Is content marketing an evolution of product placement?

Each week, Evan Peterson rounds up stories from across the Web that scribes of all stripes should check out. Content marketing is the new product placement, or maybe they’re the same thing. Also, the outlook for getting paid to write novels and long-form journalism has improved.

Content marketing or product placement? A traditional concept of advertising is the idea of product placement, an object or message in a script paid for by a brand, but made to look natural. Brands that do this now are often credited with the more favorable term “content marketing.” Content can mean a lot of things, but commissioned articles, publications, even feature-length films are becoming more and more common. It’s even moving into books, as the Annoyed Librarian blog wrote this week. The Sweet n Low company invested $1.3 million to have its product mentioned repeatedly throughout the text of a new romance novel. Content marketing, in its best form, is content about a brand without you caring that it’s content about a brand. Assuming the entire novel, “Find Me, I’m Yours,” is not entirely about sweetener, Sweet ‘n Low may have broken new ground in the classic form of product placement, or they just took content marketing to its logical next step. Read the post here.