Content marketing is a bit like playing Centipede.

If you're not familiar, this was a legendary 1980s arcade game created by Atari and famous for its trackball input, a unique implement in the pantheon of standard joysticks.

That trackball was slick, man. It made the whole experience fluid, slinky, super fast – and a little hard to control.

The goal of the game was simple: keep shooting at the interconnected segments of the snake-like critter as it winds its way down the screen to eat you. Even if you succeed in vanquishing it, another rises in its place – and with each round, the chain keeps getting longer and longer.

Like Centipede, content marketing is an unruly beast that feeds on chaos. You try to slay it, but you need multiple tools to execute and a good strategy to manage the complexity. Assets are everywhere, strewn about like a brand minefield. Meanwhile, the scope of your content keeps growing, and you keep feeding quarters relentlessly into the machine.

Oh, and all too often, a small team – or even just one player – is responsible for operating the trackball.

Both games can be fun and frustrating. There's no panacea for your Centipede gameplay (I never made the high score list myself). But as for the analogous subject, there is a solution: Content Marketing Platforms, or CMPs.

In terms of a basic framework, the analysts/digital philosophers define CMPs as “software solutions that support the practice of content marketing.”

Sounds a little too simplistic, right? Right. So let's follow the centipede down the screen.

What are Content Marketing Platforms?

CMPs are a broad class of creatures in the content wilderness. They're centralized systems that empower marketing organizations to plan, write, collaborate, and distribute content to a variety of channels and audiences across the campaign lifecycle. They do this by facilitating the creation and curation of digital components and assets – stuff like text, video, images, graphics, audio, e-books, white papers, and even interactive content assets.

The category isn't new per se, but it's evolving (maybe even bloating). Gartner has been tracking it for quite some time, focusing on enterprise-grade products that can deliver high-quality content at scale – helping brands tell big, interconnected stories that engage with customers and audiences.

In the recently published 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, just over 1,400 products support the broader category of “content marketing.” Not all fit Gartner's view of the CMP world, but this “centipede of choice” is a clear indicator that the field is exploding with opportunity – and competition.

This is where it gets tricky because “content marketing” covers so much ground. The Supergraphic offers up a wide range of options – everything from DIY platforms like Canva (which many large brands are using) to Apple Podcasts. This is why Gartner has endeavored to refine its criteria.

Chief Marketing Officers are particularly keen on these enterprise tools, as they address the critical need for maintaining a persistent content workflow and keeping it properly supplied. And as we all know, good content drives awareness, builds demand, and nurtures customer loyalty. All important goals for any modern brand.

At the same time, CMPs can incorporate a broad set of both tools and talent. In the case of Contently, their CMP offers a generative AI tool called “Story Ideas” that can be used to test and optimize suggested content. They also maintain a human network of freelance writers as an on-demand service (you know, the “old-fashioned" intelligence).

Because CMPs help unify a brand's ecosystem of assets, marketers can efficiently streamline how they create, curate, and utilize their branded, AI-generated, and even third-party content.

Given their tangential alignment to the publishing layer – think CMSes and DAMs – it's logical that more DXPs are expanding their offerings to include content marketing capabilities. And some of them are pretty darn good.

Case in point: Optimizely. The digital experience platform, which continues to nibble at Adobe's ankles in the Gartner MQ for DXPs, has also been a fixture on Gartner's grid for CMPs for the last seven years.

Unlike the DXP MQ, Optimizely holds the crown in the CMP category and enjoys a substantial lead over Adobe and most of the field. But what gave Optimizely the edge? And who else should we be paying attention to as the CMP field expands?

Hold on to your trackball. We're hunting for centipedes.

The high score goes to Optimizely

The news that Optimizely was named a Leader on the MQ for CMPs punctuates a period of remarkable growth for the company. As digital teams increasingly gravitate towards centralized marketing solutions, Optimizely's commitment to innovation – particularly across its Optimizely One platform – has catapulted it to the forefront of the industry.

Optimizely's journey towards a content marketing and operations system began with its 2021 acquisition of Welcome, a CMP with robust marketing resources and digital asset management capabilities. That same year, Welcome led Gartner's field of content market platforms, elevated by its progressive marketing orchestration capabilities. This success made the platform a more attractive target.

According to Gartner, Optimizely was positioned at the top right in 2024 for its ability to execute and its completeness of vision among the vendors evaluated. Of course, reaching the “top of the top” in a growing competitive field requires a little more muscle in your gameplay.

“For far too long, marketers have largely been without the best-in-class tools needed to create engaging content and campaigns,” said Shafqat Islam, CMO at Optimizely. “Our CMP addresses these needs by seamlessly connecting every stage of the content supply chain to unify marketing efforts. With everything from AI-driven content optimization to flexible workflows, our CMP is a key component of Optimizely One – allowing our customers to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.”

And Optimizely One is precisely what gives the DXP a clear edge. Buoyed by its holistic platform approach, Optimizely's CMP is connected to the rest of its ecosystem, driving immense value and potential for its customers as they realize the promise of “atomic content” across the marketing lifecycle.

Optimizely's CMP offers rich, marketing-centric management tools, enabling teams to collaborate in one place to plan campaigns, structure calendars, and even create marketing request tickets. From a content creation perspective, there's generative AI and customizable workflows to help ease the creative process, and tools like an omnichannel editor with structured content blocks.

You can also access your marketing assets from a centralized repository, ensuring that everything used in a content marketing campaign remains on-brand. If that sounds a lot like a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, you're right – because it is.

But here's where the roads diverge: with Optimizely's CMP, once you've created your content, you can publish across channels from within the system, leveraging the platform's CMS (or another CMS of your choice). You can also push to social media and video channels through an array of best-of-breed integrations.

Optimizely's analytics are also a standout feature and clearly part of its legacy as an optimization platform. In the CMP, you can leverage content analytics, operational metrics, and even ROI insights to improve the performance of specific content and marketing campaigns. A dynamite feature.

Finally, Optimizely is a highly scalable, industry-leading solution that's designed for the complexities of large enterprises. As such, they're uniquely positioned to hold up against its closest competitors (more on that in a minute). By leveraging its deep roots in optimization and personalization, it can also scale to places that others can't, bringing greater value to optimization as a service.

What's changed since the 2023 Gartner MQ for CMPs?

Right. Let's look at the rest of the field.

As is par for the course, there are always a number of strengths and cautions levied across the vendors Gartner evaluates. A quick glimpse of 2023's Magic Quadrant shows a slightly different set of vendors in play, which is a common challenge when reading the analyst's tea leaves: the products change.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms, 2023 and 2024. Source: Gartner.

Looks a little like Centipede, doesn't it?

Last year, a slightly smaller field of CMPs was included in the analysis. Optimizely was still in pole position at the head of the pack. A smattering of more focused, pure-play platforms, including Sprinklr, Storyteq, and Skyword, rounded out the 2023 Leaders quadrant.

There's a bit of marketing mele given how each vendor is posturing. For example, Storyteq positions itself as a “Creative Automation Platform,” allowing you to generate, scale, and activate marketing campaigns. Sprinklr has some novel messaging around its unified CXM approach. Meanwhile, Upland's Kapost sees itself as a “Content Operations Software.” They're all delivering many of the same core CMP features, but these distinctions speak to their focus.

Coschedule, Contently, and Upland Kapost also dotted the map in last year's Challenger and Niche quadrants.

And then there was Sitecore, the sole DXP contender holding court in the Visionaries sector.

What a difference a year makes. 2024's MQ includes two more vendors and a much tighter race at the top between Optimizely and Storyteq. Sitecore has made forward progress as a Leader, but the entire field has expanded with the addition of Adobe and Acquia – two major DXPs – in the Challengers category.

Adobe is a logical fit considering its breadth of CMS, DAM, and other features connected to its Marketing Cloud, which includes its Marketo Engagement Platform. Marshaled as one unified solution, you can manage, personalize, optimize, and orchestrate cross-channel campaigns. There's also its legacy Creative Suite and desktop publishing tools, which have long been staples of marketing agencies and departments – so it has a heritage of creative tools under the hood.

Acquia and Sitecore also provide similar CMS and DAM features within a connected ecosystem. Acquia's Content Cloud helps streamline content creation, editing, and scheduling with access to its Monsido accessibility tools (a key differentiator when considering the importance of digital equality). Sitecore's CMP offers some slick content strategy and planning resources, as well as some nifty collaboration tools for optimizing content creation and distribution.

As I said previously, DXPs are potentially great candidates for CMPs given their scope of integrated products, vis-à-vis CMS, DAM, marketing automation, and more. Most already have custom workflow capabilities, and all feature permissions and granular admin resources for managing users and stoking collaboration. Add on-board analytics, personalization, third-party integrations, and generative AI features and you're just missing the tools for managing campaign lifecycles and building creative assets.

But is that enough? No. Because there's more nuance to being a CMP than just being a DXP.

Refusing to be “Player 2”

Despite all the potential pros of DXPs offering CMP capabilities, tools like Storyteq are giving Optimizely a run for its money by enriching the creative toolset for marketers.

For example, Storyteq's extension for Adobe After Effects and browser-based Template Builder allow users to create dynamic content assets with great efficiency. It can also deliver multichannel campaigns with video, digital banners, and even print assets, and it can pull from almost any DAM or PIM. There's also a ton of automation, enabling teams to push rich campaigns based on any timetable across every platform, and it's all juiced with generative AI.

Like Contently and other players, Storyteq offers professional services alongside its SaaS platform. Their creative and marketing specialists can provide support with template building, developing brand portals, and handling content versioning (among other things).

Is this blended model of technology and people the key to a successful CMP? It's hard to say. Marketing is as much art as it is science. Clearly, customers are looking for assistance with some of the more grueling skullwork around strategy and set up, so these cottage services might be how these platforms compete against mutli-headed hydras like DXPs.

Why it matters

Here's a bit of trivia: Centipede was one of the most commercially successful video games from the Golden Age of Arcades. It was also one of the first with a significant female player base. Wicked.

Centipede was also hard. Just like content marketing. That's why people are so essential to the practice.

No matter how much technology we throw at it (and this includes AI), humans cannot be replaced from the content equation. Every tool we create is designed to amplify creativity, improve productivity, and optimize performance. But the raw creativity required to inspire a successful content marketing campaign? That's still the domain of people – because it's all about reaching people.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a distinction to be made around the field of “content marketing” and how a CMP serves to support it. If the Martech Supergraphic tells us anything, it's that the field itself is expanding rapidly – so we can expect to see a lot of activity across the tools that populate this category. That might include some consolidation, but I think we can safely predict that we'll see more products coming, and not less – and all of them accelerated by AI.

The addition of Adobe and Acquia to this year's MQ for CMPs signals greater diversification at the enterprise level. As digital experience platforms become more composable, they're positioning their discrete offerings to better compete for new customers while nurturing existing ones. Mid-market and enterprise targets that need a CMP are likely to utilize a CMS or DAM in the same ecosystem due to the ease of native integration. Conversely, existing DXP customers will make great ABM targets for a DXP's content marketing tools.

Can we expect to see more DXPs on next year's grid? I say it's a near certainty. Water always seeks its own level, and competing platforms always manage to find parity. That said, Optimizely's CMP innovations reflect a major shift in content marketing as brands seek blended, AI-powered capabilities within a dynamic UX – and the centralization of their content planning, creation, optimization, and delivery workflows.

At the end of the day, the Gartner Magic Quadrant is largely intended to help buyers narrow the field and evaluate the right technology tools. With so many products in the content marketing space, the MQ is attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff. It also illustrates a bit of the identity crisis that large DXPs might wrestle with as they embrace the CMP mantle bestowed by analysts.

But hey, innovative new tools keep disrupting the space at an accelerated pace – and in 12 months, it could be a whole new game of Centipede.

Remember to bring your quarters.

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Optimizely Leads Gartner's 2024 MQ for Content Marketing Platforms as More DXPs Join the Game