Neil Patel published on QuickSprout a post titled How to Create a Content Marketing System That Runs on Autopilot. With tons of respect to Patel, one of the most influential online marketers out there, the title he crafted for this post, and to some extent the post itself, represents everything that is wrong with content marketing today.

Putting ‘content’ and ‘autopilot’ in the same sentence just fuels the gullible, panicked nature of how marketing departments approach content marketing.

I want to respond to some of the claims Patel made in his post and offer a different take on things.

"If there’s any area where content marketers run into trouble, it’s the inherently time-consuming nature of the process.

Creating epic content takes time and energy."

Starting with the second part of the quote - absolutely. Creating quality content doesn’t come easy, time and energy wise. And coming from Patel, an exceptionally crafty and prolific writer, gives it even more substance.

But why is that troubling? We aren’t troubled with programming being time-consuming. We aren’t troubled with UX design being time-consuming. We aren’t troubled with the fact that nurturing leads is ridiculously time-consuming.

With content creation though, CMOs, marketing directors and managers are inherently troubled with its time-consuming nature. I suspect it’s because everyone can write. Very few people write well, or enjoy writing, but since everyone can write, folks tend to be impatient toward writing. The prevailing attitude is, c’mon, get it over with.

When writers are hurried, it hurts the quality of their writing. When the focus is on quantity rather than quality, it shows.

“60 percent of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.”

This is one of the stats Patel mentions to illustrate “just how time-consuming content marketing can be.” I would want to see the complementing stat about the quality of these daily-produced pieces of content. And this remark doesn’t insinuate in any way on Patel’s writing; he’s too experienced to publish lesser quality content.

"I’ve found that half of the battle of content marketing is simply coming up with new ideas for blog posts, white papers, videos, etc.

There never seems to be enough new ideas to 'feed the hungry content monster'.”

When we start talking about “coming up with new ideas for blog posts” it means we are looking at content marketing from the wrong side. (And let’s fine-tune this - we are talking about B2B content marketing.) It means that our main concern is volume. Number of posts. Frequency of publishing.

The right side of looking at content marketing is that of publishing informative, educational, meaningful and relevant content. When I look at this group of adjectives what comes to my mind is that content creation should sprout out of real need, not out of a calendar.

There is no “content monster”. Let me rephrase that. There is a content monster, and it’s tearing apart content marketing. Monsters are creatures that are out of control, that don’t respond to reason or logic, that just are; with no purpose.

I’m aware of the need for consistency, to publish on a regular schedule and to follow an editorial calendar. I’m also aware of the role content serves, for marketing and for SEO. And I’ll be the first to admit that I have written articles in the past with the sole purpose of getting a link, or ‘organically’ injecting my company’s product into seemingly education-driven content.

My admission doesn’t make it OK. The immense pressure that is put on content, the fact that it carries almost the entire burden of marketing and SEO on its shoulders corrupts it.

"If you’re looking for a tool that works well for content curation, check out DrumUp.

It 'analyzes tens of thousands of stories every day from across industries, interests and niches,' so you can quickly find great content to share."

I don’t care what industry you are a part of, if there are “tens of thousands of stories every day” that’s just insane.

The fact that content curation became a task of marketing departments is a testimony to the cheapening of content. A recent article I published got more retweets than actual people who read it from Twitter; how’s that for content curation. And if your reaction to this statement was “duh” that’s exactly the problem. If we got to the point that content is shared without being read, or shared by bots and we are whatever-ing it, well, that’s not autopilot, that’s UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle).

* * *

I’m a purist when it comes to content. I believe in context, and relevancy and real purpose. Now, that I’m more in control, I insist on writing only when I have something valuable to say; I think it’s valuable, I’m not saying it’s objectively valuable. Without offending anyone, the notion that hundreds and thousands of companies have something valuable to say every single day doesn’t ring true to me. This peer-pressure to publish and share isn’t doing good to anyone, nor to content itself. Content marketing has lost it true calling and has become a machine that feeds itself with almost no intervention of the people it is meant for. Tools are curating and sharing, other tools are liking, Google - the mother of all tools - is indexing and along the way, here and there, a few humans actually read a piece or two of content.

The way I see it we have two options: either to scale back and revert content to what it’s supposed to be - educational, informative, entertaining, relevant, original and thought-provoking - or somebody cook up already an algorithm that can write and free us, people, from this laborious, time-consuming content thing.