The King is dead. Long live the king.

I'm sad to see the final nail hammered hand and fist into the King Content coffin by Isentia. By the very same company that bought them a little under 2 years ago, for a lot. I'm sad for the team who are there today, all of them retrenched. There are some great people who I got to work with and learn from.

At it's height, King Content attracted the best talent in the business. The very best. They really were the sharpest tools in the shed and they won clients, did great work and expanded the agency around the world.

So what happened?

I joined King right at the top in 2015, when it was riding high on the content marketing boom in Australia. It was front of market in Australia in designing and championing the content strategy and content marketing methodologies that are now commonplace in every business. It was signing lots of new tier one clients and business was good. It was also for sale and had a number of large suitors circling. Isentia was the corporate shark that won the bidding with $48 million dollars (which became a final price of $38 million after buy-out targets weren't achieved). It was top dollar.

After the purchase we were expecting all sorts of drastic changes as the King Content team was integrated into Isentia. But it was very quiet for 12 months. Too quiet. Of course the machinations were happening in the backrooms as they prepared to bring King Content into the fold. And there lay the opportunity for Isentia in the first place.

The privately owned Media Monitors was more than 40 years old when it rebranded to Isentia in 2012. High barriers to entry meant competition was minimal so business flourished. They very nearly had a monopoly. The digital transformation of the noughties saw the moat that protected the business for so long start to shrink and new competitors and disruption set in. Isentia needed change.

Buying the leading content marketing agency in the region, with it's startup energy and thinking was an obvious way to create opportunity and drive change. Acquired disruption. King had access to new markets and its customers were the marketers, not the communications team that Isentia's sales teams already had wrapped up. In that perfect world, King and Isentia's offerings were in synergy and on paper both businesses would create growth for each other. Bringing the two together would widen the moat, and defend their turf as the likes of Meltwater rolled in their siege machines to steal some of the media monitoring pie. Unfortunately, that's not how it all happened.

The axing of King Content came rapidly. A bumpy integration and two rounds of restructuring before the axe finally fell on the King's neck today. The founders are well and truly paid and happy but the staff that were left have been made redundant and there's some Isentia shareholders that will be asking some hard questions.

I'm a fan of content marketing. Done right it fuels long-term business growth. Done badly and it leaves businesses burning money on pointless activity in social media, aimless blogs and content that is not designed to deliver ROI. Content marketing, or marketing as it should be called, is a powerful tool for both B2B and B2C businesses and we may have seen the death of the King, but content still rules.