English translation of the Portuguese original. The audio is in Portuguese.
Danilo Vitoriano started out in communications, went through ad agencies and ended up in software. I know that path well, because we worked together before each of us went our own way. In episode 3 of /root, published in 2023, I used that mix to ask him what had changed in content marketing after so many trends, tools and courses:
And, Danilo, I know we’ve had all kinds of trends over the last 25, 30 years, fads, tools, right? Courses, courses, everything. I wanted to understand a bit what has changed in content marketing over the last 20 years.
What Danilo told us
He began by recalling that the term content marketing barely existed twenty years earlier. The starting point was Web 2.0. As an intern at a small advertising agency in São Paulo that handled surfwear brands, he heard about blogs for the first time: a place where people wrote about their daily lives and others commented. Until then, the internet meant portals and newspapers, reading with no way to respond. Blogs opened a two way street, and social networks began giving people the chance to do their own marketing.
The bigger change, in his view, came in the budget. Small companies lived on word of mouth and, at most, flyers. At large companies, by his estimate, half the budget went to TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, with billboards and direct mail completing the picture. That money began moving to the internet: first to banners, then to more specialized portals, at a time when a banner cost as much as a magazine ad.
With blogs and Fotolog, brands started asking people with an audience for posts and photos. Danilo summed up the route like this: the budget left traditional media, went through portals, banners, sponsored sites and paid ads to show up on Google. He said he gained ground in his career precisely when a smaller budget could be split across several online channels. Later, the money moved on to content marketing, talking directly to whoever created the post, the Instagram photo, the fashion or tech blog and, today, the YouTube channel.
For him, that is the big difference of those two decades: the budget moving from traditional media to the internet and, from the internet, to content creators.
Three years later, the budget looks for the answer
Danilo’s map follows a logic that goes beyond chronology. Budgets have always chased the point where the audience’s decision takes shape: on TV it was the living room’s attention, on search engines it was typed intent, with creators it was trust in the people you follow. The next address already has a date in Brazil. On September 8, 2025, Google started rolling out AI Mode in Search in Brazilian Portuguese. In the announcement, the company describes a technique that breaks a question into subtopics and runs many searches at once, and says its goal is to show an AI generated answer whenever possible.
That changes the unit marketing buys. Banners bought impressions, paid search bought clicks and creators bought recommendations. In a synthesized answer, what matters is being the source the model picks when it writes, and that choice follows criteria no keyword auction controls. At CMO Summit 2026, I summed it up in a line I still use: “ranking is no longer enough, you have to be the answer”.
In practice, the content budget starts to look like an evidence budget. It covers public documentation that answers real questions precisely, consistent data across every company channel, reputation in third party sources that models treat as reliable and comparisons made honestly. Measurement follows: beyond rank and clicks, it now counts which questions the brand appears in, in what context and how accurately it is described. In technical markets such as financial infrastructure, a wrong answer about a company is costly, and accuracy matters as much as presence.
Creators stay on the map. People who publish in depth and spark discussion produce exactly the material models read, so investing in them also pays off as citations inside the answers the audience receives ready made. The line Danilo drew in 2023 gained one more stop, and anyone planning a budget in 2026 already needs to account for it.
The full episode is on RSS.com and YouTube.
Credits: /root, o Podstech da Celcoin. Hosts: Adriano Meirinho and Thiago Zaninotti. Guest: Danilo Vitoriano. Episode 3: O que mudou em Marketing e Criação de Conteúdo, published in 2023. Question at 1:56 to 2:10; summarized answer at 2:10 to 7:25.