Brand Journalism Expands, Content Marketing Spending Rises

Welcome  to this week’s episode of PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, which can now be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

This week’s show

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Show overview

1. Content Marketing in the News

1. Content Marketing Spending Up, Outsourcing Down: The Custom Content Council and ContentWise released its 14th survey on the content marketing industry. In this year’s study, 37 percent of the total marketing budget went to content marketing, for a total average of $1.8 million per brand. One key finding was that outsourcing dropped from 56 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2013, meaning that more brands are bringing their content marketing production inside the organization. (Contributing release: Custom Content Council)

2. Time Inc. Expands into Native Advertising: Joe and Robert discuss Time’s aggressive move into offering more native advertising opportunities, and what this means for both brands and publishers alike (spoiler alert: This may not be the salvation media companies are waiting for, after all). (Contributing article: NY Post)

3. Coca-Cola Does It Again: Coke announced the expansion of its Coca-Cola Journey Content Platform by introducing a new blogger network of experts. Coke states that this brand journalism initiative will be unlike the LinkedIn influencer program in that Coke is going after new voices. (Contributing article: eConsultancy)

In addition, Ashley Brown from Coca-Cola announced Coke’s plans to kill the press release for good by the year 2015. Here is a two-minute video on that strategy for your viewing pleasure.

1. Congratulations to Joe Chernov: Joe and Robert congratulate long-time CMI friend Joe Chernov (and CMI’s 2012 Content Marketer of the Year) on his move to HubSpot. Formal announcement can be found here. (Contributing discussion about Dharmesh Shah and HubSpot’s move away from “inbound marketing” as a term can be found here.)

2. Rants & Raves

1. Joe’s Rant: Joe rants about his recent confrontation with a marketer who stated that truly great content does not need to be marketed. Joe contends that if you are going to create any content at all, you better have an idea of how to market the content first.

2. Robert’s Rant: Robert rants about marketers’ use of metrics. Robert addresses a particular study in which 73 percent of respondents rely on website traffic as the No. 1 indicator of success for content marketing (which is very much in line with CMI’s own research, found here).

3. This Old Marketing Example of the Week

1. LEGO Magazine was launched as Brick Kicks magazine in 1987. Over the years, the magazine has gone through a number of renditions, yet today it still remains a key customer retention/ loyalty/ up-sell vehicle for LEGO. Today’s magazine features comics, games, modeling tips, user-generated examples, and more. (Contributing article: Wikipedia)

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