Reflections from Sanity's Structured Content 2022 Conference

"Content is king."

Every content creator on the planet has heard these words.

While this ubiquitous phrase is frequently credited to Bill Gates circa 1996, some argue that Sumner Redstone first conjured it 20 years earlier. Of course, it was about a different kind of media in the 1970s. 

Over the decades, the web has certainly evolved the definition of content. But the same fundamentals still ring true: content, online or otherwise, is the main ingredient for creating great experiences. And that's what makes it king.

Or... queen?

Now Sanity, an open-source headless CMS in the Jamstack category, is offering up yet another novel permutation of this phrase:

"Content is data." 

While it might lack the pomp and gravitas of a royal reference, it speaks volumes about the company's innovation and how it sees the future of content.

In an effort to build greater community awareness around the subject, Sanity hosted its very first Structured Content 2022 Conference, focusing on the growing role of structured content and what it takes to deliver remarkable digital experiences. 

The event took place live in San Francisco and virtually at watch parties in Oslo and London between May 24 and May 26. It was also the first-ever conference dedicated to structured content. Sanity managed to attract some heavy hitters to sponsor its dance card, including Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, and Gatsby. If you have missed the live conference, no worries, you can watch the recordings on Sanity's website.

I spent time tuning in virtually and provided some highlights from the event. 

What is Sanity.io? 

Sanity is a San Francisco/Oslo-based SaaS startup that provides an innovative platform for structured content. 

Sanity positions itself as a "fast-growing alternative to the traditional CMS," uniquely treating content as data. By storing resources in their Sanity Content Lake, organizations can effectively de-silo their content – making it available for both collaboration and global distribution. By leveraging APIs, users can manage their text, images, and other media in a unified platform and build engaging digital experiences in real-time.

Sanity also enables teams to collaborate on content, design, and code in parallel, allowing them to achieve velocity and ship better products faster. Editors are also able to work more efficiently in customized editing environments built on Sanity's open-source Content Studio, which developers can customize and extend with their own React components.

Over the past few years, Sanity has tripled its customer base and doubled its revenues while broadening a portfolio of notable brands, including Unilever, National Geographic, Figma, and others.

What exactly is "structured content," anyway?

Sanity defines structured content as "content that is broken into its smallest reasonable pieces, which are explicitly organized and classified to be understandable by computers and humans."

Basically, structured content is the idea of rendering content into smaller re-usable blocks. It might be easier to think of them as Legos: the pieces don't change, but they can be taken apart, put back together in a different configuration, and so on.

It's apropos then that the motto at Sanity.io is "create once, publish everywhere." 

In recent years, there has been a massive shift to headless CMSes and JAMStack frameworks. At CMS Critic, we cover headless and headless CMSes on a daily basis.

While Sanity is a superset of a headless CMS, its focus is on structured content. The benefits of using structured content are numerous, allowing content to be authored once and re-used across channels or enhanced through third-party APIs. It also makes it easier to prototype and iterate.

Does the future of digital experiences exist in structured content? How has using structured content helped organizations like the New York Times and AT&T? During Sanity's three-day conference, content professionals from across the globe heard from people and brands about the impact of structured content – and what insights they've gleaned. 

Here are some of our highlights from the keynote:

"The Future of Digital Experience Will Be Powered By Structured Content"

"We're addicted to pages."

-Simen Skogsgrud

This presentation by Sanity Co-Founder and CTO Simen Skogsgrud is my favorite keynote of the conference. In it, Skogsgrud drew attention to creating experiences to connect on a human level.

Simen Skogsrud keynote speech

Skogsgrud opened the keynote by talking about the content being pushed into templates and the bland, cookie-cutter experiences online. One of Sanity's most prominent projects is the new website for OMA – the architecture firm co-founded by the Dutch designer Rem Koolhaas. What Skogsgrud talked about the next resonated with me the most as he talked about his experiences visiting the Prada store in New York and how elevating and special the experience was for him. 

"An experience feels special when it feels intentional. When it feels like someone cared about my interests and are deriving joy in delivering that."

The New York Prada store interior source: prada.com

The most prominent feature in the building is the slope, which has steps, and it provides a unique vantage point both for displaying shoes and accessories and also functions as a seating area, facing a stage that unfolds from the other side of the wave.

Yet, the experience you get at the physical store vs. at the online store is completely different. The experience is generic, and there is no relation between the items presented at the online store. They look like unrelated items floating in space yet within the same grid size, so there is no way to differentiate them. As Skogsgrud stated, in the online store, everything is purely transactional. There's no way to fall in love with Prada in this space as opposed to the physical store.

The Prada store online

When I was an architecture student, we were asked to design a shoe store in Manhattan – and we were given this Prada store as a guide and an inspiration. We visited the store and took photos to draw inspiration for our projects. Now, as a former architecture graduate turned web designer and a content developer, I can't help but agree with Skogsgrud that the content experience online needs to better match the physical experience.

What happens on the digital side is, unfortunately, that the same templates with the same grids are used. All the magic of the meticulously designed store is lost in the digital sphere. Skogsgrud states that "unremarkable experiences lead to unimpressed audiences. Although there may be transactions, they're not connecting with the brand or engaging with the stuff."

The team at Sanity is quite passionate about creating the same experience on the digital side and designing content on the level of a well-designed broadsheet newspaper or a mail-order catalog from the sixties – and in 2022, it must be possible to deliver a remarkable integrated experience that elevates, connects, and inspires audiences. 

Carrie Hane giving keynote speech

How can we craft more remarkable digital experiences? Head of Content Strategy Relations Carrie Hane laid out seven guiding principles to create more inspiring integrated digital experiences:

"How Publishing Organizations Harness Structured Content to Power Editorial Experiences"

Sarah Sweat, the New York Times

Sarah Sweat giving keynote speech

Sarah Sweat demonstrated how she used structured content to innovate new ideas and test out new visions for the New York Times. Some of the key features that Sanity's structured content allowed Sarah's team to do were:

• Create multiple distribution methods: They were able to make their web app look good on other devices such as iPads and using structured content made that a lot easier. This allowed them to get their designs in front of their audience and get their feedback with greater ease. 
• Access live previews: I don't know if you've seen the Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – it was quite an innovative piece of multimedia web journalism that put storytelling at its heart. In the case of the New York Times, art has been quite important, and the editorial teams wanted to know how their designs would look like in real-time. With the content being data, the editorial team was able to listen via webhooks and change their draft content more seamlessly.
• Make new data types easier: In one of their "How-to" articles, the only code that was required to create the page was the code on the right, all of which eliminates the process of having to build and query from an API:

• Improve editorial communication: Editors wanted to leave comments and talk to each other on the platform. With Sanit attaching a new field on their content type where they store their notes or comments that editors leave for each other.

"The Business Side of Structured Content"

Samira Virani, Associate Director, Technology Strategic Platform, AT&T

Samira Virani giving keynote speech

Samira Virani, Associate Director at AT&T, talked about the challenges her company faced in the content category. This included multiple sources and variations of content, frequent updates, constant handoffs, compliance audits, and more. Having to maintain multiple versions of their content for different types of user segments and testing purposes resulted in very complex content publishing workflows.

Like many organizations, AT&T started with a traditional CMS: a monolithic system with no API that required manual content syncing and merging that would take, at times, days. When the time came to consider an upgrade, they sought a platform that would allow them to customize the content publishing workflows for their SEO, as well as meet accessibility and legal requirements. They also wanted a centralized omnichannel CMS that was multi-tenant, stable, reliable, performant, and self-serviceable. They also sought a solution that provided a decentralized content model with a flexible platform to support custom content types. 

The answer: go headless. 

With structured content and a headless CMS, AT&T was able to easily add more channels and adapt to a more composable architecture. Using structured content also allowed meta-tagging so that they could take content and integrate it into their personalization engine. In essence, they were able to accomplish their goals by adopting a modular, content-first approach.

Magnus Hillestad – CEO at Sanity – continued the conversation with Scott Gentz, Director - Technology Strategic Platforms at AT&T. They talked about how and why they made the switch to structured content, and the challenges of migrating to a different CMS. Gentz talked about tooling the stack, revamping their design system, and embracing a more componentized building block approach for the presentation layer on the web. He also covered how their CX team ideated with wireframes, handing them off to the UX team with discrete specifications. 

In the past, digital was all about online. But that’s evolving, and there are multiple touchpoints to consider. As a result, AT&T started thinking about its customer journey in new ways, exploring how it could offer experiences to its customer – regardless of where they are in their journey – and make the experience consistent with structured content. 

Conclusion