Nothing in Marketing Ever Dies. It Just Gets Renamed to Death.

I read a post last week announcing that content marketing is dead.

I lost the link. Doom scrolls do not keep receipts.

But I remember the head shake. And the thought right behind it: how many more words are we going to bury just so we can dig up new ones?

I mean, email is dead. SEO is dead. The funnel is dead.

Content marketing is dying now, apparently, which is awkward for all the people currently making it.

I’ve been in marketing for more than 25 years. Long enough to watch us all hold a funeral for nearly everything we’ve touched in marketing.

Then we give it a new name.

We build a software category around the new name. We put it on conference stages. We add it to job titles. And eventually, we sell it back to the same people who were already doing it.

(Usually with a dashboard.)

None of this means marketing hasn’t changed. It has. Sometimes the change is enormous.

But the funeral is often how the change gets sold.

I started in marketing in my mid-twenties. I’m just about to turn 54.

Which means most of those renames below happened after I got here. I didn’t read about most of this. I lived it. I implemented it, sat through the rollout deck, or watched a department rename its own work so the budget would survive another year.

And now that I run my own strategy consulting business, I work with expert business owners who don’t want to be full-time marketers but still have to constantly figure out what the new terms mean and, wait, did that one die yesterday?

The short version

What we called it first	What we called it next
Editorial-style advertising (1910s)	Native advertising (2011)
Celebrity endorsement (early 1900s)	Influencer marketing (2010s)
Publicity (1900s) and public relations (1920s)	Brand journalism (2000s)
Direct-mail sequencing (1970s)	Marketing automation (late 1990s)
Word of mouth (ancient)	Viral marketing (1996)
One-to-one marketing (1993)	Personalization (2010s)
Multichannel marketing (1990s)	Omnichannel marketing (2010)
Key account management (1970s)	Account-based marketing (2003-2004)
Lead generation (1980s)	Demand generation (2000s)
Networking (centuries old)	Social selling (2009-2010)
Permission marketing (1999)	Inbound (2005-2006) and content marketing (2010s)
SEO (1997)	AEO (2010s) and GEO (2023)
Content marketing (1990s)	Attention marketing (2020s)

The part I didn’t notice while I was inside it

I spent years running content teams, buying the software and sitting in the meetings where one department explained why its version of the thing was entirely different from the other department’s version.

Sometimes it was. Sometimes we’d changed the channel, the speed or the scale. And sometimes we just changed the nouns.

That’s the part I notice now. The new name isn’t a side effect of the industry changing. The new name is often what makes the old work sellable again.

I’ve seen it with the aversion some people have to the “marketing funnel.” It isn’t dead. It never died. It’s just how people move from not knowing you to knowing you. But you can’t sell someone the thing they’re already doing. You can tell them that thing is dead, introduce its replacement and offer a certification by Thursday.

I’m not mad about it. Honestly, I respect the commitment to the bit.

But if marketing has left you feeling permanently behind, one framework short and six months late to a party you didn’t know had started, know this:

You may not be behind.

You may be watching marketers market marketing.

What earns a place on this list

I needed rules. Otherwise we’d end up with every marketing term ever invented, and no one needs that tab open for the rest of the week.

A rename has to pass three tests:

1. It was sold as new. A book, keynote, conference track, software category or service line arrived with it.
2. It described a practice that already existed. The tools may have changed. The underlying job didn’t.
3. The industry adopted it. It appeared in job titles, agency offers, budgets and those diagrams with far too many arrows.

That second test matters.

Email marketing isn’t on this list because email was a new channel. Nobody was emailing customers before email existed.

Marketing automation is here because its basic logic already existed in direct mail: send something, watch what happens and decide what gets sent next. The database changed what was possible. It didn’t invent the sequence.

New plumbing. Familiar house.

The marketing renaming timeline

Editorial-style advertising (1910s) becomes Native Advertising (2011)

Before anyone called it native advertising, brands were paying to place ads that borrowed the shape and voice of the publication around them. Cadillac’s 1915 ad “The Penalty of Leadership” is an early example: long-form copy, designed to read more like an editorial than a product ad.

The phrase native advertising arrived much later. Fred Wilson is widely credited with using it at an industry conference in 2011. The internet version added targeting, live data, programmatic placement and a scale no magazine could offer. Those aren’t tiny changes. But the central idea stayed put: make the paid thing feel like it belongs beside the unpaid things. Apparently, one of marketing’s oldest hobbies is finding ways to make an ad look a little less like an ad.

Celebrity Endorsement (early 1900s) becomes Influencer Marketing (2010s)

Put a recognizable person next to a product and borrow a little of the trust, attention or aspiration people already feel toward them.

That worked when the recognizable person was a baseball player on a tobacco card or cereal box. It works now when the recognizable person has 42,000 followers and films from her kitchen.

The shift from celebrity endorsement to influencer marketing did change who could hold influence. You no longer needed movie-star fame. A smaller audience could be more specific, more trusted and more valuable to a brand than a giant one. And now brands could measure clicks and sales instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the famous face did something.

But paying a person for access to the trust they’ve built? That part is very old.

Publicity (1900s) becomes Public Relations (1920s) becomes Brand Journalism (2000s)

This one has managed more than one costume change.

Publicity was about earning public attention. Public relations added a more deliberate practice around shaping relationships and opinion. Edward Bernays helped formalize that work in the 1920s and gave it a theory, which is more than a simple rename.

Then brand journalism arrived in the 2000s: companies hired reporters, editors and producers to publish stories people might choose to read. The work got better. The ethics and standards could be different. The company became its own publisher. But a company creating a story to earn public attention still has some very old fingerprints on it.

Publicity would recognize its grandchildren.

Direct-Mail Sequencing (1970s) becomes Marketing Automation (late 1990s)

Send the first piece. Record the response. Send the next piece based on what the person did.

A direct-marketing team could run that sequence decades before a browser opened. It took more paper, more time and a filing system that would make most of us lie down for a while, but the logic was there. Marketing-automation platforms appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s changed the scale. A team could trigger thousands of messages, score behavior and connect the whole trail to a customer record. That is real progress.

It is also the old follow-up sequence moving at internet speed.

Word of Mouth (ancient) becomes Viral Marketing (1996)

People tell other people about things.

We had this one working before we had printing presses, databases or quarterly pipeline reviews.

“Viral marketing” gave the spread a useful modern metaphor in the 1990s. Digital networks made it possible for an idea to move farther and faster than ordinary conversation ever could. Referral programs also gave companies a way to reward some of that sharing and count what happened next.

What they didn’t provide was control. That hasn’t stopped us from selling formulas for virality, which is one of marketing’s more optimistic hobbies. The mechanism still begins in the same place: one person decides another person needs to know.

One-to-One Marketing (1993) becomes Personalization (2010s)

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers published The One to One Future in 1993. Their argument was right there in the title: stop treating every customer the same.

Twenty years later, personalization became a software promise.

At first, it often meant putting a first name in an email subject line and acting as though the computer had remembered your birthday. (I mean, we all remember the pencils with our names on them. We loved that. And yes, some version of that example showed up in many a meeting when personalization was “introduced.”)

Then the systems became more capable. They could change offers, recommendations, timing and entire site experiences based on behavior. Again, the ability changed. The idea didn’t.

Know who you’re talking to. Remember what you know. Don’t make every person walk through the same door.

Multichannel Marketing (1990s) becomes Omnichannel Marketing (2010)

This may be my favorite because the rename is almost entirely a prefix.

Multi means many. Omni means all. The difference was supposed to be integration. Multichannel meant a brand appeared in several places. Omnichannel meant those places remembered one another, so a person could move from a store to a website to an app without starting the relationship over each time.

It was also what a good multichannel plan had been trying to accomplish. We weren’t doing it well enough. So we changed the word, drew a cleaner diagram and tried again.

Sometimes a rename is just the industry putting the same homework in a new folder.

Key Account Management (1970s) becomes Account-Based Marketing (2003-2004)

Choose the accounts that matter most. Learn how they work. Coordinate the people serving them. Treat each one differently.

Large sales organizations had managed key accounts that way for decades.

Account-based marketing formalized the marketing side of the practice. ITSMA is credited with naming ABM around 2003 and publishing its early work in 2004. Technology later made it possible to identify target accounts, tailor campaigns and watch engagement across a buying group.

I even got a certificate in ABM, which before that I just called our Hot List marketing. I kinda like my name better.

But the goal of it was to help marketing and sales work from the same list, at least until someone opened a spreadsheet called FINAL-final-accounts-v7. (We can debate if sales and marketing play nicely together because of it…)

Still, the core instruction was familiar: Pay closer attention to the customers worth paying closer attention to.

Lead Generation (1980s) becomes Demand Generation (2000s)

Lead generation finds or captures a person who may be interested.

Demand generation is supposed to create the interest before asking anyone to identify themselves. I have sat in the meetings where this distinction was drawn very carefully, then watched both teams count the same form fills six months later.

The newer name widened the job. It pulled in education, brand, category awareness and the long stretch before a buyer raises a hand. Good. That stretch was always there, whether the spreadsheet admitted it or not. But businesses didn’t suddenly discover that people need a reason to want something before they become a lead.

We renamed the part we’d been undercounting.

Networking (centuries old) becomes Social Selling (2009-2010)

Talk to people in your field. Be useful. Remember what matters to them. Stay in touch. Eventually, someone buys something or introduces you to someone who does.

Networking has worked that way for a very long time. Social platforms moved more of it into public view and made the circle much larger. Around 2009 and 2010, social selling began showing up as the name for using those networks as part of the sales process.

Then came playbooks, dashboards, training and certifications. The tools let us listen at scale and maintain relationships across distance. But posting something useful, joining a conversation and remembering the human being on the other side isn’t a new species of selling.

It’s networking with notifications.

Permission Marketing (1999) becomes Inbound Marketing (2005-2006) becomes Content Marketing (2010s)

Seth Godin published Permission Marketing in 1999: earn the right to keep talking to someone instead of buying the interruption.

Brian Halligan coined inbound marketing while HubSpot was taking shape in 2005 and 2006. The company built a method and a software business around attracting people with useful content rather than chasing them with ads.

Then content marketing became the umbrella many of us used for making and distributing that useful work. I can tell you this was not the first time content marketing was used. I mean I watched soap operas (still do), which were literally a precursor to the doom scroll. Entertainment created so you would watch the ads around it.

The names aren’t perfect synonyms. Each one took a piece of the same basic idea and made it more specific, more organized or easier to build a process around. But all three rest on the same bargain: help first, so people choose to come closer. That bargain goes back to 1732 at the very least, and probably about 3,600 years further than that.

We keep naming it. The audience keeps deciding whether it’s worth reading.

Search Engine Optimization (1997) becomes AEO (2010s) and GEO (2023)

SEO has been declared dead so many times it should have its own loyalty card.

Now we have answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. GEO was introduced as a formal term in a 2023 research paper. Both names reflect a real change: people can get an assembled answer without clicking through a list of blue links.

That changes how content is found, quoted and measured. It doesn’t make SEO irrelevant. Google now says that its existing SEO guidance still applies to generative search, and that AEO and GEO are terms for work it still considers SEO.

Which is almost too perfect for this article. Make the work findable. Make the answer useful. Give the machine and the human a reason to trust it.

The screen changed again. The job is still in the room.

Content Marketing (1990s) becomes Attention Marketing (2020s)

And now we’ve reached the rename that started this article.

This is the one I lived every day.

Remember those soap operas? One of my first content marketing attempts in the 90s was a website where I wrote fan fiction episodes about Days of Our Lives. Back then, we lived off one chat room board on AOL and an email listserv. When that moved over to business too, we just called it marketing.

I ran content teams through the years when “content marketing” went from a thing you had to justify to a thing with its own budget line, its own conference and actual job titles. Eventually, as VP of Content, those people reported to me. But now, content marketing is over, we’re told. There is too much content. People don’t want more of it. The new job is attention marketing: make fewer things that earn and hold attention instead of filling a calendar.

I agree with the diagnosis. I question the birth announcement.

Content marketing was never supposed to mean producing seven beige posts a week because Tuesday looked empty. It was supposed to mean making something useful enough that the right person chose to spend time with it.

It’s still content marketing. It’s still… just marketing.

(I should also admit that an earlier URL on my own site for an article on the history of content marketing used the phrase attention marketing. I changed it while working on these articles. Even I’m not immune to a good renaming.)

What actually changed

Saying the work keeps getting renamed doesn’t mean the work stayed the same.

The channels changed. A company once had to buy distribution or own a printing press. Now a person can publish from the grocery line and reach more people than a regional newspaper did.

The speed changed. Oreo’s “You can still dunk in the dark” post during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout existed because a brand team could react while the event was still happening.

The scale changed. One automated sequence can respond to more people before lunch than a direct-mail team could process in a month.

And the measurement changed. We can see a trail that earlier marketers would have paid dearly to know: who opened, clicked, watched, returned, compared and left.

Those changes are real. They matter.

But the tools changing doesn’t mean the people underneath all this suddenly became a new species.

What never changed

Under every name in that table, three things keep surviving.

Be useful before you’re promotional. Franklin’s almanac included weather, sayings and practical information. Michelin told drivers where to eat and stay. John Deere’s The Furrow taught farmers about farming. The usefulness gave the promotion somewhere to live.

Show up often enough to be remembered. The famous examples didn’t publish once, admire the launch graphic and wander away. They kept going. This is not the glamorous part of the story. It is annoyingly often the part that worked.

Be specific enough to be recognized. Useful isn’t the same as memorable, and it definitely isn’t the same as yours. The language you use, the examples you reach for, the opinions you keep coming back to, the strange little details people start associating with you. Those are fingerprints.

They’re what make useful content recognizable instead of interchangeable. If the work could have come from anyone in your category, more distribution only makes the sameness travel farther.

That last one isn’t really a content problem.

It’s a story problem.

And this is where all the renaming can get expensive for a business owner. A new term shows up, it sounds like something important changed, and suddenly you’re wondering whether the strategy you already built needs to be replaced.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes somebody just renamed the furniture.

So what do you do with this?

Less than you might think.

The next time someone announces that the thing you’re doing is dead, check the body. Did the behavior disappear? Did the channel stop working for the people you’re trying to reach? Did the economics change? Or did the industry give an old job a new name because the new name fits on a conference badge?

You may need to change the way you do the work. You may need a better tool. You may even need to stop doing it.

But you don’t have to attend every funeral.

Some of the guests aren’t dead.