“You can’t bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.” – David Ogilvy.

This David Ogilvy quote, which leads today’s article on Contently, is the perfect way to view the work we do as marketers and content producers.

2015 was the year ad-blocking exploded, a proof on how may view advertising: boring, irrelevant, intrusive.

When content does its job properly, no ad-blocking is necessary. Good content is delivered at the right time, in the right context. And this is the reason 2015 was the year where content marketing also exploded.

This is the last article I’m sharing with you in 2015, the time at which publishers and bloggers release their top 10’s, year-in-reviews, predictions, etc.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to prepare you a list of the 5 most-shared or clicked newsletters this year, but then I stumbled across this article by Contently.

They published a great preview of the year to come, built around three themes it believes will drive the next 12 months:

  • Theme 1: Omni-Channel Publishing
  • Theme 2: Increased Focus on Content Distribution (Particularly Paid)
  • Theme 3: Data Fuels Enterprise Content

Taken together, these themes explain where we are going as an industry. Brands need to focus on being able to reach customers on as many platforms as possible (at the right time, in the right context). But to do it, they will have to invest in paid distribution (in the form of paid social/display/traditional advertising leading to content, but also in native placement). And in the end, their setup and strategy will have to allow to be agile and react rapidly on the data and analytics they capture.

I’ll spare you my list of most-clicked-articles-this-year and rather invite you to dig deeper into these themes in Shane Snow’s article over at Contently.

And Happy New Year to all!