Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to not succeed in content marketing. -George Santayana

HOW TO MAKE CONTENT MARKETING HISTORY

PART 1 – INTRODUCTION

It was the late 1990s.  The Internet bubble was chock full of newly IPOed companies that may or may not actually have business models.  But they sure did suddenly have a lot of cash.  They did what they thought they needed to – they bought airtime and spent money on making commercials to promote their businesses like it was going out of style.  Little did anyone know, it was going out of style, so to speak.  But we marketers didn’t know that, either, and we had more work than we knew what to do with.  It was a mini-Roaring Twenties.  Everyone seemed to be rich all of the sudden.  Client budgets were huge and expense accounts were lavish.  Then, somehow, the whole world finally figured out that most of these tech start-ups didn’t really do anything that turn a profit… ever.  And the bottom fell out.

The market crashed.  The dot coms that were so kindly paying advertising agencies exorbitant fees and broadcasters a million dollars per second of Super Bowl ad time saw their stock price dive to next to worthless.  And instead of extravagant lunches at Spago and Morton’s we all ended up having to brown bag it for lunch.

What did our industry learn from this?  Apparently not much on the whole.  But the smart marketers took their lumps, learned the lesson, and moved on to the future leaner and more agile.  It’s a good thing they did.

Most of us had an email account by the late 1990s, which we thought was pretty neat.  Maybe we had an eTrade account where we watched our portfolio go up and up and up forever.  That was as far as technology could possibly go, right?  Well, of course not.  Soon we all heard whispers of a tech company called TiVo that actually made something that did something.  We started hearing about something called YouTube where you could watch videos on your computer.  Google, a search engine, became a verb.  And somewhere, someone’s college student daughter laughed at her father when he overheard her talking to a friend and asked, “What’s Facebook?”

Somehow it happened while we were all trying to craft the next big broadcast message to blast out there to a captive audience on our terms – that captive audience was no longer captive.  Good god-fearing Americans started TiVo-ing the Super Bowl, grilling out with their friends an extra hour, then starting the playback and skipping all the commercials.  The next day they watched the popular Super Bowl ads on YouTube – but only the ones they chose to watch.  Then they Googled themselves for vanity’s sake before logging onto MySpace or Facebook and conversing with their friends about the game, the parties, and how cute that Tom Brady quarterback from the Patriots is.

The writing was on the wall – or rather posted in chat rooms, on social networking sites, in blogs, and everywhere else online – our precious captive audience didn’t need us big broadcast marketers anymore.

So thus began a widening chasm in the world of marketing with those clinging to the old model of traditional broadcast advertising on the one side and those embracing the new model of a very different world where you can’t force feed your message to your audience – they have to want to hear you out and they get to talk back.

If you’re hanging on to the old paradigm of marketing, this blog series is here to convince you to let go.

If you’re already looking to embrace the new world order, this series is here to show you the best examples of success (and failure) in how to do so.

Either way, welcome to the fun, cost-effective, interactive reality of marketing to consumers (and other businesses) who don’t want to be marketed to.  It’s less daunting than you may think.  We’ll show you how we do it.  We believe that with this series you can take our experience and knowledge and expertise, build on it, and in very little time, be the next great success in marketing.

AboutFace Media, my company, specializes in content marketing centered around short-form video supported by most conceivable methods of outreach across the spectrum of social media.  This series will make a convincing case why you should consider specializing in content marketing in much the same way.  Bottom line, it works, it’s big, and it’s getting bigger.  Just don’t steal out clients.

Part 1 of an ongoing series.