In early 2017, we stopped calling our product “branded podcasts” and instead opted for “original podcasts with brands.” The term “branded podcasts” felt like it didn’t describe what we actually did — it felt like there was too much baggage around the phrase “branded content” and audiences would assume the shows were just pieces of marketing disguised as a podcast.

That’s very different than our actual business of helping brands think and act like media companies by creating original, audience-first shows.

I have come to feel similarly about the term “content marketing.” In the last few weeks, my social feeds have been filled with posts from Content Marketing World and Hubspot’s Inbound conference. Every year, it feels more and more clear that “content marketing” is being interpreted by too many marketers as a way to create heavy-handed marketing and disguising it as content. There is an avalanche of click-bait, an overload of listicles, a mess of memes, and an abundance of growth hackers. Rarely does it smell authentic and rarely does a click feel good afterward.

This is not to say that there aren’t some fantastic content marketers out there doing great work… there are lots of them. It’s just that the ones that aren’t doing great work are starting to give it a bad reputation.

My primary background is media and content creation, so I approach marketing through that lens. When I first attended content marketing conferences, I was struck at how much “MarTech” (Marketing Technology) played a role at the trade shows, the keynotes, and the overall areas of interest for the attendees. Marketing technology is wonderful in many ways — efficiency, automation of repetitive tasks, gathering information about who is interested in your product, etc . However, MarTech can be awful in others — putting up gates, capturing lots of information about you before you can get any content, setting up spammy email and/or phone calls for every new target client, etc.

So I’ve been thinking about why content marketing has been leaving more and more of a funny taste in my mouth lately.

Then Seth Godin wrote about “two kinds of marketing” a couple weeks ago:

There’s the kind that no one can possibly like. The popups, popunders, high-pressure, track-your-private-data, scammy, spammy, interruptive, overpriced, overhyped, under-designed selfish nonsense that some people engage in.

And then there’s the kind that inspires us, delights us and brings us something we truly want.

We call them both marketing, but they couldn’t be more different.

As usual, Seth hits the nail on the head and it clearly captures my concerns about a lot of content marketing. Too much of it is the first kind of marketing —desperately trying to get as many people as possible into the sales funnel, spamming them and rushing them into buying a product so that sales quotas in the next quarter can be met.

It is never a good experience when, as an audience member, you click on something that promises to be content and then realize that you’ve been click-baited into a marketing pitch for a product or service that is thinly disguised as a story. It’s even worse when you have to enter your email address and personal information to get access to a piece of content that then turns out to be an infomercial.

The best kind of content is a gift — a gift of valuable information, a gift of entertainment, and a gift of empathy. Truly valuing the precious time your audience will spend with your content means making that content as fantastic as possible.

I love that in Seth’s full post, he describes the two kinds of marketers as “selfish” and “successful.” Selfish does not work. Maybe it’s time to come up with a new term to describe marketers who are focused on audiences instead of themselves.

Generous marketing? Unselfish marketing? Or maybe it’s just time to revisit and remember Seth’s original call to arms — Permission Marketing.

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