Last week, The Association of Business Information & Media Companies (ABM) interviewed McMurry/TMG's Chief Operations Officer Fred Petrovsky about the state of content marketing, the recent merger of McMurry and TMG, how content strategy is developed and many more crucial elements to the growing importance of quality content in marketing.

You can scrap any New Years’ resolutions you made for your brand if they don’t include a heavy investment in content marketing.  

As reported yesterday on eMarketer.com, content marketing became truly top of mind for client side marketers in 2013 with 39% agreeing it's their most important digital priority. The original report from Econsultancy and Adobe reveals an increase of 10% from last year, with more and more marketers channeling resources and budgets into content development and distribution.  

In the fall of 2011, when Joe Pulizzi got six hundred people to schlep to Cleveland, Ohio, to talk about content marketing, you knew that the concept he had coined was beginning to take hold.

Around the same time, the brand giant Coca-Cola announced and described its “Content 2020” strategy in such manic detail that the video needed an intermission. That was a big deal too.

We're taught to make things visuals. Want to spread your message? Make an infographic. Tell the story in a connecting image. Make itvisual. And we know time and again that's true. Magazines needs images to catch the eye of the potential reader. TV news needs to show it audience what's happening. Pinterest pinners need to know what their finished DIY project should look like.

If you’re like me, as a content marketer you may often find yourself battling to balance what is sometimes a bi-polar job description; on one hand you need that creative-focused mind of an artist to stay inspired while creating concepts, campaigns and content. And yet, on the other, you’re somewhat lost without the analytical brain of a lab-rat testing hypothesis, headlines, CTAs, images and delivery methods while all-the-while measuring the results.  

A recent encounter with a content marketing exec reminded me why so few organizations get content marketing right.

Content marketing requires two commodities rarely combined in corporate communication: belief and brains.

After making the case for sticking with the print format a few postings back, I am happy to learn, via McMurry’s ContentWise 2012 Industry Characteristics Study, that print remains the content marketing industry’s channel of choice.

Sponsored by the Custom Content Council, this 12th annual investigation into “The Volume and Type of Content Marketing in America” finds that most (87 percent) of the Fortune 1000 marketing professionals and executives surveyed for the study are still very much “on” paper. Print spending was $23.6 billion across the content marketing industry, with $16.6 billion spent on all other forms of media.

With so many new channels for reaching consumers, knowing how to plan, execute and measure the effectiveness of your content and related distribution efforts is a daunting task. Research shows 73% of Americans now multi-task with more than one form of media at any given time in a day (according to AdWeek, tablets seem to be a new and large contributor to this trend) – the Internet itself is splintering into new channels that require permission based access to consumers and use of proprietary applications controlled by the platform creators. It’s hard to know how and when to tap into these channels or even to answer the seemingly simple question of “Why should we?”

A new study identifies a huge population of the “global enraged”—consumers who think business stinks, and who don’t trust messages that emanate from corporations.  

Consumers who see business as greedy and overly influential have become “a powerful and potentially dangerous vanguard,” according to Michelle Singer, who heads Global MONITOR. “Anger has pushed consumers past the tipping point.”  

To the extent the survey is true, it represents a hell of a problem for content marketers, no?  

Using kids to push products is as old as advertising itself. In its Rewind archive series, AdAge recently featured a 1950’s campaign for 7Up that depicted babies drinking the soft drink. The accompanying copy, devoted to explaining “why we have the youngest customers in the business,” also recommended that mothers serve their babes the “wholesome combination” of 7Up and milk.