Author: Robert Rose

Robert is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert’s third book – Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi has been called the “book that rewrites the rules of marketing.” His second book – Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing is a top seller and has been called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” Robert’s first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top 10 marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owners manual” of the content marketing process. You can follow him on Twitter @Robert_Rose.

By robert-rose published January 25, 2023

B2C Marketers Treat Content Marketing as a Project; That’s a Mistake [New Research]

In The End of Competitive Advantage, Rita Gunther McGrath illustrates all competitive advantages are transient. She contends everybody understands that. So why hasn’t basic strategy practice changed?

As Rita writes:

Most executives, even when they realize that competitive advantages are going to be ephemeral, are still using strategy frameworks and tools designed for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage, not for quickly exploiting and moving in and out of advantages.

That last part resonates after working with hundreds of enterprise brands over the last 10 years. Most businesses think about how they can change content to fit marketing’s purpose, not how they might change marketing to fit content’s purpose.Continue Reading

By robert-rose published January 20, 2023

Don’t Limit Audience Data to a Legal Concern or You’ll Miss the Big Opportunities [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Sound the alarm a little.

Marketers at product and services companies fail with first-party data, yet it could be their biggest contributor to growth in the coming year.

Do you know who doesn’t fail at first-party data? Media companies. But I’ll come back to that.

It’s coming on five years since the EU’s GDPR privacy legislation put the proverbial content, marketing, and first-party data soup on the heated stove. Next month is the third anniversary of Google announcing, and subsequently punting many times, the death of the third-party cookie. (It’s currently set to die in 2024.)Continue Reading

By robert-rose published January 13, 2023

Web3’s Marketing Value Is Function, Not Form [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Picture a time when a new technology angered many because of the copyright infringement risk to creators, yet people considered technology and media company leaders heroic.

A new technology protocol prompted an entire version number upgrade to the web. A new technology challenged Google for search supremacy. And every startup name contained fewer and fewer vowels.Continue Reading

By robert-rose published January 6, 2023

What’s Your Word for 2023? [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Happy new year.

It’s that time. You dust off the journals neglected in the end-of-the-year rush. You locate the gym membership card and wonder if it will still scan since it’s been a few months – or maybe a few years, given the concern about being around people. And you create New Year’s resolutions.

Or maybe you don’t.

Have you come up with your 2023 word yet?

Resolutions seem so old school. Instead, pick one word to summarize your intentions and hopes for the new year. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years, and it’s worked well.

My yearly word sets the foundation for where I want to focus. It acts as the root of all the intentions I write in my new year journaling.Continue Reading

By robert-rose published December 23, 2022

‘Twas the Night Before Break – 2022 Edition [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Editor’s note: And now, for our last post of the year, something completely different. 

‘Twas the night before break, Elon was high,
Content marketers worried they’d be replaced by AI.

Inflation persisted, economic signals unclear,
And all hoped that more layoffs wouldn’t soon appear.

All content practitioners climbed into their beds,
While visions of first-party data danced in their heads.

Continue Reading

By robert-rose published December 16, 2022

ChatGPT: The Future of AI in Content Is in Your Hands [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Have you heard a lot about ChatGPT lately?

I thought so.

In case you haven’t (maybe you’ve been too tied up with holiday shopping or closing the fourth quarter), ChatGPT is a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that’s gotten a lot of media and social media coverage. This class of generative AI technology receives prompts from users, then generates new text or images (based on the data set used to train the model) in response.

That means if you’re a software engineer, you can ask it to write (or check) your code for you. If you’re a writer, you might ask it to write a blog post on technology (reasonable) or a history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss (Why? Because you can). If you’re a student, you might use it to write a college application essay. You get the idea.

The results are impressive – sort of. But I’ll come back to that.

Continue Reading

By robert-rose published December 9, 2022

Before Deciding Where Your Content Team Reports, Pay Attention to This [Rose-Colored Glasses]

When a brand creates a new content marketing or content strategy team, they often ask, “What function or department should the content team report to?”

My answer? “Yes!”

Now, I’m not trying to be a smart aleck. (Well, I am a little bit, do you even know me?) But seriously, my yes comes from years of helping implement content teams in dozens of businesses. My affirmative response indicates the most important thing isn’t to whom content reports; it’s that content teams report to the business.Continue Reading

By robert-rose published December 2, 2022

How a ‘Purple Audience’ Approach Leads to a Better Long-Term Content Strategy [Rose-Colored Glasses]

“The stock market is not the economy.”

When the stock market is up, it doesn’t always follow that the economy is great. When the stock market crashes, it doesn’t always mean the economy is bad.

That’s as true today as it was 25 years ago when I first got into marketing. And it’s a great reminder to avoid basing business decisions on faulty connections.

Over the years, I’ve learned an adjacent lesson about content and audiences: Popularity isn’t a sign of differentiation. People don’t necessarily regard what is popular among online audiences or the media as high quality – or even true.

Continue Reading

By robert-rose published November 18, 2022

How a Spoonful of Story Helps Even ‘Boring’ Content Go Down [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Content practitioners create a spectrum of creative content. Some, like thought leadership e-books, entertaining videos, or customer stories, are seemingly filled with storytelling opportunities.

Then, there are the more process-oriented pieces – standards, guidelines, how-to instructions, and other initiatives that relay valuable information. Though necessary, these “constructed” pieces are rarely considered a place to stretch the creative legs.Continue Reading

By robert-rose published November 15, 2022

The New Chief Content Officer: Why the Job Description Must Change

CMI first described the Chief Content Officer (CCO) job more than a decade ago.

In those days, companies needed senior leaders to spearhead the integration of “content marketing activities” into more traditional marketing campaigns.

Today, content leadership must expand beyond marketing (even content marketing) to encompass an all-communication strategy.

That means today’s chief content officer (regardless of whether that’s the title the person holds) guides the content that makes up every experience a customer, audience member, or prospect has with a brand.

What does that look like in practice? I’ll explain and provide a chief content officer job description you can copy.Continue Reading

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