Brands like Red Bull, Coke and, more recent­ly, Taco Bell are lead­ing the charge toward edi­to­r­i­al-dri­ven web­sites that for­sake tra­di­tion­al cor­po­rate site con­tent for the sto­ries, images and videos that were once the purview of blogs and news sites.

When Coke debuted its revamped site in 2012, the move was still per­ceived as some­what rad­i­cal. Now, how­ev­er, mar­ket­ing experts say a ver­i­ta­ble evo­lu­tion is under­way.

Here are 10 changes dri­ving this shift toward whol­ly edi­to­r­i­al brand sites – which eclipse sup­ple­men­tal edi­to­r­i­al con­tent – and why mar­keters must evolve or die.

1. Value

Mar­cos Sanchez, vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at tech­nol­o­gy-focused ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Runa Cap­i­tal, said hav­ing a cor­po­rate web­site sim­ply doesn’t cut it any­more as mar­keters look to pro­vide more val­ue with the result being that more com­pa­nies are look­ing at con­tent mar­ket­ing some­where between edi­to­r­i­al and adver­to­r­i­al.

Accord­ing to Sanchez, most brands under­stand con­sumers don’t want to just go to a com­pa­ny site, but rather want a rea­son to be there.

“Whether that’s cus­tom games, online order­ing, cus­tomized prod­ucts or edi­to­r­i­al con­tent, it’s impor­tant to give peo­ple a rea­son to go to your site, and just post­ing a tra­di­tion­al web­site isn’t enough,” he said.

This is also the rea­son old­er dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tac­tics are dying out.

“Obnox­ious ban­ner ads that force acci­den­tal clicks do noth­ing more than arti­fi­cial­ly skew click-through rates. They pro­vide no val­ue to the con­sumer. It’s exact­ly why Apple is push­ing a ban­ner-free ecosys­tem,” said Kyle Reyes, pres­i­dent and cre­ative direc­tor of The Silent Part­ner Mar­ket­ing. “You could care less about what tech com­pa­nies want…but we need to acknowl­edge the par­a­digm shift. The three top down­loaded apps in the Apple Store recent­ly have all been ad-block­ing soft­ware. Clear­ly there’s a strong wave hap­pen­ing at the con­sumer lev­el and it will con­tin­ue to fuel a shift towards con­tent-dri­ven web­sites that actu­al­ly bring val­ue to the con­sumer.”

Melanie Deziel, direc­tor of cre­ative strat­e­gy at Time Inc., too, notes adver­tis­ers must pro­vide more val­ue in part because con­sumers have an incred­i­ble array of resources out­side of a cor­po­rate web­site to learn about a giv­en brand’s prod­ucts or ser­vices.

2. Social

Per John Nesler, researcher and con­tent writer for online mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny Cre­ative Cal­i­for­nia, edi­to­r­i­al-dri­ven web­sites are sim­ply a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion from brands devel­op­ing their own social feeds.

“At some point, the breadth and cre­ativ­i­ty of their spon­sored con­tent becomes so var­ied that it makes sense to devel­op their own inde­pen­dent pseu­do-enter­tain­men­t/ed­i­to­r­i­al out­let to con­tain all of it,” he said.

Eliz­a­beth Clor, senior direc­tor of con­tent mar­ket­ing at cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment firm Clarabridge, agrees.

“Con­sumers now fol­low their favorite brands on Face­book, Insta­gram, etc. and so they have lit­tle rea­son to actu­al­ly vis­it their web­sites, unless they are mak­ing a pur­chase,” she said.

3. Influence

For her part, Rebec­ca Brooks, part­ner at mar­ket research firm Alter Agents, notes con­sumers have access to tons of infor­ma­tion about brands that does not come from the brands them­selves and word of mouth – par­tic­u­lar­ly dig­i­tal word of mouth – is a huge influ­encer.

“In the past, you only talked to peo­ple you knew, but now there’s a vast army of strangers that have already tried a prod­uct and giv­en feed­back,” Brooks said. “Irre­spec­tive of the brand, dig­i­tal word of mouth is becom­ing the dom­i­nant influ­encer in mak­ing pur­chas­es, so how does a brand stay rel­e­vant when it is not includ­ed in the con­ver­sa­tion? Edi­to­r­i­al is one of the paths to that.”

4. Mobile

Fur­ther, Mat Zuck­er, a part­ner at brand and mar­ket­ing con­sul­tan­cy Prophet, said mod­ern mobile-first cus­tomer expe­ri­ences have put huge ques­tion marks over web­sites in gen­er­al.

In oth­er words, brands must now ques­tion how the expe­ri­ence changes when vis­its aren’t from the desk­top and what the val­ue propo­si­tion is of a web­site ver­sus an app or oth­er owned chan­nels.

5. Authority

In addi­tion, Christophe Jam­met, direc­tor of social media and mobile at strat­e­gy firm DDG, said if brands invest in high qual­i­ty, edi­to­ri­al­ly-dri­ven con­tent, con­sumers will asso­ciate their pos­i­tive con­tent expe­ri­ences with your brand.

Fur­ther, Jason Brew­er, CEO of dig­i­tal agency Bro­lik, said con­tent hubs that are designed well and filled with good con­tent become con­sumer mag­nets and increase a brand’s author­i­ty.

“These con­tent hubs improve the per­cep­tion of a brand but can also have tech­ni­cal ben­e­fits like increased domain author­i­ty and organ­ic search traf­fic if the con­tent hits on pop­u­lar ques­tions and inter­est top­ics of the tar­get audi­ence,” he said.

6. Journalism

News orga­ni­za­tions are also respon­si­ble for this shift toward edi­to­r­i­al-dri­ven sites as they shift away from report­ing with neu­tral­i­ty, accord­ing to Nesler.

“News sto­ries have long been shaped by the bias­es of the cor­po­ra­tions and brands that par­tial­ly or whol­ly owned the media out­lets which pro­duce those sto­ries,” Nesler said. “So, in a sense, Taco Bell, Coke and oth­er cor­po­ra­tions are meet­ing these news out­lets in the mid­dle.”

Fur­ther, more biased posts are more like­ly to gen­er­ate desir­able mar­ket­ing out­comes, he said.

“Look­ing at social media, it’s clear that biased news arti­cles, opin­ion pieces and oth­er con­tent, which all amount to cor­po­rate-spon­sored con­tent, get tremen­dous trac­tion, being quick­ly shared by mil­lions of peo­ple,” Nesler said. “It makes per­fect sense for brands to get into the game by devel­op­ing con­tent that isn’t focused entire­ly on their prod­ucts, but instead riffs on the inter­ests of their tar­get­ed con­sumers. Peo­ple aren’t going to share a Coke com­mer­cial on Face­book, but they’re quite liable to share an inter­est­ing arti­cle that just so hap­pens to be pro­duced by Taco Bell, or a weird and quirky video made by Coke.”

7. Channels

The ad space is evolv­ing such that mar­keters now have to cir­cum­vent both tech­no­log­i­cal and men­tal ad block­ers, accord­ing to start­up mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant Nigel Raven­hill.

“So you have the rise of new adver­tis­ing chan­nels and for­mats, which aren’t what any­one old­er than 40 would even rec­og­nize as adver­tis­ing – or define as adver­tis­ing,” Raven­hill said. “As adver­tis­ing morphs beyond its his­tor­i­cal­ly rec­og­niz­able shape, using chan­nels that didn’t exist in the 20th cen­tu­ry, man­aged sto­ry­telling like [Coke and Taco Bell] will be increas­ing­ly cen­tral to com­pa­nies.”

Brew­er, too, said the shift away from tra­di­tion­al cor­po­rate web­sites points to a change in mar­keters’ mind­sets.

“Brands are final­ly catch­ing on to the fact that their cus­tomers don’t want to be sold to and they don’t real­ly care about the ‘cor­po­rate’ run­nings of their busi­ness,” he said. “Brands that focus on the needs of cus­tomers and strive to cre­ate con­tent that adds val­ue to their lives are see­ing cus­tomer loy­al­ty and engage­ment improve.”

8. Consumption

We are liv­ing in the “It’s All About Me Econ­o­my,” in which con­sumers want data, infor­ma­tion, and con­tent when and where they want it, Reyes said.

“They want to con­sume sto­ries and info­tain­ment that will help enhance their lives and their buy­ing deci­sions,” he said.

9. Perception

Aaron Wat­ters, vice pres­i­dent of SEO firm Lead­hub, said big brands have put in years of work toward prod­uct aware­ness and are now focused on top of mind aware­ness.

“The more engag­ing a big brand’s con­tent is and the more they own top of mind aware­ness, the more dif­fi­cult it is for new com­peti­tors to enter the mar­ket,” he said.

He uses Red Bull as an exam­ple.

“For years, they’ve been engag­ing their audi­ence with amaz­ing con­tent from extreme sports,” he said. “If you vis­it their U.S. site it’s all about con­tent that their audi­ence is inter­est­ed in – it’s more of a blog than a sales plat­form. In fact, their pri­ma­ry nav­i­ga­tion does­n’t even include infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts.”

10. Humanization

For his part, con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gist Hen­ry Ada­so said it’s the need to become more per­son­able that is dri­ving this trend.

“Peo­ple don’t tra­di­tion­al­ly view brands as peo­ple. So sto­ry­telling and more per­son­able con­tent are ways for brands to con­nect with the every­day cus­tomer in the social media age,” he said. “The per­cep­tion is that brands don’t care about peo­ple. Peo­ple care about peo­ple. So how can brands show that they care? By cre­at­ing per­son­able con­tent and by part­ner­ing with social media tal­ent.”

What do you think? Are tra­di­tion­al cor­po­rate web­sites doomed?