Let’s revisit it, and plot RTB on its curve. What else looks a bit like a technological roller coaster? It’s the enterprise’s old friend, the Gartner Hype Cycle. It sounds like a roller coaster ride, doesn’t it? What have we seen over this brief period of time? An open standard, the birth of a market, testing and trialing at a widespread level, skyrocketing growth, some pitfalls along the way (bots!) and finally acceptance and rapid adoption. RTB adoption, frankly, rivals the adoption of other long-lasting and hugely significant technological trends, such as the proliferation of Wi-Fi, Google’s explosion in search, the growth of mobile phones and even the adoption of the iPhone. In the four years real-time bidding has been commercially available, it has emerged as one of the industry’s fastest-growing technologies.
Today’s column is written by David Shapiro, vice president of corporate development at DataXu. “Now,” he says, “is when the hard work begins."Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. While he’s no less enthusiastic about the promise of content marketing, Joe recognizes that we’re in the earliest innings of the game. “These are content-first brands,” he says.Īnd they’re also eons ahead of the average content marketer. Joe mentions bold-faced brands like Red Bull, Lego and Marriott that clearly get content marketing.
They target too many audiences-where brands fail to focus on a serve a niche, instead casting a wide net with content that’s one size fits all-but, more likely, all sizes fit none.They tell undifferentiated stories-where your content is lost in a cacophony of competing content-or, worse, when a brand’s content sounds exactly like its competitors.They’re impatient for impact-where executives expect content marketing efforts to ring the cash register on a short horizon-and, when it doesn’t, they deem it a failure.They’re more about the brand than the audience-where marketers focus on their value proposition more than their values where the brand-not the audience-is the hero in the story.They focus on campaigns, not conversations-where content marketing is executed with a beginning and an end explicitly to drive short-term results for the business.Joe shared what he sees as the causes of these failures offered here with some light editorializing: He said that we’re now starting to see more failures than successes-and they’re becoming public. He said that, while last year’s tone reflected unbridled optimism, this year he’s seeing disbelievers. But while he’s an enthusiastic promoter of the content marketing movement, his comments struck a cautionary tone. Joe is a showman who wears perfectly orchestrated orange accents to amplify his brand. I had a chance to spend some time with Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, producer of Content Marketing World, and widely considered one of the most influential voices in content marketing. It was an impressive event-its size, scale, quality and attitude testament to the energy around the content marketing movement. I heard these findings echoed back last week in Cleveland, where I attended the fifth annual Content Marketing World. However, plenty of others are still fumbling awkwardly to adapt to the age of brand publishing. This research, of course, focused on the best practices of the most progressive content marketers. It simply means that there’s cause for vigilance-and perhaps some rocky roads ahead.Įarlier this year, my Gartner colleague Kirsten Newbold-Knipp and I published research that pointed to the maturation of content marketing as a practice, from experimental to operational (see “ Content Marketing Comes of Age” subscription required). This year, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing showed this category on the decline-rounding the peak of inflated expectations and flirting with its slide into the trough of disillusionment.ĭoes this mean that content marketing is doomed to fade away? Take, for example, content marketing, which has ranked near the top of digital marketing spending priorities for the past several years (see “ CMO Spending Survey: Eye on the Buyer” subscription required).
Others trends are longer-lasting, following the full arc of the Hype Cycle, arriving at the plateau of productivity for a dignified salute. Some fads burn incandescent and quickly flame out or slowly fade away. Of course, while all trends are subject to laws of gravity, some are granted a bit more hang time. It’s a principle that applies to digital marketing trends as it does to baseballs and airplanes. Sir Isaac Newton said that what goes up must come down.