Content Marketing as a Service

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.