It's 2010. You've got a venerable brand in the U.K. but it's virtually unknown in the U.S. You're also aiming to be the first company to sell your product direct to consumers online. How do you generate awareness? How many of you answered: "You create a branded entertainment series on the Web that doesn't mention your name - or hint at what you do - except for a short lead-in and close during its first 10 episodes"? That's exactly what business insurance company Hiscox did when it wanted to establish itself as a company that understood the tribulations of small-businesspeople.

"We've been doing what they call content marketing for 25 years," Bruce Bolger told me last Friday. "It's a big part of enterprise engagement." Bolger, a friend and hiking buddy, is an entrepreneurial author who has been pushing the importance of engaging everyone involved in the sales of goods and services - customers, employees, partners and suppliers - into a proactive process of communication, learning, recognition and collaboration. "It's 21st century marketing," he says. "It's finally taking hold with CEOs, and the advertising industry hates it. Advertising is a 20th-century solution."

It's all about relevancy, Otto Bell will tell you: finding that kernel of a story within every brand that provides some kind of utility, or deepens a viewer's understanding of a subject, or even just evokes a smile. This requires that brands "rethink their modus operandi a little bit and recognize that they are sometimes sitting on stories that are oftentimes of really wonderful societal relevance," he feels. That's not something often said about the :30.

Radio One, which reaches 82% of the African-American population across platforms that also include television, live events websites and social media, is the latest media company to create a custom content studio - OneX - to work directly with brands and their curators.