December 22, 2018 • 30 mins
We’re talking all things content marketing on our last episode of 2018 with Citia Founder & CEO, Linda Holliday. Linda talks with us about the paradigm shift from advertising to content, the (invisible) role technology should play for marketers, pursuing a new infrastructure and designing for entirely new spaces. Hear why she thinks B2B advertisers tell big stories in small pieces well, why marketers should always be publishing, and what brands we think did content marketing best in 2018. Plus an all new #KILLBUYDIY. Happy holidays and wishing you the best in 2019, ADLANDIA!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm off my game today. No, you're not. People are
going to have to start making better content. I think
we're gonna be talking about this for a long time.
When you program for everyone, you program for no one.
I think it's that we're purpose driven platform like we're
trying to get to substance. How was that? Are you
happy with that? This is marketing therapy right now? It
really is? What's up? I'm Laura Currency and I'm Alexa Kristen.
(00:29):
Welcome back at Landia. We made it over and out.
Happy holidays at Landia. Happy holidays everyone. So we're in
the studio talking about all things content marketing with Linda Holiday,
CEO and founder of Sitia. Yes, Linda, we've known her
for a few years now, and I think we've both
been kind of fascinated with her really interesting background and
(00:54):
the product that she's created and the company she's created
is a SAS software as a service company that has
a very kind of usable interface for what I would
say is content marketing in this kind of new media
and use your interface world. And I think some of
the insights Linda has been in the space since so
(01:15):
it's interesting to see how her perspective has evolved as
obviously technology, new platforms have emerged. I think just in general,
one of the themes that we've talked about at length
over the course of this year has really been the
need to move towards content ecosystems and moving away from
the idea of campaigns and flight dates and very structural
channel planning and these like little spikes that go to nothing,
(01:37):
spikes that go to nothing. And I think she's going
to talk about some of that stuff. So with that,
Linda Holiday for the holidays, we'll be right back and
(01:58):
we're back in the studio. Welcome Linda Holiday, founder and
CEO of Sidia. Hi, Linda, Hi, great to be here,
you guys, Thanks for joining. So Linda tell us what
Sidia is and does. So it's hard to talk about
what City is without doing a tiny bit of a
backswing because it's not obvious, but the Internet has kind
(02:21):
of gone through a face shift. We used to make
pages and lots of big things and now it's all
a bunch of small pieces that get reorganized according to
some kind of intelligence and flow through feeds and streams.
So City is really a platform that helps big companies
make that kind of media. So if you're a brand
new company, you started making that, But if you're an
older company, you've inherited a lot of like tech dad
(02:43):
and cms s and things that aren't really well suited
for these channels. So it's a platform that big companies
like Ge and Comcast and Viacom used to make media
that goes across all channels. So sometimes we think of
ourselves as a shipping container system but for content. So
you make some once and we make sure we can
get it to everywhere and that all the metrics are
(03:03):
standardized and counted and human and intuitive. What was the
insight too move into a shipping container business for content?
Um One of the insights was that the format itself
was getting commoditized. Right. We used to make websites and
then somebody invented this thing called the laptop, and we're like, what,
we have to make another one, a smaller one, like
(03:25):
you couldn't actually put a desktop website on a laptop.
And then fast forward, we've got a gazillion channels and
they're all different, and so everybody's running like a million
teams making format changes, which is a tremendous waste of
time and money. So that was one insight that the
format itself was becoming commoditized, so people, different people are
(03:46):
using Sidia for different things. I remember when we were
talking to Ross Martin, who's been on the show. When
I first met him, he actually walked me through like
the Viacom innovation lab and he was showing me all
these things that they had done with Cydia, which is
like kind of a big deal for Viacom At the time.
I was like, how do we get content out that's
lightweight and easy and quick and can be modifiable. Um,
(04:09):
they were using you know, Citia in one level. What
are the kind of different use cases for Citia that
you've seen? That's how funny because g was our first
client and Viacom was our second, and it was literally
turbines to tattoos because I love that, and so we
sold it in for content marketing, and content marketing was
you know, kind of hot then and should be hotter now,
(04:31):
but back then people were really investing in it, and
so we found the people who were looking to do
that kind of convert thought leadership, white papers, a lot
of the you know, support um content around brand marketing
and corporate marketing. And then what happened was inside. People
started to make all the stuff we never thought about, right,
so HR investor relations training, and we just like watch
(04:54):
people make these things. And because it really is multi
purpose content and once you know how to use it,
it's like power pointer, keynote. Anyone can get in there
and make stuff. So people did. And now I'd say
our number one use case still is content marketing, and
the second use case would be communications, you know, pr
and so the actual product itself is really like a
(05:14):
deck that you can swipe through and get content and
sort of a card like format. Is that accurate? Yes?
And so another kind of insider observation is that the
most native motion on a phone is a swipe, not
a tap, right, So we made swipeable media because that's
the most ergonomically correct. Like if you think about how
(05:35):
use the phone, it's like a coffee in one hand
and the phone and the other. Right. So if that's
the most natural motion, like what do you what do
you want to do to get through a lot of
content fast? And the other kind of insight behind that
is users know what they want, like we're all really
great and navigating, and if you give people content that
they can get through quickly they will find what they want.
(05:56):
It's actually designed to help users get through a lot
of content fast. So if you think about how most
things are now just a feed and it's a column
and it could be a hundred feet long, and it's
kind of exhausting. But if you open up like the
depth or that Z axis, then you also can get
people to a lot of depth much faster because it's
(06:17):
actually three dimensional content, so more engagement obviously. Well it's
it's engaging because we like to you know, kind of
you know, surf and and brows and try and find
what we find. And it's also kind of satisfying. There's
this little like almost worry bead effect to getting through stuff.
If I started over, I wouldn't have done all of
(06:38):
that at once, because as a designer, I spent a
lot of time studying ergonomics and like, it's just not
healthy to bobble head up and down with your content, right.
That's not good for your neck, it's not good for
your eyes. It's better that the content move in your
head stay straight, right, that's much more human. So I'm like, well,
let's just do that, and people are like whye to
(07:00):
it's swipe because it was before Tinder, So yeah, we
stuck it out. And so now people understand that that's
actually a really efficient way to get through content. And
I see things all the time that look like Citia,
like the UM app Store, the Apple App Store, but
it's one card thin. I'm like, this is so inefficient.
You could get through so much more if you could
(07:21):
actually get to you know, UM app apps for language
learning and go booba boo bah boop. Right, how old
is Cidia? How long has it been around? We launched
in two thousand and twelve, but we were working with publishers,
and in two thousand and sixteen we switched over to
corporate customers and ge was our first customer, which we
launched in UM first quarter sixteen. It's interesting to think
(07:44):
about how you were starting to develop product based on
sort of the learned behavior or the evolution of behavior
for how we interact with technology that's going on what
seven years ago now, UM, And it's interesting to think
about how in the current marketplace UM, we're still developing
one size fits all formats and expecting those to travel
(08:08):
to you know, different screen sizes or played different viewing environments.
What have you learned over the last seven years that
you would share with our audience when thinking about how
to diversify format and really paying attention to the space
and behavior that consumers are leading with. I think the
hardest transition for traditional marketers is to understand that what's
(08:30):
most important now as relevance. We all grew up in
an era where we kind of had the mic, right,
and we said and they listened. You know, ten years ago,
ninety five percent of media was made by businesses. Now
it's less than half, right, So we are those of
us who are trying to put you know, commercial messages
out in the world are competing with a lot of
(08:51):
stuff that we didn't used to compete with. And to
compete in this new tent, you have to be relevant, right,
So we all cared a lot about reduction values. Me especially,
I can be a real perfectionist, right. I love storytelling,
I love the big canvas. I spent a lot of
my life making television commercials, which are excruciating lee you know, perfectionists.
(09:12):
But now like that doesn't matter so much. It matters
more that you get there when the party is going on, right,
Like attention is a stock market now goes up and
down so fast. Right, So if you can't make things
as a as a commercial entity fast enough to get
in on whatever people are interested in, you're going to
be irrelevant. So you know, I would say we need
What we've learned is people have to really dial up
(09:33):
how fast they jump in and how they find the
right connection between their products and their content and their
customers or potential customers interest. Do you see that translate
in your product, like do you see brands or creatives
using or publishers using your platform the wrong way? And
what would you advise in terms of you know, evolving
(09:55):
content to even just fit within the product you've created.
I think it is a pretty big learning curve, right.
I kind of think of it as going from baseball
to soccer, right, So everybody's on that, on that learning curve.
Companies like Viacom, of course, that have a lot more
customer um touch points learn faster right there in a
(10:15):
lot of social channels, They've got a lot of teams,
so there's more shared learning. Business to business customers have
been really good at content marketing for a long time,
so they actually understand not going right for the jugular immediately,
but they have to kind of earn some attention and
credibility by being useful to their customers before they try
to close a sale, so they are farther ahead in
(10:37):
some surprising ways. A lot of the traditional you know
CpG companies are trying to go too far, too fast,
and they scare their customers. Yeah, you know, what's your
perspective and what are you hearing from some of the
kind of big old companies that are really trying to
transform and how are you helping them do that? With Sidia,
(10:59):
maybe can sexually as well as you know from the
executional standpoint on using the interface. So we have B
two B and B two C customers and they have
different kinds of challenges. Right, the B two B customers
have had a lot of attention and they've been able
to use things like white papers and UM conferences and
(11:21):
now UM they're just realizing that their customers are also
in control. When I was in healthcare, we used to say,
you know, you would go to the doctor, that was
a healthcare consult. Then all of a sudden, you went
to the internet. You went to the doctor. You went
to the internet, that was a healthcare consult That's happened
to all B two B just recently. So they used
(11:42):
to control access to their product information and you had
to like talk to their sales people. And so now
those sales people walk in if they can get in
at all, and they can't, Like there's a disaster. That's
pretty underreported that B two B sales people really can't
get the FaceTime with their customers they used to. But
that customer has also done a tremendous amount of research.
Their procurement people have helped, and when that salesperson walks in,
(12:05):
it's a firing squad. It's more shark tank than let
me tell you about our new product. So it's a
tremendous change, and they're trying to figure out how do
we put smaller pieces of content? How do we tell
big stories and small pieces so that we're pushing all
that relevant information into the places where our customers are
doing their own, you know, kind of self exploration around
our products. And that's a really hard transition to make
(12:28):
because again they have the microphone and now they don't.
The customer has it. How does your platform as a
technology solution, how is that kind of either disrupting or
replacing kind of the standard content management? And I don't
mean content management systems. But even again, the content management
(12:50):
philosophy or is it content marketing and advertising are kind
of converging and right, both of those teams bring something
different to the marriage. Right, So um, the advertising people
think in terms of campaigns, and I think now the
more appropriate mindset is always be publishing. Like our customers
(13:11):
are always on and we have no idea where they
are in their product discovery journey, so we have to
be out there and all these channels all the time.
So if you put in your head that isn't always
be publishing model, then you would say, I need a
platform that supports that kind of behavior from our content
marketing and our advertising team. So that's what City is.
But I would say most of our customers still think
(13:33):
in terms of campaigns, and campaigns are great, like they
organize your effort, they give you, you know, some meaning
that you can actually dial up for bursts of time.
It's also good. But software as a service is actually
of foreign concept to advertisers and marketers because we've been
taught to think about just launching something, not maintaining and
(13:54):
holding things. You know, this concept of frequency from you know,
reach in frequency, like you had to act. She build
a certain amount of um memorability by repeating your message, right,
So that was how you kind of made a little
bit of a permanent impact on a customer. You guys
do all these amazing events and they happen in there
like a month, right, and then you let all of
(14:16):
that awareness go down to zero again, and then you
have to build it up from scratch at the next event.
So we would say you should think of that as
a platform and it should have some kind of maintenance
level of activity all the all year, and then you
have a party like once a year, you know, where
you really you know, punctual for all that thing out right,
and get all the drama, but keep it going during
(14:37):
the year, because when you let it go down to nothing,
you have to rebuild it from nothing. Yeah, we've talked
a lot on the show about the idea of impact
and attention being the new retrequency, and this idea of
these mic drop moments being supported by communication that happens
in between them. And so I think the idea of
communications planning and channel planning and the role of messaging
(14:58):
has never been more important to agree. I think one
of the things that we haven't really talked about is
what is the infrastructure? And I've become like nerdy obsessed
with this because like everybody talks about mar tech and
your tech stacks and your this and your that, but
really talking about how there has to be kind of
a transformative maybe even like a layer or two things,
(15:21):
um that allow that engine to run. It's all bespoke, right,
and it's all like you know, these kind of bespoke
islands of things. And I think that even if the
holding companies want to be successful at this kind of stuff,
they need to have not only a perspective, but they
need to have a foot into the technology space to
(15:43):
really enable this stuff. What are your thoughts on that.
I would like technology to go away for you guys,
for marketers. Yeah, like you should just be thinking about
your contents, your strategies, and technology is a burden, right.
I remember back to when everything you thought of didn't
have to go through some giant I T loop that
(16:04):
made it more expensive and more time consuming. Right. You
could just make stuff and you could get it into
the world. And while the world spelled up, we slowed down. Right,
that's a mismatch. There's one thing there that I think
It's really exciting, is that right now? In general, it
actually still is in the I T loop in terms
of like, if you're a marketer and you want to
have some kind of metrics, analytics and you want to
(16:29):
get things out quickly, you are still effectively going through
some version of your I T or you're outsourcing it.
You're going to a publisher who can get it done
very quickly. You're going somewhere else who can get you know,
to someone who can get it done very quickly. What
the power of the marketer actually owning that hasn't really
happened yet in the industry. There are some marketers I
(16:52):
think who are more tech savvy marketers, um, but you're
seeing like the rise of that digital officer. Really, I
think that's kind of spraying that on. But you know,
what does that look like? What does that look like
when the marketer takes it. What has happened and I
don't think people have even noticed it is its Instagram
(17:13):
because Instagram is something marketers can do without tech, and
so I think a lot of the success of that
plain that a little bit like what you could just
leave here and post something you don't need anybody's permission
you don't need any you know, roadmaps, you don't need
to get in a queue. You're just done right. So
I think the user friendliness of Instagram is at least
(17:33):
half the reason it's become so popular for marketers. Interestingly,
you're solving for future facing problems sitting on the tech
side and the design side, but you've had a career
on the agency side and you've seen what it takes
to think about or put in place solutions that will
help brands. Can you talk about your background and how
(17:53):
you've navigated to end up in developing a company like
City of Well backing up from year UM, I kind
of had the problems you're talking about, right, and I
called it death by a thousand cuts. You know. The
proliferation of all these channels made UM figuring out what
to do and doing it well almost impossible. And if
(18:15):
you already have scale, you need a solution. Like it's
great for the disruptors because they can pick a channel
and do it well, and so the barrier to entry
came way down. But if you're selling you know, um,
deodorant or cars or whatever, and you're already trying to
talk to millions and millions of people. You had a
(18:35):
much tougher challenge, which was managing all that complexity. And
there has to be something for business at scale to
make it simpler to take advantage of the benefits of scale.
And I know, you know it's kind of fashionable to
kind of um disparaged scale, but that's what everybody wants.
Here's the thing that I love that you just said.
(18:55):
That is really right, Like it's not fashionable to talk
about scale. The reason it's not fashionable to talk about
scales because scale represented the one size fits all model.
The point is every DTC brand wants scale that no
one's gonna say to you, I don't want to grow,
I don't want to be selling to millions of people.
They will say to you, I want to maintain what
(19:16):
keeps me special and I want to grow my relationship.
So I'm looking at a lifetime value of always A
lot of big companies got really far away from their customers,
you know there you know our media, habits, our tastes, ingredients,
you know, so many things changed all at once, and
a lot of smaller companies drove trucks through that. Well,
(19:37):
what do you think the people that you're mentioning like
a Casper. They've done a great job at doing content marketing.
I don't know what they would say, but at least
doing you know, speaking to their audience and knowing who
their audiences and then backing it up in their product
experience and all of that. But like, what's next. I'm
nodding furiously because I don't really see a response from
(19:57):
the traditional mattress makers. And this has been going on
for years now. This Casper didn't launch last week, right,
So I think a lot of these companies, you know,
they're too big to change, and so I do think
a lot of these disruptors are going to eat some lunches.
What does the future of content marketing look like? I
(20:18):
think we're ready for the second wave of content marketing.
You know, the first time around, we all thought it
was a panacea and that we would just make this
instead of advertising and everything would be great. And it's
not easy. It's hard, Like there aren't many I've heard
you guys say there aren't many people who know how
to land the plane, right, So, um, it's a different
skill set. And one of the barriers is that inside
(20:40):
the company, you know, the CFO and the rest of
the people you're accountable to expect you to bring in
a certain kind of business for a certain kind of
spend in a certain amount of time. And content marketing
doesn't work like that, right, And so there has to
be like a resetting of expectations inside and some patients
for people who knew the former metho that to learn
(21:00):
the new method and execute it well. And so now
we really have to do it because I'm sorry, but
the Internet doesn't like advertising very much. I think that's
also the issue, you know, and speaking on the media side,
like starting with a channel mix before you even have
an idea, you know, and thinking about I'm going to
go out and create, um this media mix and allocate
(21:21):
percentages of my budget and then I'm supposed to fill
it fill it with content that might look the same
across the entire ecosystem. That's been the model. And I
think what we're all sort of, you know, alluding to
is maybe we need to take a step back and
realize that channels are just tactics to deploy this bigger
content message or idea of what we're working towards. It
(21:42):
actually starts with the customer because people don't understand that
content marketing is service that It's about how can I
be helpful and meaningful in your life if I make toothpaste,
you know, can I help a mom understand exactly what
she or he needs to know to manage the oral
care from you know, birth to college and be trusted
(22:06):
for that. You'll buy my toothpaste if I do that? Yes,
I mean I love that example. It's so funny because
Gimblet Media, you know, came out with Chompers, which is
like a two minute podcast for kids and parents about
brushing their teeth. The problem is is like advertising has
become almost fs I, like right when you start thinking
about content and product like this, all of a sudden
you're like, holy shit, a thirty second ad, the way
(22:28):
we've been thinking about it, the way we've been buying it,
the way we've been placing it becomes like an fs
I compared to something that is going to give me
a relationship and an emotional response and actually a product
that I care about. It makes you want to spend
time with the brand. With the brand, yes, and if
you go right for the business, you know, people put
their guard up, right. But when you started thinking about storytelling,
(22:51):
that actually is valuable to me in that moment, and
has goes along with this kind of product variance all
of a sudden, it's very different type of storytelling. There
are degrees, right, like a business Amazon that has exclusive features, right,
there's no Amazon too, right. So it's easy to develop
(23:14):
a preference for that because they deliver something nobody else does.
But a lot of these other products are considered kind
of interchangeable, like you know, SUV S. If I had
to go buy an sub, I would have to start
doing some research. I don't really have a preference. So
that's where a lot of what we're talking about comes in.
Who connects with me not just in features which might
(23:35):
be kind of minor from one vehicle to another, but
which one of those represents my idea of freedom or convenience. Yeah,
so that's where that's where the craft comes in, you know,
trying to connect those kinds of products to people more deeply.
If you know something's kind of sell themselves. I think
that's a really excellent point when you think about it
(23:57):
that way, is like, aside from a few attributes, what
really is differentiating? And I think that we don't spend
enough time really leaning into the insight of why somebody
may care about a particular product or service. Reaching more
people doesn't necessarily mean that we're reaching more people. I everybody,
but you know, like I've been using this line on
(24:19):
I think I'm going to retire. I have used this
line the entire year on the speaking circuit. It's one
thing to buy impressions, it's another thing to make one.
And I want to live in a world where we
are focused on the ladder. You know, reach also has that,
you know, double entendre. You have to get there at all.
When you get there, you have to get the kind
(24:39):
of engagement that matters right, right, So it's hard. It's
harder now than it ever was. Like how we say,
how do you tell big stories in small pieces? Right?
Because that's what we have and some of the challenges
we're talking about actually require a lot of time and
a lot of attention. So you have to really, you know,
figure out how are you going to earn that. Who
do you think from a intent marketing perspective, who do
(25:01):
you admire in the brand space? Who do you think
is doing a really good job. I will tell you
that B two B companies are underrated because they've been
pretty good at this Intel in that space was fantastic
and has been for a long time. And then of
course you look at red Bull and red Bull has
you know, completely earned its position in the world with
content marketing, right, So I think those are are some
(25:24):
good examples that come to mind. Who was your favorite
content marketer of the year, that's a good question. I
think Patagonia. Patagonias some fucking amazing stuff and like talk
about putting your money where your mouth is, and I
talk about them all the time. People who have really
surprised me as Yetti. So Yetti has done some really
(25:44):
fun videos. Do you know what, I'm so phenomenal with
the woman who's the fisher like the fisherman dogs. Oh god,
when that guy starts breaking down, I'm like an Aisle
twelve might like see you know what, I'm in a
different air route. I was crying with you. But was
(26:05):
so great was it wasn't about product placement, it was
really about the customer. Was so well brilliantly, brilliantly scripted,
brilliant story that felt so Really when you talk about
the Yetti approach, I think of a ven diagram, right, like,
what does YETI want? And what does its customers want?
And what's the halfway point? Right? We both care about
(26:26):
the outdoors, we both care about hunting. Right, That's where
your content marketing nucleus needs to be, not your brand,
but also the idea of serving that up on an airplane,
I think sort of that isolated emotional experience. I think
the placement of it was in as much effective as
the narrative itself. And so I'm going to answer my
(26:46):
own question and say that the I'm going to actually
not go with a brand. I'm going to go with
a channel of where I thought content marketing was extremely
effective this year, and that was out of Home. I
think when you think about how brands leveraged UM locality,
how they leverage sort of continuity UM and really sort
(27:07):
of using it as an impact medium as well as
an awareness medium. You know, when you think about the
ways UM newcomer challenger brands use transit totally completely efficient
and I'm sure as completely effective UM as anything else
that they might have been able to use to see
lift in particular markets. So as we head into we
(27:29):
have to play our favorite game kill by d I
Y which one first? What would you kill? I would
kill surveillance advertising. What is surveillance advertising knowing so much
about me to such a granular level that I feel violated? Okay,
I think we can do a lot with less, Like
(27:51):
we don't have to know every excruciating detail and we
can still get close to the target. Right, So I
think I'd like to see a lot more um ca
ouciousness about how much data gets collected and how it
gets used, because I think we're also in danger of
poisoning the pond. Alright, I like it like that. What
would you buy? I would buy listicals because everybody likes
(28:15):
likes or swipe a bles, swipe a bleistical, so so
listicals listical suistical. So um. We love to hate listicals
because they seem like a cheap way out, but even
the New Yorker is making them now. They just don't
call them that you know ten articles on architecture that
you might have missed, right, So it's a really human
(28:36):
way to organize information. If I tell you you know
ten things to do in in Barbados, or five things
to give your child before their first day of school,
like you know how to put that in your own head.
So I think we should respect the fact that that's
a really great way for people to manage too much
information and to organize things personally, they get no love
(28:57):
and what would you do yourself curate? I think, UM,
you know too much stuff out there and I would
love to be in another life for another time somebody
who helps sift through it and find like the unexpected
and the trustable and the useful. And I think in
the next few years that's going to be a huge
(29:17):
role for organizations and people to help us find our
way in like so much choice. You have a really
interesting background with design and technology and your perspective on
all of these things that UM, the business world actually
needs a little bit more curation from some of the
partners that they're working with. One thing that I know
that you've done at CITYA is actually give a lot
(29:39):
of executives perspective beyond how they're using their your product
and really given them a bigger perspective on what content
actually could do and the difference in communications messaging UM
and the shift that's kind of happening. So thank you.
Thanks for coming out. If people want to get in
touch with you to talk about city and all things
(29:59):
swipe able con tent Linda at City see I T
i A dot Com. Thank you Linda for coming on.
Happy Holiday, Thank you, Happy holidays. What a year, so
many amazing conversations with so many of the industry's biggest
game changers. Thank you all for coming on, sharing your
(30:21):
insights and experiences and helping us move the industry forward.
And thank you to our audience. This has been an
amazing year for at Landia and I think what Atlantia
represents in the marketplace so in we want to talk
to you more, we want to see you more, we
want to hear you more. So big thanks to you
at Lantia listeners. Big thanks for our producer Dana, all
(30:42):
of our friends and family at Pattivelee. Happy holidays, Laura,
love you, same to you. We'll be back in twenty MM.
Full disclosure. Our opinions are our own.
I'm off my game today. No, you're not. People are
going to have to start making better content. I think
we're gonna be talking about this for a long time.
When you program for everyone, you program for no one.
I think it's that we're purpose driven platform like we're
trying to get to substance. How was that? Are you
happy with that? This is marketing therapy right now? It
really is? What's up? I'm Laura Currency and I'm Alexa Kristen.
(00:29):
Welcome back at Landia. We made it over and out.
Happy holidays at Landia. Happy holidays everyone. So we're in
the studio talking about all things content marketing with Linda Holiday,
CEO and founder of Sitia. Yes, Linda, we've known her
for a few years now, and I think we've both
been kind of fascinated with her really interesting background and
(00:54):
the product that she's created and the company she's created
is a SAS software as a service company that has
a very kind of usable interface for what I would
say is content marketing in this kind of new media
and use your interface world. And I think some of
the insights Linda has been in the space since so
(01:15):
it's interesting to see how her perspective has evolved as
obviously technology, new platforms have emerged. I think just in general,
one of the themes that we've talked about at length
over the course of this year has really been the
need to move towards content ecosystems and moving away from
the idea of campaigns and flight dates and very structural
channel planning and these like little spikes that go to nothing,
(01:37):
spikes that go to nothing. And I think she's going
to talk about some of that stuff. So with that,
Linda Holiday for the holidays, we'll be right back and
(01:58):
we're back in the studio. Welcome Linda Holiday, founder and
CEO of Sidia. Hi, Linda, Hi, great to be here,
you guys, Thanks for joining. So Linda tell us what
Sidia is and does. So it's hard to talk about
what City is without doing a tiny bit of a
backswing because it's not obvious, but the Internet has kind
(02:21):
of gone through a face shift. We used to make
pages and lots of big things and now it's all
a bunch of small pieces that get reorganized according to
some kind of intelligence and flow through feeds and streams.
So City is really a platform that helps big companies
make that kind of media. So if you're a brand
new company, you started making that, But if you're an
older company, you've inherited a lot of like tech dad
(02:43):
and cms s and things that aren't really well suited
for these channels. So it's a platform that big companies
like Ge and Comcast and Viacom used to make media
that goes across all channels. So sometimes we think of
ourselves as a shipping container system but for content. So
you make some once and we make sure we can
get it to everywhere and that all the metrics are
(03:03):
standardized and counted and human and intuitive. What was the
insight too move into a shipping container business for content?
Um One of the insights was that the format itself
was getting commoditized. Right. We used to make websites and
then somebody invented this thing called the laptop, and we're like, what,
we have to make another one, a smaller one, like
(03:25):
you couldn't actually put a desktop website on a laptop.
And then fast forward, we've got a gazillion channels and
they're all different, and so everybody's running like a million
teams making format changes, which is a tremendous waste of
time and money. So that was one insight that the
format itself was becoming commoditized, so people, different people are
(03:46):
using Sidia for different things. I remember when we were
talking to Ross Martin, who's been on the show. When
I first met him, he actually walked me through like
the Viacom innovation lab and he was showing me all
these things that they had done with Cydia, which is
like kind of a big deal for Viacom At the time.
I was like, how do we get content out that's
lightweight and easy and quick and can be modifiable. Um,
(04:09):
they were using you know, Citia in one level. What
are the kind of different use cases for Citia that
you've seen? That's how funny because g was our first
client and Viacom was our second, and it was literally
turbines to tattoos because I love that, and so we
sold it in for content marketing, and content marketing was
you know, kind of hot then and should be hotter now,
(04:31):
but back then people were really investing in it, and
so we found the people who were looking to do
that kind of convert thought leadership, white papers, a lot
of the you know, support um content around brand marketing
and corporate marketing. And then what happened was inside. People
started to make all the stuff we never thought about, right,
so HR investor relations training, and we just like watch
(04:54):
people make these things. And because it really is multi
purpose content and once you know how to use it,
it's like power pointer, keynote. Anyone can get in there
and make stuff. So people did. And now I'd say
our number one use case still is content marketing, and
the second use case would be communications, you know, pr
and so the actual product itself is really like a
(05:14):
deck that you can swipe through and get content and
sort of a card like format. Is that accurate? Yes?
And so another kind of insider observation is that the
most native motion on a phone is a swipe, not
a tap, right, So we made swipeable media because that's
the most ergonomically correct. Like if you think about how
(05:35):
use the phone, it's like a coffee in one hand
and the phone and the other. Right. So if that's
the most natural motion, like what do you what do
you want to do to get through a lot of
content fast? And the other kind of insight behind that
is users know what they want, like we're all really
great and navigating, and if you give people content that
they can get through quickly they will find what they want.
(05:56):
It's actually designed to help users get through a lot
of content fast. So if you think about how most
things are now just a feed and it's a column
and it could be a hundred feet long, and it's
kind of exhausting. But if you open up like the
depth or that Z axis, then you also can get
people to a lot of depth much faster because it's
(06:17):
actually three dimensional content, so more engagement obviously. Well it's
it's engaging because we like to you know, kind of
you know, surf and and brows and try and find
what we find. And it's also kind of satisfying. There's
this little like almost worry bead effect to getting through stuff.
If I started over, I wouldn't have done all of
(06:38):
that at once, because as a designer, I spent a
lot of time studying ergonomics and like, it's just not
healthy to bobble head up and down with your content, right.
That's not good for your neck, it's not good for
your eyes. It's better that the content move in your
head stay straight, right, that's much more human. So I'm like, well,
let's just do that, and people are like whye to
(07:00):
it's swipe because it was before Tinder, So yeah, we
stuck it out. And so now people understand that that's
actually a really efficient way to get through content. And
I see things all the time that look like Citia,
like the UM app Store, the Apple App Store, but
it's one card thin. I'm like, this is so inefficient.
You could get through so much more if you could
(07:21):
actually get to you know, UM app apps for language
learning and go booba boo bah boop. Right, how old
is Cidia? How long has it been around? We launched
in two thousand and twelve, but we were working with publishers,
and in two thousand and sixteen we switched over to
corporate customers and ge was our first customer, which we
launched in UM first quarter sixteen. It's interesting to think
(07:44):
about how you were starting to develop product based on
sort of the learned behavior or the evolution of behavior
for how we interact with technology that's going on what
seven years ago now, UM, And it's interesting to think
about how in the current marketplace UM, we're still developing
one size fits all formats and expecting those to travel
(08:08):
to you know, different screen sizes or played different viewing environments.
What have you learned over the last seven years that
you would share with our audience when thinking about how
to diversify format and really paying attention to the space
and behavior that consumers are leading with. I think the
hardest transition for traditional marketers is to understand that what's
(08:30):
most important now as relevance. We all grew up in
an era where we kind of had the mic, right,
and we said and they listened. You know, ten years ago,
ninety five percent of media was made by businesses. Now
it's less than half, right, So we are those of
us who are trying to put you know, commercial messages
out in the world are competing with a lot of
(08:51):
stuff that we didn't used to compete with. And to
compete in this new tent, you have to be relevant, right,
So we all cared a lot about reduction values. Me especially,
I can be a real perfectionist, right. I love storytelling,
I love the big canvas. I spent a lot of
my life making television commercials, which are excruciating lee you know, perfectionists.
(09:12):
But now like that doesn't matter so much. It matters
more that you get there when the party is going on, right,
Like attention is a stock market now goes up and
down so fast. Right, So if you can't make things
as a as a commercial entity fast enough to get
in on whatever people are interested in, you're going to
be irrelevant. So you know, I would say we need
What we've learned is people have to really dial up
(09:33):
how fast they jump in and how they find the
right connection between their products and their content and their
customers or potential customers interest. Do you see that translate
in your product, like do you see brands or creatives
using or publishers using your platform the wrong way? And
what would you advise in terms of you know, evolving
(09:55):
content to even just fit within the product you've created.
I think it is a pretty big learning curve, right.
I kind of think of it as going from baseball
to soccer, right, So everybody's on that, on that learning curve.
Companies like Viacom, of course, that have a lot more
customer um touch points learn faster right there in a
(10:15):
lot of social channels, They've got a lot of teams,
so there's more shared learning. Business to business customers have
been really good at content marketing for a long time,
so they actually understand not going right for the jugular immediately,
but they have to kind of earn some attention and
credibility by being useful to their customers before they try
to close a sale, so they are farther ahead in
(10:37):
some surprising ways. A lot of the traditional you know
CpG companies are trying to go too far, too fast,
and they scare their customers. Yeah, you know, what's your
perspective and what are you hearing from some of the
kind of big old companies that are really trying to
transform and how are you helping them do that? With Sidia,
(10:59):
maybe can sexually as well as you know from the
executional standpoint on using the interface. So we have B
two B and B two C customers and they have
different kinds of challenges. Right, the B two B customers
have had a lot of attention and they've been able
to use things like white papers and UM conferences and
(11:21):
now UM they're just realizing that their customers are also
in control. When I was in healthcare, we used to say,
you know, you would go to the doctor, that was
a healthcare consult. Then all of a sudden, you went
to the internet. You went to the doctor. You went
to the internet, that was a healthcare consult That's happened
to all B two B just recently. So they used
(11:42):
to control access to their product information and you had
to like talk to their sales people. And so now
those sales people walk in if they can get in
at all, and they can't, Like there's a disaster. That's
pretty underreported that B two B sales people really can't
get the FaceTime with their customers they used to. But
that customer has also done a tremendous amount of research.
Their procurement people have helped, and when that salesperson walks in,
(12:05):
it's a firing squad. It's more shark tank than let
me tell you about our new product. So it's a
tremendous change, and they're trying to figure out how do
we put smaller pieces of content? How do we tell
big stories and small pieces so that we're pushing all
that relevant information into the places where our customers are
doing their own, you know, kind of self exploration around
our products. And that's a really hard transition to make
(12:28):
because again they have the microphone and now they don't.
The customer has it. How does your platform as a
technology solution, how is that kind of either disrupting or
replacing kind of the standard content management? And I don't
mean content management systems. But even again, the content management
(12:50):
philosophy or is it content marketing and advertising are kind
of converging and right, both of those teams bring something
different to the marriage. Right, So um, the advertising people
think in terms of campaigns, and I think now the
more appropriate mindset is always be publishing. Like our customers
(13:11):
are always on and we have no idea where they
are in their product discovery journey, so we have to
be out there and all these channels all the time.
So if you put in your head that isn't always
be publishing model, then you would say, I need a
platform that supports that kind of behavior from our content
marketing and our advertising team. So that's what City is.
But I would say most of our customers still think
(13:33):
in terms of campaigns, and campaigns are great, like they
organize your effort, they give you, you know, some meaning
that you can actually dial up for bursts of time.
It's also good. But software as a service is actually
of foreign concept to advertisers and marketers because we've been
taught to think about just launching something, not maintaining and
(13:54):
holding things. You know, this concept of frequency from you know,
reach in frequency, like you had to act. She build
a certain amount of um memorability by repeating your message, right,
So that was how you kind of made a little
bit of a permanent impact on a customer. You guys
do all these amazing events and they happen in there
like a month, right, and then you let all of
(14:16):
that awareness go down to zero again, and then you
have to build it up from scratch at the next event.
So we would say you should think of that as
a platform and it should have some kind of maintenance
level of activity all the all year, and then you
have a party like once a year, you know, where
you really you know, punctual for all that thing out right,
and get all the drama, but keep it going during
(14:37):
the year, because when you let it go down to nothing,
you have to rebuild it from nothing. Yeah, we've talked
a lot on the show about the idea of impact
and attention being the new retrequency, and this idea of
these mic drop moments being supported by communication that happens
in between them. And so I think the idea of
communications planning and channel planning and the role of messaging
(14:58):
has never been more important to agree. I think one
of the things that we haven't really talked about is
what is the infrastructure? And I've become like nerdy obsessed
with this because like everybody talks about mar tech and
your tech stacks and your this and your that, but
really talking about how there has to be kind of
a transformative maybe even like a layer or two things,
(15:21):
um that allow that engine to run. It's all bespoke, right,
and it's all like you know, these kind of bespoke
islands of things. And I think that even if the
holding companies want to be successful at this kind of stuff,
they need to have not only a perspective, but they
need to have a foot into the technology space to
(15:43):
really enable this stuff. What are your thoughts on that.
I would like technology to go away for you guys,
for marketers. Yeah, like you should just be thinking about
your contents, your strategies, and technology is a burden, right.
I remember back to when everything you thought of didn't
have to go through some giant I T loop that
(16:04):
made it more expensive and more time consuming. Right. You
could just make stuff and you could get it into
the world. And while the world spelled up, we slowed down. Right,
that's a mismatch. There's one thing there that I think
It's really exciting, is that right now? In general, it
actually still is in the I T loop in terms
of like, if you're a marketer and you want to
have some kind of metrics, analytics and you want to
(16:29):
get things out quickly, you are still effectively going through
some version of your I T or you're outsourcing it.
You're going to a publisher who can get it done
very quickly. You're going somewhere else who can get you know,
to someone who can get it done very quickly. What
the power of the marketer actually owning that hasn't really
happened yet in the industry. There are some marketers I
(16:52):
think who are more tech savvy marketers, um, but you're
seeing like the rise of that digital officer. Really, I
think that's kind of spraying that on. But you know,
what does that look like? What does that look like
when the marketer takes it. What has happened and I
don't think people have even noticed it is its Instagram
(17:13):
because Instagram is something marketers can do without tech, and
so I think a lot of the success of that
plain that a little bit like what you could just
leave here and post something you don't need anybody's permission
you don't need any you know, roadmaps, you don't need
to get in a queue. You're just done right. So
I think the user friendliness of Instagram is at least
(17:33):
half the reason it's become so popular for marketers. Interestingly,
you're solving for future facing problems sitting on the tech
side and the design side, but you've had a career
on the agency side and you've seen what it takes
to think about or put in place solutions that will
help brands. Can you talk about your background and how
(17:53):
you've navigated to end up in developing a company like
City of Well backing up from year UM, I kind
of had the problems you're talking about, right, and I
called it death by a thousand cuts. You know. The
proliferation of all these channels made UM figuring out what
to do and doing it well almost impossible. And if
(18:15):
you already have scale, you need a solution. Like it's
great for the disruptors because they can pick a channel
and do it well, and so the barrier to entry
came way down. But if you're selling you know, um,
deodorant or cars or whatever, and you're already trying to
talk to millions and millions of people. You had a
(18:35):
much tougher challenge, which was managing all that complexity. And
there has to be something for business at scale to
make it simpler to take advantage of the benefits of scale.
And I know, you know it's kind of fashionable to
kind of um disparaged scale, but that's what everybody wants.
Here's the thing that I love that you just said.
(18:55):
That is really right, Like it's not fashionable to talk
about scale. The reason it's not fashionable to talk about
scales because scale represented the one size fits all model.
The point is every DTC brand wants scale that no
one's gonna say to you, I don't want to grow,
I don't want to be selling to millions of people.
They will say to you, I want to maintain what
(19:16):
keeps me special and I want to grow my relationship.
So I'm looking at a lifetime value of always A
lot of big companies got really far away from their customers,
you know there you know our media, habits, our tastes, ingredients,
you know, so many things changed all at once, and
a lot of smaller companies drove trucks through that. Well,
(19:37):
what do you think the people that you're mentioning like
a Casper. They've done a great job at doing content marketing.
I don't know what they would say, but at least
doing you know, speaking to their audience and knowing who
their audiences and then backing it up in their product
experience and all of that. But like, what's next. I'm
nodding furiously because I don't really see a response from
(19:57):
the traditional mattress makers. And this has been going on
for years now. This Casper didn't launch last week, right,
So I think a lot of these companies, you know,
they're too big to change, and so I do think
a lot of these disruptors are going to eat some lunches.
What does the future of content marketing look like? I
(20:18):
think we're ready for the second wave of content marketing.
You know, the first time around, we all thought it
was a panacea and that we would just make this
instead of advertising and everything would be great. And it's
not easy. It's hard, Like there aren't many I've heard
you guys say there aren't many people who know how
to land the plane, right, So, um, it's a different
skill set. And one of the barriers is that inside
(20:40):
the company, you know, the CFO and the rest of
the people you're accountable to expect you to bring in
a certain kind of business for a certain kind of
spend in a certain amount of time. And content marketing
doesn't work like that, right, And so there has to
be like a resetting of expectations inside and some patients
for people who knew the former metho that to learn
(21:00):
the new method and execute it well. And so now
we really have to do it because I'm sorry, but
the Internet doesn't like advertising very much. I think that's
also the issue, you know, and speaking on the media side,
like starting with a channel mix before you even have
an idea, you know, and thinking about I'm going to
go out and create, um this media mix and allocate
(21:21):
percentages of my budget and then I'm supposed to fill
it fill it with content that might look the same
across the entire ecosystem. That's been the model. And I
think what we're all sort of, you know, alluding to
is maybe we need to take a step back and
realize that channels are just tactics to deploy this bigger
content message or idea of what we're working towards. It
(21:42):
actually starts with the customer because people don't understand that
content marketing is service that It's about how can I
be helpful and meaningful in your life if I make toothpaste,
you know, can I help a mom understand exactly what
she or he needs to know to manage the oral
care from you know, birth to college and be trusted
(22:06):
for that. You'll buy my toothpaste if I do that? Yes,
I mean I love that example. It's so funny because
Gimblet Media, you know, came out with Chompers, which is
like a two minute podcast for kids and parents about
brushing their teeth. The problem is is like advertising has
become almost fs I, like right when you start thinking
about content and product like this, all of a sudden
you're like, holy shit, a thirty second ad, the way
(22:28):
we've been thinking about it, the way we've been buying it,
the way we've been placing it becomes like an fs
I compared to something that is going to give me
a relationship and an emotional response and actually a product
that I care about. It makes you want to spend
time with the brand. With the brand, yes, and if
you go right for the business, you know, people put
their guard up, right. But when you started thinking about storytelling,
(22:51):
that actually is valuable to me in that moment, and
has goes along with this kind of product variance all
of a sudden, it's very different type of storytelling. There
are degrees, right, like a business Amazon that has exclusive features, right,
there's no Amazon too, right. So it's easy to develop
(23:14):
a preference for that because they deliver something nobody else does.
But a lot of these other products are considered kind
of interchangeable, like you know, SUV S. If I had
to go buy an sub, I would have to start
doing some research. I don't really have a preference. So
that's where a lot of what we're talking about comes in.
Who connects with me not just in features which might
(23:35):
be kind of minor from one vehicle to another, but
which one of those represents my idea of freedom or convenience. Yeah,
so that's where that's where the craft comes in, you know,
trying to connect those kinds of products to people more deeply.
If you know something's kind of sell themselves. I think
that's a really excellent point when you think about it
(23:57):
that way, is like, aside from a few attributes, what
really is differentiating? And I think that we don't spend
enough time really leaning into the insight of why somebody
may care about a particular product or service. Reaching more
people doesn't necessarily mean that we're reaching more people. I everybody,
but you know, like I've been using this line on
(24:19):
I think I'm going to retire. I have used this
line the entire year on the speaking circuit. It's one
thing to buy impressions, it's another thing to make one.
And I want to live in a world where we
are focused on the ladder. You know, reach also has that,
you know, double entendre. You have to get there at all.
When you get there, you have to get the kind
(24:39):
of engagement that matters right, right, So it's hard. It's
harder now than it ever was. Like how we say,
how do you tell big stories in small pieces? Right?
Because that's what we have and some of the challenges
we're talking about actually require a lot of time and
a lot of attention. So you have to really, you know,
figure out how are you going to earn that. Who
do you think from a intent marketing perspective, who do
(25:01):
you admire in the brand space? Who do you think
is doing a really good job. I will tell you
that B two B companies are underrated because they've been
pretty good at this Intel in that space was fantastic
and has been for a long time. And then of
course you look at red Bull and red Bull has
you know, completely earned its position in the world with
content marketing, right, So I think those are are some
(25:24):
good examples that come to mind. Who was your favorite
content marketer of the year, that's a good question. I
think Patagonia. Patagonias some fucking amazing stuff and like talk
about putting your money where your mouth is, and I
talk about them all the time. People who have really
surprised me as Yetti. So Yetti has done some really
(25:44):
fun videos. Do you know what, I'm so phenomenal with
the woman who's the fisher like the fisherman dogs. Oh god,
when that guy starts breaking down, I'm like an Aisle
twelve might like see you know what, I'm in a
different air route. I was crying with you. But was
(26:05):
so great was it wasn't about product placement, it was
really about the customer. Was so well brilliantly, brilliantly scripted,
brilliant story that felt so Really when you talk about
the Yetti approach, I think of a ven diagram, right, like,
what does YETI want? And what does its customers want?
And what's the halfway point? Right? We both care about
(26:26):
the outdoors, we both care about hunting. Right, That's where
your content marketing nucleus needs to be, not your brand,
but also the idea of serving that up on an airplane,
I think sort of that isolated emotional experience. I think
the placement of it was in as much effective as
the narrative itself. And so I'm going to answer my
(26:46):
own question and say that the I'm going to actually
not go with a brand. I'm going to go with
a channel of where I thought content marketing was extremely
effective this year, and that was out of Home. I
think when you think about how brands leveraged UM locality,
how they leverage sort of continuity UM and really sort
(27:07):
of using it as an impact medium as well as
an awareness medium. You know, when you think about the
ways UM newcomer challenger brands use transit totally completely efficient
and I'm sure as completely effective UM as anything else
that they might have been able to use to see
lift in particular markets. So as we head into we
(27:29):
have to play our favorite game kill by d I
Y which one first? What would you kill? I would
kill surveillance advertising. What is surveillance advertising knowing so much
about me to such a granular level that I feel violated? Okay,
I think we can do a lot with less, Like
(27:51):
we don't have to know every excruciating detail and we
can still get close to the target. Right, So I
think I'd like to see a lot more um ca
ouciousness about how much data gets collected and how it
gets used, because I think we're also in danger of
poisoning the pond. Alright, I like it like that. What
would you buy? I would buy listicals because everybody likes
(28:15):
likes or swipe a bles, swipe a bleistical, so so
listicals listical suistical. So um. We love to hate listicals
because they seem like a cheap way out, but even
the New Yorker is making them now. They just don't
call them that you know ten articles on architecture that
you might have missed, right, So it's a really human
(28:36):
way to organize information. If I tell you you know
ten things to do in in Barbados, or five things
to give your child before their first day of school,
like you know how to put that in your own head.
So I think we should respect the fact that that's
a really great way for people to manage too much
information and to organize things personally, they get no love
(28:57):
and what would you do yourself curate? I think, UM,
you know too much stuff out there and I would
love to be in another life for another time somebody
who helps sift through it and find like the unexpected
and the trustable and the useful. And I think in
the next few years that's going to be a huge
(29:17):
role for organizations and people to help us find our
way in like so much choice. You have a really
interesting background with design and technology and your perspective on
all of these things that UM, the business world actually
needs a little bit more curation from some of the
partners that they're working with. One thing that I know
that you've done at CITYA is actually give a lot
(29:39):
of executives perspective beyond how they're using their your product
and really given them a bigger perspective on what content
actually could do and the difference in communications messaging UM
and the shift that's kind of happening. So thank you.
Thanks for coming out. If people want to get in
touch with you to talk about city and all things
(29:59):
swipe able con tent Linda at City see I T
i A dot Com. Thank you Linda for coming on.
Happy Holiday, Thank you, Happy holidays. What a year, so
many amazing conversations with so many of the industry's biggest
game changers. Thank you all for coming on, sharing your
(30:21):
insights and experiences and helping us move the industry forward.
And thank you to our audience. This has been an
amazing year for at Landia and I think what Atlantia
represents in the marketplace so in we want to talk
to you more, we want to see you more, we
want to hear you more. So big thanks to you
at Lantia listeners. Big thanks for our producer Dana, all
(30:42):
of our friends and family at Pattivelee. Happy holidays, Laura,
love you, same to you. We'll be back in twenty MM.
Full disclosure. Our opinions are our own.
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