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B2B Thought Leadership and Content Marketing Are Broken · Uphoff on Media Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let's face it, B2B thought leadership and content marketing are horribly broken.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: What started as a way for business brands and leaders to establish credibility,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: trust,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: and a direct relationship with prospects,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: customers, and the broader industry has gone off the rails.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Today is this spammy mess of machine-optimized white papers, blogs,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: email newsletters,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: and social media posts that have become meaningless to B2B buyers.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mention it to a B2B buyer and you're likely gonna get an eye roll and a chuckle.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: The declining results are the proof points.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So how the heck did we get here?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: How did something that started so promising go so horribly wrong?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I was an architect of this transition and I'm looking in the mirror,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: not standing in judgment of anyone else.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: In this podcast episode and the post on Substack,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I walked through a brief history,
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: how we got into this mess and a framework for restoring the value
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: and thought leadership and yes, Even content marketing.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's get to work.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is titled, B2B Thought Leadership and Content Marketing Are Broken.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Vendor content built credibility, trust, and relationships.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's declining in impact.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Here's why and how to restore it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Open your LinkedIn feed and read 10 thought leadership posts in a row.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Count how many times you could tell apart if the names were stripped off.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: That number,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: not how many posts got published this year,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: is the real measure of how broken B2B content marketing has become.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Enterprise technology went mainstream and so did the people who ran it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the late 1980s and early 1990s,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: enterprise technology was a real and growing market,
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: almost entirely invisible outside the people who bought it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: That changed once the personal computer,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: then the internet went mainstream and companies like Microsoft,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and SAP rode the same wave into the business pages.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Their stocks bit up on the size of the opportunity ahead.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Mainstream companies produce mainstream curiosity about the people running them.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: It became routine for a reporter to ask Bill Gates or Andy Grove
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: or Steve Jobs what they thought about the next wave of technology,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: and tech leaders turned into public figures in their own right,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: writing books and giving speeches that had nothing to do with their product line.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: As the internet handed every company its own printing press,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: these same companies started publishing directly to an audience for the first time.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: That instinct, not a marketing department's idea, is where brand as publisher actually started.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: B2B media was dying at the exact moment vendors learned to publish.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The other half of the story was happening inside the B2B media industry.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: The internet that was making tech companies mainstream was disrupting
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: the high margin print business B2B media had run for decades.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: One response was custom publishing.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Vendor sponsored content,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: clearly labeled as such,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: running inside the same magazines and websites that carried
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: the independent coverage.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, brand as publisher and custom publishing converged.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the modern thought leadership and content marketing era was born from that collision.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Most of what came out of that convergence worked okay.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Buyers trusted content that came directly from the company's building the technology
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: and used it to evaluate and shortlist vendors.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: This shouldn't have come as a surprise.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oracle, Salesforce, SAP,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: IBM and others hired the B2B tech journalists
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: that declining media companies could no longer afford and put them
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: to work producing exactly the kind of content they used to produce
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: for media companies.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So far, so good.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Then marketing automation arrived and the math changed.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was one of the pioneers of this and I had plenty of company.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I did not see what was coming next.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent over half my career running B2B media businesses and I was one of
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: the pioneers of the very things I'm describing here and so were plenty of my peers
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: in B2B media.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sponsored media,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: custom publishing,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: marketing automation,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: demand generation and thought leadership at CMP Media and UBM TechWeb.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The same adaptation a lot of B2B media publishers were making as
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: the internet ate our print businesses out from under us.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was one of the pioneers of this shift at CMP Media and later UBM TechWeb.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: In an effort to evolve a business model, the internet was steadily disrupting.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: B2B media companies used their traditional editorial processes
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: to build sponsored content operations and applied the new technology
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: of marketing automation to open a new revenue line in demand generation.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: In 2010,
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: while CEO of UBM TechWeb,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a white paper called Marketing as a Service that outlined the path forward.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: This was before content marketing or brand as publisher had become common terms.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: The model is what eventually got operationalized by brands,
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: custom content providers,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: and demand generation companies,
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: dramatically escalating the volume of content being produced.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: What we really didn't anticipate was how fragile that model actually was or where
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: the talent would go once it started cracking.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Evans,
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: my editorial partner at Information Week and UBM Tech Web,
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: became Chief Communications Officer at SAP, then Oracle, and now runs Cloud Wars.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Rob Preston,
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Fritz Nelson,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie Stahl,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: and Tom Smith,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: editors I worked alongside at Information Week and UBM Tech Web,
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: now lead marketing and content organizations at some of
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: the largest technology companies in the world.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: One of them now runs the Content Marketing Institute.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: A flood of talented B2B editors moved from declining media companies into
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: the vendors they used to cover,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: carrying real editorial skills and judgment into organizations
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: that would eventually systematize it into something else.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I made this argument in May.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: AI just put it on fast forward.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: In May, I argued that B2B marketing has substituted measurement for the work itself.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: That attribution models and MQL dashboards had become a stand-in
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: for brand positioning and judgment in the post How B2B Marketing Lost Its Way.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I ended that post with a prediction that is proving out faster than I expected.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: What survives in an agentic world is genuine brand authority,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: distinctive positioning, authentic thought leadership.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: The things that cannot be tracked are the things that matter the most.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: As generative AI marketing automation,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: every tool in between scaled thought leadership
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: and content marketing output exponentially.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: What got optimized was scale,
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: not judgment, taste,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: or any real understanding of where a piece of content actually supported
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: a purchase process.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: 15 years of tools were built to measure clicks, downloads, volume, and SEO score.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: None of them were built to measure whether a reader trusted what they read or
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: whether that trust moved them one step closer to a decision.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The tools did exactly what they were built to do.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: That was the problem.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing automation was the opening move.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: What it triggered next was an arms race.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've already tallied where that race ended up in the post The Stack That Broke Marketing.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: 15,384 commercial MarTech tools as of last year, up nearly 100-fold since 2011.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yet utilization sits at 49%,
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: meaning close to half of everything B2B marketing spends
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: on technology produces no active output.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Content and thought leadership inherited the same math.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: More tools bought than anyone had a plan to use.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: 52% of newly published articles on the web were AI generated as of last year.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's up from near zero four years earlier per graphite analysis
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: of 65,000 English language articles.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: That number alone would be a footnote if the content underneath it were still doing its job.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: 95% of B2B marketers now use AI tools and content production,
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: yet fewer than four in 10 report a measurable performance improvement from them.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: 96% of B2B brands produce thought leadership.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Only somewhere between 4% and 11% rate their own program as advanced.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: 56% of B2B marketers cannot attribute ROI to their content at all.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing budgets grew nearly 9% heading into this year anyway.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Traffic volume gave content marketers cover, so a real ROI conversation never had to happen.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Reading these numbers, a troubling pattern emerges.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Adoption is universal, effectiveness is not.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: That gap is not a rollout problem better prompting fixes next quarter.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is what happens when a discipline built on editorial judgment gets handed to
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: a machine built to optimize what a dashboard can report,
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: run by people who never had to answer for the one thing a dashboard cannot show,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: whether anyone trusted what they read.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Buyers noticed before the metrics did, Buyers do not have that blind spot.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: A Gardner survey published this year found that 69% of B2B buyers still turn
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: to human sales reps to validate AI-generated insights before they trust them,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: even as those same buyers say they prefer a self-service rep-free experience.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Content marketing was invented in part to let a company scale trust without a person
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: in every conversation.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: The tools first version of this did not scale trust.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: It just made buyers trust the human relationship more.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: A recent outsell study of 226 B2B buyers found reliance
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: on vendor produced content falling across the board,
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: down 14% among the end users closest to a purchase decision,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: while reliance on peer communities,
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: analyst reports, and trade press rose by double digits over the same period.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I used this same data two weeks ago to make a case about how AI changed
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: the way B2B buyers evaluate vendors.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Read from the content side instead of the buying side,
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: it makes an even sharper case against the content itself.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Buyers are not abandoning research.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're relocating their trust to sources a company cannot buy its way into.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: None of this is new.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Edelman's original thought leadership research found 56%
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: of B2B decision makers got no value from what they read,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: and 86% rated it merely good, mediocre, or poor.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: That predates generative AI by close to a decade.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: The tools did not create this problem.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: They gave it a much faster printing press.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I asked Tonya Reese,
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: who spent a decade working on Edelman's trust barometer research,
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: what she's seeing now, and here's her take.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, we spent years measuring what audiences do with content,
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: whether they click it, share it, or respond to it.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Treating those behaviors as proxies for trust, but attention is not the same as trust.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Audiences are reading the trust signals in the content itself.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Does the company demonstrate real competence?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Is it candid about complexity and uncertainty?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Does it reflect the reader's interests as well as the company's?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Does it give a potential customer a reason to rely on their organization
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: when their career is at stake?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: AI is making content dramatically easier to produce,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: which means those trust signals are going to become even more essential.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: If your content is capturing attention without also earning trust,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: your funnel will start leaking, no matter how healthy it looks from the top."
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Run the audit before your buyers run it for you.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a way to determine where your own programs stand before a reader does it for you.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm calling it the Narrative Index.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Take your last three published pieces and score each one one to five
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: against these seven questions.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, byline accountability.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Does a named person's judgment stand behind this?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Someone accountable if it's wrong.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, source diversity.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Does it draw on more than one voice or data set or is
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: a single synthesized take dressed up as insight?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, distinctive point of view.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Could a competitor publish this exact piece with their logo swapped in?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Number four, third-party earned trust.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Has anyone outside the company chosen to cite, share, or reference it unprompted?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Number five, tool dependency.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Did this require a human editorial decision beyond hitting publish?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Number six, incentive alignment.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is the team that made this rewarded for whether it changed your reader's mind or
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: for how many of these shipped this month?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And number seven, jobs to be done fit.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Does this move the buyer forward on the job they hired your category to do,
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: or does it just talk about the category?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Add the seven scores.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: 35 is the ceiling.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: 29 to 35 means your program is still narrative-led,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: rare enough to protect rather than optimize further.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: 18 to 28 means you're at risk,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: which is most programs and still salvageable with real editorial judgment back
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: in charge.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Below 18,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: the tools are running your program and your content will continue to decline
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: in impact.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: The test isn't rhetorical.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Run it on your own byline.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, go back to your feed.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: The 10 posts you could not tell apart were not written by lazy people or bad marketers.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: They were produced, correctly, by a system built to reward exactly what they delivered.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Volume, coverage, a checked box.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: I built part of the discipline those systems were supposed to scale.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing automation and agentic AI are forcing functions.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: They require a balance of human and machine judgment to scale effectively.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right now,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: we are way,
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: way out of balance, and the declining impact of content marketing proves it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's it for this episode.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this useful,
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: please do one thing,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: follow the Uphoff on Media podcast on Apple or Spotify, and please leave a rating.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's the single best way to help another operator find this.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Tony Uphoff, back at it next week.