In this special "CMO Mashup" episode, AMA's brings together insights from top marketing leaders across industries to explore the strategic and human sides of marketing. Join us for a powerful discussion that showcases diverse approaches to building resilient brands, nurturing creativity, and forging authentic connections in today’s marketing landscape. Guests Include: Dan Csont with Corpay, Radhika Duggal with Major League Soccer, Alex Morrison with Pearpop, Leah Chandler with Discover Puerto Rico, Clemence Sop with InterSystems, Krenda Frushour with Blistex Inc., Erin Levzow with Batch & Box, and Robert Rose with The Content Advisory.
T.J. Anderson
Hello and welcome to an exclusive episode of AMA's Marketing and Podcast. I'm your host, TJ Anderson, and in this special episode, we'll be sharing stories and insights from several of our season three guests, which focused on the CMO experience.
With these conversations, we hope to help listeners unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. In this special episode, we'll touch on several topics, including the creator economy, how to think about AI as a tool, leadership, the value of content marketing, and what happens when marketing gets a seat at the table. Join me for a virtual roundtable conversation courtesy of our podcast guests.
In our first segment, Alex Morrison, the CMO of Pear Pop and AMA's Bennie F. Johnson talked about influencer marketing and the creator space. Bennie and Alex also talk about the value of entrepreneurship and what that means for influencer marketing.
Alex Morrison
In the context of RGA, founded what we called Creator Studio inside RGA. And we built a really good practice, the first one ever at RGA, around creator marketing. Fast forward a few years, I ended up going to take the role at Gray that you mentioned. But in the back of my mind, and partly because there's such a vibrant ecosystem around this space here in LA, but around the world. This is taking off in a huge way. I knew that this was a space that I wanted to revisit and I just didn't know when or how it was going to happen. And then there was a very, very serendipitous moment that happened in mid 2021 where through a mutual friend, I got connected to this dynamic young founder, Cole Mason, who's the founder of AirPod. And it was really just a, I was blown away by how clearly he could see the future
Bennie F. Johnson
Mm -hmm.
Alex
The creator space and how brands would intersect into that. He had built some pretty amazing tools out of the gate, but what he needed was a partner to help bring it to life in the market. And it took a lot of introspection and, you know, closing your eyes before you leap. But I decided to do it. And, you know, it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made because PearPop is really a special offering in the creator space.
You know, all the cliches about startup life are true. But, you know, we are, we're thriving and, you know, to be a part of this ride has been something I wouldn't trade.
Bennie
I love from the bio, it acknowledges that you all have been noted already with that short period of time as one of Fast Company's most innovative companies, right? You've been honored in that space, but it talks about Pearpop helping a community. I love that assist right there, helping a community of more than 200,000 creators earn a living doing what they love while also giving brands instant and direct access to collaborate with relevant, authentic brand creators. So relevant, authentic, and brand safe. That one statement is loaded with a lot of good insight that you have there. Talk a bit about how you started to bring this together, helping a community connect both as creators and as the brands that need to work together.
Alex
Yeah. So one of the things that really separates Pearpop from a lot of creator marketing companies is that we are fundamentally a creator first company. So our mission is to help creators earn a living doing what they love. Any creative person, you know, I've been a musician throughout my life. Anyone with a creative bone in their body knows, you know, there's that moment when you have to decide, am I going to go for this professionally or am I going to sit it out and take a corporate route? Right. And a lot of people, myself included, you know, the path was just too difficult to see in this sort of truly creative path, right? And that keeps so many people away from doing the thing they truly love, right? And I thought, you know, what better mission to get behind and to help people with creative spark pursue that spark professionally and do what they love. And the beautiful thing about the creator space, is that people, it's really the new gateway to entrepreneurialism for a whole new generation, right? I mean, if you're gonna start the new Procter & Gamble, if you're gonna start the new media company and you're a 20 year old in 2024, you should start by building an audience, building a personality, a rapport with people, and then you can start to figure out where you wanna take that, right? This is an unbelievable opportunity for creative.
Bennie
Right.
Alex
So I think on that side of what we do, it's incredibly inspiring. And we've built a community of about a quarter million creators who trust us to bring them opportunities that allow them to earn a living doing what they love. And then for the brands, of course, if we're just thinking about creators, at the end of the day, we need to make sure we are delivering an amazing solution for brands that meets their needs and surprises them with things they didn't even know to ask.
And so I think on the brand side of the house, the real magic of Pearpop is in the name, really. It's pairing the right brands and creators using data. And so our dynamic matching algorithm, which is the sort of beating heart of what we do here, helps for any brief, any brand parameters that we might receive, we can find a really, really great short list of creators that those parameters. And then we'll lay human eyes on them as well. So it's this sort of man and machine working together to ensure full compliance with the brief as well as brand safety, right? And not just brand safety, but is it brand suitable? Is it actually advancing the brand? Right? We can go beyond do no harm, right? How can creators actually be almost an ambassador for a brand to bring them into difficult to reach communities and audiences, right?
Bennie
So I'm going to switch to the other side of the marketplace and ask you, what advice do you have for brands who may be looking to move into this space, right? We know the first movers and real creative brands are always going to take the risk in there. But what do you have for that fattier part of the curve of brands and the brand leaders who are listening to this podcast and maybe thinking about exploring creator economy as a part of their marketing mix? What advice would you
Alex
Yeah. Well, so first of all, I don't think there's any reason to be scared of getting involved. The creator space is incredibly diverse in every facet, every dimension of that word, right? So there are creators who are risque, there are creators who are absolutely ten and two and keep it dialed into everything you want to say. there's absolutely 80 % of marketers are already in the creator space in some way, way, or
Bennie
Right
Alex
If the last 20 % are on the line here, I would encourage you to take a good look because the benefits of participating in the creator space are massive. And what I would say to that is, know, creators have this uncanny ability to connect with audiences that are very, very difficult to reach through other types of media.
T.J.
When we talk about AI as a tool, it becomes a conversation about integration. Clemence Sop, head of marketing innovations at InterSystems, shared her perspective on what AI can mean for marketers.
Clemence Sop
Marketing people speak to marketing people, executives speak to executives, and suddenly we are multiplying our touch points and we're building our footprints within the company and we walk in clusters. So that's my definition of social selling. But how do you do that efficiently? You have to get a lot of insight and insight doesn't necessarily mean that, you you just Google here and there and you have to read through the finance reports, you have to understand.
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
Clemence
What people like because when you're engaging with insights, right, you get feedback. If you engage without feedback, you spam people. So my team and I began experimenting with AI tools to scrape through the net and find information so we could report back to all of the members of the clusters.
Bennie
Right.
Clemence
You know, to drive it could even help drive the marketing and designing their messaging, how sales is designing their outreach and how also our executives are designing their messages and their approach towards all the executives that we're targeting. understanding what people talk about company pinpoints, right? Understanding where there's an opportunity for investment or if the close investment only just those really triggers and nuggets. And obviously a lot of AI tools are evolving and coming up every day, right? And then the mistake we did, because we also learn, we learned is just trying to test all of it because one has a feature that the other one doesn't have, right? So we, my goal was to understand how we can use AI to be very much efficient and save time. The biggest advantage to us is really scraping through and getting these insights and reporting it back to the team and using that in our outreach.
Bennie
Right.
Right.
Clemence
So as to increase our lead quality and what I call, call to engagement. So communications and networks, that's one thing. Automation, using AI for marketing automation and personalization, right? What I tell my team is that with all of these AI tools, we are faster. This doesn't necessarily mean that we have to rely on them. We need to activate our left AI brain, meaning spend more time to be creative.
Bennie
Right, right.
Right. Right.
Clemence
Spend more time to personalize your approach so we can get past the brick wall that everybody has, right? Everybody has this brick wall or the mental spam filter. Yeah, so that's my experience. I think we should embrace it, but not like go into it, just, you know, and we need to understand where we want AI to step in and help us.
Bennie
Right. Right.
Clemence
I, you know, what you also see, I just can spot AI written content online, right? In the ever evolving landscape. I mean, you have it. That's something not to do, right? And that's how we learn.
T.J.
While AI is a big part of the conversation, the relationships we build through our work are just as important. Clemence and Bennie went on to talk about meaningful relationships and the importance of understanding people.
Clemence
People are bombarded with information, social platforms are saturated, right? Taking LinkedIn, you accept the connection request. It feels like you accept, you give somebody an invitation to your living room because they keep bombarding you with messages that you didn't even want, right? That is an overall trend right now. And what happens? That people are becoming very cautious and the call to engagement reduces. The quality of leads also we get.
Bennie
Right.
Clemence
It's challenging to get the good leads, right? It's challenging to have meaningful conversations or to get through to people. So what I see and what I'm telling the people when I travel is like, look at these platforms as a way to network with people, build relationships, and then you can sell, and then you can market, and then you can bring them to your community. And you can track and see if your message is resonating with them. Does that make sense?
Bennie
Right.
Bennie
It makes a lot of sense and these are things that are good foundational spaces for marketing that are intentionally amplified in our global space now. Yeah, so I want to talk a bit about listening as strategy. What advice do you have about being able to use the tools that we have to listen to be able to engage with your marketplace?
Clemence
Yeah. Yeah.
We have to listen a lot, right? And listen, you have to listen with insights too. Like knowing there's difference. Like if you're looking at data points and you look at, I topographies, keywords, if you know that these people are looking for the specific keyword, is that enough insight to reach out to them? Probably not, right? You need to do your homework, right? Yeah, exactly. Without being intrusive.
Bennie
Not in an effective way without being intrusive, right?
Clemence
You know, if you know, understanding is all about understanding people's pain points, because then when you're engaging, you're engaging with insight. And the best thing you can do is even meet them in their research journey, because 88 percent, think I read this article the other day, a good 80 percent of the buyers journey is online. They are active researchers, active listeners, but they don't want to be bothered. It would even be better if you meet them there in their search.
Right. And you can only do that if you've done your homework. So listening, can help us very well to listen, know, to understand, to summarize information, understand what project people are working on, what their pinpoints are, what kind of solutions they are looking for, and personalize our outreach. You know, I always tell people I work with like, you increase your call to engagement by so many points when you try to add a personal note to it. Simple example, when I'm doing my research, you are on my radar and I would like to talk to you, right? And I realized we probably went to the same school or your daughter just graduated and you just posted about it. That's an entry point, right? If I start with that, then we can...
Bennie
Hmm. Okay. Right. Right.
Clemence
People is the people to people platform. And if we can add that personalized touch, we can build relationships and then we can achieve our goals.
Bennie
That's a really powerful point, right? When we strip away everything in there, our conversation as marketers is always about people-to-people relationships.
T.J.
What shapes the work we do? Bennie and our next guest, Dan Csont, Chief Marketing Officer of Corpay, talked about pivotal career changes, the inspirational moments in our careers, and what it means to be a success.
Bennie
And in your role as the overall global CMO, I know you report directly into the CEO. Talk a bit about what has been some of your advice for having a successful executive partnership between the chief marketing officer and the CEO.
Dan Csont
Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is to learn the business. You really can't have any credibility with any senior leader, especially a CEO of a company, if you don't really understand the business. You can't come in, even in a function like marketing, you can't come in with all kinds of marketing knowledge. And when you try to apply it to the business, if you don't understand it, it really just falls flat. And a CEO can see through that pretty quickly.
Bennie
Right. Right. Mm -hmm.
Dan
And it just won't work. So I would say that's the first thing. The second thing is to understand what's really important to them, understand their vision for the company. This was one of the biggest steps I had to take when I came on board. It's one thing to discuss, hey, let's consider rebranding the company. It's another thing to really do it. And in the process of doing it, that vision and that CEO perspective is so important because CEOs
Bennie
Right.
Dan
Really set the tone for the entire company. So really having my finger on where he wanted to steer the company in the next 10 to 15 years and what was important to him and his vision was very important. So I'd say those are probably the two most important things.
Bennie
In that moment, you talk about the vision, when was the moment that you woke up and realized that you had become Corpay? That the team and the company and the business had really internalized the new brand. When was that moment?
Dan
Ha! Yeah. yeah. Well, the yeah, no, it definitely has. I mean, the probably the the the moment that it really has, I would say there's there's two. The first is when you see the first advertising on digital channels and and it's it's all new. I mean, it's everything that you've created is there and the world is seeing it. That's that's probably the first thing.
Bennie
Or has that moment happened? Right.
Dan
But the second one is kind of an interesting one. When, when the signage changes in the building and you get off the elevator and it has the new name, I'll tell you, it's, it hits you. It really does. My boss, my boss came in that day, you know, cause he named the company originally. He essentially founded the company and he named it Fleet Core originally. And so he came in my office that day and said, wow.
Bennie
Right. Great, great. Okay.
Dan
I've known we were going to do this for multiple years and still when I walked in, it hit me. Wow, it changed. So I'd say those two moments.
Dan
I, first of all, I really think that, one of the biggest challenges I've always had in most CMO and senior marketing roles. And I've talked to others that have had the same is convincing folks that marketing is a very relevant and impactful function. And it's gotten easier in recent years, but you know, many, many operators and general managers and sales leaders and pro, you know, hardcore people, they just, they, they kind of think of it as the side function as opposed to really the core of how we can actually create not just short -term customers, but long -term customers. And so I have a, I have a boss who gave me this term that, that I love, which is the marketing of marketing internally is so important.
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
Dan
How you sell the function internally to your peers and to your CEO is absolutely critical and almost as important as what you do externally. And so I would say that is just an absolute critical part of the function is really showing the value that marketing brings to the table.
Bennie
That's right. That's right.
Right. Right. And I'll add to your conversation when that point and it's building the credibility before you need it. Right. Because because where does that come in? The marketing of marketing? It comes in in those inflection points, getting a budget approved, getting a new strategy introduced. Right. Taking a risk on new platforms and spaces. If you haven't done the work that you talked about before, marketing, marketing, building the credibility, you're really, you know,
Dan
Yes. Yes.
Bennie
Swimming against the tide for those moments.
Dan
Very much so, yeah, very well said.
T.J.
Our next guest, Erin Levzow, an innovative marketing leader and the growth advisor for Batch and Box, talked with Benny about working with people and understanding priorities.
Bennie
Right? Let's talk a bit about that, like your influence beyond just the marketing team. How are you able to take those lessons and drive your influence as a marketing leader across the rest of the business?
Erin
So I think it's a lot of psychological understanding, like psychology. When you think about what makes someone close off, well, when they feel like their voice isn't heard, when they feel like they have to be defensive, when there's a culture of fear, when someone tells them no. The word no, we have built in our society as a bad word. If someone hears no, they immediately are like, you hate me. Versus.
Bennie
Mm -hmm. Right.
Erin
Okay, well, let's flip that. What creates openness? What creates the ability to not feel defensive, to feel like you can put it out there without judgment? One, some of that takes time. How do you build a culture of that? Two, how are you an active listener? And then three, the yes and versus the no. Like, okay, I hear where you're going or tell me more. I do a lot of that too. Like tell me more why you're thinking that. And a lot of time other departments, other stakeholders, they just want to be heard. And a lot of times they're not wrong.
It's what their priorities are and what they're getting kind of judged against. And those might not match with marketing. And so it's figuring out, okay, well, who matters at this? The business matters, right? The business people matter. And the best way to get to that, right, is to figure out if our priorities are misaligned or where they lie with each other. So it's a lot of active listening. It's a lot of wanting to do there.
Bennie
Right. Right.
Erin
To be in those situations because a lot of people shy away and put their silos up and go, I'm going to sit here in marketing. But marketing, we're a support mechanism. I can bring the horse to water, but everything else has to be running smoothly for the horse to drink, to leave and tell all their other horse friends to come back to the water. None of this matters.
Bennie
Right. Right.
Erin
If I my job, great, but nobody else does theirs, great. So how we work together is such a key part of that. And being open, active listening, saying yes, understanding how our priorities line up, it's all part of it.
T.J.
Bennie sat down to talk with Krenda Frushour, Senior Director International at Blistex Inc. about the impact of her role models on her career and the need to understand your audience and consumers when your work is global.
Bennie
Right. I'm going to talk a bit about challenges, as you mentioned, working, coaching and mentoring and being connected to women in leadership and marketing. Now you've had this really robust career in global marketing. You've been in 70 countries. You know, one of the things that we know is that as a woman in leadership, each of those environments aren't necessarily the most hospitable. How have you been able to navigate that with such tremendous success? How you have any advice for
Krenda
Right.
Bennie
Our listeners who may be looking into global spaces and are coming up against often unspoken, but we know challenges being a woman who's a leader in marketing going into these global marketplaces.
Krenda
I think that's a good summary of people who may be concerned about going into international marketing because it might not be as comfortable. But I would say to move forward. Don't be fearful. And I was personally inspired by my own mother and grandmother who were told, you can't do something.
Bennie
Mm. Mm -hmm.
Krenda
And I say, how do we figure out how we can do it, right? And for my mother, she was not allowed to take an advanced math class because she was a girl. And my grandmother fought it, and she won. And she would always tell me that story at the dinner table. And I was so inspired of someone who
Bennie
Right, right, right. Right. Wow.
Krenda
Was told not to do something and then they did it and then they really excelled in it and she became a math and science teacher. And then if you think about her two daughters get an MBA, are directors and then board members, we've really continued on that. And so someone needs to create the path and why not? Why not do that? And so in working in other...
Bennie
Right. Right. Right.
Krenda
Countries, have found that just letting people know how much you're interested in them and interested in their business and that you're there to help them really builds that relationship and that respect, no matter whether you are female or male.
Bennie
Mm.
I love the energy direction and I love the story of your mom and the multi-generational push. It really resonates for me as well. I think I'll be telling you before, my wife's a mathematician and software engineer by training and being in that and being the only girl in the math classes and pushing forward and she's really being committed to that. It really is a gateway for things that are possible. And I think about that as you look and grow.
Bennie
Wow. When you think about the complexities of the marketplace, do you ever have creative tensions where your messaging in one country rubs up against consumer needs or perceptions in another? It's close enough where someone sees or is engaging with the brand differently outside of their home country and comes back and there's a tension.
Krenda
You can have some tension, but I think the way to get ahead of that is to actually inspire each of the groups of what your core marketing and reason for the brand is with the brand pyramids, with examples, really showing the positives of what we're doing to make a difference in consumers' lives. So I think in marketing, you have a choice of
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
Krenda
Are you communicating fear or are you communicating love? And when you go down that path of love, you're less likely to have an issue of that conflict and negativity coming into the market. if, know, Blistex consumers, you know, it's common to have problems with dry lips and chapped lips, but we're not showing
Bennie
Right.
Krenda
Bleeding chap lifts in our advertising, right? We're showing the positive of people who are going outside in the sun and the wind and dry atmospheres, and whether they're skiing in Finland or they're doing water sports in Panama, it's still the same theme of that you can go out without fear and your lifts will be protected.
Bennie
Right. Mm -hmm.
Krenda
Because Blistex will protect your lips. So that seems to go in a positive manner, no matter where you are in the world.
Bennie
Wow, I love the kind of leading with positivity. And I never thought about showing the pregame of the Blistex in this space. That never would have crossed my mind as an option, but directly, it could have been an option. And I'm glad you've gone with the other one.
T.J.
Leah Chandler, Chief Marketing Officer of Discover Puerto Rico, talked with Benny about the CEO and CMO partnership and why marketing needs to have a seat at the table and internalize the company's mission.
Bennie
It's so great when you can kind of fill it in that space. When I think about you being employee number two, it really leads to the conversation about partnership between the CEO and the CMO. And we hear a lot of kind of conversation about how does marketing get a seat at the executive table? How are we involved in decisions? You really were kind of a co-partner and engineer in building this out. Talk a little bit about your relationship with the CEO in helping you lead a marketing-first organization.
Leah Chandler
Well, I'm very, very fortunate in the sense that I have a, think the perfect scenario for any CMO is a CEO who gets marketing, but doesn't want to do marketing. that's, you know, that's what I mean, honestly, you know, every CMO probably fears that, you know,
Bennie
Right. Right. Nice distinction there. I like the nuance, right?
Leah
You've got a CMO who gets it and they want you to be successful in your role, but hey, I'd love to see that before it gets sent out or hey, let me take a look at that ad. And that's just not Brad Dean. Brad Dean really understands the bigger picture, the mission of the organization. He's got very specific roles and relationships that he's managing. I spoke to Brad for the very first time during a phone interview back in 2018.
And he actually asked me, he said, what is the most important thing that you need from a CEO? And I said to him, I said, I need someone who will take the bullets, you know, as a CMO, especially, you know, in an organization that's kind of quasi government, you're going to have, you're gonna have supporters, you're gonna have detractors, you're, making a case, you're building out this organization, trying to explain what it does and the impact it has.
And in order for me to be able to truly concentrate on the marketing and the results of the marketing team, you have to have a CEO who can handle all of the other stuff so that you're not getting pulled into conversations that are distracting you from your objectives. And in that conversation, I remember him also talking about this opportunity to create this new destination marketing organization. And he referred to it as a mission.
It wasn't a job. wasn't a career move. It really was a mission. And I was immediately kind of stopped in my tracks. And it's something that I've talked to every single person I've hired in the six years since that conversation to understand that it's, yes, it's about heads and beds and yes, it's about revenue and yes, it's about economic impact. But at the root of what we do every day is the people of Puerto Rico and how are we bringing prosperity of the people of Puerto Rico.
T.J.
Radhika Duggal, Chief Marketing Officer of Major League Soccer, talked with Bennie about being a CMO and why taking on new challenges is not only about the opportunity, but the people who make up the organization.
Bennie
So we're going to start off with, know, what drew you in to Major League Soccer? I know in our careers we have gravity that kind of extends beyond what we planned that draws us in. You've had such a varied experience from consulting and fintech and Pfizer. What drew you to Major League Soccer.
Radhika
I would say there are two things that drew me in. But even ahead of that, it's just if I took a step back and paused, how could you say no to the role of being the chief marketing officer at this organization? That's the first question. And so that's the first orientation. But then when I had the opportunity to go through the interview process and meet so many of the folks on the team, I learned two things.
Bennie
Mm -hmm. Right. Right.
Radhika
Number one, the league has incredible tailwinds behind it. This is the moment where we have the opportunity to take advantage of so many incredible consumer behavior, fandom trends that are just taking the league on an exciting growth and trajectory path. And I think that's very cool. And particularly for someone who's worked in different stages of businesses, that's really exciting. It's always more fun to be in the growth stage business that is an established league, it's growing, that's wonderful. But the most important thing was actually, as I was meeting people through the interview process, people were amazing. People were humble, they were kind, and they were passionate about what they did. And for me, like the most important thing is I wanna spend my time with people that I want to be around, whom I can learn from. And this place has that in spades.
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
It's interesting, know, one of our first questions we were talking earlier and I asked you what was top of mind. The first thing you said were your people. And that really stood out to me with all the things you could have brought up about the work and the business. You really focused it focused in on the people that are helping you deliver this space. Talk a bit about your philosophy for taking care of your teams.
Radhika
Yeah, I mean, I'll say people are everything, right? Like as a CMO, I do literally nothing myself, which I think is actually like a very interesting thing. Like as you get more senior, you do less and less yourself. And so the most important thing is making sure, and the whole job is making sure you're enabling the people on the team.
If you start with that orientation as that is the single most important thing, then how you do that is the question. And for me, think there's a couple of things. First and foremost, you know, and the jury's out, like I'm interested if you were to ask some of the folks on my team whether this is true or not. But because that's the real judge. But for me, it's really important to make sure that the people on my team feel valued, that they know I value them.
And that they value each other. And we find and make intentional ways of showing that. So that shows up in making sure I say thank you as many times as possible, making sure I share their work with others in the organization, particularly sharing up with my boss or his boss, making sure people really understand the value the team delivers. I that's among the most important things.
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
Radhika
You know, really big part of my people leadership philosophy is I've got to be available and enable people instead of the other way around. So I don't necessarily expect my team to rearrange their schedule. For me, it's actually got to be the other way around because they're the ones doing the work. And if they're waiting on me, I'm essentially wasting their time. And I think
Bennie
Mm -hmm.
Radhika
That's maybe slightly different from how some of the other leaders I've worked with in four have operated. But I really feel like my role is to enable my team and I've got to be bending over backwards to make sure they have what they
Bennie
Right. Because that really becomes the art and the creative magic of the role when you're a CMO.
T.J.
In our final segment, Robert Rose, founder and chief strategy officer of the Content Advisory, talks with Benny about the evolution of content marketing and why content has to earn its keep.
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 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 have you seen lately that's really pushing the boundaries of what content marketing can truly be.
Robert Rose
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 de -evolution 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.
T.J.
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