Robert Rose [00:00:00]:
What’s the one thing that marketers need to know these days about content? It is to get out of the container first mentality. Right. We are trained as marketers at university. You’re trained. I need an email, I need a white paper, I need an article, I need a blog post, I need a video, I need a podcast. Right. And then we go, great, let’s go make the container. And then we go, okay, what are we going to put in it? And instead you start with the story, the content, the actual what? The thing is the machine that builds the story.

Robert Rose [00:00:30]:
Start with the story and then put it in as many containers as feels appropriate.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:34]:
Yeah. Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. You know, thought leaders are people who make a stand on a topic based on their experience. They do, as Seth Godin calls it, the emotional labor of taking a chance of being wrong. But because of their experience and their track record of being right, we follow them. Today’s guest is one of those people I follow. We don’t always agree.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:00]:
And that gives me even more reason to challenge and listen to what he has, has to say because again, his experience tends to lead us in the right direction. He’s a leader in the marketing space, an absolute leader in content marketing and a trusted guide through the maze that we’re going through right now of marketing changes. So welcome again, Robert Rose.

Robert Rose [00:01:21]:
What’s going on, my friend? We, we don’t always agree, but one thing we do agree on, we got similar taste in music and, and, and, and when we get together, we definitely have a cocktail or two.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:33]:
So I’ll tell you where that came from. It was, I don’t know. I won’t name the post. It’s a post I made a few months ago and I can’t. And we didn’t exactly agree, but I loved it because it’s, I said, you know what, I’m around the right kind of people because we, we’re all thinking, we’re challenging each other. We have opinions and it’s up to the viewer of our both opinions to decide what, what fits in their lane, what they want to take. And like, someone told me about somebody who I totally don’t like, they were like, you know what, just spit out the seeds. Like they’ve got some good stuff, but spit out the seeds.

Robert Rose [00:02:12]:
So I like that metaphor. That’s cool.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:14]:
Yeah.

Robert Rose [00:02:14]:
Right.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:14]:
So when you listen to me, to Robert and I, there may be some things you love about what we say, maybe some things that don’t fit, but you know, Take the vitamins and the fruit, whatever, and spit out the seeds.

Robert Rose [00:02:23]:
Yeah, yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. It’s pushing the craft forward. That’s what we’re doing. We’re pushing the craft forward.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:29]:
Exactly. So I know it’s gonna be a great convers right now, Robert, I’m in a kind of a sarcastic place, I think, because I’m tempted to tell marketers, yeah, this is kind of scary, but every day I feel more about this. So I want to tell marketers, measure less and do more. And as a recovering marketing operations manager, that’s kind of counterintuitive. But the reason is because most of the things that we measure and the tools we’re using to measure are a bit out of date. And I think that we need to kind of bury our heads into experimentation maybe for the next few quarters. What are your thoughts on measurement versus time spent innovating?

Robert Rose [00:03:08]:
So this is an area we’re going to violently agree on. Right. So we are going to. So this is something I have, I’ve spoken about for, for a number of years, is sort of the, the, the myth of, of marketing measurement and what is possible. And I literally had the conversation last week with a guy who was frustrated because his CFO kept saying, hey, I need the algorithm for dollars in and dollars out. Right? In terms of the words that we.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:36]:
All quote is the wrong thing.

Robert Rose [00:03:38]:
And, and, and the point being, like, we’ve never been able to do that. Like, you go all the way back to the Mad Men days of, of, of, of marketing and we’ve never had a dollars in and dollars out. Marketing has always been half art, half science, always will be half art, half science. There is no way to put a complete predictability. It’s always something that we fine tune. And it’s interesting because you know what you’re. What your quote reminds me of very much is something that I use in a workshop, which is this, you know, there’s this quote that often gets thrown out with measurement, which is what gets measured, gets managed. Right? And it’s often thrown around with Peter Drucker or, you know, you know, so many different, you know, people get quoted for.

Robert Rose [00:04:20]:
It’s mostly Drucker that gets quoted with it. And he never said it, by the way, and it’s not true. The actual quote, quote comes from a guy who was actually basically criticizing measurement. And what the full quote of that is is what gets measured, gets managed, even when it’s pointless to do so. In other words, businesses get so wrapped around the axle of measurement that we start measuring everything even when it’s completely pointless to actually measure it. And that. So it’s, it’s actually a critique of measurement when we say what gets measured gets managed. Because, yes, we start measuring things because we can.

Robert Rose [00:04:59]:
And we get so wrapped up around that line going up and to the right that we forget to do things. We forget to do the creative things, we forget to take risks, we forget to swing for the fences with that big weird campaign that might actually, you know, do things. We end up doing safe, incremental things that are just really running us down the road of mediocrity. And so therefore you, you can’t ever improve other than sort of just in that little bit. And you spend so much of your time doing that little bitty thing that you, you forget to, you forget to do the big things. So I love it. I love your point of view on that.

A. Lee Judge [00:05:34]:
I saw a post yesterday on LinkedIn when someone, a thought leader in marketing, made a great point about being audacious or being creative in their marketing and whatever they suggested. Someone in the comments says, but where are the numbers on that? And I was like, cringe right there. And I was like, okay, how do I keep scrolling and not comment on this? I felt a temptation and I did respond and I said, the, the person who’s waiting for those numbers will never be a leader. They won’t be. First, just keep on waiting for those numbers while the rest of us go ahead and innovate out in the front.

Robert Rose [00:06:12]:
That’s right.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:12]:
If you numbers are lagging, right?

Robert Rose [00:06:16]:
Yeah, they’re, they’re, yes, they’re always, they’re always rearview mirror, right? It’s always about rearview mirror. Because you, you, you certainly can, you know, you can look at it like the weather, right? You know, there are only two ways to get to measured goals. You can, you can forecast, in other words, what’s the weather like today? It’s likely to be that, like that way tomorrow. So I can bet that if it’s raining today, it’ll probably be raining tomorrow. We can forecast then you can back cast. And that’s, that’s mostly what we do in marketing, which is when we back cast, what we do is we say, hey, here’s what we need to happen. Like, here’s what success looks like. Now how do we reverse engineer that to actually create something that, that can do that, right? So we say, well, the thing we did before is, you know, X, Y or Z.

Robert Rose [00:07:03]:
And then we say, okay, well here’s something we want to do in the future. Now, let’s reverse engineer to how many clicks, how many conversions, how many things we need to actually achieve that. The thing is, we’re almost. When we backcast, we’re almost always wrong, right?

A. Lee Judge [00:07:18]:
Yeah.

Robert Rose [00:07:18]:
Sometimes we’re wrong. If we take a big bet, we’re wrong in a really wonderful way. Like, we didn’t. We had no idea this thing was going to go viral. We had no idea this thing was going to crush it. We had no idea this product or this announcement was going to just like, light up, light the world on fire. And honestly, it’s usually. My experience is that it’s usually the things that we have the least expectation about that sort of burn up the charts and the things that we sort of look at and go, hey, let’s make sure that the algorithm is perfectly correct on that and we get the right shade of blue and that we a be the test the hell out of that thing.

Robert Rose [00:07:53]:
Those are the things that usually go, me okay, it was fine.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:58]:
Well, you know, I don’t want to beat the dead horse of the Cracker Barrel to death, but my comment on that whole fiasco was if anyone planned this whole thing, they deserve an award like they deserve the marketer of the year award if it were planned. I don’t know. I don’t know what your take is, but I’m thinking if they plan the change and the change back and they got the attention of the President of the United States, down to the country out on the corner, everybody got involved, marketers blew it up. I’m still seeing all kinds of comical variations of it. I saw a version this morning that had all the dead logos in heaven, but they were all like the dead slave logos. So it was Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, and they were welcoming the Cracker Barrel guy. And of course, given it was ancient mom and Uncle Ben, they’re like, hello, Cracker. You know, man, it’s like, take it how you want, but it’s the old logos in heaven welcoming the Cracker Barrel guy.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:03]:
Yeah.

Robert Rose [00:09:03]:
Yeah. Well, my take on it is I, you know, look, I look at it in a bit. Most of these things, I sort of put Occam’s razor to it, right? So, you know, the simplest answer is probably the right one. And I think they just, I think they just over. They just got a little further out over their skis than they, than they really wanted to. And I think, you know, they, they were really trying, right? They’re really, they’re. They’re, you know, I think it’s an. It was an earnest swing at the ball.

Robert Rose [00:09:28]:
Right. To say it was too. We need to modernize. We need to look a little younger. The old guy’s looking kind of old, and you don’t really even. It’s very hard to. He doesn’t even read. Really be like, you look at the Rito, The.

Robert Rose [00:09:40]:
The. The. The logo. He doesn’t even really read that well. And so, yeah, simplifying it probably made sense, but it was a classic case of blanding, right. Where we literally just take all the personality out of a logo. And that particular segment of people had a toxic freakout about it, and they sort of capitulated to the toxic freakout. I think ultimately it was a big nothing burger, in my view.

Robert Rose [00:10:06]:
It’s like we. We tend to over dramatize these things a lot and. But also.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:11]:
But I love to have been the guy.

Robert Rose [00:10:13]:
Absolutely love the. I love the. I love that it’s. They’re meeting the logos in heaven. That’s awesome.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:19]:
I would love to have been the guy who. I don’t think I agree with you. This was. They just went the wrong direction. They had to have the correct. I would love to be able to hang my hat on and say, hey, I had this great idea of over modernizing our logo, getting tons of viral activity, getting everybody’s attention, getting all this free press and this free content, and then we’ll just go back to the regular logo and, you know, enjoy all the sunshine we got from the attention. That would have been a great campaign. I don’t think anybody has the kahunas to do something like that, but it would have been a great campaign.

Robert Rose [00:10:54]:
Yeah. I mean. Well, here’s the interesting thing, I think, and this gets. I’m sure we’ll talk about this a little later, but I think this is something where when we look at what’s actually going on in the CMO’s office right now, it’s actually a bigger challenge, which is equating attention with value. Right. In other words, all attention is good attention. You know, Astronomer learned this with the whole, you know, Kiss cam video thing. They basically made the decision, I think, foolishly, that any attention was good attention.

Robert Rose [00:11:27]:
That basically shifted off of the Kiss camp thing. And they said, basically, oh, let’s do something with Gwyneth Paltrow, because that’ll be great. It got them attention. They won the moment they went viral with it. But I think they lose when it comes to brand value. Like, they didn’t build any brand value out of that. They didn’t build Any good affinity with their customer base. They didn’t really extend that story.

Robert Rose [00:11:50]:
You know, if they had taken a moment to say, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow is a really interesting idea here. How can we integrate her into a year long campaign to actually rehabilitate or, and, or relaunch our brand under a different idea now that’s a different story, right? Is taking the time to actually think about the long term value of developing versus the short term sort of sugar high of the attention and metrics and you know, all the things that we just talked about from a measurement perspective. It’s like taking that moment to say we don’t need the sugar high. We actually need something that’s going to build long term value and it’s going to take longer and it’s the measurement of it is not going to look good in the short term.

A. Lee Judge [00:12:30]:
Yeah, they put a quick band aid on it when they should have just went to the gym, right. To get better long term.

Robert Rose [00:12:34]:
And that’s the Cracker Barrel story too, right? It’s like, you know, they, they, they. It’s hard to know exactly but it feels like they rushed it, right? It feels like that they, you know, that they either didn’t do the research or they didn’t do the, you know, they didn’t do the right to see what it would take etc or that they didn’t go far enough. Right. In other words, they, that like if they’re going to change the let’s, let’s change it. Like let’s, let’s make it modern. Let’s not just the dude, right? Let’s actually change the idea of the entire brand and go forward from there and make a big bet instead. They made that sort of incremental change, that sort of a B tested change, right. It’s like, which one do you hate less basically?

A. Lee Judge [00:13:16]:
Well, I can tell you as someone who grew up in the country, I think I’m the last generation that even sees any nostalgia in the store at all. Like I’m old enough to have been in a country store that looked just like that in real life now given my black guy in the south, it wasn’t all good memories, but it was a store that I recognize. And so they’ve had their legal issues too in terms of they’ve had to settle some suits for lgbtq, they’ve had to sell some racial discrimination stuff. They, their past isn’t that great anyway in terms of that stuff. But yeah, I might go in there and go, oh, I remember that kind of cookie that kind of, you know, cracker or that kind of candy from when I was a kid. But I’m probably the last generation that remembers that stuff. And from a business standpoint, and you know that your demographic who understands that nostalgia is literally dying away, at some point you gotta pivot because it becomes a museum with pancakes if you don’t. So, you know, I think you just.

Robert Rose [00:14:20]:
Found, you just found the title of this episode. A Museum with Pancakes is great.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:28]:
Have you ever thought about doing a podcast for your business? And if you have, you probably have some questions. And we understand that because podcasting isn’t for every business. That’s why we’ve created a tool called podcastornot.com if you go to podcastornot.com you can take a quiz that gives you a full assessment of the strengths and weaknesses you may have in terms of if you’re ready to start a podcast and how it can benefit your business. Now, we know podcasts are a great marketing tool and a great source of content for all businesses, but maybe you’re not there yet. So take this assessment. @podcastornot.com we’ll give you a full report that you can share with your team about are you ready? And is a podcast a fit for your business? So go to podcastornot.com take the quick quiz and get a full assessment of should you start a podcast for your business? Back to the content. So you mentioned CMO and measurements. I want to go that direction because we both work with the executive marketing teams and I know we’ve seen a lot of CMOs either lose budget or lose their jobs because they can’t prove their impact.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:35]:
I saw this morning on LinkedIn, Mimi Turner. LinkedIn said she was using like a Moneyball analogy when she said when brand is poorly attributed, CMOs lose the budget argument. Even when brand investment delivers a home run, revenue attributed to it stops at first base. Love that way. She landed that. So what do you say to CMOs who are fighting that fight of attribution when we know it’s a long game?

Robert Rose [00:16:03]:
So this gets back to our discussion on measurement and I think it’s, it’s the measurement has, has never. So look, measurement has never been about accuracy in measurement, right? Measurement has never been about attribution. The value that we place in measurement has nothing to do with the accuracy. In other words, take for example, television ratings, right? Television ratings from the day that they were invented were a flawed accuracy measurement. It just always flawed. I mean, you speak to the idea of diversity, right? I remember working in Cable television when we had a, you know, we were a small cable TV network and the Nielsen ratings that we had in our, you know, basically in our, what they called VPV ages, viewers per viewing household, basically, they would look at and we could see how many people we had. One black guy. One black guy in our audience, right.

Robert Rose [00:16:56]:
He died. And our audience statistically went to zero with African American audiences, Right? It’s like, wait a minute. Yeah, because one person, right? So that was the idea. We had 2500 households that were determining what 100 million households were being graded on. But we. That didn’t stop us from building a multibillion $100 billion industry over the top of it, right? So accuracy is not about the thing. What it is is agreement. And what she’s getting to the point of which I think is a really good point, which is most CMOs, CEOs, CFOs, these leadership team, and the middle, the middle management team, by the way, never agree, never get agreement on attribution or what that measurement signifies.

Robert Rose [00:17:46]:
In other words, we say, oh, this brand campaign, increased revenue by X percent. And the CFO goes, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that to be true. The CEO goes, wait a minute. Those numbers look suspect because we never took the time to actually agree to say, this equals this, right? In other words, this measurement equals that. This is what. Let’s paint a picture and let’s all agree on what success looks like. What is a click, what is a view, what is engagement, what is an mql, what is an SQL, what is a.

Robert Rose [00:18:18]:
What are those things that we are sort of putting value to attributing, and then get agreement on that among the entire team, which never happens, by the way. So that when we put forward this idea, yeah, first base is as far as you’re ever going to get, because honestly, you never got agreement on what second base looks like, third base looks like, or a home run looks like. And that’s the problem with cmos is that we never sort of establish the standard. We never establish what the standard of good or success looks like to a Always, as we got, as we talked about in the very beginning of the show, the always flawed attribution model. Attribution has always been a flawed idea. The only thing we can ever do is look at the attribution and go, this is what the truth looks like to us. This is what our truth will be. And if we can agree on that, then we can actually get the home run.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:12]:
I think to anybody who’s Listening to this, who’s trying to figure out in a corporate sense how to measure and what to measure. There’s a lot of noise that I see that messes up how we take measurement. Because one, a lot of data comes from companies who sell measurement measurement software. So I wouldn’t trust data management software company that says you must measure this. Or here’s the new acronym you should watch for because they, they need you to use your software for that. And then you have executives who want to keep their jobs. You have executives who want to please the board. I wrote about it in the honesty part of my book where I had a situation in real life when I was a market operations person.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:51]:
It’s five o’, clock, I need to get a report turned in. And I realized that our data team had read the wrong field out of our CRM and gave me a report that was wrong. And I was like, I can’t turn this into the cmo. The data manager, the owner of that division comes and says, lee, they don’t give a crap about this report. They just want their numbers. Give them their numbers and they’ll be happy. And I was like, my integrity didn’t want to turn those numbers. I didn’t.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:17]:
They were not right. I knew they weren’t right. But he showed me the CYA culture. Cover your butt culture.

Robert Rose [00:20:24]:
Of course.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:25]:
Yeah, just pass the report to the cmo. He’ll be happy. Pass. He’ll pass it on to the CFO or CEO. They’ll be happy and they’ll make a decision and business moves on. Everybody keeps their job. The board is happy, but the numbers are wrong. Where does a business go at the end of the day?

Robert Rose [00:20:43]:
That’s right. One of my favorite things to do is when I talk to a CEO or a CMO is I’ll ask them, and this is, and this is my, this is the way that I get the understanding of how they perceive marketing as a philosophy in their business. And the question I ask the CMO or the CFO and or both. Right. Is tell me the last major business decision that was made based on a marketing insight. In other words, and a non marketing decision like new product, new location, acquisition or merger or, or you know, major business decision not related to marketing, but that was made based on a marketing insight. Tell me the last one. And if you, A, they don’t have one or B they can’t really say it.

Robert Rose [00:21:34]:
What it tells me is they make no business decisions based on marketing insights. So it’s, it’s not that they don’t even care about that report. They don’t understand that report. Therefore, they see no. They see no importance in that report. Therefore, they don’t really care about marketing all that much. It’s just a tax that they have to pay in order to get sales and revenue. And so that’s.

Robert Rose [00:21:57]:
That’s. It’s. It’s understanding that. Where you can start to say, okay, what’s my. What’s my adventure then? Right? Am I here to change the culture? And in other words, am I here to make them care about marketing? Or am I here to play the. You know, am I here to play the game?

A. Lee Judge [00:22:14]:
If they haven’t made any decisions, it makes you think about there’s probably three or four or five people on the payroll whose job is to make numbers and go nowhere.

Robert Rose [00:22:24]:
That’s right. That’s right. It’s literally check the box. Right? It’s literally check the box. It’s. And the interesting thing is a friend of mine who used to work at a really big brand, he said to me, it’s a line that I have remembered to this day, and I love this line. And it just speaks to corporate culture these days. What he said to me was, he said, it’s not what you do, it’s what they think you do.

Robert Rose [00:22:46]:
In other words, it has nothing to do with your. It has nothing to do with the fact that you were putting your integrity and your blood, sweat and tears into those data numbers and making sure they were accurate. It’s all what they think you do. And as long as you’re producing that report, what’s in the report doesn’t matter, because what they think you do is produce a great set of numbers. So you’re good. Right. Which is a sad state. It’s a disappointing state.

Robert Rose [00:23:11]:
Right. For the culture of that company. But it’s also. It’s the oxygen you have in the room at the time.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:17]:
Yeah, I’m gonna throw a shameless plug in there for my book. Because if you ever wonder honesty, part of Cash is. That’s what it’s about. It’s about.

Robert Rose [00:23:24]:
Yeah, for sure.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:25]:
Reporting on here marketers and sales leaders. If you want to close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash. And I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, Cash the four Keys to Better Sales, Smarter marketing, and a supercharged revenue machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue the most. Communication, alignment systems, and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing engine, and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now@aleadjudge.com cash now back to the content.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:05]:
So after that plug, I want to pivot a little bit because we can’t not talk about content marketing in the face of AI. I’m ready for the change because I love to hear directly from people in their conversations. So while AI content is still on the rise, do you think we are about to see a renaissance of human content marketing?

Robert Rose [00:24:27]:
I do, I do. And I’ve just written about this recently where I think interestingly enough, and you can actually see this and in the article I wrote, I wrote about the search trends, right? And what you saw over the last, you know, call it 10 years was a bit of a plateau, right, of, of the search trends around the idea of content marketing. And I think we’re seeing. And then you can see that there’s a spike in the last couple of years, last year. And I think a lot of that has to do with AI. And I think what it means to me is that that content marketing as an approach is evolving again, right? And I think what we’re seeing is the, you know, when we used to think about content marketing, especially in B2B, what we would think is great blog post, search focused, you know, looking at being discovered, looking for the top of the funnel, looking for establishing thought leadership, looking for that, you know, valuable how to ebook or whatever, to be a lead magnet, et cetera, et cetera. And all those I think are still somewhat viable, right? I think it’s a, it’s a declining thing and AI is certainly adding to the AI slop and certainly, you know, getting harder to pierce the noise with those things, et cetera, et cetera. But what we’re seeing is a resurgence of doubling down on the big product bets of content marketing.

Robert Rose [00:25:50]:
And I’ll give you an example of it. So Bilt B T, the financial services company that does the sort of credit cards for paying your rent for young people and all that kind of stuff. Well, they have that series, Roomies on Instagram and it’s a complete, it’s like a television series, right? They’ve built a complete television series. It’s got its own Instagram channel, it’s distributed through Instagram primarily, but they put it on other channels as well. And it’s doing very well for them. It’s doing very, very well for them. AI can’t do that, right? AI is not going to create a complete TV series for you. I look at what ServiceNow is doing with folks with Idris Elba Integrating it into their online University, the ServiceNow University, and Building a learning platform, but also using paid media and social media to promote it through IDIs, Elba, etc etc.

Robert Rose [00:26:37]:
AI can’t do that. AI doesn’t duplicate Idris Elba and it doesn’t duplicate the valuable learning you’re going to get in this servicenow University. So but it’s treating those things like products, like genuinely human created content products that sort of themselves stick out, right? It means bigger bets. It’s not just snackable content anymore. It means the bigger bets into bigger pieces that look like media products more than anything else. Which in a way is sort of a classic nod back to the originality of content marketing. But it’s sort of in this, you know, sort of like getting out of the ebook blog post, SEO focused article, blah blah, blah, and getting much more into series, bingeable, you know, all those kinds of things. Big, big media products.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:23]:
So you said media a few times and you talked about a couple of examples that were video. Now I remember when I first began, probably first met you researching content marketing in almost every article almost to this day leans directly towards text. Like we see a new paper comes out about content marketing. It’s almost always talking about text. Now. Yeah, of course it gets my attention because we produce content that’s not text. Video podcasts, that’s our niche. And so I’m like, okay, our case studies point to video.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:56]:
Our platforms are, most are pushing video. We know video is one way to look more human. But yet when we look at our research, marketers always end up getting text research. Why is that?

Robert Rose [00:28:11]:
It’s easy and cheap. It’s that it goes back to what we talked about earlier, right? The, the immediate focus on efficiency and speed. It’s just easier and, and cheaper to do a PDF report or to do a long blog post or to do text. Right? It’s just, you know, it’s hard, you know, you know, it’s hard to do a really good video, it’s hard to do really good audio. It’s hard to do multimedia in a way and not hard from like you can’t learn it. It’s just there is there, there is the artistic aspect to it, right? It’s hard to get really good at it. You know, I mean, not like none of us are Steven Spielberg, right? You know, but, but on the other side of it, it just takes longer. It’s just, it’s just more effort and so you have to make a bigger bet on it.

Robert Rose [00:28:59]:
Thus people aren’t doing it. And because we got so wrapped around the axle of search engine optimization. Well, then it became, then it became all about text, right? It became like, well, it’s not going to rank for search. That’s its only value. So that’s how we have to do it is text. So we at least have to have the script and the transcript, and all of that is a big blog post. So it gets found, blah, blah, blah. And what we’re finding is, is that video really is the discovery these days.

Robert Rose [00:29:24]:
Video, you know, whether it’s TikTok or LinkedIn or, you know, YouTube or whatever, that. That is becoming the discovery of, of, of, of brands and of content.

A. Lee Judge [00:29:33]:
I think what you actually inadvertently is telling me is that Content Master needs to do the research to put out there to show that video content. In fact, it isn’t necessarily more expensive, it isn’t necessarily harder, but that’s the perception. I mean, I began creating video content 201617 for businesses, and it was difficult and it was more expensive. Now, not so much. But the audience doesn’t know that. You know, I’ve spent.

Robert Rose [00:30:00]:
Level of effort has come down. The level of effort has come way down, right? I mean, it has been democratized. Producing video, producing audio, producing multimedia generally has been democratized. The tools are great, but it is linear, right? It is a linear process. Therefore, it is sort of more. It is. It might be incrementally more, but it is more effort than writing a blog post, right? Making a video and a script and making it good is just inherently more effort. And so when you start, when a.

Robert Rose [00:30:29]:
When a business starts looking at that and they go, all right, well, we can, we can get five blog posts done or we can get one video done. Well, let’s get five blog posts done, right?

A. Lee Judge [00:30:39]:
It’s like, what about what we’re doing right now, though? Because we’re talking for probably an hour.

Robert Rose [00:30:43]:
I don’t disagree with you. I don’t just. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t disagree that it’s right. But I mean, not to toot our own horner, but you and I, we know what we’re doing here. We know how to do this. Right. This is not a skill set that is necessarily inherent in most businesses, right? They just, they either A, don’t like themselves on video, B, are uncomfortable on video, and C, can’t like, sort of speak on the fly, speak on, you know, speak extemporaneously. You know, they need that preparation work.

Robert Rose [00:31:14]:
So it’s, it’s harder for some people.

A. Lee Judge [00:31:16]:
Yeah, I’ll say a Little bit more than anecdotally, because it’s a small sample group. But we’re gaining more and more clients that thought they wanted a podcast but realize they’re getting a content machine. And we’re hearing more often now people coming to us for a content machine versus a podcast.

Robert Rose [00:31:35]:
Yeah, for sure.

A. Lee Judge [00:31:36]:
We had a client recently said, oh, we don’t care about the podcast numbers. That isn’t why we hired you. We hired you because now we’re creating videos, we’re getting executives to have conversations with us, we’re meeting clients, we’re writing articles, and we’re like, you get it. You get that you’re getting.

Robert Rose [00:31:53]:
Right, Exactly.

A. Lee Judge [00:31:54]:
If we had more people to get that, oh, we’d be blasting off, you know, with more business that we can handle. But, yeah, for those customers who say, look, dude, we’re putting out so much content that’s valuable and unique. We don’t give a crap about a podcast. Listen, we are cranking out real articles, talking to real executives. Like, what we’re doing right now will be a great article. Because as Christopher Penn said, there’s going to be unique words we used in this conversation that will tell, AI, these are two experts talking. This isn’t a writer who wrote an article about this thing.

Robert Rose [00:32:26]:
It is. Exactly. So I’m often asked at workshops on podcasts when I’m a guest, when I’m, you know, getting interviewed, they’ll ask me, they’ll say, what’s the one thing. What’s the one thing that marketers need to know these days about content? And you just elucidated it perfectly. Where I’ll say it is to get out of the container first mentality. Right. We are trained as marketers at university. You’re trained.

Robert Rose [00:32:53]:
I need an email, I need a white paper, I need an article, I need a blog post, I need a video, I need a podcast. Right? And then we go, great, let’s go make the container. And then we go, okay, what are we going to put in it? What are we going to put in the container? And instead, what you’re suggesting is, and I 100% agree with, is you start with the story, the content, the actual what, the thing is, the machine that builds the story. Start with the story and then put it in as many containers as feels appropriate.

A. Lee Judge [00:33:21]:
Yeah, I think you, You. You gave me that thought when I was. Had a post probably a year or two ago about can we stop using the word podcasting? Because it’s. It narrows down things. And you were saying kind of the same Thing like, let’s get out of the container. You know, it’s content we’re creating. Podcast is just one channel, one way to package it, but it’s content that can be repackaged all kinds of different ways.

Robert Rose [00:33:44]:
That’s right. Container is just a function of distribution. And it’s. And it’s. And it’s. And it’s just. And so you got to get your story straight first and get the story right and get everybody involved in creating the story, whoever that collaborative team is that you’re working with, whether it’s marketing your entire company or whatever, then you have the story straight, then you can create that story, Then you can figure out all the distribution containers that will help basically expose it to your audiences.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:14]:
Absolutely. Well, Robert, I want to get into your new book, and here’s the interesting angle on this, is that this year at Content Marketing World, we’re both talking about topics that would, on the surface, appear to be opposites, but I’m sure they’re not. I’m talking about content, AI and automation, basically how you can optimize and speed up quality content creation. And you’re talking about your title, your book, Valuable Friction, and how to intentionally slow down parts of the process. So tell me how and if both of these can exist, so they can.

Robert Rose [00:34:50]:
Exist because ultimately, Valuable Friction isn’t about speed or slowness. In other words, it’s not about either. It’s about the dulling of both. And what I mean by that is. And the best metaphor that I’ve come up with so far, it’s how do you know there’s a great basketball game being played? Because you hear the squeak of the shoe. Right? The squeak of the shoe is the value. And so it’s the friction, it’s the difference, and it’s being conscious and acknowledging the difference in the two. Yes.

Robert Rose [00:35:20]:
In some cases, it is about moving faster. Because what you’re doing is you’re putting exactly to our. Just our last conversation. Right. You think about and slow down the process of getting to a great story instead of rushing to container, instead of rushing to speed and efficiency and convenience of. The most convenient way for us to do this right now is a podcast. No, we’re thinking it through. We’re thinking it.

Robert Rose [00:35:43]:
Actually taking the moment to wrestle with the idea of what’s the entire story here? And then how can we speed up the content reuse, repurposing and republishing of all these great containers once we have a better. We’ve taken the time, the pushback. I get on that, by the way, for most businesses, it says, well, it sounds like you’re going to really slow down my content creation process. And I’m like, yes, spoiler alert, I am. I’m going to slow down your content creation process so that you speed up your content distribution process. And so that’s the idea there. It’s the difference between the two that you create more value. And we’ve become so obsessed with speed, businesses have become so obsessed with speed as the foundational value that we have forgotten to take that moment, right? We’ve forgotten to take the moment to say, is this good? Is this right? You know, you look at something like, you know, for example, the, the astronomer thing that we talked about earlier, right? They didn’t just, even in this focus of, we have to get a message out today, just ship it, move fast, break things.

Robert Rose [00:36:47]:
You know, that sort of mantra, that mentality of the astronomer, folks. Nobody went, wait a minute, let’s slow down for two seconds here and wrestle with this idea some more and figure it out if it’s right for the brand or right for the product or if it’s right from the moment, right? It’s just this mentality of just ship it, right? Minimum viable product, move fast and break things. And now we’re 10 years later after moving fast and break things and wondering why everything is broken. And so this is the idea that I’m trying to convey in the book, is that there are moments that we can take in operationally, strategically, creatively and relationally with relationships even where we can introduce tension, we can introduce friction to make what it is we do more memorable and to stand out. That’s the, that’s the general idea. So I don’t think those ideas are opposed at all that what you and I are going to talk about. I think it’s just, it’s introducing that tension, the squeak of the shoe.

A. Lee Judge [00:37:49]:
You know, it’s interesting because even in that talk that I give, there are moments where I say, look, I’m showing you the faster way to do it. But this piece right here is what puts in the quality and makes it unique. That part is the slowing down. Like, exactly. I’ve got one place where I say, hey, put in a prompt and AI will do it for you. But I have to also recognize I took a long time. The prompt is like two pages long. That was the slowing down to plan and think who the audience is and how it should, the voice of it should be.

A. Lee Judge [00:38:20]:
There’s some slowing down in the speeding up.

Robert Rose [00:38:22]:
Yeah, I, I, I Write a weekly article every single week. Right. Done it for four years. And every week I have to, you know, I’m writing, you know, anywhere between 1500 and 2000 words into a, you know, into an article about whatever. Right. Marketing generally. And so, you know, like every writer, some weeks it comes easy, some weeks it doesn’t come easy. And I, I look and because I measure my time, on average before I started using AI, I would spend probably three to four hours with a particular article.

Robert Rose [00:38:58]:
Now I spend between six and 10 hours for an individual. It takes me longer to create an article. Why? Because I use AI to pressure test my ideas, to go out and look and see if it’s been talked about before, to identify the gaps, to help me basically make a much deeper. And I’m using it to slow down my creativity process. Because what happens is I don’t write a 2000 word article anymore. I write a 4000 word article and it takes me a lot longer and the ideas are more deeply explored. But that 4,000 word article, well, now it becomes my weekly article for CMI, becomes probably my rant on my, this old marketing podcast. It becomes part and parcel for my newsletter that I send out twice a week or try to send out twice a week.

Robert Rose [00:39:43]:
And basically all, it becomes a repurposeful story that I can tell across all my different channels because I’ve taken the time to actually put in the work. And AI helps me be more creative and slow down that process. And that’s, and it’s, it’s really been.

A. Lee Judge [00:39:59]:
Interesting and the quality of your product shows it. I mean, it’s really good stuff. It’s worth the follow.

Robert Rose [00:40:05]:
Yes, thank you. I, I think it has too. I mean, I always leave that to the audience, but I, I believe I’m happier with my work these days than I’ve been in a long time.

A. Lee Judge [00:40:15]:
I feel you. So last but not least, you mentioned the book. Tell us where we can find it, where you want us to go to get it, and where we’ll see you at soon.

Robert Rose [00:40:23]:
You’re so nice. Yes, the book can be found@valuablefriction.com, which is just a landing page on my own little website, which is robertrose.net but valuablefriction.com will get you there to buy the book and take a look at it like that.

A. Lee Judge [00:40:37]:
Great, Robert. Well, thanks again for joining me. I enjoy the conversation as usual.

Robert Rose [00:40:42]:
Thank you, my friend.

A. Lee Judge [00:40:43]:
Yes, sir. And for the listeners, if you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Robert and I video the podcast and Others are available in the Podcast section of content monster.com catch you next time.

Robert Rose [00:40:59]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing Podcast, a show brought to you by ContentMonsta.com the producer of B2B digital marketing content show notes can be found on ContentMonster.com as well as Aleadjudge.com.