TechCrunch writes a great article for today’s tech companies letting them know, what is old is new again, finally. But, not really.

The premise is a simple one. Regardless of new terminology like “inbound”, “content” & “social media” marketing, what they all mean, is what they have always meant… and that is, it’s all just marketing.

“Imagine that it is the year 1996. What did traditional marketing departments think about? The four Ps. The promotion mix. Communications strategies. SWOT analyses. The five forces. Building brands. Then, by 2006, what did digital marketing teams think about? High Google rankings and more website traffic. Getting Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers. Keyword density. Building links.

“Marketing departments” were using professional strategies that had been developed over many decades. “Online marketing departments” were calling themselves “marketers,” but did not even know what every 18-year-old marketing student in business school knows. Two very different teams were doing two very different things.

The biggest problem in marketing in the tech world today is that too many marketers do not know the first thing about marketing.

Digital marketers — who, as marketers, really should be cynical enough to know better — have fallen into an echo chamber of meaningless buzzwords.

Hold on – that’s going a bit far. They are buzzwords, but that are hardly “meaningless.” To say that a content marketer does the same thing as a social media marketer is simply inaccurate. Further, to lump them all together like that discounts the fact that no two clients’ marketing needs are the same, therefore require tailored marketing suitable to their brand, and their product or service.

“Content marketing” is nothing new

While all of these changes were occurring, online marketers should have discarded their imitation marketing and started to practice real marketing and brand building.

But “inbound marketers” had always been wrongly declaring — without any proof or evidence — that “outbound” strategies such as advertising, PR and publicity were “dead.”

Okay, I know I said this was a great article, but this part? It’s simply nonsense. I’ve been involved in digital marketing since 1996, and never in that time has anyone I’ve worked with or for not understood that digital is a piece of marketing, not the whole cake. There are exceptions, but those are short term in the case of a startup, where their marketing dollars are best spent online, simply for economic reasons. Digital ain’t everything, but it’s certainly cheaper, and for those who have to measure ROI in single dollars, the band for the buck tends towards to digital in early stage companies. However, once they grow, all oars are in the water.

But here’s the good stuff:

Marketing has always been the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience in an effort to build brands, increase demand and move people down sales funnels. The same is true today — the only differences are that we have two additional sets of available channels, called the Internet and mobile devices, and those channels allow for a greater variety of content formats.

In the 1950s, a marketer may have created a message about a product and then put that message into a print advertisement that was then transmitted through a newspaper. Today, a marketer may create a message about a product and put that message into a video that would then be transmitted through YouTube.

The tools and channels change, but the process remains the same. “Content marketers” are doing nothing different from what creative teams have always done. In the SEO community specifically, more marketing software tools and digital marketing agencies are beginning to understand the negative effect of buzzwords as they rebrand themselves away from “SEO” and more toward “marketing.”

In the end, all marketing is “content marketing” because all marketing uses content.

The author, Samuel Scott (@samueljscott), is saying that marketing is just marketing, and digital is just another channel for marketing, just like outbound methods like direct mail, radio etc. Which is true, but not quite the whole truth.

What’s changed, and changed forever is the marketers message that flows out through those channels.

Once upon a time there was marketing. And then along came the Internet and digital marketing. For a while, digital marketing outshone traditional marketing because, “Hey, look over here, jingly shiny keys!!!”

Then, over time, everything evolved. Search engine companies decided to best serve their customers, they should insist that content providers, oh sorry, marketers, be above board and should work hard to be honest brokers. As a result, bad sites were punished and Black Hat SEO disappeared, hopefully forever. In their place, higher quality, more informative content became the “must-have” for brands as consumers, prior to buying, became information hunters. In the 50’s marketers had to get to the people. Today, good marketers can get the people to come to them.

So, I agree with Simon here. Things have returned to normal. We are all marketers now. However, how we are marketing is not the same.

It’s not even close.