What Marketers Need to Learn from Hunter S. Thompson

We have already passed the peak of content marketing popularity — at least content marketing in its current form.

After thirteen years in content marketing, I think it’s fair to say that most of the content on corporate blogs has been created by people with no first-hand experience in the subject matter. We’ve built a profession of couch potato commentators, a class of marketers who exist almost exclusively in a world of theory and abstraction.

I count myself among them. I have hundreds of articles on subfloor moisture management, information security, SaaS pricing models, agency resource management. I am not an expert in any of these topics.

This has been the content reality of content marketing for over a decade, a natural consequence of the incentives created by the early Google search engine. Historically, being a great content marketer required no specialized knowledge. All you had to do was read a lot and write speedy.

Mountains of organic traffic were built on the backs of amateur commentators like me. Time spent on in-depth, detailed research was, by and immense, wasted because 80% of the profits came from simply rehashing someone else’s ideas and putting a few keyword-targeted H2s in the right places.

But today it doesn’t work anymore.

Despite all its flaws, generative artificial intelligence is an excellent solution, truly world-class commentator from behind a desk. If the task at hand is to read a dozen or so articles and guides and transform them into something semi-original and reasonably coherent, then AI is really the best tool for the job. Humans can’t imitator generative artificial intelligence.

In other words, the content marketer’s role as curator has become obsolete. So what’s next?

Hunter S. Thompson popularized the idea gonzo journalism“a style of journalism written without claim to objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story, using first-person narrative.”

In other words, Hunter was history.

When asked to describe the growing Hell’s Angels phenomenon, became Hells Angel. While covering the 1972 presidential campaign, he openly supported his preferred candidate, George McGovern, and actively slandered Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby focused almost exclusively on his own promiscuity and mayhem—a story that has outlived any actual coverage of the race itself.

In the same vein, content marketers today need to become their stories.

It’s a truism in content marketing that it’s unreasonable to expect writers to become experts. There’s a superficial truth to this—no content marketer can acquire a decade of experience in a few days or weeks—but there are great rewards for any company that’s willing to question this truism very, very seriously.

As Thompson has proven, tiny, intense periods of first-hand experience can yield incredible insights and stories. So what would happen if you radically reduced your content production and devoted yourself half your content team’s time for research and experimentation? If their job was doing things worth writing about, instead of just writing? Was personal involvement, no matter how miniature, a necessary condition for this role?

We are already seeing this change.

Every week I see more and more companies hiring marketers who are true, sincere experts in their field (I’m including the Ahrefs content team here — for most of our team, “writing” is a secondary skill to a decade of hands-on experience in search and marketing). They’re steep, challenging to find, and in the age of AI, worth every penny.

I see a growing expectation that marketers will document their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that often outperforms “real” content. I see more companies willing to share subjective experiences and stories, and avoid competing solely by sharing objective, factual information. I see companies spending money to promote the personal brands of internal creators, actively encouraging parasocial relationships, while their corporate brand accounts remain dormant.

These are ideas that didn’t make sense in the ancient content marketing model, but they make a lot more sense today. This level of effort is quickly becoming the only way to gain any moat, creating content that doesn’t already exist on a dozen other company blogs.

In an age of information overload, our need for information is relatively straightforward to satisfy, but we have a nearly limitless hunger for entertainment, human interaction, and strange, disruptive experiences.

Gonzo content marketing can meet your expectations.