortunately shifted my understanding of online expressions of mourning towards a clinical, cool cynicism. Two years after I left ZoomerMedia, I exchanged emails with my ex about Lou Reed’s passing. “What sucked even more [were] all those lame Twitter tributes from bands and celebrities,” I wrote. “The Who tweeted ‘RIP Lou Reed. Walk on the Peaceful Side.’ Some Hollywood actress I follow wrote: ‘Damn. Lou Reed. Damn.’” This sardonic commentary was really about me being reflexively analytical about my own grieving online, and that limiting social etiquette. A simple #RIP seemed careless; the selection of an appropriate photo or YouTube clip could be loaded with personal brand agenda. Was this saying more about you than the person themself?

I felt this disconnect most acutely with Steve Jobs’ death. Throughout 2011, McLean would send me emails regarding the Apple CEO’s declining health. “We need to plan for this,” was a common refrain in our Google Chat conversations after he’d drop yet another link speculating on Jobs’s imminent death. “This will be huge.”

When Jobs did pass away in October 2011, the death content machine marshalled itself into military formation. We had the inspirational quote image macros, the curated selection of videos to roll out, and a blog post anointing him as an iconic Boomer in the tech world. That blog post was mostly co-written by McLean; it felt like he was trying to reclaim, in a way, his own utopianism about computers and the internet.

But traffic for Layton performed better than Jobs. It had been spontaneous and unexpected, and the strategy rolled out from there; Job was too big, and our image macros competed with others. The great experiment in generating savvier, Boomer-oriented content versus our legacy media competitors had failed, since the audience couldn’t exactly discern clearly the difference.

By this point, a year since I’d started the job, the work stopped being interesting. ZoomerMedia had acquired VisionTV, a multi-faith and multicultural specialty channel, and our online work seemed to swing haphazardly between website testing and trying to draw traffic to a newly launched 45+ dating site that I was tasked with creating fake users for. I was pressured to draft more marketing copy for contests and giveaways. My work wife scored a job in London and had given her two weeks notice. My other boss, who advocated for me when McLean sent demanding, late-night emails, was going on maternity leave. I had just started organizing an art party series, and probably alarmed my other coworkers — by this time, mostly developers, since the sales reps got moved elsewhere — the time I came to work wearing a Tina Turner-esque wig. I was burned out writing about Google trends, chasing Reddit-spawned memes, and lurking in the conversations of Boomers who drank McDonalds coffee, looking for a spark of inspiration. Like any entry-level worker, I was facing a future without any raises or direction. It was all about the traffic, and nothing else. When I was laid off in January 2012, it wasn’t a surprise.

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Less than ten years later, after I had shifted from media to museum work, I started to recognize the Boomer death content farm in other areas of public life. In 2018, I was visiting Montréal, and saw the MAC’s Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything exhibition. It was odd to see my past and present careers converge in a well-intentioned exhibition that mythologized a recently-deceased Boomer. Like the David Bowie Is… exhibition, which was curated from Bowie’s own archive, A Crack in Everything showed the inevitability of Boomer icons having more of a hand in their own legacy-building. The MAC organized commissions by artists like Candice Breitz and Jenny Holzer to make work ostensibly inspired by Cohen’s style and recurring themes, which further cemented Cohen’s stature.

When I was hired as an assistant curator at a boutique art hotel in Toronto a couple years after I left Zoomer, I had already worked as an editor with Blouin ArtInfo, and McLean was one of the few references I could rely upon who could attest to this career shift. He was a performer at a Joni Mitchell tribute I hosted for the art party series, one of my first curatorial projects. We bonded over her 1972 For The Roses album, which was recorded at her home in British Columbia, in the same province where he was raised. He was born in Barbados, and I was second generation, and we understood what it was like to grow up with Caribbean roots in Nanaimo and King Township, respectively.

McLean died in March 2016, and I often think about how his legacy had become so intertwined with ZoomerMedia that it overwhelmed the more innovative work he did as a dot-com trailblazer. Even though he was profiled in the New Yorker and the New York Times, made early websites for Puff Daddy and Spike Lee — not to mention did a YouTube-esque television show pre-YouTube — his earlier accomplishments seemed too easily swept under the rug by a mostly white Canadian media establishment. It profoundly disappoints me, especially as I reflect on how rare of an experience it was to have worked with him, and less directly, Suzanne Boyd, and how that was the last time I had a Black boss.

Our WhatsApp chat log was saved on my phone long after his passing. When I emailed him a 2012 Huffington Post article crediting a YouTuber with creating the grandparents-discovering-Photo-Booth compilation we had generated as traffic bait — the great ruse at Zoomer, of course, was to mimic our users’ social content — he replied cheekily, “great artists steal. :)” He felt our editorial work was best when it was seamless and invisible, redistributing content in a more effective way. I wonder what he would have made of the “OK, Boomer” meme, of some Boomers refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jane Fonda breaking up with Richard Perry.

Looking back, McLean was early in realizing that the internet is a multigenerational space sustained by attention economics: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Whether you’re a millennial, Gen Xer, or Boomer, you’ve likely clicked already on the awful deluge of content tailored to your respective demographic anxieties and insecurities; at worst, you might have already fallen for its hopelessly addictive misinformation and falsification. Sooner or later, the Death Content Farm comes for everyone.

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