A few weeks back, a colleague of mine shared an interesting video of a talk given by Gary Vaynerchuk.As a whole, a lot of his talk focused on LinkedIn ads, but I found one of his points particularly interesting, and equally applicable to content marketing.To paraphrase…There’s a ton of value in becoming a media platform rather than an advertiser–being a publisher, not just a marketer.The problem is that most people are in sales. So, when they turn to marketing, they’re actually just doing sales–like a promotional video (or, in the case of content marketing, a salesya blog article, email newsletter, or website talking solely about themselves).And in reality, nobody wants to see that. People aren’t all that interested in an infomercial about your business.It’s not a value-add. Period.And while marketing is harder to gauge in the short-term, it’s much stronger than sales in the medium and long-term.So, whether you’re doing LinkedIn ads (a la Gary Vee) or content marketing, focus on creating value for people, not just selling your space.At the end of the day, that’s what sticks.If you want to check out the full video, you can find it here.