Back in 2010, expert marketers were thinking of ways to make their client’s products stand out more online. A few people tried producing content that customers would find useful in the hope that this would generate sales. But because the concept of content marketing was so new, few people really expected it to take off in the way that it did.

Once content marketing got going, it was practically unstoppable. Everybody piled in and soon those lofty returns that certain early adopters had enjoyed early on were whittled away.

This taught marketers a valuable lesson: always be on the lookout for the next way to market to your audience which nobody else has thought about.

Here are some forms of content that will help your business rock the airwaves in years to come.

Dynamic Video

If you’ve been following artificial intelligence news over the last year or so, you may have come across stories about how AI is now being used to make videos out of still photographs. Essentially, AI systems are able to use their knowledge of what should happen after a photograph was taken, if time was suddenly restarted, meaning you can show an AI a photo of a horse running, and it’ll produce a 5-second video clip showing what it thinks happens next.

It’s all pretty cool stuff. But MIT has come out and said that they are developing a tool that will allow people to manipulate objects in videos, using a similar AI platform. You’ll be able to do things like push objects, pulls them towards the screen and interact with them in much the same way as you can in real life. Sounds like a great idea for companies wanting to provide product demos.

Mini-Movies

Back in 2001, BMW created a bunch of films showing off its cars. 2001 was an era well before the advent of social media or online video and so the idea of mini-movies was somewhat novel. Companies would hire film companies to produce interesting mini-movies based on their product.

But now BMW is looking to resurrect the mini-movie and trial it out again to see if it has a significant impact. Back in the day, BMWs movies – around 8 short films – won prizes, including the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Titanium Lion. BMW got more than 100 million views of its movies through its website, which was pretty impressive in the days before YouTube.

Interactive Stories

The first proper showing off interactive stories we saw last year was from the New York Times during the summer Olympics in Rio. The New York Times created interactive stories by integrating data, visual treatments, slow motion and video into its articles. As a result, the paper’s content, which is usually derided on social media, was actually shared, all because of the joy of being able to interact with a story as it is read.

The take home for companies is that they need to embed rich media in their regular content to get users sharing their articles.