Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute is the organization Joe Pulizzi founded in 2011 to give the discipline he'd been naming since 2001 its infrastructure: education and training, the Chief Content Officer magazine, Content Marketing World — the orange-soaked Cleveland conference that became the field's annual capital — and, with MarketingProfs, the annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks research the industry has cited every year since. UBM acquired it in 2016 (now under Informa); Pulizzi later returned to the conference stage as its founder-emeritus presence.

The benchmark research is the durable asset — the longest-running dataset on what content marketers do, budget, and struggle with, making 'according to CMI research' the field's most common citation. Institutionally it legitimized the discipline: a certification, a magazine, and a 4,000-person conference signal 'profession,' which is what Pulizzi was building all along.

Cite the annual benchmarks for budget and strategy arguments (the documented-strategy correlation is the most-used finding); use the training for team standardization; and treat CMWorld as the field's state-of-the-union — the session list itself is a trend report on where content marketing is heading.

Pulizzi launched CMI in 2011 (with the first Content Marketing World the same September) as the institutional layer over the movement he'd named at Penton in 2001 — explicitly modeled on building the category's hub. UBM acquired it in 2016; Informa absorbed UBM in 2018.

Etymology: source.

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