Curious copywriters, marketers and SEOs can find millions of “expert opinions” on content marketing surfaced by Google or AI. Credible, firsthand insights into the industry are harder to find.
So when I had the chance to sit down for a chat with Robert Rose, I jumped at the opportunity.
As Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Strategy Advisor and founder of the Content Advisory, Robert Rose is uniquely positioned to share big-picture insights.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Robert explains how his early career in the arts segued into marketing. He speaks thoughtfully about content marketing’s roots, its growth as a practice–and its future.
Lorraine: Robert, can you share how you got into content marketing?
Robert: I grew up in Texas and immediately after graduating from college with an English Lit degree, I moved to Los Angeles. I was going to be either a rock star or a playwright.
It went about as well as you think it might. I got into writing and I ended up doing well, relatively speaking. I had a few plays go up in Los Angeles and one in New York.
I had worked a little bit on a script for Showtime networks. And I ended up, just to pay the rent, getting into their marketing department.
Robert Rose’s self-taught MBA
And as I tend to do when I’m trying to learn a new skill, I immersed myself. I read everything about the history of business and marketing. And I loved it. I loved all things about it.
My own little MBA in 1997-ish happened to coincide with the .com boom. I started working with .com companies and building websites.
My wife and I moved to DC and I ended up in website design. We grew that business and were building websites for some of the biggest companies on the planet. AOL. MCI.
We moved back to LA and I got a job at a big internet consulting firm building content-oriented websites, mostly in the entertainment business. Websites for NBC and the Oscars.
Then the.com boom went bust. So circa 2002, I ended up in the diaspora with some friends who formed a software company.
The VC basically plopped millions of dollars on my desk and said, “Marketing, go do that. We don’t know what it is. Go figure it out.”
Creating Value with Content circa 2002
Much to the consternation of my board and management, I said, “I’m going to build a media department, instead of a marketing department. And I want to hire journalists and writers and designers and communicators.”
So I built a group that basically put out content.
The Marketing Part is Easy.
My hypothesis was to hire people who can write—go a mile deep on thought leadership content—and teach them to do marketing. The marketing part is easy.
You can teach how to do an A/B test or an email or how to buy media. That’s tactical. But you can’t teach someone to be a great writer, a great communicator.
And it worked, weirdly enough. We grew—for six years I grew that company and everything was going great.
“This Guy was Calling it ‘Content Marketing’.”
Then I read this book, Get Content Get Customers, by Joe Pulizzi. This guy was calling it “content marketing”—this thing that I’d been doing for almost six years.
I was out on the speaking circuit and met Joe. We had dinner—and from Day One, we got on immediately. Just became fast friends.
And he called me a couple of weeks after that, and said, “Hey, listen, I’m going to start this thing. The Content Marketing Institute.”
He asked me to be on the advisory board in 2008. In 2009, I quit my job and went all in with Joe. He was coming at it from the media side of the business, the publishing side. And I was going to come at it from the practitioner side.
2007: The Blogging Sweat Equity Era
Lorraine: Around 2007-2008, content seemed to be sort of a grassroots marketing movement associated with blogging and bootstrapping small businesses. It was distinctly shaped by people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Brian Clark at Copyblogger. Can you comment on that?
Robert: I think it was a result of the popularity of inbound. You saw two things converge. The stuff that Brian Clark was doing with Copyblogger, which was amazing, right. He was teaching people how to blog.
And the blogging converged with the popularity of inbound. You had HubSpot driving a content marketing program. And there was a lot of VC money and people saying “be found, drive leads.”
And the way you’d be found is to create a lot of content. It was quantity, quantity, quantity. Push out stuff. Answer every question.
Content that Drives Results Instead of Settling Bar Bets
I always, from the very beginning, felt that was a flawed model because for me, it was always settling bar bets. I didn’t want to settle bar bets.
Because the way that I was taught by Theodore Levitt and Peter Drucker, quantity metrics don’t matter. It’s all about the action the customer takes.
For me, steeped in that model, it was always about driving results not vanity metrics. So it was about the quality of the writing.
VCs Enter the Content Marketing Landscape in 2011.
Lorraine: When did capital start to pour into content marketing, and when did automation and applications start exploding?
Robert: I would say it started in 2011. That’s when the East Coast VC firms began investing. Content start-ups were courted by the VC crowd mostly in Boston and New York.
That’s when we saw the big growth of the venture-backed capital-based company started to come to Content Marketing World.
Today’s Biggest Content Marketing Challenge: Silos
Lorraine: At Content Marketing World, each year I hear one or two repeated themes on content marketing’s biggest challenge. Some say distribution. Lack of C Suite buy-in. Or siloed departments. I wonder what your takeaway is this year. What’s the biggest challenge we face?
Robert: The biggest challenge that was noted in this year’s research was the silos. And I see it every single day. With every single client. These days, it is rare I’m creating content marketing strategy from scratch. What I’m doing now is fixing broken strategy.
Businesses say, “Oh, content, we need to do that. That’s an important thing. You and you—go figure it out.”
And they do. The content team goes to conferences. They read books. They figure it out. They say, we’re going to get a blog. Or we’re going to get a resource center. We’re going to make some assets. They start experimenting with it. And it works in varying degrees.
And then the business goes, “Yes. More please.”
So the first reaction is to go to a freelancer network and say, “More assets. We need to pour more assets into the organization.”
And then it works or it doesn’t work. Or it starts to fall down. It’s a marketing problem—not a content marketing problem. It’s marketing that’s siloed.
And I blame it mostly on the digital efforts of the early 2000s, when we started to stratify the buyer’s journey and create all these different teams. Agencies did the same.
So you had a social agency. You had a digital agency. You had a lead and an SEM and a PPC agency.
Now teams don’t talk to each other. Quite frankly, they don’t really like each other. And the original content team is trying to serve everyone. And they can’t. They won’t. Or they’ll serve all of them poorly.
Privacy and the Death of Social
Lorraine: One of the most intriguing points of Joe Pulizzi’s CM World presentation was his prediction of the “end of social.” Outside of marketing, there is growing concern about issues of privacy–as documented exhaustively in Shoshona Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism. Thoughts?
Robert: Content marketing done well, done right, is the answer to GDPR (Editor’s note: GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation) and privacy. I’ve been talking a lot about this with clients and at workshops.
People complain that the GDPR is vague. One of my colleagues, Tim Walters, who thinks a lot about the GDPR, notes it was meant to be vague. They didn’t want you to be able to check a box and basically engineer around it.
It wasn’t meant to be just complied with. It was meant to be in the spirit. So not figuring out: “Okay, I can work around this checkbox and this checkbox. If I just do the privacy statement the right way, I’ve complied.”
What content marketing does so well—when it’s done well—is deliver a content product of value to an audience. And if we treat those audiences with the same care and respect that we would our customers, then we’re not only in compliance, we’re in the spirit of those privacy issues.
We’ve actually decreased the size of the Web to Google, Facebook, Netflix, and a couple of others… There’s a research study that said we basically visit 12 websites.
The problem is we, as marketers, are getting conflated with that. We’re in a bad halo effect at the moment.
And so even if we do mean well and do have integrity in mind, it’s hard for us to get out of people conflating us with Facebook. And thinking we’re going to use data for evil purposes.
And I’d like to think we can keep the Web free and open and also lean in to data collection, as it makes sense to deliver better experiences for consumers. I believe that. I really do. I’m always optimistic.
Social’s Organic Reach is Done
Lorraine: Regarding the “death of social”: For companies relying on social and not an owned platform…
Robert: I think it’s the death of organic reach. Social is promotion and distribution. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, these are the ABC, CBS and NBC of our time. They’re broadcast media.
We pay for the privilege of reaching audiences with some frequency. And so they’re paid distribution networks of content, where you can pay for an ad, you can pay for content to be promoted.
And hopefully we’re pulling those people into some owned experience and building an audience.
Where is Content Marketing Headed?
Lorraine: Any other thoughts on the future?
Robert: I’m hopeful for it. Somebody asked me the other day, “What’s the future of content marketing?” And I said, well, it’s just marketing. It’s part of an integrated marketing program. Content becomes part of what we do. I hope it just becomes smart marketing.
Robert Rose’s Mini MBA Reading List
Robert generously shared his list of favorite marketing books and articles.
- The Practice Of Management, Peter F. Drucker
- The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker
- The Marketing Imagination, Theodore M. Levitt
- Marketing Myopia, Theodore M. Levitt
- Kotler on Marketing, Philip Kotler
- Marketing Management, Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller
- How To Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen
- Crossing The Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore
- The One to One Future, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
- Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Youngme Moon
- The End of Competitive Advantage, Rita Gunther McGrath
What’s Your Biggest Content Marketing Challenge?
What’s the biggest hurdle you face in content marketing today? I’d love to hear your thoughts in comments.
Thank you for the information you wrote.
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