The Death of Content Marketing Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Last week was an amazing time covering the #OCPGlobalSummit with TechArena.ai. While I don’t have any articles myself out of this one, the energy and the conversations got me thinking way back to 2020. When we all lived on Zoom, there were some (admittedly fringe) predictions that the conference industry would never bounce back. Why travel when you can connect online and go to sleep in your own bed?

While the latter remains a compelling point, in-person conferences have come roaring back with a vengeance. Last week’s summit boasted 11,000 attendees, a record for the organization. And that rebound from a crisis got me thinking about the latest doom-and-gloom predictions around the future (or lack thereof) of careers in content marketing.

As even OpenAI begins to question if artificial general intelligence is a worthy or attainable goal, it’s starting to feel like the most-fevered hype around generative AI may be just starting to break. We are still a long way from seeing the full effects of this technology, but when a company that was gunning to create AI to "outperform humans at most economically valuable work" starts questioning that premise....it may be a turning point.

Five years ago, I thought there was a very real possibility I’d never work an in-person conference again. While I still like sleeping in my own bed best, I'm glad I was wrong. And while work is certainly changing with AI-enhanced tools, I’m seeing more content produced from more corners of the internet than I ever did before. My crystal ball for 2030 is cloudy, but I’m not ready to count out careers in content creation yet.