A great 3-minutes history of content marketing designed by the Content Marketing Institute.
Scroll down below to read our full recap and a text timeline of the video.
Watch The Video:
Content Harmony Recap:
In this video from the Content Marketing Institute, they define content marketing as brands telling stories to attract new customers, and note that content marketing is not new – brands have been telling stories for centuries.
Below are some of the examples included in the video
- In 1895, John Deere puts out The Furrow magazine, which now has a 1.5 million circulation in 40 countries and 12 different languages.
- In 1900, Michelin develops The Michelin Guide, a 400 page guide with an iconic red cover that helped drivers maintain their cars and find decent lodging.
- In 1904, Jell-O distributes free copies of a recipe book that contributes to sales of over $1 million by 1906.
- In the 1930s Procter & Gamble begin radio soap operas with brands such as Duz and Oxydol, hence “soap opera.”
- In 1982, Hasbro partners with Marvel to create GI Joe Comic book leading to a revolution in toy marketing.
- In 1987, LEGO launches Brick Kicks magazine, now LEGO Club Magazine.
The video then takes readers on a journey through the magazine revolution, the rise of television, the boom of the customer magazine marketing the in UK in the 1980s, and then documents the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990 by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. With that, came the launch of AOL for Windows in 1992, the founding of GeoCities in 1994, the development of web conferencing by Placeware/Xerox’s PARC Laboratory, the development of AOL Instant Messenger in 1997.
With regards to content marketing, the Custom Publishing Council is born in 1998, while the term “content marketing” is used in Cleveland, Ohio for the first time in 2001, when the spend on custom content nears $20 billion.
In the early 2000s, we see the launch of MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and YouTube, along with the launch of the first major corporate blog, Channel 9 by Microsoft in 2004. In 2005, LiveVault’s John Cleese video goes viral, and the following year Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion, where in 2007, BlendTec uploads the first video in the “Will It Blend?” series.
After Twitter launches in 2006, SXSW makes it a mainstay when the conference launches in 2007. American Express launches the Open Forum, and in 2008, Procter and Gamble hits another content marketing highlight: their BeingGirl.com site is 4x more effective than traditional advertising.
By 2009, the average company is spending $1.8 million per year on content creation and distribution, and the Content Marketing Institute is born in 2010, when 88% of all brands are using content marketing and 25% of companies’ marketing budgets are going towards content marketing. In 2011, content marketing spending in the UK nears 1 billion pounds
Because of the rise of content marketing, content marketing publications begin to take root, starting with the Get Content Get Customers: Handbook for Content Marketing’s release in 2008, the Chief Content Officer magazine by CMI in 2011, and the ConFab content strategy conference , also in 2011.
With the birth of the iPad, the launch of Google+, the 50 million blogs now powered by WordPress, it’s a content marketing world. Hundreds of years, thousands of brands, but one thing remains the same – the power of story.
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