This article originally appear on the Central Desktop blog.
It’s a foregone conclusion that people hate advertising, right? More accurately, they hate interruption. They hate anything that takes them away from what they are doing in any given moment. Yet that’s the premise of most forms of advertising.
When the internet presented itself to marketers, many thought they could just replicate what they did offline in the online world. In other words, create video pre-rolls, interstitials and banners. All that accomplished (barring the first few years when everyone clicked on everything because, well, it was novel and new) was banner blindness and a rabid hatred of anything that got in the way of one’s online activities. Couple that with the DVR offline and things began to look bleak for marketers.
Now that marketers have realized interruption is not the way to go and the internet has given people the ability to find exactly what they want at the exact moment they want it, they have discovered that educational, informative content is what people want and need. And they have discovered that that very content can also be used to market their brands.
This “discovery” yielded what is now known as content marketing or inbound marketing. There are similarities and differences between the two, though I prefer the more all-encompassing term “inbound marketing.”
