Michael Farmer, who has been consulting for advertising agencies for 25 years, sees the industry trapped between "fee-cutting clients and profit-hungry owners." Farmer lays out the details of how agencies have steadily fallen from the height they held 40 years ago and lays out a compelling argument for how they can best regain relevance and appropriate remuneration in a new book, "Madison Avenue Manslaughter." It will be available in September; I read an advance copy. At a time when some marketers question whether they need a traditional advertising agency at all to achieve their objectives, I posed a few questions …

Steve Butcher, the CEO of Seattle-based global ticket vendor Brown Paper Tickets, says he's had "a lot of love and respect for traditional marketing" dating to when he discovered Adweek magazine at his first job when he was 14. Not that his company does any.Instead, what Brown Paper Tickets does - and has since its inception in 2000 - is do things that aim to make a difference. "As we were growing the company, we decided that instead of putting money into marketing, and normal stuff like that, we were going to put it in the service level," Butcher says.

Susan Murphy figures she's been doing content marketing since she was graduated from Marquette University with a degree in journalism 30 years ago and landed a job as an assistant account executive at Edelman Public Relations. Still, sitting in meetings lately with younger, tech-savvy associates, she has been wondering if everything has been moving faster than her ability to keep up through hands-on osmosis.

Want to engage potential customers with content marketing? Humor helps, along with having a product that evokes passion - one way or the other - in the target consumer. Or, barring that, you need the talent to create a roiling controversy out of any material that happens to be at hand.