B2B marketers be warned!
We stand at the threshold of a "Content Arms Race," says Doug Kessler, creative director for Velocity, on Hubspot's Inbound Marketing Blog.
He compares the state of content marketing today to that of TV advertising in the 1950s.
"The first companies to jump into this exciting new medium discovered something big," he writes. "They discovered that they could use TV ads to build something called brands."
But it wasn't long before TV's pioneers were swamped by sodbusters, and TV advertising lost its luster.
"We’re in a similar place right now," Kessler writes. The window is shutting on opportunities to become content-marketing pioneers ("Those guys who put out that great stuff”).
Marketers instead are entering a Content Arms Race in which "every marketing discipline is becoming
content-powered.
"In the
content marketplace, you’re not just up against your direct competitors," Kessler says. "You’re up against everyone who’s
producing content on the same issues. You’re
competing against all of these in an epic battle for the scarcest resource on Earth:
people’s attention."
What's the fallout?
"When
the deluge hits," Kessler says, "all this content is going to start to look a hell of a lot
like something we’ve all become really, really good at ignoring. It’s going to
look like advertising."
