My bugbear about “SEO is dead” (and I’m sure most of my peers will agree) bears similar resemblance to this in that people who say “SEO is dead” clearly don’t understand what SEO is.

The point of SEO is to get yourself found by as many people as possible, by whatever means. Just like the printing press means you could get your book read by more people in a shorter space of time….

Who writes… sorry, PUBLISHES…. content with the intention of no-one reading it?… Oh hang on, if I MARKET my content then more people will see it…

I guess it depends on the client and it depends on the agency.

But as we know, these terms seem to come and go with the rapidity of Director Generals of the BBC, but the fundamentals stay the same.

As you said, the main reason for calling it content marketing is to sell it as a ‘new’ concept.

If an agency went to a client and said ‘we want to turn you into a publisher’ or even ‘we want to start blogging for you’ that doesn’t sound appealing and would be a hard sell.

And it’s short, which is always a good thing.

And as you can get it for free (it’s out of copyright), there is little reason not to read it.
http://www.funeralrockstars.com/marketing-master-claude-hopkins/

Almost everything that happens in digital marketing has happened for hundreds of years, the tools for doing it might have changed but the principles have not. Read Claude Hopkins book called Scientific Advertising and you can see the business model for social networking laid out in black and white.

Now someone writing a book is not the end result, it’s keynote speeches, TV appearances.

As I’ve tried to maintain, clients are very dumb, overlook the obvious and need people like us to state the obvious and make them look good in the eyes of their bosses, peers, industry. They are smart when they hire us.