This second installment in the McMurry Infrographics series is a simple look at the sheer volume of content marketing spending among US companies and how much it's grown in just the last ten years. This series is built on data collected from McMurry’s own ContentWise “Industry Characteristics Study”, a digital survey of marketing professionals and executives throughout the Fortune 1000.

When you watch a YouTube video, you watch it for one of four reasons: You think it’s gonna be hilarious, death-defying, adorable or touching—or ideally all four at once. If the video you’re watching doesn’t begin to deliver on those promises in the first 10 seconds, you go on with your life.

I'll admit - it's easy to get sucked in. You find yourself on a company website and there's a sidebar with a short list of headlines and links (this is an actual list)...

Check out YouTube’s statistics page and you will see some jaw-dropping numbers on the channel’s traffic, social media and other metrics.   

Over 800 million unique visits each month. Some 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, with over 700 YouTube videos shared on Twitter each minute, and 100 million people taking social actions such as sharing and commenting YouTube every week. ID Content, YouTube’s copyright and content management tool, scans over 100 years of video every day and accounts for over a third of YouTube's total monetized views.  

Kicking off a new series of original infographics is this piece, the first of ten, showing marketers’ commitment to use of major content marketing formats and channels. This series is built on data collected from McMurry’s own ContentWise “Industry Characteristics Study”, a digital survey of marketing professionals and executives throughout the Fortune 1000.  

In his August 2012 story “Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall,” New York Times media reporter David Carr addresses the declining fortunes of print magazines. Carr uses as his basis the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations’ figures, which show newsstand sales falling precipitously across a number of categories. Titles “punished in the pile-up” include Vogue, Cosmopolitan and People (percentages all down in the mid- to high-teens) and Time, down 31 percent. In the first six months of 2012, 21 of the top 25 U.S. titles dropped significant points in their single-copy sales.  

I don’t remember much from Content Marketing World 2012. Orange you glad I took my video camera?

I’m more than 40 years old. When a thousand otherwise sensible marketing people start flocking to flashy conferences organized around a brand new idea, I giggle nervously.  

On my way to the conference.

As fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and then in her role at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the late Diane Vreeland was the supreme arbiter of taste, trend and style. Back in the spotlight via the upcoming documentary of her life, The Eye Has To Travel, Vreeland valued fanfare above all else.

“There’s enough ugliness in the world! Why add to it!” she once told her grandson, reacting to his ill-advised short haircut.  The eminently quotable Vreeland, however, took an expansive view of attractiveness. To her, “a little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika” and she was “a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality.” The biggest no-no, for Vreeland, was to have “no taste at all.”  

The media playing field is as level as it ever was. But boy is it getting muddy.  

Last week, I read in The New York Times about a Todd Rutherford, who found himself in the difficult job of getting professional reviewers and other high-profile bloggers to review the books of self-published writers.  

“Suddenly it hit him,” The Times wrote. “Instead of trying to cajole others to review a client’s work, why not cut out the middleman and write the review himself?”  

Members of the 90s British pop group “The Spice Girls” might not have had the world’s longest-running entertainment careers, but the theme of their top hit “Wannabe” struck a chord with many: knowing what your partner wants can lead to a highly successful relationship (and an in with the Olympics to boot). This concept is especially simple when applied to the courtship that occurs when brands and their fans form successful relationships via email.