Over the last 10 years, most content has been produced in order to improve relevancy for specific keywords, but content marketing gaining, or regaining, prevalence within the online marketing theatre is a pretty big shift in the way things are done.
This shift is fundamentally a shift away from producing content which is designed to make you more easy to label (so that search engines like google can categorise your website), towards content which is aimed at being engaging with viewers.
This engaging, or at the very least informative content is something which websites need to focus on in order to be able to compete in the current environment. The fact that it provides benefits beyond SEO is perhaps good reason to argue for its fairness. It shifts focus away from competing based upon who can optimise for a computer reading your content and towards your website’s merits based upon a readers perspective.