Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into the conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We aim to introduce you to the visionaries whose stories you might not have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. 

Through thought provoking conversations, we unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, we have a really special guest, none other than Robert Rose. You may know Robert from his work with the Content Marketing Institute. He is the founder and chief strategy officer of the Content Advisory, the author of multiple books, his latest coming out the end of last year, Content Marketing Strategy.

Previous to this, he served as CMO and led product and marketing development for one of the world’s first enterprise web content management solutions. He brings a true passion for marketing and technical innovation. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Robert to our podcast. Welcome, good sir.

Robert Rose 

Thank you very much, my friend. It’s always great to see you.

Bennie 

Likewise. I’m so looking forward to our conversation, because this is where we get to have fun, you know, in talking about our world around us. I’m going to delve right in. You have been referred to as not only a strategic leader in marketing and content, but you’ve also been referred to sometimes as the best kept secret. So how did you become?

Robert 

Absolutely. Ha ha!

Bennie

The best kept secret for so many brands that have turned to you to help navigate this ever evolving and tricky world of content marketing.

Robert 

I have to tell you, I love that question. I’ve not been asked that before, although I talk about it all the time. So thank you for that. Here’s the thing, I have always been a marketing fanboy and, of course, a member of AMA for years and years. I’ve got the gray hair to show it now. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now. So for me, it has always been about the work.

Right? It has always been about the, you know, about rolling up my sleeves, getting in. And what I’m really good at, if I’m good at anything, what I’m really good at is helping draw maps, right? Draw maps and help people understand how to get somewhere, how to, you know, how to take a vision, how to take a big idea. And I’ve been very lucky in my career to work with some extraordinary brands who have big ideas. You know, they don’t lack for creativity.

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm-hmm.

Robert 

They don’t lack for cool, interesting, big ideas to go execute. What they typically lack is the sort of organizational or operational approach to being able to get the right people, get the right alignment, get the right workflows, get the right content, get the right, you know, operations and technology all working together so that everybody’s moving in the same direction. And so I’m very much behind the scenes. Like I’m not a creative director that’s going to be front and center.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Robert 

You know, as I said for years, it’s your story. Just help you tell it a little better. And so what ends up happening is I end up working with so many executives in brands where, yeah, I’m just, I’m behind the scenes and helping those executives really execute their vision. And it’s the role that I love to play. That’s where I really like to play.

Bennie 

Hmm. You know, since you’ve had such a storied career in helping spaces, I’d love to know your thoughts. What were the big ideas 20 years ago, and what are the big ideas today? It’s one of those things. It seems like content marketing as both strategy and practice keeps getting larger and larger. And I think back to what would have been considered a big idea 20 years ago is probably table stakes today.

Robert 

Ha. Yeah, well, mean, look, 20 years ago to the day almost, we were in the midst of trying to deal with, interestingly enough, tough economics coming out of the dot com boom and bust. Everybody was trying to sort themselves out with this, what was a website? What was content? What was email? What was marketing automation? What was pulling all of the disparate parts of digital together?

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Robert

And it was that cohesiveness in that strategy that was really the big idea. It’s like, how do you, you know, you’ll remember back in the day we used to separate out. Did you, there was the digital marketing team and then there was the regular old marketing team that sat across the hallway and did other things. Right. And those big ideas in 2004 and, and 2005, the mid, you know, the sort of mid aughts as it were.

Bennie 

Right. Right, right.

Robert

It was all about how do we creatively put together a program where we can actually start to be found. It was the birth of inbound marketing. It was the birth of so much of what we now do in content marketing. And it was all around search and finding the, you know, finding the ways that our consumers would start to find us online. But pulling all of that together was the, was the big idea of its time.

Bennie 

So, you know, one of the things that’s interesting, when we think about the last few years, just how robust content marketing has become. You think about 20 years ago, what was innovative and the big ideas we talked about is now table stakes. Talk a bit about what you have seen lately that’s really pushing the boundaries of what content marketing can truly be.

Robert 

You know, it’s, it’s really the evolution, I would say of well, and we’ll probably talk a little bit about AI in a minute, but of course, you know, that’s, that’s, you AI is currently sucking all the oxygen out of the room. but more than that, I would say it has been the evolution. Some might see deevolution of what we’re seeing across social media. and broadly speaking, that gets to misinformation, disinformation, and trust, levels of trust across all the different platforms that we’re seeing. Brand safety certainly comes into that. But more than anything else, is in, because of search, because of AI, and because of social media now, the silos are becoming ever more tight for where people are consuming content. So it’s ever more important that we get our

Bennie 

All right.

Robert 

Great ideas, whether it’s thought leadership, whether it’s inspiration, whether it’s entertainment out on the platforms where our audiences are. So if leading up to let’s call it the pandemic, you know, even then as late as, you know, 2019, 2018, those kinds of things were all about how do we build our owned media properties to such that we can be found on search and, know, and create differentiation and all those things.

Content marketing is now starting to shift post pandemic into a world of how do we get our message, our trusted message out on as many platforms where our audiences are. And interestingly, the complication with that of course is TikTok and the for you algorithm that is really taking over the world of social media now means your audience size on those platforms matters much less.

Bennie 

Right.

Robert

You know, so every post has to earn its keep. Every piece of news you put out has to earn its keep. Every single piece of content has to earn its keep. So it means moving more of our quality content out further to the edges so that we can actually create that reach and differentiation and trust all the way out at that edge.

Bennie 

You know, I’m going to pivot on something you said before. We talked about how much more complex it is. And I want us to look both inside out and outside in and across lines. You know, at one point in time, the content marketing, both the strategy and the work was really in the domain of marketing solely. But now when we look at organizations, know, content that’s doing heavy lifting may come from any part of your organization.

How have you seen marketers evolve in being in more of a racy model where they may be consulted but not responsible for content that ultimately shows up in the world in representing the brand?

Robert 

Not well, I will tell you, it’s been a struggle. It’s been a challenge. When your entire organization is creating content that will ultimately be consumed by somebody out in your various audiences, everybody from salespeople to marketing people to customer service people to executives to just about everybody creates public facing content in some way for the brand, governance, workflows,

Bennie

Yeah. Right. Right.

Robert

Really the idea of how we’re creating some mindfulness over the, the way the content is actually managed in the enterprise organization is tough these days. It’s really, really hard and complex. And I will say for the most part, it is, it remains in most organizations, a very siloed process. and sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter all that much, but in many others,

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

It, you know, if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is actually saying on a public platform and it can really, you know, it can really get you into trouble.

Bennie 

Yeah, I would say even from the conversations of brands that I have, large and small, and even from my own experience, it’s one of those things where it’s all fun and games until someone gets in trouble, right? And then it ultimately becomes the marketing team’s responsibility to clean up whatever happened on aisle five, right? Even when we have space in there. What’s really great is our definition of content has expanded so much in the last 10 years.

Robert

Right? That’s right. That’s right.

Bennie 

The access to content creation has become so democratized in the last five years. But to your point, that governance and responsibility of the brand still centers around the marketing folks who have eager colleagues who are ready to get out into this wide, brave content world. So as you’ve seen a lot of things have gone bad, are there any examples that you’ve seen where you’ve seen it go right? Where it’s been a more democratized…

Robert

Mm.

Bennie 

Know, experience with content in which there’s the right kind of guardrails and amplifiers out there.

Robert 

Yeah, I can give you a couple of examples of where I really see success. And one of them actually, what we see typically are when they’re trying to, when a larger organization is trying to put these guardrails around content, broadly speaking, they’re sort of one of two directions. I mean, there’s obviously lots of nuances to this, but the two sort of extremes are one, you build kind of a content department, right? So a department of content, if you will, who

Bennie

Right.

Robert 

Handles all of the content for marketing and communications. And you get a high degree of control, but it’s hard to scale that. But Cleveland Clinic does an amazing job at this, where their digital content and offline content too is all managed under one particular group that reports in through marketing. And there’s a complete content studio where they manage the website, the blog, the marketing materials, the signage in the hospitals, the whole, all of it.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Robert 

And it’s very highly controlled and it really, really works. in others, it’s a much more matrix situation, right? Where you’ve got, maybe it’s an executive council or you’ve got a content council, or you’ve got some sort of group, cross functional group that manages in kind of a hub and spoke way, the way that content strategy or content is getting created throughout the organization. and there’s tons of examples of that, probably more examples than that than there are of the former, but you know.

Bennie

Right.

Robert 

One that comes to mind are companies like REI, who do an amazing job of having different groups manage different elements of their, they’ve got their sort of gear blog where you can sort of get best practices on gear, but it’s tied right into their e-commerce. But they’ve also got their brand, their co -op, where they’re basically creating the co-op journal, which doesn’t have any mention of product at all. And they do that very well.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Robert 

And then on the B2B side, I would point to ServiceNow. They’re doing a great job of pulling together marketing -related content, then thought leadership -related content and creating disparate groups that all communicate with one another to make sure they’re all moving in the same direction and talking about the same things.

Bennie 

Right. It’s interesting when you talk about successes, because I’ll be honest, nothing in the way you describe this screams creative innovation marketing success, right? Nothing on the front end describes it. It is cut and dry, blocking and tackling structure and organization. But that’s what yields the space for the creativity to happen in the order and success that you talk about.

Robert 

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s plumbing. mean, at the end of the day, right? mean, it’s like, you know, and what we find anyway, you know, in working with clients is that those big ideas, the big creative, amazing, differentiating ideas are fostered more readily when you’ve got a good, when you’ve got good plumbing in place, right? In other words, if you’re not constantly thinking about, you know, playing, you know,

Bennie 

Yeah, yeah, right.

Robert 

You know, womper at, know, with, sort of trying to figure out where you’re, you know, what problem you’re dealing with today and what group is publishing here and what social media issue you have. You you’ve got a really codified and well organized strategy. It really builds in the bandwidth to be able to say, let’s take a slow, considered approach to really cool and differentiating ideas so that we actually can create that really interesting, innovative idea.

Bennie 

Mmm. Which I think is a great lesson and bit of pro tip advice for those who are listening, right? Because you can sometimes, you can speed past all the plumbing and the infrastructure and get out to the dazzle and then end up doing your brand and your work at this service, because you don’t show up the way you need to for the brand or for the customer. It’s nothing like having a great piece of content doing all the heavy lifting and you forgot to inform e-commerce and you forgot to get the supply chain involved.

Robert 

Yeah. No, that’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s you you’ve you’ve and that’s the thing. I mean, I still to this day have clients where I talk to them and they’ll and I’ll you know, I’ll say, how do you you know, a sales team, for example, and I’ll say, how do you get your best content and they’re like, well, we just use Google. Because you know, our site search is so bad. So I use Google and I have it search our site and I figure if it’s on our site, then it’s you know, it’s approved to use. So I’ll use it on that and it’s like

Bennie 

Thank you.

Robert

That’s crazy, right? The internal communications are so bad that they’re looking at what’s published before they can actually make a decision of whether they’re going to send it to a client or not.

Bennie 

Wow. And, you know, we’ve had spaces in which, you know, often the marketing technology strategy exceeds the technology capacity of organizations in there and end up with a space. You know, I’m interested as well about this evolution. You know, at one point in time, when we said content, we immediately thought a page on a website, a blog, an image. Now we have an entire world of assets that consider content.

Robert 

That’s for sure.

Bennie

It can be anything from a platform, can be an image, can be music, can be anything that we put forward in there. And they often have different authors in different spaces. What advice do you have for, you know, an emerging marketing leader who’s coming into a house they didn’t set up, but has all this disorder of all this content? What advice do you have on kind of finding a clearinghouse? And I say it in that way because we’re now in like…fourth generation of content management, right? If that, then more. So now you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from a technical term here, a hot mess sometimes.

Robert

Yeah. Yes. You know, I’ve written about this before. Call them, you know, they’re classic, what is known in sort of urban planning and others, you they’re called wicked problems, right? They are problems that you can’t really understand how to solve until you try and solve them. And so my advice is, the biggest piece of advice is to make content a thing.

Bennie 

Yeah.

Robert 

Right. so, and what I mean by that is, is it sounds like a very simple thing, but it’s, but it’s not for most organizations. When you ask most senior level executives in most organizations, how do you create content? You know, it is the most expensive thing that you do by far. is the thing that everybody does by far. And yet it is one of the only things that we don’t have a strategic process for measurement and management around. And so making content a strategic function of the business.

So just literally making that decision, putting someone or some people in charge of it, and then starting to get your arms around, you know, the metaphor I use all the time is sort of like air traffic control, right? You know, the first thing you got to do is you got to know about all the planes in the sky. You got to figure out where they’re all coming from, where they’re going, and you got to be able to locate them on radar. And then you can actually, and only then can you actually…

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Start to say, Ok, direct those planes so that they’re all flying in the right direction. And so just even taking that first step to say, it a proper process and a priority for us to get a measurement plan around, a management plan around, and a story plan around is the best first step here.

Bennie 

It’s so true. I think it’s so true. We see often that those things that are important, we put that strategy and that management infrastructure around, right? And it sends this throughout business that it’s important enough to elevate that. And I think one of the confusions that we see sometime when we say content is we get twisted on whether we’re talking strategy, whether we’re talking work program, whether we’re talking assets, or whether we’re talking technology platform.

Robert 

Yeah, that’s right.

Bennie 

And it’s all of those combined together. But I have had conversations, and I’m sure you’ve had as well, in which an organization is focused on the platform and the technology and have given no thought to the strategy, the impact in the business, but are focused on this platform equals my content. know, dare I say strategy, right?

Robert 

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And, different, and by the way, different platforms, right? Is it a digital asset management system? Is it a web content management system? Is it a marketing automation? Is it customer data? Is that content? You know, all of those things start to come to play when you’re, you know, when you’re trying to figure out the best way I’ve, I’ve thought about it. and this is the way I sort of refer to it in the book is because, you know, many companies that I talk to will come back and say,

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Content is just too big a word, right? It’s just too big a word for what we’re trying to deal with here. We can’t get our arms around it. And I said, yeah, that’s, you’re right. It is a huge word and probably an overused word. But if you just equate it to communications, how are you communicating as an organization and content in that regard equals communications. So if it’s meant to communicate an idea or express an idea or express an experience to your customer,

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Or to one of your audiences, one of your constituencies, then it’s content and you should get your arms around

Bennie 

Right, right. It’s so true and it becomes the strategy portion comes in as to how you’re going to use this and how you’re going to engage. And it’s so interesting how many organizations haven’t asked themselves that question, right? You create a piece of content and you just throw it out in the universe. You know, and it doesn’t what I see a lot isn’t so much throwing it out in the universe and having it explode and go viral and do that.

What I see most concerning sometimes for brands is when it just stays and languishes. And it’s on all your platforms and it’s on all your spaces and your businesses change, but the content is still the old content is still there. I was at an AI demo with a content, with a platform that was pulling stuff. they said, yeah, we can pull things from the brands, you know, history on the web. And I said, okay. And then the back of my mind, I’m thinking, how many ways can this go bad? And we saw the demo and it went really bad.

Robert

That’s right.

Bennie 

Because the AI tool was really great at mining all the leftover information that was for brand versions removed that still existed on the web. And it pulled together this asset that was true in the sense of the process, but completely off in terms of what the brand was today. And it exposed all of these parts of the brand that they thought were hidden, but were still a part of the conversation. It was old content.

Robert 

Yeah, exactly right. I’ve had that same demo where somebody want, you know, a client wanted to put in a chat bot for their customer service and they were going to use their repository of customer service documentation to actually feed the AI, but nobody bothered to do an audit on whether the customer information in that repository was accurate or not. And so when the AI started coming up with like crazy stuff that was not right for that version of the product, people were like, why is it doing that? And it’s like,

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Because you fed it the wrong information is bad content.

Bennie 

Right? Right? And you haven’t purged or cleaned what’s out there. So the interesting thing is that just highlights what’s been going on with your brand all along. So if that time is elevated, you just have to notice that customers are getting the wrong idea and the wrong information all along. So in this moment, mean, as we’re well into 2024, and as you talk to clients, both in public settings and in the private candid spaces.

Robert 

Yeah, well, exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Bennie 

What are some of the things you wish that corporate leadership and marketing leadership knew about content strategy before they came to you? What are some of the things that you wish that would make your interactions even more productive if they had that table stakes?

Robert 

Well, I you know, I think, you know, I mean, part of the way I make my living is that it’s a problem for them. So I don’t want them to figure it out too much. And I’m joking there, of course. But no, the thing is,

Bennie 

Right. Well, yeah, but it would like a running start sometimes.

Robert 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Here’s what I’ll say to that is, I think the interesting, one of the first questions that I’ll ask when making a business case to create a truly enterprise level content strategy, to make it a thing like we were just talking about, is I’ll ask the CFO or I’ll ask the CMO or even the CEO in some cases and I’ll say, how much did you spend last year on content? And they sort of look at me like,

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Robert 

My dog looks at me when I make a weird noise, you know, and they sort of tilt their head and go, well, what do you mean by that? How would we even begin to track that? it’s like, exactly, right? That’s the challenge. The thing is, once you start to understand as a line item how much you’re spending on content, full stop, like customer service, customer experience, marketing, sales, PR, comms, know, brands, social media, all of it.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm, right. Right.

Robert 

How much you’re spending on the creation, production, and ultimately publishing of all of that content, it’s probably one of the, if not the most expensive line items that you would uncover. Now, of course, you’re not gonna track it as a separate cost center, unless you do, of course, but the point of it being, you can’t understand how much you’re spending on it, you don’t know whether you’re spending too much, you’re creating too little, you’re creating not enough.

And so you’ve got to get your arms around it. And one of the things that would give that running start to anyone who’s starting that is to actually just go in and, you know, we call it auditing the tacit, you know, the occurrence process, OCCURRENT, occurrence processes, which are, you know, the things that really happen, right? The things that are really going on in the business when it comes to content. So

Bennie 

All right.

Robert 

You the classic version of this is, you you go in and you’re an employee for the first day and, you know, you get your manual, your employee manual, and you’re holding your employee manual and Jane, the person running you around is saying, I know on page 76, it says to do this, don’t do that. You go to Mary. Mary is the one who’s gonna make sure you get that thing or you do that, you know, that’s the way stuff really happens here. That is endemic in all businesses, right? The sort of organic.

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Cultural processes that have built up over time and they’re certainly prevalent when we talk about content So it’s mapping just literally if you could map all those things out And it’s a lot of work. So maybe you start with marketing. Maybe you start with PR Maybe you start with you know thought leadership, know, whatever you want to start with But if you just map it all out now You’ve got a good sense of what it’s gonna take to fix it. You can actually identify the problem

Bennie 

Right. Which is so true. So I’m going to pivot a little bit on this where we have a space where you’re on board, the CMO is on board, we’ve got all the processes on board, and you’re going down in a methodical, strategic and creative way. Everything is working. But you’ve got your C suite, your executives who’ve got caught up on the latest trend in popular business press. What advice do you have to marketing leaders who may have kind of are doing the right things we’ve talked about and are putting the right focus in there?

But they’re still having to manage a CEO that says, the other day I read an article where someone told me that I should be, and we should be doing this one, insert your favorite new platform, insert your new aggressive space in there. What advice do you have for our listeners in there? Because we all have that. We have to admit that we have someone who comes in and says, hey, you all lead marketing. I’ve got an idea.

Robert 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that the high level answer to that is strategy should drive the technology decisions, not the other way around, which is so often the case. It’s like, shiny object syndrome. We see this new AI is a perfect example of this. We see this shiny new tool and we go, well, we should do something. We should do something with that. It’s like, no, no, no, no, you should have a good strategy. And then you should figure out whether a technology can help you scale or make that process more efficient.

Bennie 

Yeah. It’s that. Right.

Robert 

It is start with strategy, figure it all out. Cause you know, I’ve seen data on this where most marketing organizations only use a small, small portion of any technology solution they actually have. You know, I saw some, you know, crazy statistic, like we use 25 % of the capabilities of most marketing automation systems, right? Most businesses are still using their marketing automation system as a spam gun, right? They’re not actually using it in its full capacity.

So we’re not even good at the technology we have yet, much less adding new ones to our staff.

Bennie 

You know, that’s so true. I’ve seen organizations where you throw out the technology because of the human usage error or the lack of ability. It’s like, don’t like this technology platform because it doesn’t do X. Well, the reality is it does do X. It’s just your team, your people or the structure may not have set it up to do X. And then we go to the platform.

Robert 

Yeah. it definitely speaks to the larger, I mean, there’s a big broader issue. We could do a whole show on this. The broader issue of marketing specialization, right? Marketing is very much like medicine. Marketing itself is becoming a very specialized practice where we just have to accept that the idea of you know, having general knowledge about, know, little, a little bit about a lot, you know, is, is okay, but there are definite specialists that are needed that have deep expertise in things like social media tools and marketing automation tools and CRM tools and customer data platforms and PIM systems and all of these things that really are expert systems in and of themselves.

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

And require expert pilots, right, to be able to navigate them. And our teams are becoming ever more specialized into these technical skills and specialized, you know, application skills like search and AI and, you know, and creativity and production and all of these things. So it’s a, it’s a real recognition of the, of a balance of talent on our teams too.

Bennie

So true. I’m going to ask this question a bit. You alluded to it, and we talked about this before a lot, that AI in conversation really takes over much of the oxygen in the room and our mission. But there’s the space in which I want to offer this question to you. If we were to put a pin into that, if we were to create a room with more oxygen in it, what are the top things that you think are content-driven, content-focused marketing leaders?

Robert 

Yeah.

Bennie

Should be thinking about for the next 6 to 12 months outside of AI. What are the other things that should capture our attention and deserve some attention?

Robert 

Yeah. The biggest one I think is the need for developing trust, right? So if the first 20 years of digital marketing was all about attention, right? How do we make ourselves more provocative? How do we make ourselves, you know, the whole idea of clickbait, the whole idea of really moving more provocative, controversial in some cases, inspiring and entertaining, you know, maybe for better adjectives.

But the idea was gather attention as you may, right? Whatever it takes, get the attention. Get them to convert, get them to click through, get them to find you at the top of the search page, get them, you know, get them, get them, get them in that moment, attention in the moment. And as that becomes increasingly even more difficult than it has been, it is more important than ever to develop trust and value immediately, right? So in the most tactical, way too tactical example, but in the most tactical example, gone are the days where you write a post about a recipe for apple pie, where the first 500 words are the history of apple pie and the various different versions of apple pie and all that. And then you get to the recipe. It’s like, no, no, you got to get to that recipe immediately. And you’ve got to develop that trust and value immediately for the user in that YouTube video or in that social media post or in that white paper or that research or whatever it is you’re doing, got to deliver value in the first five or 10 seconds because you’ve got to deliver that value before they swipe right or swipe left or swipe up, right?

Bennie 

Right? And to your point, you’re not even getting to the recipe, which is a statement of steps. You’ve got to see the end product and have them believe that you’ve got the best apple pie.

Robert 

That’s right. That’s exactly that’s exactly right. They have to care. They have to care about it, too. So you’ve got to bring an extra level of value. You know, it used to be that you could, you know, there was the classic sort of just answer all your customers questions on your website, right? Just, you know, turn your website into a giant FAQ. And it’s like that. Nope, that’s no longer good enough. Right. In a world where everybody has already answered the question, the question certainly answered on Reddit.

However, you know, all the questions that your customers have are answered not on your website. And so what are you going to do on your website or what are you going to do in your blog or your thought leadership platform to actually deliver that extra level of value that they could get nowhere else?

Bennie 

Right. And our friends at Reddit have really kind of understood that evolution as a platform. They’re kind of at this nexus of search and social. So it’s answer. Right. And I get really excited when I look at that and see the opportunities for brands in that space where, you know, I was looking at one fact recently where the Google search is being amplified by people adding whatever they want to search plus Reddit. And getting truer answers, right? Because this is the unfiltered, unsponsored, trusted space of experts in my community. No matter how my is, right? Or how large my community is, it’s experts in my community. So those who actually grow apples, pick apples, make apple pies, and love apple pies are gonna give me feedback, right? And I expect that feedback because Robert, my friend, I know you like an apple pie.

Robert 

Yeah, that is exactly right.

Bennie 

So this is why I’m going to expect your feedback.

Robert 

I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah. And it’s, you know, I mean, I hate the fact that we’re, we’re in these, you know, that so many of us are in these echo chambers, these siloed echo chambers of communities that, know, where because of social media and the way that search algorithms work and the way those things are, it’s very hard for consumers to get exposed to new ideas that aren’t interruptive.

Robert 

Right? You know, it’s just hard. It’s just hard to interrupt people these days with, things that are external ideas that aren’t part of their normal echo chamber. And so it’s both a consumer problem as well as a marketing problem.

Bennie 

Yeah, you know, as you’re talking about and we think about it, you know, a lot of this is about the breakthrough, right? How do you have the breakthrough, whether it’s for brands, whether it’s the marketers yielding the brands, or in this space, where we have the consumers who are equally co-creating the brands, right? We all have an experience in our brand. How, you know, what advice do you have? How do we break through as marketers? We’ve never had this many platforms, this many devices, and this many needs for… story and content and impact. But how do we break through all of the noise?

Robert 

You know, I mean, I wish I had a, I mean, I would be sipping a different drink here on a beach if I had the right answer to that, I guess. But, but the, you know, but I think the broader answer is you’ve got to figure out a great content distribution strategy that really works for the audiences you’re trying to attract. And, you know, we all I’ve said for years on my own podcast, you know, don’t build your home on rented land, right? Where, you know, don’t.

Bennie 

Yeah.

Robert 

Don’t rely solely upon the Facebooks and the Instagrams and the LinkedIns and the TikToks to deliver your message because someday they may not. yeah, right. But increasingly you’ve got to be there, right? Increasingly you have to be there and delivering value and designing content specifically for it because that’s where the audiences are. And so there’s that part of it.

Bennie 

So you don’t have a MySpace page, is that you’re not holding onto that.

Robert

And then the second part of it is, you know, when you start thinking about paid and what, how you’re leveraging paid media in advertising, you know, we, we all know that, you know, programmatic and banner ads and sort of the, sort of static ads of the last 20 years are really reduced, you know, have been a, a, a, and there’s been a huge reduction in efficacy of those ads and fraud and all sorts of automation as well as AI and challenges there. But how do you start developing deeper brand experiences in a paid way, whether that’s sponsored content, whether that’s native advertising, whether that’s getting product placement, whether that’s getting influencers involved and them voicing your products. Humans and influencers now are the topic du jour about how to get reach.

And that’s a form of paid media, ultimately. So it’s a rebalancing of paid, owned, and earned media and a real focus on moving that content out to the edges.

Bennie 

Yeah. I think so. The only thing I would add to that is we’ve always played with a shared space as well. So it’s that circle of earned, shared, paid and owned media and the space and getting that right mix to your point. And some enter strong with budgets on pay that yield other spaces and others are coming in on the earned media that shapes the space. But it really shows up for your brand in that moment.

Robert 

Sure. Yeah.

Robert 

That totally yeah, 100%. And that’s, you know, that’s, that’s, it’s changing the nature of PR. That’s for sure. You know, all of that and changing the nature of social media and changing the nature of organic outreach to, you know, communities and, and to, know, and, the idea of building communities. And so it’s a hugely important piece of what we’re doing as an integrated, you know, it all goes back to Don Schultz and the integrated marketing mix, right? So

Bennie 

Yeah, really does. Well, my brilliant friend, we’re not going to let you go to the beach with that drink because this problem is more dynamic and we need your good thinking here. You know, because it’s to our point, marketing is such a dynamic field and has been, we’re always expanding, it’s always evolving and changing in there, which I think pushes us to be the best that we can be as practitioners. And I think the work that you’re doing on the content side really reinforces that.

Robert

Hahaha

Bennie 

But what I love about content for us is it is one of those spaces that can be democratic and a great equalizer for brands and organizations. We haven’t had that space before where a small brand or a small mission organization could capture our hearts the same way the big top hundred brands could.

Robert 

Indeed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there it is. That is is absolutely the truth.

Bennie 

I think about all of the successful startup spaces in there that become brands that are a big part of your life and people have this connection to you and you realize they’ve been around for less than 10 years.

Robert 

Right? Yeah, exactly.

Bennie 

And you feel like they’ve been a part of your world ever since. But then you look at the child, you know, I look at, we spend a lot of time talking about heritage brands, and I’m amazed at how many heritage brands exist in spite of what we may think about as good strategy today. Coming in and reinventing and reinforcing, but they have a great sense of, you know, earned brand respect and credibility from a hundred years of all.

Robert 

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm, 100%.

Bennie 

You know, so I’ll ask this question because we talk a lot and we get to AR, AI and AR. There’s a subtext of fear in the conversation often with our marketing leaders. What I like to do in our conversations is acknowledge that, but talk about what excites you about the opportunities of what this next generation of AI could mean for content strategists, for brand strategists.

Robert 

You know, I think it’s really interesting right now because, mean, obviously you’re 100 % right with the sort of this bifurcation of fear and excitement, right, over what AI is going to bring to marketing. I actually get a lot more excited on AI for things like predictive analytics and data analysis and talking to

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right.

Robert 

Data in a way that provides me with insight and analysis that otherwise would take hours and hours with an Excel spreadsheet. To me, those are the more interesting and exciting parts. However, when we talk about AI, we mostly talk about generative AI and sort of content creation and expression and those sorts of things. I think if I’m excited on that score, because I’m still a little, I mean, if I’m completely honest, a little unimpressed, let’s say I mean, you know, it’s, it’s an amazing technology. It’s huge innovation. And I don’t, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to fault it too much. But as a creative idea generator, you know, the imagery is fine. You know, as I like to say, it’s, know, AI doesn’t give you the best content gives you the most, you know, the most probable content. So what it’s really good at right now and where there is excitement for me is in what I would call derivative content, right? Where you’ve got, there’s a lot of need to create content about our content. You know, you’ve got an amazing idea for a thought leadership paper or an ebook or some article or some thing, and you want to create a summary and an abstract and a, you know, and you want to take

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Four of them and make a derivative piece out of it, or you want to create summaries for meetings, or you want to do things with transcription and automated transcription of meetings or webinars or those things. Those to me are really great efficiency and wonderful uses of AI as it exists today. It’s changing so fast, who knows what it’ll be tomorrow. as it exists today, what excites me is the

Bennie 

Right.

Robert 

Speed and scale by which I can create derivative content that gives me more freedom in my day to create new and amazing ideas, right? So I no longer have to figure out what that webinar abstract is gonna be written as. can have AI do it for me. Those are the big exciting things for me.

Bennie 

Right. Right, it’s one of those things where I think about, does it push us to be better? Right, push us to be better. And that first example that we both experienced where you kind of use AI in the demo and it exposes all the kind of flaws or the misfaces in there. Ultimately, that pushes us to be better, because the organizations that see that have to clean up that content. You know, it’s been exposed. Does it point out, you know, miscues in our analysis?

Robert 

Yeah.

Bennie 

We can pull large parts of data to say the data actually says X instead of Y. Does it make us better in that space in there? And to your point, yeah, because eventually if everyone has the same limited access to generative AI and it’s responding to the same prompts in there, you’re right, you’re going to get meh ideas. Because eventually, if everybody has and everybody uses it, that becomes the average not exciting baseline, right?

Robert

Yeah, I mean, it becomes informative, but not necessarily inspiring. You know what I mean in terms of the ideas? The example I always use is, you go to an AI and you say, one of the generative AI tools, and you say, give me a piece of content and whatever varying prompt you use to get that piece of content out. And let’s pretend it’s a semi -good prompt. And you get a piece of content back. And then you go, OK, great. Is that as good as you can do?

You ask the AI, that as good as you can do? And it’ll dutifully say, no, I can do better. And it’ll rewrite the content again. And then you go, okay, great. Is that as good as you can do? And it’ll say, no, no, no, I can do better. And you can repeat that process forever. It will never come back to you and go, you know, the third one was really the best one I did. So you just need to shut up and just use the third one or don’t ask me this question anymore, right? And so.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Robert 

That’s the kind of interesting things that might start to emerge. But until then, it’s just rearranging words on a page until it fits what you like. And we have a cognitive bias to say, wow, that’s better than I could do.

Bennie 

Right. No, you’re right. It comes into it. You know, I’m often fond of talking about marketing in this way, in these three ways, to think about it as art, science, and magic. And it’s interesting, the tools that we talked about before help us organize, help us create, but that’s the intangible part that we talk about the magic, right? The doing more, the two plus two equal and more is really magic. And I have to just share with everybody, one of the things I’m always excited about is our partnership and what we’ve been able to do in both our capacities with AMA and with Content Marketing Institute, you know, coming together to say, what are the things that we can equip those who working in content with so they have better, stronger organizations, teams, and deliver better impact to their brand? And that’s the conversation that we have about partnerships. So as we close out our conversation, I want to invite all of our listeners to check out the work that’s happening and the big event later on this fall for content marketing world.

Check out the work that we’re doing with our AMA certification that’s really taking some of the work that Robert and I have been talking about, the cutting edge skills, tools, techniques and strategies that are helping us shape this next generation of content strategies. We invite you to check it out. And as you said, Robert, we can go on and talk about this forever. And I think we should, I think we need to make this a regular conversation every six months just to check in on each other.

Robert

I like it, I like it.

Bennie 

But I mean, what I appreciate you coming in and allowing us to demystify this a bit, right? That that strategy should come first and as strategy drives, it enables us to make better sense of our impact, the technology, the tools. And with your spirit and presence here, it allows us to have a little bit of fun with it. So like I said, you can’t go to the beach yet, my friend. We’re gonna have to have the fun here now because so many brands…

Robert

Yes.

Bennie 

So many opportunities and such a wonderful way to put content front and center. So thank you for being a part of my conversation today and being a part of our podcast. And I think it was incredibly helpful to your view of the world.

Robert 

Thank you so much for having me. I’m a huge fan, so it was a real pleasure to be here.

Bennie 

Well, we’re going to make sure that we get back on the schedule as we start the new year. So we’ll see what new products are out. We’ll do our list. We’ll do Robert and Bindi’s list of the content brands that are surprising us in getting it right. We will award the ones that are leading and we won’t name the guilty. We’ll just encourage them.

Robert 

There it is. I like it. I like it. I like it.

Bennie 

But thank you and thank you all for joining us for this episode of AMAs Marketing And again, I’m your host AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson, and we’ve spent the day with Robert and talking about content, content strategy and your world around you. We invite you to check out the Content Marketing Institute and their major conference this year, and also to consider being a part of the AMA in our new content marketing certification.

Thank you once again for helping us create marketing that is art, science, and indeed magic. Thank you.