Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn’t automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands’ programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What’s different between content that’s adored and content that dies in obscurity?
The brands that win make content that audiences don’t see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they were being favored.
A gift doesn’t need your logo on it. Your fingerprints are already there.
Our guest knows how to do this. His early career was working in production at AOL and several TV and radio networks. Then in 2014 he launched Pacific Content, an agency he built into the one brands trusted when they wanted to stop making noise and start building audiences. It was acquired by one of the country’s largest media companies in 2023. What he learned doing that became the book Earn It, which came out in 2026.
Let’s go to this talk with Steve Pratt.
Chapter Timestamps: 00:00 Why Content Gets Ignored 01:00 Meet Steve Pratt 02:12 Attention Is Finite 04:38 Be The Party Host 06:52 Marketing As A Gift 08:23 From You Not About You 09:55 Bravery And Commitment 12:46 Promote The Gift 15:03 Podcast Case Studies 21:07 Measuring Time And Trust 24:04 Fewer Things Better 25:35 Expertise Over Platform 27:04 Pacific Content And Wrap Up
Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.
This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way.
A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet – and at their peak 158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy.
That model didn’t take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification – and most weren’t willing to share that kind of data.
What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I’ve got to call out how , as buyers, we’re also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic.
But our guest maintains that it’s in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we’re all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change. We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She’s also a speaker and a podcaster.
She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let’s go now to speak with Katie Brinkley
Chapters/Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley 04:01 What Community Means 06:03 Attention Economy Shift 08:58 Audio Beats AI 10:40 Discovery On Rented Land 11:48 Four Post Strategy 16:10 Platform Culture Matters 17:35 Metrics True Fans 19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset 23:35 Katie Origin Story 28:03 Burnout And Conversation 32:16 Audit Your Feed 33:29 Where To Find Katie 34:00 Closing Thoughts
To enjoy the wondrous technologies we have today, we first had to grasp the science behind them. Science is built on good data—but did you know that bad data delayed one of the most significant inventions of the last 150 years? The engine at the heart of every plane, train, and automobile was held up for decades simply because of how records were kept.
For millennia, we’ve known that combusting fossil fuels releases immense power. By the 1700s, scholars realized that if the gases trapped within those fuels could be ignited predictably in a chamber, they could create an internal combustion engine. To do that, however, you’d need to know the exact nature of every gas—the fuel composition, the air-to-fuel ratio, and the necessary heat resistance. Without those specifics, an engine stays on the drawing board.
That didn’t stop scholars from trying. They studied gases under various pressures and charted their results in massive tables. Robert Boyle recorded values when temperature was constant; Jacques Charles did the same for volume. But despite all this data, we weren’t getting closer to a functional engine. Using tables to capture every possible variable was inefficient—we needed a universal rule.
In the early 1800s, physicist Émile Clapeyron compiled these century-old tables with recent findings from Amedeo Avogadro. By consolidating these scattered sources, he realized they all pointed to a single law governing gas behavior that had been buried in the noise. This was the Ideal Gas Law. With it, engineers could finally calculate exactly what an engine needed, moving from theory to the rapid production of the vehicles we use today.
Your marketing and sales data is likely in the same shape as those old tables. It may contain breakthrough ideas for growth, but they will remain hidden as long as your data is disorganized. Just as it worked for the scientists of the industrial revolution, once your data is in order, the insights will follow.
Today’s guest will convince you that your data must be in a scientific state. She is a recognized expert in data classification, cleaning, and transformation. Known as the Classification Guru, her blogs, books, and talks have earned her over 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. We’re discussing her 2026 book, Optimizing Sales and Marketing Data.
Let’s go to Guildford, England, to talk with Susan Walsh.
Positioning is an element that’s so foundational to Marketing, it’s taught in every introductory class alongside the “Four Ps” of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price.
But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail?
Take Microsoft Zune: Because how people thought of MP3 players had already been set by Apple
Colgate Frozen Entrees: Sure, both food and toothpaste enter our mouths, but other TV dinner brands don’t plant the taste of toothpaste in your head.
Harley-Davidson’s “Legendary” Cologne: People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not one whose name evokes burned rubber and gasoline.
Cosmopolitan Yogurt: There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn’t think a fashion brand belonged there
Frito-Lay Lemonade: Marketing a salty snack and chasing it with a “Thirst-quenching drink” strikes people as a cynical cash grab
The reason these brands flopped is they tried positioning themselves on a competitor’s turf. The correct way to position yourself is to start with customer needs and work outward from there. To do this right, we’ve got to flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we’re talking with today says we must deposition our brands.
He is the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer. Over three decades, he has led strategy for Fortune 500 companies as well as venture-backed disruptors. His work has been featured in the New York times Forbes and MIT technology review.
Let’s go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin.
