Adam Kasper, chief media officer at Havas, predicts that the content marketing business will grow, as content comes closer to media buying, and automation will have a huge impact on this growth.

As you consider your organization's content strategy, perhaps the biggest inflection point is quantity versus quality. How much versus how good? It can be very difficult to do both, particularly for organizations with limited resources.

I recently wrote about the latest Content Marketing Lumascape, which showed just how crowded this market is getting. It made me wonder how much of this is technology tricks and how much is just tried-and-true principles tied up in a neat bow. To answer that question, I reached out to David Brown, executive vice president of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a content marketing company that sits within Meredith Corporation.

Marketers want content, but they need lots of help. According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2014 trends report, 93% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing, but less than half (42%) think their efforts are effective. One of the greatest challenges companies face is producing steady streams of engaging content.

I could never be in sales. It's not that I don't like to "sell" in my writing -- in fact, I think as content marketers, we all, to some extent, channel our inner salespeople. But as marketers, we're allowed to do so in a much more indirect way, introducing the context within which someone might want to purchase our product or service rather than saying overtly, "Here's my product and have I got a deal for you." But in some cases, being subtle in our content marketing may also be doing us a disservice.

Last week Federated Media split its legacy content marketing business from its programmatic, ad-buying business, which is now called sovrn. Whether this move spells an end for Federated Media or whether the content marketing arm will bloom again at LIN Media is unclear. But surely it marks the end of an era, so I thought we could reflect on the intellectual legacy that Federated Media left behind.