The Sausage Factory

Matt: Welcome to the Sausage Factory. So this is our regular look at the world of content marketing. So we're gonna be celebrating the good and shining a light on what could be better with the single aim of trying to encourage the world to make better content. So for this episode, let me make, use some introductions.

I'm Matt Labon, I'm a performance marketer and founder of Rockee, the content feedback

Mark: And I'm Mark Willis, , creator, director, copywriter, and increasingly sausage apologist.

Matt: together we're gonna be grinding the good, bad, and unidentifiable into 20 minute content sausages for you every single month.

Mark: Today, the Sausage Factory is host to James Ainsworth, global Head of Content for iManage. So James is gonna be talking to us about, content relevancy, feedback loops and the ideal strategy for creating and distributing content. And as usual, we'll be asking him to share some great content in Matt's bangers and some not so great content in the now infamous sausage of death.

But first off, welcome to the Sausage Factory James.

James: Thank you very much for having me. As a four year old playing with my Brio train set, I said to my mom across the room one day, uh, when I grow up, I wanna be on an ambiguously named podcast talking about content marketing. And she said, lots of podcast. good to be here.

Matt: Um, dreams can come true, James. So let's, let's give the audience a bit more context as to, to who you are and what you do. So, James is the, global head of content i, I manage. You've got, quite a resume. I'm gonna read out some of your achievements in your experience.

Former co-chair of the DMA Social Media Council, the co-founder of Rules of Engagement, which is Bristol's longest running content and social networking event. In your current role, like James is heading up the, the team I manage, which is, for those that don't know I manage, is an industry standard technology provider for knowledge workers globally.

So they're Chicago based, but with teams across the globe in the us, uk, and India. So James's team, content wise is a five person team with, you know, supported by freelancers and specialist agencies. and the interesting thing with, James is the team he runs and the function he runs is an agency like service. Offering different kind of resources, predominantly for marketing, but also supporting requirements across the whole of the business there. So quite a task to ensure brand consistency and scalability, uh, and making everything work. So it also comes with an agency background previously at Prophecy and there's done a lot of work in B2C two with Confused and Non-Bar Costa. You name it, James. I'm tired. What a long list of achievements, like how you must be exhausted.

James: I'm tired too.

Matt: Um, so before we, go into, um, kind of the blend and, and kind of finding a bit more about your background, mark, let's do the quiz first.

Mark: The feature that's, been earmarked for early retirement on a, regular basis, but it's still just about hanging on by its sausage, little fingers. The sausage quiz is back, who knows for how long? We should say, James, it will only test your preferences when it comes to sausages.

It will not provide an in-depth psychological profile that Matt and I will explode for our own diabol lens. we'll jump straight in for our three part sausage quiz, starting with, do you have a favorite type of sausage?

James: Okay, and this is where I will get judged and psychologically profiled. Marks and Spencer's six posh dog pork sausages with smokey seasoning.

Mark: Excellent. we've got off to a, good start. favorite sausage based dish.

James: Now a very specific one as the question asks for a sausage roll, but specifically from Harts bakery in Bristol. So Harts bakery is in the arches underneath Bristol Temple ESE train station. It's a fantastic bakery. They often run out, but that doesn't matter because actually the mushroom and pearl barley veggie sausage roll might just be better.

Mark: This is just making me hungry now. so to everybody's favorite question in the sausage quiz, do you have, uh, preferred meat content, in percentage form?

James: Uh, I'm not going low on an 85% if I can help it.

I will add that, uh, you know, those, uh, hi sausages in beans that you get of have in you cupboard as an emergency. Uh, I picked one of those out the other day. 15%

Mark: Wow. I think some, somebody said a a party sausage the other day in the sausage quiz, and I'm guessing that's a similar sort of 15 percenter. thankyou for taking part in, uh, the sausage quiz, James. Um, That was, uh, very revealing.

Matt: Right.

So that brings us onto the blend and thank you, James for indulging Mark in the quiz. It's mixed results so far. One person hating sausages, uh, the other one not really caring and you seemingly caring more than than everyone so far. So it's kind of a. It's a pretty even kind of scoring card so far.

So anyway, let's get into it. Let's talk about content, content marketing. So to start us off, tell us a little bit about your journey, with content. Where did you start and what are the biggest

influences that you've come across along the way?

James: after I'd, So six years after I'd, uh, declared to my mother that I wanted to be on a podcast, uh, my first piece of content was my very own magazine that I

made to accompany the USA 94 World Cup.

I basically got some paper traced the official logos from my actual official panini sticker album. Uh, shout out to that kind of particular vehicle of content marketing that helped McDonald's sell chips to kids. and I wrote player profiles. Uh, I didn't have a photocopier, so I hand wrote all five copies, colored them in myself and sold them to kids the street for 50 p. So that, my entry point, page 10. Um, And then fast forward to secondary school, my career's advisor saying I would never make it in journalism. I then went to. Banga University and did a degree in psychology. Uh, By my third year of studies, I was also the editor of the university newspaper, made its first ever profit for advertising. Uh, Immediately after that I went and did a master's in journalism at Cardiff University, right at the point where entry level jobs in journalism at all, but disappeared. I did actually work for minimum wage at my local newspaper for 18 months. Uh, so I can can say almost ev that I've done a journalism, uh, so I guess score one for the careers advisor revenge, but not for the career

prospects. So from there I quickly pivoted into this new thing on the block that was social media.

got a job at a content marketing agency, someone who knew what they were doing with Twitter. I applied, set up my Twitter account the day before learned how to use it, got the job, um, which felt like a bit of a fluke, but, uh, Stood me in good stead. Since then, uh, the last 10 years have been a few technology companies, uh, a decent sized agency with some high profile clients mixture of content strategy. But the way I like to approach it is with an understanding for the need for cut through creative. and I find I actually work best now when I can bring in proper process for getting a piece of content through the business that's kind of tied to an objective cuz that unlocks the strategy and all its supporting tactics after that.

Mark: Well, really comes across, you know, the, like the passion for, for content as well. And like it's clearly, particularly with the, the USA 94 piece, like the.

the kind of the enjoyment of creating content. you know, have you got a USA 94, kind of guide equivalent at the moment? Is that, what are you working on at the moment that you, you really enjoying any kind of highlights or, or favorite jobs?

James: well, I mean, There's always some kind of content thing over the years that's kind of, you know, that you're particularly proud of. Um, or, you know, or, But equally it's always the

next thing. So you know where you're saying what, what's going next? You can get excited about that. Uh, I say content far too often, I'm sure we all do, but, I think, you know, I've got a reputation for saying it too much, of un. Apologetically. So, but I've been lucky to work on some projects that have actually, you know, truly made a difference to people's lives, which sounds very worthy, but then kind of true when you see the feedback that comes back, uh, when you release some stuff. so I actually came. Off the back of, my own paternity leave with my first child. and immediately the first week back I had to co-write a hardback book on what the first few days of having a newborn are like. Uh, and that book was part of a CRM program for a well-known baby brand,

um, and was sent out as a free thing. You can actually still buy it off eBay. People are flogging it still.

Uh, which again, as a measure of feedback, a free, free bit of content marketing now being sold on eBay is a pretty good measure of success. Uh, and then I've also worked on some stuff that's, you know, shifted more cups of coffee, some new build houses, car insurance, and Japanese cars, worthy, but is a job. Uh, most recently with iManage, I've been kind of bringing first party research data to life in a way that, hopefully, Makes the complex as accessible, relatable, and actionable as possible, and that's a project that we'll be launching. Soon. So I can't go into too much detail, but it's, yeah, that's my day-to-day right now is focusing on getting that out and all of the supporting content that will go around that.

But as I say, the kind of the commonality with all of those things is that there's always been a robust strategy behind the deliverable, how they connect to what is the next click after that, you know, once you've read that book, Where do you go next? what do you do next? and then how do you bring it to life with other kind of supporting, you know, you don't just do the book, you do, you know, in the same way, you don't just do the podcast. You know, you've, you've got the video of this, you've now got a transcript, you've got the audio, you've got the opportunity to cut it up into social shorts. Start with one thing that has a solid strategy behind it,

Matt: Let's dive into that a little bit about how you do that. Uh, I manage, so it was, what was really interesting that struck me with it is you, you sound like you're, you're running an agency within a brand, basically, like you've got multiple kind of mouths to feed. And different priorities and stuff like that.

So, so how do you do that? There must be so many different people wanting different things at different times. How do you prioritise how do you build a strategy and how do you organise a team to, to deliver the very best output they can.

James: Um, so I think wherever I've led content teams, I've always kind of organised the content team around strategy, production, and distribution. Again, to kind of labour the point, if you don't have strategy, what's the point in producing something? If you're producing something and there's no distribution to it, what's the point in the production?

So it is all kind of interrelated and, and even if we don't actually control all those functions, so in agency land, a different agency likely owns the paid delivery. But that mindset ensures that everyone kind of considers the bigger picture of content. It's not just a tactical unit of work to be delivered in isolation.

It's not a sweatshop of done. It's, all joined up, uh, eventually. But, you know, as I say, the key to it all is starting with a brief, or at least approach to documenting requirements. We use Asana as our kind of project management tool. Uh, we've got it heavily customised so that people can kind of submit.

a Ticket request, uh, almost for their requirements. And there's lots of different kind of tickbox you, we make people jump through quite a few hoops up front. To make sure we've got the absolute detail and deliver faster and right first time. and then it also gives us a kind of single source of truth in the moment. And historically, if we need to go back to go, well, do we have a gap here or have we done something similar already? Um, and we've got filters switched on around audience asset type, we do t-shirt sizing for the level of effort required. You know, if there's. It's a website update. It's a small t-shirt.

It's, you know, less than 30 minutes work. If it's a white paper, you're extra, extra large, and your 10 hours plus of. Effort from the team to deliver it. I've never actually been more process oriented in my life, but it actually makes a world of difference when you've got multiple stakeholders and team members in different global locations and the volume of work people ops have requirements. marketing itself has requirements and, you know, we are typically focused on the what can we do for. Prospects, but then there's also, well, how do you market to customers? And, uh, you know, there is a customer success team and they, you know, there's just such a range of requirements and delivering it and managing expectations.

The one thing year is kind of service level agreements. we reverse engineered all of the kind of that t-shirt sizing data that we had in Asana. We went back through everything we did last year to then provide a rough estimate of it takes this much time for us to deliver a social update, ebook. Uh, and that's, again, managing people's expectations is kind of critical when there's that many people all after stuff.

Mark: Yeah, that's, that sounds really cool. I love the, the the um, kind of system as well. it kind of just reminds me as well that like, even on the creative side, like having a strong process in place is so important for the quality of. What you produce, isn't it? And when you were talking about getting the hoops that people jump through, uh, at the start.

And quite often we come across situations people's effort is just put in the wrong place. you know, your stakeholders come in like halfway through or towards the end of the process and it just becomes a nightmare. yeah, getting that input early on sounds, I wish it had

always worked that way in my career.

James: I think I say, yeah, when I say I've never been more process driven and you know, there's certain from agency world, there's certain things I miss. So the t-shirt sizing stems from the fact that in agency world, your time is not necessarily your own time. It's booked out by a traffic manager of time to deliver this effort. You don't have the luxury of a traffic manager, uh, in-house. so I needed something. I hated it agency side. I hated the fact I couldn't control my own time and destiny and then all of a sudden I'm out of agency world and I was kind of craving this thing of people need to know how long it takes to do something.

People just assume a blog post and we'll get onto the AI conversation later, I'm sure. you can't just. Spit it out. so yeah, it was craving some of that kind of agency world and bringing it into this you know, we are an agency kind of offering, to

some extent

in the process and the

mechanics of how we deliver.

Mark: And that, I mean, that sounds, It a well oiled machine. I'm wondering if, you've kind of had, um, if there have been any trial and error, any mistakes along the way, and any things that you've kind of, from things that haven't of initially expected, perhaps.

James: Yep. Uh, absolutely be mistakes. Uh, some of them my own. cliche, but mistakes are the best way to learn. As I say, you, you have to manage, if not over-manage expectations, you have to bring people on the journey. You have to bring the right people in at the right time on every content strategy or even every content deliverable. Um, you know, that is a steep learning curve, again, from switching from agency to in-house. Uh, and there'd be multiple stakeholders having. You know, correct and rightful insight and input into it. Um, and then a younger me might ever seem that a strategy that was baked in my head when committed to a PowerPoint or more recently, me, that that would make sense to the end user first time.

And I say end user very deliberately, it's a super clinical term to use. You're talking about colleagues here, uh, but that's the content marketing mindset that you. Kind of need, you know, you're rarely writing for yourself. Even an autobiography is for other people. Um, so, you know, you also need to be thinking about their experience, the end user experience of, you know, what you share from white paper to email, to internal Slack update.

Someone's gonna be experiencing whatever update you're delivering. So you need to think about that. So that's the internal audience as much as it is external. another part of the whole working with other people thing, and again, it's an in-house. concern really in terms of, we use now in like my second year I managed, compared to my first year, we are using in-house subject matter experts more to co-create the content as a team.

We are highly skilled content marketers, but we are not the equal technology industry veterans and had law firm experience. and so we kind of share our topics that we know we need to create. We have internal subject matter experts, uh, because then we can crash something together rather than it just being, level desk research piece from a content marketer, uh, that kind of leaves the end user feeling shortchanged.

So as a team, we all kind of collectively realized and agreed that we are never gonna get to the detail of the substance if we are just creating it. And often we're slower at creating it ourselves. So we re-engineered our kind of approach

Matt: and there's something interesting there, like this has come up a few times already about how to kind of. Manage the quality of it. There's the huge challenge of what's the strategy, what's the distribution program, what's the process to deliver it, and then how do I ensure that the quality is right for the audience as well.

And we, we've had some nice feedback already about how people, you know, talk to sales teams, listening on, on calls and things like that, talk to products and experts within their own organization. So in terms of, you know, effectiveness, how do you manage that?

Uh, I manage. What does, what does good content look like for you?

James: Good content is, uh, I mean that's a fascinating Yeah, because as I say, we always think of the end user and good content. It's actually hard to know what they think is good content if you're not, if you don't have the right measurement or feedback loops in place. So let's kind of unpack that a bit further. Um, And also if you don't start with good data in the first place. So we work with an agency called Metier. Uh, they've got a global footprint. Um, work closely with their research team in Seattle. Uh, They've got a proprietary measurement framework that kind of measures your. Content relevancy and can give you a score plus detailed recommendations of where your audience is having online conversations, topic modeling, thematic recommendations, and even type, which will resonate the most with the audience. Um, so that means that we don't just create a white paper and that single asset will hit audience, uh, and do the job. Sell some products, sell some solutions, because we've done a white paper. audience and a place for white papers of course. but you know, what's the Twitter Fred version of that white paper or the LinkedIn carousel that resonates better with a different segment of the same audience? Uh, and it all stems from the data our. CRX data. and we can then, and as I say, we then connect that kind of, these are the topics you need to be writing about.

It's for this audience, it's for this persona. And then we take that kind of information to our internal subject matter experts to get to the best deliverable. So we're going in with confidence that everything that we're creating and putting out there is good and relevant being the critical thing because, the CRX data gives us the best of both worlds in terms of. it allows for modeling against your messaging and your positioning and your own kind of marketing framework of, as a brand, what do you want to stand for? What do you do you have the right to play in? What do you Uh, that kind of obviously maps, maps up to the solutions that you offer.

And then it also gives us that kind of natural language of what is your audience talking about? How are they talking about it? What language do they expect to see? So that start point. Putin's way ahead of, ahead of, because it, I guess in the olden days, might start with an SEO keyword word strategy. Uh, Whereas that's just chasing down keywords and that's, you know, satisfying Google, obviously, frankly Google is shifting more towards, you know, relevancy and what is a good experience for the end user, and that's all great, but ultimately you're still chasing down keywords and. Chasing rankings, whereas we're chasing a relevant

Mark: I guess staying on measurement, um, what other kind of tricks do you have up your sleeve to kind of measure content quality? Like how.

James: Uh, so again, in agency world another team, the likes of Matt. and you would see reports or you'd be presented with insights on a regular basis. In-house it's a bit different and, you know, we are, we and they do great reporting and, you know, they are, uh, helping all of us in the marketing team would like to kind of be on a very rapid learning curve of measuring better.

And measuring the right things and joining the dots on one say an email campaign, uh, you know, being linked to driving traffic to the website via some content that is then housed on the website. you know, you still need to know what does that all mean? Uh, that's just a. Disparate set of data points, you need to tie it together to work out, oh, there's a journey going on here, or let's fix it, or let's optimise Um, so we're certainly getting there and having to be a little more self-sufficient on knowing regiment questions are to actually ask of our ops team, uh, rather than luxuriating, I guess, in the agency model of digital operations being a line item you can charge the client it's always their on-demand kind of thing. Um, and similar to me, I, you know, the Ops team. Get multiple requests for across the business as we get multiple requests for content. So we are not always a priority and nor should we be, juggle those kind of expectations. One of the next big steps that I'm actually really excited for, and again, because we start our content creation with a relevancy data point, is getting that kind of near immediate feedback loop on the go and asking the user if they actually found the content they have just consumed relevant and useful, which is two distinct questions and it gives you two distinct measures, uh, and critically.

It's not just another data point. But it's a usable one. That means we can kind of faster and on the fly, if anything. Uh, So we're close to activating Rockee as our feedback tool of choice and, uh, excited to see not just that use case I've mentioned come to life, but the range of things and stuff. People tell us when we, when we simply ask

them and when we make it simple for them to tell

us.

Mark: Crazy

James: Right. I'm quite excited to see what that you know, refine further still,

Matt: Yeah, like it's, it's gonna be an interesting one as well. Cause already we've seen really good data points that inform optimization where there's always little blind spots. As much as you might, you know, go to internal experts, do all the best research and planning and. The world and then someone will go, oh, you've missed a reference here.

Or I don't quite understand how you explained this particular, this section. And in those little blind spots are just impossible to see from, from analytics and things like that. Like obviously we are delighted and excited to see how that goes I kind of wanna go back half a tiny step and indulge, hopefully indulge me in a bit of future gazing. Cuz as much as we try and avoid it and pretend AI content isn't taking over. It fundamentally is. And there's something you said that was really interesting about how you almost write for two different things. You know, you, you are writing one over here for SEO to meet an objective around ranking and performance.

And then the other time you are, you're writing around resonance and actually engaging your audience. And that's kind of the thing content's supposed to do, isn't it? it's supposed to actually be helpful and, and to do that. But like, how, how do you kind of see that evolving in, in your line of work in terms of. You know, what's that balance between AI or, or not ai, for example, and, and,

and kind of competing objectives at the same time as well.

James: AI thing, The AI doesn't have access to our CRX data, so it's not utilising that as a source. Some of it I guess, is working you still have to plug that data in, so the AI's writing, you can put in any kind of command and prompt that you like.

It's still sort of writing for itself. It's trying to satisfy a coherent response. And chances are it might line up pretty well to what the end user wants, but is it, yeah. See that all of a sudden you've got some that's three different audiences or areas of concern. So I mean, on the AI thing, our policy is that we will never publish something that has been wholly created with generative ai. Simple, simple policy to have easy to kind of, everyone to buy into and understand why. But that does say that I'm for 10 or uh, as a copywriter, uh, you know, a grammatical sense check. I'm happy too. Uh, again, you still want to kind of, humans still have a role to go. I mean, you know, but it makes and that kind of thing. So Starter for 10. absolutely fine. but again, the robots, the robots, like they're, they're coming to take us over. sausages first. Um, yeah, they're not subject matter experts.

They use sources aggregate stuff really. so yeah, AI can be incorporated, but it must be. Used responsibly. And, uh, there's a thing that I do find fascinating, and this is a slight sidebar, but given the self-learning model of most AI machines from input to input, so every prompt that you put in, it's learning and every generated output to output.

So it's response that feeds back into the machine. I wonder how many marketers are actually working on new product launches. And a readily sharing embargoed or confidential copy with generative AI to create release materials way before the release date itself. I find that

fascinating and I'd love to see some research on that.

Matt: You might be about to say the same example as mema. There's already been a company that's locked down use of ai.

Mark: was one.

James: But it's, it's, hard to lock down because, yeah. Microsoft has, it kind of has had it baked in for a long time. It's only now it's got trendy and popular that

now announcing it as speech of function releases. It's always been there.

Mark: Yeah, I think the the Samsung story was something that, uh, it was kind of proprietary code that they were, they were working with and that they'd shared through. And so the code then leaked I think chat G P T or, or something like that. Um, Might might need to fact check that story a a little bit.

James: the way that we, yeah, as I say, the way that we use it is where we get these, the, you know, essentially the output of the CRX data is kind of highly targeted phrases. So not dissimilar to seo, but slightly more. Natural language and you know, actual phrases than two word kind things like that. We will then use that through generational AI to at least get to an, an national outline. And then we can conduct an intake call with the subject matter internally and go, we want to talk through this. Uh, It's a starting point. It's a, or it could be a provocation. The subject matter expert goes, that's just not true.

It's actually like this. And then you actually kind of, you, you let the passion rip through the recording from the subject matter expert. You create something that is data and expert informed, and then the content team's job is to polish that output with the brand cloth of marketing and positioning.

Matt: It sounds like such a nice blend and I, I haven't heard of, I, this is fascinating when you speak to different people, how they're using it. Some are using it to kind of whitewash the entire parts of their business, and then there's others who are using it as a, essentially, like as a way of, actually I'm, I'm improving process. I'm taking time out of the day by. By doing kind of things that normally take a long time to, to kind of lay out an outline. But if I've got the structure here and then I can inject in my own expertise, my own first party insights, first data insight, like all of those kind of relevant

things that make it actually unique and and interesting to your business.

So like,

James: Yeah, it's, it's a balance of reducing effort and then freeing up time. To work on other tasks And it's, you know, the other side of it, as I say, is that conversation straight away, who knows what they're talking about. so that, You know, as a content marketer, again, it's moving us away from that, just having that high level understanding, but it sort of still gives you a bit of a high level understanding cuz that's all it's doing. but we can get to stuff quicker and at scale if we automate that very tiny bit.

Mark: that was great. Thank you James. Um, for a quick commercial, commercial message, which is of course an opportunity for Matt to audition for any voiceover or extras work.

Matt: Well, hopefully you enjoyed that short commercial break. Now it's time to get into Matt's bangers. This is the part of the show where we showcase a piece of content that our guest has found amazing. It could have influenced them in any number of ways, and we wanna find out why. What's the secret source behind the amazing content?

So, James, over to you. What have you got for us?

James: Okay, something recent, My wife took our eldest daughter, she's six, to the cinema of a week to watch the Maria Brothers movie. I wasn't, yeah, I was happy to go and see it. I wasn't really, you know, much of a gamer as a kid, you know, playing with my brio dreaming of podcast. my wife was more of a keen game and she used to play Marriot all the time.

Uh, and so we watched the film. Really enjoyed it. You know, it's, yeah, a little thin, a little light on a plot. But yeah, it's good. It's got some good jokes in there too. uh, and a song that is still in my head two days later with pangs of nostalgia cuz I didn't play it. I had bought an Nintendo Switch console so I could play Mario. So I've shorted sold. They have shorted with the greatest piece of content marketing in recent history. They've done a whole movie, which, you know, a considerable expense. But if there must be others like me who have two days.

Matt: could, could the movie have not been an ebook?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. A, a gated ebook. Um, yeah, I think the, the Lego movie must have movies must have had a similar effect as well, I guess. Uh,

James: Yeah.

The, the model is now defined, isn't it? Right. So what, what's next? Um, I mean, the, the Brio movie,

Matt: I can't, I can't wait for that actually.

James: Um, so yeah, that's that's I guess like a recent example, but if you're content marketing, uh, an all time banger, that might actually have it. I present to you the greatest piece of content marketing that originated in 1900 and is still going strong to this day. The objective, let's start there. It's always good to start at the objective, and that's something I get a lot of stick for internally at work for banging on about the objective. Get the people of France to drive more and wear out their tires. Simple objective, the strategy. Create journeys for French people to take in their cars.

That gives them an experience, time it again, and wears out their tires. The tactic, the Michelin Guide to Restaurants. There were only a couple of hundred cars in France at the time, so they also had to help sell more cars. yeah, the first Michelin guide, they printed 35,000 copies. Uh, it included maps, it included instructions on how to repair and change tires. And then it also included a list of restaurants, hotels, and mechanics and gas stations along popular routes. In France, it was this all-encompassing bible for motorists to the road and burn some rubber. you could argue that the brand and the objectives of kind of transfer to raising restaurant profiles these days.

But you know, it was all for the rubber. And then the next thing that they kind of then did to extend it further. And again, I'm always a big fan of something that starts off and then gets extended. They're responsible for the Eye Spy books that, uh, you may have had as a child.

Eye Spy on the Motorway. Another classic, uh, book where you would tick things off that you saw. I saw a Gantry Woohoo. 25 points for gantry.

And then they had, what else did have, uh, aircraft tails, like designs, so you had to tick those off. And just all sorts, a whole entire franchise of just books in the hands of kids where Michelin gave them a great experience.

Mark: you've articulated that beautifully and like the, the strategy at the heart of that is I think we, you know, we are big fans of the, the Michelin Guide and, and how it originated. And it is that, that strategy at the heart of it, um, saying earlier, that's, that's so impressive. Um, so I wonder if we can segue from, um, the super impressive and that, as you the goat of content marketing into, down to the other end of the spectrum and, our sausage of death. Feature. So, regular listeners will know, um, it's named after a Danish phrase That means something really boring.

The Danish for sausage of death. Keep meaning to I, I, it might not. I'm pretty sure it does, but, um, yeah.

James: in? It's fine.

Matt: enough now, it feels

Mark: Um, But yeah, nobody's questioned it so far. Um, But but James, uh, have you, we'd like you to nominate a piece of content for the, for the Sausage of Desk title this week.

James: I have.

Mark: Brilliant.

James: Live blogs on things that don't require live blogs. Now I do have to declare full disclosure, I have a history of live blogging. It was something that I used to really enjoy doing, going to events, and doing it. Uh, A former colleague and I once did a 24 hour live blog for charity on the general election for a publication that offered support to small businesses. Little did we know it would be a hung parliament and the toys and the lid Dems would go into a coalition that actually meant we had to keep the life log going for longer than 24 hours cuz there was no outcome. me a massive hypocrite. Cuz ultimately you could now say probably wasn't the right format for the theme, but you know. We didn't know that was gonna happen. But my example, the local website, you know, the popular ones got all those banner ads that make it impossible to read the content in the first place. They did a live blog last week for an online queue to get tickets to a surprise Louis Kapal gig in Bristol. The ticket sold out in six minutes. live blog ended not long after.

Matt: Wasn't, wasn't that like any highly predictable outcome of like, there's gigs being released for a high demand concert. Let's let's a format that's designed for long, long term engagement.

James: I think the only format would've after the fact.

It wasn't even a physical queue. If they were queuing outside rough trade or something like that, you'd go and interview people. You vox pop the heck out of it and spin it out

for an hour. It was a digital queue.

Mark: Wow.

James: yeah, the right, I mean, it always comes back to the right content for the right job, and that will always come back to the objective and what's the strategy. So I've bored myself now by saying objective and strategy and content too much. So, uh, good luck to your

Matt: Thank you, James, for that great example.

So let's wrap this sausage up for the week, get it packed and onto the shelves. So in future shows, we are gonna continue to dissect what truly great content looks like with a number of guest experts. If you want to get in touch, we'd love to hear from you. And. Any of your contributions you might have to Matt Bangers or conversely the sausage of death.

So you can get in touch via all the normal mediums. Uh, our Twitter handle is Rockee io. You can visit, visit us@Rockee.io online or on LinkedIn as well. So until then, that is all from the Sausage Factory this week. Thank you so much, James, for being on the show. Thank you very much for listening. And as always, don't forget to give us your feedback.