Today's guest post is by Christopher Hosford, editor-in-chief and head writer at HosfordGroup LLC, a New York City-based content marketing agency. He is former East Coast Bureau Chief of Crain's "BtoB" magazine, and former editor-in-chief of Nielsen's "Sales & Marketing Management" magazine. He is a regular contributor to ViewPoint and can be reached at chris@hosfordgroup.com.

Thanks to a LinkedIn post by Howie Sholkin, former IDG communications guru, I was directed to a sprightly Mediapost essay titled, “Why content marketing probably won’t work for you.” Authored by Tom Goodwin, founder of the U.K. agency Tomorrow, the post asserts that content marketing is “a totally doomed area.”

“Content marketing is like setting up a small food stand in the middle of a Las Vegas eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet, to an audience that's just eaten. And one that happens to have the world’s finest chefs serving their best dishes for free, while the top fast-food joints do the same,” Goodwin asserts.

I think Goodwin’s reasoning offers a gloss of logic which (like a lot of other smart, short-form Internet writing) overlooks several key points.

Goodwin’s critique of content marketing, and why it’s “doomed,” is based on two premises: One, that it’s old hat anyway, dating back to 19th century examples of corporate magazines. And two, that we’re surrounded today by too much great content vying for our attention, and drowning out marketing messages.

“At any moment in time, I can pretty much choose from any of the best content ever made, often for free,” Goodwin writes. “I can watch one of hundreds of Oscar-winning movies, listen to any piece of music ever recorded, see amazing personal pictures from my family, read any book ever printed, on any device, any time.”

Let’s put aside the it’s-already-been-done idea, as well as the purported quality of Las Vegas chefs — food is food to me — and get to the nut of the issue.

First, marketing campaigns are not aimed at amorphous populations (e.g., Las Vegas visitors) but extremely targeted ones. As sociologist Robert A. Gordon has pointed out about politics, “Information campaigns fail despite strong efforts because all persons do not offer equal targets.” Quoting the studies of others, Gordon observes that “There is something about the uninformed which makes them harder to reach, no matter what the level or nature of the information.”

B-to-b marketers in particular already know their messages should be directed to discrete, well-versed populations that are inherently interested in the discussion at hand. Yes, content must rise to qualitative heights to better engage these populations. But given the already interested nature of carefully targeted customers, the qualitative bar can be somewhat lower than, say, “Hamlet,” “The Great Gatsby,” or even “Nightmare Alley.”

(In “Nightmare Alley,” William Lindsay Gresham wrote, “A third of life is spent unconscious and corpselike." I’m not sure if he meant all people are unconscious and corpselike for one-third of their lives, or that one-third of the entire population is unconscious and corpselike during their entire lives. Or maybe he was just a facile wordsmith. My point is that the unconscious and corpselike are not the targets of good content marketers.)

Goodwin is completely correct in noting that we all experience message overload and stimuli. But this doesn’t paralyze us. Because marketing messages are everywhere we tend to unconsciously screen them. And what do we screen for? Things that interest us, that can aid our lives, our jobs, our families. There’s no danger of our attention being “stolen” (Goodwin’s term) by nefarious marketers. Rather, we willingly give it up to the companies and messages that interest us.

Good content marketers — all good marketers, in fact — seek out these key customers and accounts through data analysis, behavioral analytics, programmatic advertising, and via carefully targeted channels, among other means. Their messages are crafted to appeal to tire-kickers (branding, lead-gen) as well as sales-ready leads (conversion), to decision-makers as well as influencers, to individuals as well as accounts. And, if these things are done well, they can be met halfway by an engaged and interested population, often grateful for the kind of stuff they can actually use.

That’s all I have to say about that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to head down to the fast-food cart for some lunch.

By Christopher Hosford, editor-in-chief, HosfordGroup.