Not so long ago, it was relatively easy to understand what people read, watched and listened to. There were four television networks, magazines and newspapers, radio and billboards. Marketers knew where to advertise to reach their audiences. If you wanted to reach a massive audience and be part of the national water cooler conversation, all you has to do was buy a commercial spot during NBC’s Thursday prime time line-up.

Today, viewers have turned away from network television, print magazines and newspapers, to on-line video,  and social media. Four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and its billion users watch hundreds of millions of hours of video content through the platform every day. Snapchat gets 10 billion video views per day, and Facebook gets over 8 billion. Then, there’s Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and large video content streaming channels like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, along with niche players like Acorn and DramaFever. The magazines and newspapers that survived the digital revolution offer on-line editions with regionally focused content.

Everyone wants to be in the content conversation, especially brand marketers. But can anyone maintain a high Content IQ when there’s so much content to manage? The amount of quality content will continue to grow rapidly in 2017, and it won’t look the same as it did in 2016. Media platforms will expand, new creators will emerge, and new trends will sweep the nation. To stay ahead, businesses need to leverage today’s powerful digital technologies to connect with their audiences in highly tailored, influential ways. To be effective, businesses need to rely on brand and marketing experts that maintain a high content IQ and who know how to tap into the technologies to activate it.