What Comes After Content Marketing? Here Are Four Ideas. | Business 2 Community

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the evolving role of content in themarketing world — from the challenges of the “physics” of social media marketing , to Coke’s bold vision for a content-based marketing strategy .

My friend Mitch Joel has also been pondering this topic. In a post entitled The Content Crash , Mitch states that the field has simply “become a pumping ground for a marketing message. Very few (companies) are thinking about utilitarianism marketing and even fewer are thinking about the overall experience.”

Content is advertising?

But here is the line in Mitch’s post I stung me: “It is my belief, that content is the new advertising.”

Wait a minute. People HATE advertising. Does this mean that people are increasingly hating our content too?

Advertising is a paid interruption in an otherwise pleasant stream of content. Is content becoming an unpleasant interruption in our lives, too? With this native advertising trend of craftily embedding paid messages in “free” content, are the lines hopelessly blurred so that content marketing is suspicious and meaningless? Are content marketers the new snake oil shills?

Mitch contends that for content — sponsored or otherwise — to work, it must be exceedingly useful. So what does that mean? What could a possible game plan be to become the signal instead of the noise in this overly-crowded space?

Here are four possible scenarios in a “post content marketing” environment.

Radical trust 

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