American Business Media's recent B-to-B World Conference perfectly epitomized the state of the business press today. Some attendees appeared oblivious to the Web cataclysm sweeping through their industry while others are pretty far down the path of reinvention. Even the reinventors, however, are not out of the woods: it's still too early to tell what the next point of equilibrium will really look like – but my extrapolation from current market trends probably won't please any of today's B-to-B media executives.

The highlight on the reinvention path was probably the keynote by United Business Media CEO David Levin, who told a data-rich story about the turnaround of London-based UBM's U.S. business, the core of which was known for 36 years as CMP. You can read a more detailed accounting of the numbers here, but this is the bottom line: The US business went from a 2004 revenue mix of 73% print, 14% events, 12% online and 1% data and services to a 2008 first-half mix of 24-40-18-18 and grew overall profit margin from 11.9% to 21.7% in the same period.

UBM's magic came almost entirely through acquisitions and sell-offs and is a nice business accomplishment. But they’re only out of the woods if you believe that live in-person events is the business engine that will dominate the next point of equilibrium. I believe it's a waypoint, and I suspect my old friends at UBM aren't done yet (for the record, I put in 24 years at CMP).

Also at the conference, which was actually produced jointly by the ABM and the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP), BPA Worldwide made an announcement clearly designed to show how hip they are to the whole Web thing. But BPA, the organization that has for decades provided independent audits of publisher's print circulation claims, has a bigger problem than most. When your mission is to verify that a print audience exists and that it really did request to receive a publication, how do you stay relevant in a world where every reader "requests" every individual article on every media site every time that reader clicks?

What BPA announced was a partnership with Nielsen Online to deliver "near-real time" Website auditing. BPA's president and CEO Glenn Hansen said the service "will create a level playing field" with a single standard for web measurement across all publishers, eliminating the need for media buyers to depend on publishers' self-reported data. BPA's problem (other than putting the hyphen in the wrong place – how near to real will it be, anyway?) is that the level playing field has always existed on the web. I don't care about proof the audience exists when I can measure the performance of my ad directly. No third party needed.

The conference's two other keynoters – Terry McGraw, CEO of The McGraw Hill companies and Patrick McGovern, founder and chairman of International Data Group – also seemed at opposite ends of the reinvention spectrum. McGraw, for instance, exhorted attendees to press the "comparative advantage" that real media companies have over the rest of the Web, which is that their brands represent "trusted content." But clearly that advantage is being rapidly eroded because the Internet teaches us all to decide for ourselves whether or not to trust content, at the individual article level. Media brands will always be a factor in that decision, but they are no longer the crutch on which we must depend. Forced to think more deeply for ourselves, we are.

McGovern, meanwhile, closed the conference with advice that will work in any era: "Your mission is to make your reader more successful." A media business must figure out how to, "make your audience more powerful and more successful, and you'll benefit from that success," McGovern said. That's the insight a mentor offered him when he founded Computerworld, and he said he still lives by it.

McGovern's thinking is on the right path to the future, but at the risk of being branded a heretic I'd substitute "any company" for "media business" and "customer" for "audience." In other words, in the future that my calculations show emerging from the current chaos, B-to-B media is largely disintermediated by marketers who deliver their own high-quality content directly to audiences of customers and prospects aggregated by the Web.

The particular Web dynamics that lead to this startlingly different future for B2B marketing are:

Connecting everyone to everyone else: Companies can connect with prospects without media companies' help, as long as they develop at least rudimentary audience development and database skills.

Fostering user-generated content: In most cases user-generated content is at least "good enough," and thus it breaks the media companies' lock on the audience relationship (in combination with the other trends).

Teaching buyers to assess content on their own: The proliferation of information sources on the Web has forced us all to learn how to make our own decisions about what individual pieces of content to trust, so we no longer need media brands as a proxy.

Raising the stakes in content quality: Buyers expect, and can find, high-quality, in-depth, free content on any topic. Old-fashioned marketing and advertising content will no longer cut it, so companies must figure out how to produce richer information that is more useful to their buyers and potential buyers.

These macrotrends are the reason why custom publishing – something no self-respecting B-to-B media company breaks out separately, at least not for public consumption – has experienced such rapid growth in recent years. But that's just the beginning.

Eventually, more customers will wonder what value they're getting by buying custom content created by publishers. There are already plenty of examples of do-it-yourselfers, from Best Buy's Best magazine to Constant Contact's email newsletter that focuses entirely on tips and tricks that make email marketing more successful for customers of its email marketing products (the newsletter signup is on the lower right side of the page).

In the near future, then, B-to-B media companies will not only compete with traditional media companies who are also struggling to reinvent themselves, plus dozens of new media start-ups, plus thousands of individual bloggers. No, because the Internet will turn every company in the world into a publisher, we will also compete with each and every one of our customers. That won't be pretty. This vision is very well articulated in a book titled Get Content Get Customers, co-authored by a friend and former boss of mine, long-time B-to-B publisher Newt Barrett.

The best path for B-to-B media companies is to become "content marketing" agencies. Plenty of former B-to-B editors have start ups already doing that, of course – and over time ad agencies and marketing agencies will converge on the same spot. Don’t be surprised that ad agency Stein Rogan + Partners, whose founder, Tom Stein, is being inducted this week into the ABM's CEBA Hall of Fame, has already launched its "content services division," named Kilter. Competition will only get more intense, as far as the mind can see.

Success in that intensely competitive future probably comes down to an updated version of McGovern's mantra: "Our mission is to make our customers more successful. Make our customers more powerful and more successful, and we'll benefit from that success."

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Mike Azzara is a long-time senior business media and online executive turned independent content marketing consultant. He can be reached at mike@azzara.com.