An Illustrated History of Content (and a Smooth Move in Content Marketing)

You know you’ve done your job as a marketer when people do your advertising for you.

By creating something memorable, entertaining, and worth talking about, you get more mileage out of your initial investment.

This is what brands hope for when they make decisions like investing $100,000 per second in the Super Bowl commercials we saw last night.

Having your branded message contain enough passalong value that it becomes part of the conversation – as opposed to just another interruption – is the holy grail of marketing.  

But you don’t always have to spend $3 million. Sometimes you can earn your marketing with something clever, useful, and entertaining. Like Philip Sheldrake and Nic Hinton did in their illustrated history of content.

The set-up? A visually appealing graphic “history” of content from cave paintings all the way to current time.

Check it out here:

The pay-off? This version of the history of content ends, apparently, with a thing called My Taptu (my what?), which is apparently the pinnacle of achievement in content consumption. (Hey, it is their illustration. I hadn’t heard of it before, and now I have.)

The piece was so appealing that people didn’t mind (or notice) the bit of branded bias at the end of it. In fact, Wired, Mashable, and others all ran it on their sites (and obviously, so did we, which may or may not be considered less of a big deal).

This is content marketing at its finest: give the people value, and they will tell other people about it. And they don’t mind that your logo is on it. In fact, they’ll thank you for being the messenger.