If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, we’re due for a MASSIVE backlash against content marketing.
It’s already started. More and more bloggers are finally getting fed up with all the hype and are pushing back. A recent post by Neil Hopkins (Interacter) is a case in point. It’s called “Content marketing is nothing more than the Emperor’s new clothes,” which pretty much sums up what most of the new batch of whistleblowers are so mad about.
It’s not the thing itself that is getting everyone so upset, it’s the hype.
This is a weird moment for me because I tend to be the guy who likes to stick a pin in the over-inflated. I’m a card-carrying hater and I especially enjoy hating the very things that everybody else has agreed to love. Group-think triggers my aversion to anything resembling a Nuremberg Rally, Red Scare, Witch Hunt or Chelsea Football crowd. So it’s distinctly uncomfortable to find myself riding on a bandwagon when the people throwing rotten tomatoes at it look so much like me.In his post, Neil trots out the Google Trends graph showing the dramatic increase in mentions of the term ‘content marketing.’ If you’ve ever seen a hockey stick, you’ll recognise it. He also brings in the CMI’s definition of content marketing and the Wikipedia history. His conclusion: “Every time I hear the phrase ‘Content Marketing,’ I want to scream until I puke.” (Given the Google chart, it’s a mystery how poor Neil keeps any food down at all).
So even though I have to suppress an urge to join the hecklers, I am a content marketer and I feel I ought to defend the discipline. With that in mind, here’s a summary of the arguments I’ve heard against content marketing. In each case, I hope to show that the argument is not with content marketing at all: it’s with some other obnoxious phenomenon that has attached itself to our fair art.
So here are the main objections:
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