A 1 on 1: Avoiding the Doldrums of Dull, Boring, and Vanilla Content Coming from Your Brand.

Newly-hired CMO: the real reason our performance stinks isn’t the algorithms. our ads & organic content are offensively bland, vanilla, dull, boring, uninteresting, and obvious.?

Founder: Day 1 CMO hot takes FTW. I know. I hate it. What do we do?

CMO: you’re not going to like what I’m about to say?

Founder: okaaaaayyy…wanna tell me?

CMO: 3 things: 1) stop outsourcing your brand. bring content creation in-house (or make sure you work with people who you'd hire and know that you're the only brand that person is working with), 2) YOU need to be way more involved, 3) update the team: we have to make sure we have the right people in the right seats?

Founder: the hot takes keep coming. love it. on the first one, i'm viewing it as partnering with the best.

CMO:?sure, that's one way to look at it. however, and you've seen this yourself, the fundamental problems of outsourcing our only long-term sustainable moat clearly outweigh that come from working with 3rd party "experts."

Founder: i don't understand. what are these "problems"?

CMO:?2 things...first, exceptional content requires 10000% singular focus, and we don't have that. brand building is all about creating a thing that is completely unique in a crowded room of competition where everyone's shouting at the top of their lungs "LOOK AT ME".

Founder: makes sense. when i was doing the content, i knew an absurd level of nuance was required to go from vanilla to 'holy sh*t'. it's a fine line, and i knew that nuance, that special spark, is what allowed us to rise above the noise in the first place. i don't know why i lost touch with this reality.

CMO: i'm wondering if it was because you started spending so much on ads and distribution of content once you started making a little money. it hid the fact that the content couldn't stand alone without money behind it.

Founder: hadn't thought about that, but that's spot on. only my cofounder knows this, but at the beginning, i promised myself i'd never outsource brand or content. i was a firm believer that you simply can't deliver the exceptional content that truly differentiates when you're spread across multiple clients, not living and breathing the brand 24 hours a day then,

CMO: then, let me guess, you simply couldn't hire fast enough to keep up with the crazy growth of the early days, so you went to 3rd parties. at this very moment, i bet you're kicking yourself as you realize you should have brought this back in house once you got my head above water, but didn't, moving on to the next urgent thing, never stepping back to push the non-urgent, but important things like this forward.

Founder: you know me better than i know myself. what's the other shortcoming with outsourcing this? i bet you're going to say perverse incentives

CMO: nailed it. based on the way you structured the relationship, success for them is driving short term, highly measurable revenue boosts to justify their retainer.

Founder: yea, i hate that tbh. i wanted to structure something that was much more tied to long term profit generation, but honestly, it got too complicated. and, surprise surprise... i moved on to the next fire drill.

CMO: well good luck building pricing power if all the content is optimized to drive short term revenue

Founder: i'm here for it. i'm with you on the first piece about owning this key moat. however, the second thing you mentioned about me getting way more tactically involved is a non-starter.

CMO: i hear you. after all, you're a CEO of a big business, and that means NOT getting involved in any thing at a tactical level. for modern consumer brands, that's just wrong. the most successful founder CEOs i've worked with, after going through the whole "I'm a CEO so I need to delegate everything" phase, always came back to spending a material portion of their time tactically involved in the creative content output of the brand.

Founder: now that i think of it, i've seen the same thing with a few other brand founders i respect. honestly, i questioned their approach because they were, as the trendy quote goes, "working IN the business, rather than working ON the business". their brands are way larger and more profitable than ours, so there's clearly something there.

CMO: they realized the highest leverage use of their time is to be involved in the biggest differentiating value-creators in the business, and this is the main one.

Founder: interesting. to that point, as i've been seeing the content get more and more basic, i stayed hands-off to let the team make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons, assuming the weak content would get better over time. but it hasn't.

CMO:?yes, you're going to have to spend what seems like an inordinately long time giving context on what the brand is, teaching, coaching, etc. it's going to feel obvious to you, but the reality is what seems so natural and obvious to a founder is anything but for everyone else who is joining the team at this point in the brand's journey.

Founder: and it's not their fault. it's mine for not setting the team up for success. what about number 3? what's this cliffhanger about having the right people in the right seats?

CMO:?yes. the reality is that you can give all the context in the world, but this requires a special breed. and a specific team structure. and it's not a big team of specific subject matter experts in small parts of the content creation process.

Founder: but that's how you build a team when you get to a certain size

CMO: not this kind of team. the best people will explicitly NOT be experts with 'pedigrees'. it needs to be a very small team. worryingly too small with exceptionally high expectations for concept quality and completely unreasonable deadlines

Founder: interesting. that's how it was at the beginning. no one had any formal training. everyone was able to take a piece of content from ideation to narrative structuring to storyboarding to filming to acting to editing, and even to running the media, analyzing the results, and incorporating lessons from performance into the feedback loop to inform future content.

CMO: exactly. remember - you certainly weren't an expert in "brand building" when you started this thing

Founder: early on, the best early team additions were aspiring stand-up comedians, actors or performers who needed day jobs to pay rent. the other wins were friends from my past who always made me laugh and had the curiosity and intellectual horsepower to learn all the tactics of content creation.

CMO: i bet you all loved it, pushed each other to make the absolute funniest thing possible, and knew you needed to balance that need with the need to get as much content out there to get data on what works best and what falls flat.

Founder: totally. and now that we're talking about it, ALL of these people were also diehard early fans and earliest customers. this was in a time when our customers were mostly all friends and friends of friends.

CMO: that was going to be my final point - they need to be the person you're selling to - ideally, as you said, some of the earliest customers who immediately "got it". there's an enthusiasm there that can't be replicated by a professional marketer who simply isn't a die-hard customer

Founder: you're right. in the early days, the content resonated so well because we and our friends, people we deeply knew and understood, were the audience. we were just trying to make a piece of content that could be in the running to be the best thing they saw all day. we measured success more by the texts we got from friends telling us how awesome the content was rather than the revenue it drove that day.

CMO: and i'm sure at the time, you knew that your friends would buy from you whenever they were ready since they clearly knew you sold [name your category].

Founder: 100%. and i know some of the direct response ads we're running today "convert" really well, but the way I used to think about it is every ad needs to go through the filter of being something i'd feel good about texting to a good friend 1:1 knowing i was putting my reputation and friendship on the line.

CMO: ah yes, the classic 'would you text this to your buddy' test.

Founder: honestly, i'm feeling a renewed sense of clarity and purpose on this front. i'm energized to get back to the work of wowing my friends with stuff they'll text me about because of how it made them LOL

CMO: going forward, the main KPI of our content is the LOLZ factor

Founder: um, that's absurd, we're a $60M business

CMO: obvi. mostly joking, but don't forget that the $60M comes from individual people just like you and your friends making individual purchases. the fundamentals that applied then are just as applicable now. reaching a certain size doesn’t mean your business suddenly comes from faceless customers who are just numbers in your ad reports and cohort models.

Founder: great point. we were at our best when out filter was feeling so good about content we were putting out that we'd put our personal reputation and relationships on the line by texting them the video, where the goal was to make them laugh so much that they'd text us about it.

CMO: exactly. ultimately, the biggest learning i've taken away from the most successful brands i've worked with is that they didn't let the fact that they're a "big company" distract them from the reality that they're ultimately just acting the same way they did when the every customer was someone they personally knew.

Founder: consider me giddy. great talk. see you out there.