F#ck Content Marketing

When was the last time you clicked on a company’s blog post only to close the page seconds later? Maybe the layout looked clunky, or the links sent you in circles. In that moment, the problem wasn’t the content—it was the experience. In F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships, marketing leader Randy Frisch argues that modern marketers must move beyond the obsession with producing content and instead focus on the environment in which that content lives and engages audiences.

Frisch’s central premise is bold: content marketing as we know it is broken. Despite the billions of dollars businesses pour into blogs, videos, and infographics, up to 70% of that content goes unused. Marketers, he insists, have mistaken content creation for content strategy. In chasing clicks and volume, they’ve forgotten what really drives trust and conversions—the experience that surrounds the content. To fix this, he proposes a new paradigm: the content experience.

Why Content Marketing Needed a Revolution

Frisch traces the problem back to two key issues. First, many organizations expect one group—often content marketers—to handle everything from creation to strategy to distribution. These creators, often former journalists or storytellers, are stretched too thin to think systemically about user flow or buyer journeys. Second, traditional content management systems (CMSs) aren’t designed for dynamic, personalized storytelling. They trap marketers in templates built for IT, not for human engagement. The result: disjointed customer journeys and abandoned content.

Frisch’s answer is to treat content like an experience, not a commodity. He defines a content experience as “the environment in which your content lives, how it's structured, and how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company.” That means designing every interaction—from a single email link to a robust resource hub—to feel personal, intuitive, and consistent. Much like how Spotify curates customized playlists or Netflix recommends shows based on your tastes, B2B brands must deliver “Made For You” experiences that anticipate what buyers want next.

The Power of Personalized Experiences

The book’s first section, “State of the Union,” explores why personalization has redefined expectations in both consumer and business markets. Citing companies like Spotify, Amazon, and Disney, Frisch shows how seamless, recommendation-driven experiences have trained audiences to expect relevance in every interaction. In contrast, most B2B marketing still feels like a bad email blast—transactional, inconsistent, and indifferent to the buyer’s stage or needs. Drawing on examples from Volkswagen and Tesla, Frisch contrasts lazy automation with truly thoughtful personalization. Tesla’s post-test-drive follow-ups reference specific experiences and personal details, building human connection. Volkswagen’s generic convertible pitch to a father of three? A total fail.

Introducing the Content Experience Framework

In Part II, Frisch unveils his practical solution: the Content Experience Framework. It includes five stages—Centralize, Organize, Personalize, Distribute, and Generate Results—a blueprint for making content accessible, coherent, and measurable. Rather than constantly churning out new “stuff,” marketers must connect the dots between existing assets and present them in formats that move buyers forward naturally. For instance, centralization prevents great content from getting lost, while personalization ensures the next asset feels like the logical continuation of the buyer’s journey, not a random detour.

Frisch fills these ideas with vivid metaphors—a Corona beer tastes wildly different in a dark basement than on a sunny Costa Rican beach, even though it’s the same liquid. Similarly, the same whitepaper can soar or flop depending on the environment it’s placed in. He uses stories from marketing leaders like Ann Handley, Daniel Day from Snowflake, and Lisa Kenney at Blackbaud to show how centralization, tagging, and contextual design deliver meaningful personalization at scale.

From Teams to Technology

Part III turns inward, examining how organizations must align around this new philosophy. Content experience isn’t a “marketing project”—it’s an organizational mandate. Every team from sales to customer success, to even billing and HR, contributes to the brand experience through content. Frisch calls for a new role, the Content Experience Manager, to unite these factions. Just as Eloqua once birthed “marketing automation managers,” the next decade, he predicts, will belong to those who can orchestrate content journeys end-to-end.

In the afterword, Uberflip cofounder Yoav Schwartz extends this vision further. He argues that older CMS systems are destined to fail marketers for the same reason BlackBerry lost to the iPhone—they’re designed for developers, not practitioners. The future belongs to the Content Experience Platform (CEP), a tool that lets marketers—not IT—own, analyze, and personalize at scale. These systems will integrate deeply with marketing and sales tech, combining AI insights with human creativity to deliver adaptive journeys for every buyer.

Why This Matters Now

Ultimately, Frisch’s manifesto isn’t about rejecting content marketing—it’s about rescuing it from mediocrity. “If you’re not going to use the content you produce,” he writes, “then f#ck content marketing.” His message: stop measuring success by how much you create, and start measuring by how your audience feels and behaves. Every asset, every email, every landing page is an opportunity to build trust. Ignore the experience, and even brilliant content dies unseen. Focus on experience, and your content becomes a genuine growth engine—one that drives demand, revenue, and lasting relationships.

Frisch begins by reminding marketers how radically consumer expectations have changed. When we stream on Spotify, scroll Instagram, or shop on Amazon, personalization is baked into every interaction. Our playlists are auto-generated, our feeds are curated, and our carts seem to read our minds. Yet, step into the B2B world, and this seamless experience disappears—replaced by clunky email nurtures and static websites. The takeaway? Your buyers don’t change identity when they walk into the office. They expect the same relevance and ease there too.

The Consumerization of B2B

Citing Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, Frisch highlights how platforms like Spotify and Netflix use data to not only reinforce preferences but introduce discovery. Between 2014 and 2017, Spotify users went from listening to 68 artists a month to 112. These services don’t just mirror user behavior; they stretch it. The same logic applies to brand content: insightful personalization should help audiences explore problems they didn’t yet know how to articulate. It’s not about “you might also like” gimmicks—it’s about curating insight.

Disney, Tesla, and the Experience Lesson

To bring this home, Frisch leans on storytelling. At Disney World, even average rides like Space Mountain feel magical because of how they’re staged—from themed waiting lines to immersive set designs. Likewise, IKEA doesn’t just sell furniture; it sells room journeys that show customers how individual pieces interact. The lesson is simple: people don’t buy products—they buy experiences. In B2B, from onboarding webinars to email campaigns, the same must be true.

The contrast between Volkswagen and Tesla drives this point further. When Frisch visited a Volkswagen booth with his kids, the brand later sent him convertible offers—tone-deaf considering he’d test-driven SUVs. Tesla did the opposite, tailoring follow-up emails to his specific test-drive and even referencing a personal anecdote about his brother-in-law’s injury. Tesla’s marketing humanized the relationship—Volkswagen’s automated experience alienated him. It’s a master class in how personalization equals empathy.

Four Habits Sabotaging Personalization

• 1. Prioritizing the newest over the best. Marketers flood calendars with fresh posts instead of resurfacing older pieces that still drive value. Recency trumping relevance is like watching the fifth Transformers movie without the first four—confusing and unengaging.
• 2. Organizing by content type. Websites house blogs, videos, and ebooks in separate silos, forcing visitors to self-navigate. Buyers search by challenge, not format. A resource hub should mimic Spotify’s genre playlists, not dusty file folders.
• 3. Ignoring UX. Great content isn’t enough if the experience sucks. Unintuitive navigation, intrusive pop-ups, or a poor mobile interface all signal a brand that doesn’t care about your time.
• 4. Passing the buck. Too many teams assume “experience” belongs to someone else—marketing to IT, IT to design, and so on. Ownership must be clear and collaborative.

Becoming the Brand People Trust

Frisch insists that trust—the backbone of personalization—is earned, not demanded. People will only consent to share data if they see value in return. Much like how we gladly let Netflix “track” our viewing habits because it gives us better recommendations, your buyers will open up when your content proves it understands them. Ignore this social contract, and you’ll join the growing pile of brands flushed out by ad blockers, spam filters, and indifference.

Frisch’s paradigm shift from content marketing to content experience redefines what it means to engage audiences. Instead of obsessing over the quantity of content produced, he wants marketers to obsess over how that content feels to consume. His simplest but most powerful metaphor—a beer—perfectly illustrates the difference. The same Corona beer can taste dull in a cold, dim basement but divine on a sunny Costa Rican beach. The beer hasn’t changed, but the experience around it has. Likewise, the same blog post can feel useless in one setting but transformative in another.

The Three Pillars of Content Experience

• Environment: The visual and interactive setting in which content lives—a visually coherent website, a personalized dashboard, or a curated resource hub.
• Structure: How content pieces connect logically—like Netflix recommendations guiding you from one episode to the next instead of dumping you at a dead end.
• Engagement: How well the content invites further interaction through calls-to-action, recommendations, and emotional alignment with the brand.

Why Experience Drives Conversion

Frisch compares great content experiences to customer service: when done right, people brag about it; when done poorly, they never return. Sixty-five percent of buyers report frustration with inconsistent experiences, and a Harvard Business Review study he cites found that perceived personalization increases willingness to buy by 40%. The bottom line is clear: optimizing for experience is optimizing for revenue.

Designing for Discovery

Every company already has a content experience—the only question is whether it’s good or bad. To diagnose yours, Frisch suggests walking through your own buyer’s shoes: search a pain point, click your own article, and note what happens next. Are you guided intuitively forward? Does the design look trustworthy? If people must work hard to find content, you’ve failed them. In contrast, sites that guide users—like Amazon suggesting related products or Netflix recommending what’s next—convert users into binge consumers.

Frisch’s deeper message: content is no longer about storytelling alone—it’s about storysetting. You aren’t just crafting messages; you’re crafting the digital environment where those messages live. When you make that environment beautiful, intuitive, and consistent, trust naturally blossoms—and conversion follows.

To help organizations make this transformation, Frisch introduces the Content Experience Framework, a five-phase process for operationalizing personalization at scale. The framework acts as a bridge between individual marketers’ daily tasks and the organization’s broader growth goals.

1. Centralize

Marketers don’t lack content—they lack visibility. Frisch calls out “homeless content,” great assets stranded on YouTube channels or forgotten in folders. Centralizing means gathering all this scattered work into one searchable location. As Ann Handley puts it, bring your content “home.” Once centralized, assets can be indexed by format, topic, persona, or buyer stage, helping teams reuse rather than reinvent. This step alone can save organizations thousands of hours and dollars while turning lost content into leverage.

2. Organize

Frisch compares good organization to Netflix’s tagging system. The DVD-era Blockbuster organized everything alphabetically by genre, forcing customers to wander aimlessly. Netflix, by contrast, tags content by cast, mood, and theme, making discovery frictionless. Your company’s resource center should feel just as intuitive, whether someone searches by industry, persona, or problem. Proper tagging and metadata transform stale archives into dynamic recommendation engines. Companies that bake AI into this process can predict what comes next for each user journey.

3. Personalize

At the heart of the framework lies personalization. Frisch defines it as delivering “the right content to the right person at the right time.” He dissects how brands like Alight and Blackbaud create streams of content that match personas and journey stages, turning static pages into bingeable experiences. In B2B, this can mean personalized hubs for each target account (think Snowflake’s ABM campaigns) or dynamic CTAs that adapt to behavior. Done right, personalization humanizes marketing again.

4. Distribute

A great experience means nothing if nobody sees it. Distribution, Frisch argues, isn’t pushing links—it’s crafting integrated paths across channels. Email campaigns, social posts, and paid ads should all connect to curated destinations, not random blogs. He urges teams to bridge silos between content creators and demand gen in order to ensure consistency. A well-executed campaign should feel like Spotify’s “Made for You” playlist—cohesive, omnichannel, and personal.

5. Generate Results

Frisch cautions that results aren’t a final step but a mindset baked into every stage. He tells a story of a skeptical marketer named Heather who saw content as a waste of money—until data connected content to revenue. Tracking engagement, lead scoring, and attribution helps prove ROI, guiding future strategy. Multi-touch attribution is crucial, he adds: not every asset “scores,” but the assists matter too. Success means showing how every piece—blog or video—moves someone closer to purchase or advocacy.

In short, this framework transforms chaotic content ecosystems into synchronized experiences. It’s part strategy, part culture shift—a toolkit for turning content into a predictable growth engine.

No marketing framework works without alignment. In Frisch’s experience at Uberflip, fragmentation was the silent killer. Every department—sales, customer success, HR—produced content independently, creating disjointed brand stories. Sales decks mutated. Videos drifted off-message. Even internal visuals acquired strange nicknames like “The Death Star.” The outcomes were predictable: confusion, dilution, and inconsistency. To fix it, Frisch championed a new cross-functional role: the Content Experience Manager.

Why Alignment Matters

Marketers can no longer own experience alone. As Frisch writes, “Everyone creates content—even your billing team.” A missed invoice tone or inconsistent onboarding email can fracture the buyer journey. Companies like Slack and Mailchimp stand out because every communication—from invoices to newsletters—stays on-brand and adds value. That kind of alignment demands a shared mindset, not just shared metrics.

During Uberflip’s internal overhaul, leadership realized sales reps were each using customized slide decks that diverged wildly from the core narrative. Marketing intervened—not by scolding, but by providing standardized, searchable assets that could be personalized safely. They centralized materials, built tagging systems by stage and persona, and empowered reps to remix within boundaries. The result: creative freedom without brand decay.

Defining the Content Experience Manager

Frisch envisions the Content Experience Manager (CEM) as the “coach” who unites content players across marketing, sales, and post-sale teams. This person bridges creative storytelling with data-driven orchestration—part strategist, part diplomat, part UX conductor. The CEM ensures the five-stage framework runs smoothly, identifies content gaps, aligns messaging, and measures performance. Essentially, they replace guesswork with governance.

In the appendix, Frisch includes a sample CEM job description: standardizing brand messages, mapping assets to buyer journeys, advocating for experience across departments, and ensuring personalization consistency. As with marketing automation managers a decade ago, early adopters of this role will shape the next generation of marketing excellence. When teams align around experience rather than output, the entire customer lifecycle—from first click to renewal—becomes coherent and trusted.

In the afterword, Yoav Schwartz extends Frisch’s philosophy into the technological frontier. He argues that traditional content management systems (CMSs) are collapsing under the weight of modern marketing needs—just as BlackBerry fell to Apple. Both failed for similar reasons: they built products for IT departments, not end users. The CMS was built for developers to manage web pages, not for marketers to create personalized buyer journeys. The result is friction, dependency, and missed opportunity.

From CMS to CEP

In Schwartz’s view, the answer lies in the Content Experience Platform (CEP)—a practitioner-led ecosystem designed specifically for marketers. While a CMS organizes static web pages, a CEP centralizes all formats—blogs, slides, videos, social snippets—independently and deploys them dynamically. It integrates with marketing automation, CRM, and analytics tools to track engagement across the full buyer journey. A CEP is to content what Shopify is to commerce: a marketer-first hub that democratizes control.

AI as the Engine of Scale

Artificial intelligence, Schwartz predicts, will amplify personalization rather than replace marketers. “AI is currently the assistant, not the orchestrator,” he writes. Once marketers perfect the first fifty personalized experiences, AI can replicate and refine them for five thousand accounts. The CEP’s data-driven engine will analyze consumption patterns, identify where buyers are in their journey, and serve the next ideal content piece automatically. Done well, it turns personalization from manual craft to scalable system.

Reclaiming the Buyer’s Journey

Schwartz offers a practical thought experiment: what if you had to close just one account, with your entire company focused on that single buyer? How certain are you that you could personalize perfectly? Most marketers, he notes, admit uncertainty. Scaling that challenge across thousands of accounts requires both smart process and smart technology. With a CEP, every asset becomes part of a unified ecosystem that reveals, refines, and repeats what works.

Ultimately, technology is only as good as the philosophy behind it. Frisch and Schwartz’s final message is human: great marketing doesn’t happen “in” the content but through the experience of it. Whether powered by frameworks or AI, the goal remains the same—to serve people, not platforms.