Categories: Content Marketing · Marketing
Originally published February 2017. A snapshot of the content brands that defined that year — some still leading, some since acquired or unwound. Preserved for the record.
NewsCred started a list that year of the 50 best content marketing brands, calling it #ThinkContent. From that list, five brands stood out — one from each of five categories. Here they are, in their 2017 moment.
Rue La La committed to inspiring and entertaining content across every social platform where it had a presence. In 2016, the brand launched Rue Now — a content hub updated multiple times a day, pulling stories from Fashionista, The Cut, PureWow, and Stylecaster, and covering pop culture, décor, beauty, recipes, and fashion.
The result: a million Facebook fans, 41K on Instagram, 46K on Twitter, and a newsletter audience that converted at rates the rest of retail envied. Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs, said at the time: "A content marketing effort I enjoy is Rue La La's. Mostly because I'm a subscriber who became a customer based on their useful emails which are chock full of style tips."
Blue Apron, founded in 2012, was everywhere on Facebook in early 2017 — meal kits with recipes and fresh ingredients that subscribers could tailor. The brand hit $1 billion in revenue and filed for an IPO that June (the stock story that followed is its own case study). The early content strategy was educational — teaching people how meal kits worked. By 2017, brand recognition let Blue Apron shift to storytelling: local farmer sourcing, food waste, sustainable seafood.
The blog became the platform for that shift. Facebook: 1.5 million fans. Instagram: 252K. Twitter: 51K.
InVision was the design software leader with a distinctive editorial voice. Marketing leader Clair Byrd framed it: "Design is not aesthetic for us, but a way to solve real business problems. 'How do I get someone to click on this Google ad?' is just as much a design problem as 'What typeface should I use for best readability on mobile?'"
The blog ran on user-generated depth — 95% of content came from designers themselves. The 2016 documentary DESIGN DISRUPTORS — a feature-length film about companies redefining industries through design — generated 100K new leads. (InVision itself wound down its product operations by 2024, but the content playbook it ran remains a category reference.)
Late 2016, Airbnb announced a strategic shift — from home-rental platform to a "holistic" travel brand focused on experiential travel. CMO Jonathan Mildenhall committed each host to a video trailer and poster, giving the marketing engine authentic, user-centric assets at scale. Airbnb Magazine — a 32-page print title co-published with Hearst — launched in the same window, featuring host content directly.
Social scaled with it. A million-plus Instagram followers. Destination guidebooks with thousands of local recommendations — content that later became the Experiences product and, by 2020, part of the IPO story that made Airbnb a $100B+ company.
Aging is a topic most brands avoid. Pfizer ran toward it. Beginning in 2012, the company launched Get Old — a site framing aging as a new beginning, publishing daily on health and wellness, relationships, money and career, and lifestyle. Content ran separately from Pfizer's corporate channels, with its own audience — 336K on Facebook, 41K on Twitter at the time — and its own editorial identity.
The demographic backdrop: about 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day through 2030. Pfizer built content authority in a category most pharma brands wouldn't touch — and it aged well as a strategic play.
Five different brands, one pattern:
The 2017 playbook still holds. What changed is the retrieval layer. Content built on owned platforms with editorial identity is exactly what AI engines cite when a buyer asks a question — because the retrievers reward depth, publishing cadence, and category ownership. The brands that built content hubs in 2017 are the ones the AI engines lean on hardest today. See Generative Engine Optimization and AI Visibility for how the discipline evolved.
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