15:10orenmeetsworld · Tutorial
How to make viral content for ANY business
Ten repeatable moves that turn any boring business into scroll-stopping content.
June 15th 2025The argument in one line.
The brand-as-media-company thesis has gone from competitive advantage to survival requirement, and nearly every execution failure traces back to team structure rather than creative quality.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You manage a marketing team at a brand with 2 to 200 employees and feel stuck on how to actually organize for content output.
- You are a creative strategist or social media manager who needs language to pitch a pod structure to leadership.
- You are a founder currently doing iPhone content alone and want to know what the next hire should look like.
- You work at an agency and need to understand the client-side flywheel your work is supposed to feed.
- You are evaluating whether to build an internal content team or continue outsourcing everything.
SKIP IF…
- You are looking for platform-specific tactics like hook formulas or caption writing. This is org design, not creative execution.
- You are a pure B2B enterprise company where public-facing social content is not part of the go-to-market strategy.
The full version, fast.
Every brand is now expected to function as a media company, but most fail because they treat it as a content volume problem rather than a structural one. The core prescription is the pod system: a minimum two-person unit pairing a social media strategist with a dedicated creator, never combining both roles in one hire. Pods scale by adding external creators on retainer and eventually sharing editors and designers across multiple pods. The goal for even a two-person pod is 10 strong concepts per week feeding both the ad account and organic channels, with everything else off-limits until that flywheel is profitable.
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00:00 – 01:41
01 · Cold open and promise
Hook on the gap between the LinkedIn trend and tactical execution. Personal credibility: SVP marketing pivot, advised a brand studio buildout, saw traditional media pros blow up budgets.
01:41 – 05:41
02 · Brand examples: legacy and refined
Red Bull as originator, Patagonia and Salomon as early YouTube players. Rafa cycling (documentary plus clubhouse screenings), Flamingo Estate (weekly founder letter plus editorial), Tracksmith (Meter magazine plus documentary plus gift guides).
05:41 – 08:12
03 · Small business and founder-led examples
Cheese Store of Beverly Hills (one iPhone post per day), Chunky Fit Cookie (founders on camera documenting viral highs and lows), Ladder fitness app (10-20 coaches all creating on their own channels).
08:12 – 09:37
04 · Rarefy and Represent
Rarefy breaks down product history from their marketplace inventory. Represent identified as the gold standard: brand account plus founder YouTube plus sibling YouTube plus 24/7 athletic YouTube plus Spark Ads from seeded creators.
09:37 – 12:49
05 · Cluely and Darkroom: software and agency
Cluely built a content machine that outran the product. Darkroom co-creates carousels with creators in their niche. Introduces the creator economy flywheel concept.
12:49 – 13:00
06 · The brand world map
Three-layer framework: owned organic, owned paid, organic world of external creators. Content flows outward and back in. Email and SMS get the same characters and media. Everything else is off-limits until this flywheel is profitable.
13:00 – 15:40
07 · Sponsor: Swap agentic commerce
Agentic storefront technology: real-time personalization by budget, sizing, history. 2x conversion, 3x time on site, 20% returns reduction in early results.
15:40 – 16:43
08 · What you need before you hire
Point of view, patience (90-day horizon), editorial standards, process, and product plus content integration from the start.
16:43 – 20:17
09 · The pod system
Core pod equals strategist plus creator. Strategist handles briefs, analytics, posting, coordination. Creator handles shooting and editing. Pod scales to 1 strategist plus 3-5 internal/external creators. Meeting cadence: 1:1s weekly, creative review, analytics review, research.
20:17 – 22:15
10 · Scaling to multiple pods
Second pod for TikTok or founder content. Shared resources: editors, designers, producer. At 20-person org: leads for e-com repurposing, channel comms, and eventually a creative director.
22:15 – 24:35
11 · Goals and anchors
10 strong concepts per week per pod (5 ad account, 5 organic). Pilot unique repeatable formats with 4-6 test episodes. Anchors: fame, influence, story, production elements, events.
24:35 – 25:23
12 · Gear reality check and CTA
iPhone plus Osmo plus Amaran lights is enough. Workflow speed is the only metric that matters. Community call CTA.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A social show will not fix a broken content org -- it is a tool you earn access to once you already know how to make great content.
- Asking one person to run analytics, write briefs, shoot content, and post is why most brand social accounts stay mediocre.
- The pod system separates left brain (strategist) from right brain (creator) -- that split is where output quality actually improves.
- The smartest brands pull creator content from their organic world directly into their paid ad account, making influencer seeding double as media buying.
- A content team is not just creating for owned organic accounts -- the same assets feed paid ads, email automation, and SMS in one unified flywheel.
- Represent runs brand account plus founder YouTube plus sibling YouTube plus 24/7 athletic YouTube plus Spark Ads simultaneously -- that is what the gold standard actually looks like.
- The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills posts one iPhone video per day from inside their store and outperforms brands with six-figure production budgets.
- Cluely built a content machine so effective that it outran their actual product -- the machine itself became the asset.
- You are ninety days of four-to-five posts per week away from having real signal on what works for your brand.
- Production gear is almost never the constraint -- an iPhone and decent lighting will outperform an Arri in the hands of a team optimized for workflow speed.
- When traditional media professionals join content teams, costs go radically out of control -- the skills do not transfer cleanly.
- Editors and designers should become shared resources across pods, not embedded in a single pod, once you reach multiple content teams.
- The one repeatable unique concept -- a social show, a founder series, a location-based format -- is worth more than a dozen one-off viral attempts.
- Content development and product development need to be in the same room from the start, not siloed as separate functions.
- Forget trade shows, banner ads, and sponsorships until the organic-plus-paid flywheel is already printing money.
Content team structure is the real problem.
WHAT TO LEARN
Most brands fail at content not because they lack creativity but because they ask one person to do six jobs -- and the pod system is the structural fix that separates the winners from the rest.
- Pairing a social media strategist with a dedicated creator -- rather than combining both in one hire -- is the single most reliable way to improve content output quality.
- The brand world extends well beyond the core social account: founder personal brands, seeded creators, and external collaborators all feed the same ad account and email pipeline.
- A 90-day commitment to four or five posts per week is required before any meaningful signal emerges about what actually works for a specific brand.
- The repeatable unique format -- a founder series, a location-based daily, a social show -- is worth more than a dozen one-off viral attempts and should be treated like a pilot with four to six test episodes.
- Content and product development need to share a room from day one: the brands with the most durable media operations document the product journey as it happens, not after launch.
- Once the organic-plus-paid flywheel is profitable, every other marketing channel becomes accessible. Before that point, they are distractions.
- Gear and production overhead are almost never the constraint -- an iPhone optimized for workflow speed outperforms a cinema camera operated by a slow editorial process.
Terms worth knowing.
- Pod system
- A minimum two-person content team pairing a social media strategist with a dedicated creator. Pods scale by adding external creators on retainer and sharing editors and designers across multiple pods.
- Spark Ads
- A TikTok advertising format that lets brands put paid promotion behind organic creator posts, turning influencer content into ad inventory without separate production.
- Brand world
- The full ecosystem of content creators associated with a brand including the core account, founder personal brands, sponsored creators, and seeded influencers that together produce organic reach and ad assets.
- Creative strategist
- The brain of a content pod: responsible for briefs, shot lists, analytics, posting cadence, ideation, and coordination between creators and media buyers. Distinct from a social media manager in scope and strategic authority.
- Pillar system
- A content framework where brand output is organized around 3-5 repeatable content pillars, measured weekly and refined over a 90-day horizon.
- Agentic commerce
- An e-commerce model (sponsor segment) where the storefront uses an AI layer to personalize the shopping experience in real time based on customer history, sizing, and budget, replacing static product pages with a guided interactive session.
Things they pointed at.
01:41channelRed Bull
02:44channelRafa Cycling
04:00channelFlamingo Estate
05:10channelTracksmith
05:41channelCheese Store of Beverly Hills
06:25channelChunky Fit Cookie
07:00productLadder fitness app
08:12channelRarefy
08:50channelRepresent Clothing
09:37productCluely
18:20toolCapCut
19:15toolOuter Signal
19:52toolNotion
20:45toolContra
23:35channelKosas
24:00channelMerit Beauty
24:50productAmaran 300 lights
Lines you could clip.
01:41
“A social show won't solve all your problems if you don't know how to make great content. It's just a tool that you have once you do.”
16:57
“You can't ever have one person -- I have a social media manager that does this is no longer the way this works.”
14:09
“Forget any of that until this part is a money making machine.”
25:05
“Workflow is everything. Optimize for that.”
15:58
“You are ninety days away from publishing four to five times a week and getting into a groove based on real metrics.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
00:00In this video, we are gonna cover a full guide how to build a content first marketing team in 2026 no matter what the size of your org is. We are gonna cover this from the smallest to the largest of companies.
00:13I'm gonna go through examples, small and large, to kick this off of all kinds of brands that are going media company first. We've all heard this trend.
00:21You love to talk about on LinkedIn, every marketing guru that brands are media companies now, but no one talks about how you actually execute it tactically. So after those examples, I'm gonna talk about how to build a marketing plan in the content world.
00:34What does your team look like? What are the goals to give that team? What are anchors?
00:37What are goals? You actually have the ability to navigate. If you're pivoting to this new world starting from scratch or just wanna understand your place in the world as a creative and a marketer in this brand as media company era.
00:50And I've been involved on this on every level. I started as a content creator when I was an SVP of marketing, and I was pivoting my more traditional marketing org to have to think like this and it was hard. Recently, I advised on the build out of an entire studio system for an existing brand that want to bring its expensive 6 figure productions in house, working through everything from their gear to the facilities to what staff would look like.
01:11And I saw that every single time they brought in a traditional media professional, the costs were going radically out of control. It was a big part of why I decided to make this video.
01:19It's gonna be super thorough. I'm super excited for it. A lot of prep went into this.
01:23Let's lock in. And quick heads up on the twenty fourth, my next community call, we're gonna go through q and a and training just on this. So if you wanna go deeper and ask questions, you can sign up at the link below.
01:33We'll also have a PDF summary of all the stuff I talk about in here that's gonna be available for anyone that comes to the call. Let's kick off with examples. Because becoming a media company, building a content team doesn't mean just posting more TikToks or asking for more from your social media manager.
01:49It means structuring your marketing team and your organization to be content first. And you'll see a lot of hot in the moment concepts. Like, social shows are really hot concept right now, but most people who are doing them flop because they didn't know how to make a content first org before that.
02:03A social show won't solve all your problems if you don't know how to make great content. It's just a tool that you have once you do. And so everyone, when they think of brands that are also media companies, they start with Red Bull.
02:12Red Bull was the original masters of this. And I do wanna shout out. This is not a new concept.
02:17Social media has changed it, but Red Bull did this. Patagonia's had had documentaries, ripping that forever. Solomon the same way early on YouTube and just dominated with it.
02:25I remember Arcterix used to have a massive explore section of their website with all these deep dive documentaries, etcetera, that I would spend a lot of time on. This used to be a advantage for those brands to stand out in their niches, and now it is more of a thought of how you have to compete if you wanna last in this era.
02:42So Webull still does this today, right, where they basically replaced a certain type of TV that no longer really exists, the Tosh two point o, the ridiculousness, the action sports era, now just lives out on their Instagram. They've adapted it to be very good for social media.
02:54Wow. I wanted to think there's a lot of ways to accomplish this of all different sizes. One of my favorites is Rafa.
03:00They're a cycling brand. So they're interesting because they actually do long form cycling documentary. They do their great social media content including really artful, well shot stuff like this as well as kind of more conceptual carousel based stuff like this.
03:12But they really focused on documentary films and using their retail locations, calling them clubhouses, putting screens inside them and doing screenings of these documentaries and other films and participatory experiential marketing within their network of retail.
03:25So it became a hub for cycling media. Now, it also gave them the ability to debut the media that they 're creating, this long form stuff, in a way that builds real community with their active users. That's why I wanna call out that being a media company doesn't always just involve putting out tons and tons of TikToks.
03:39You can do this in more refined ways as well. One of my favorites is Flamingo State, where they obviously have amazing editorial content. If you go to their website any given day, you see all this beautiful photography and brand content.
03:48They really care about the editorial look and feel that they have. But they also do this, I believe, weekly letter from the garden from the founder where he talks not just about the brand, but about the experiences, the places he's traveling. They curate boxes from around the world, and he'll break down the intricacies of them.
04:04It's a combination of the editorial that happens on written as well as what happens on social media. I love to look at this brand as an example because I believe the backstory of this was during COVID, the founder ran an agency, and they wanted to focus their efforts on a brand as work went away. And they basically turned the media that they had produced as an agency into the media team that worked on the brand.
04:23So common example of a direct transition into, hey. We have all this quality. We have this network of creatives.
04:28Let's apply that to a really amazing story. And then they centered it around the location. Flamingo Estate is the story of this physical estate that gives it this amazing world they can document.
04:37Tracksmith is another one where they have stories. They have documentary films. They have meter magazine, a physical issue that they do.
04:43They have these documents of this amateur running that they've done online on social media. They'll publish everything from gift guides. It's built into their flow as a brand that's come up.
04:51Their Ivy League aesthetic and then the storytelling in the written world, in the documentary world, and in the short form world is a core part of the brand. Now in more social native, one of my favorites I've called out before this local to me is the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills that my friend Greg works on. And I love calling this out as an example of a small business.
05:07They have a retail store that has a immaculate selection of cheese, and they literally just have their employees interacting with customers, getting a gift, recommending different cheeses for different styles, explaining what came into the store with all the characters throughout that, all shot on iPhone, all straightforward in a constant stream of every single day.
05:25This is one post a day, a new story from the store in that location. They're documenting the same thing at a pop up. Why I like to highlight this is it's become a content focused org.
05:33Right? You could execute something like this by spending one day a week documenting a bunch of what actually happens in the physical location with a videographer actually working through that. Shoot it all on iPhone, and you have a content first promotion machine that works on all social media.
05:47This happens for orgs without a team or a contractor too. One of the recurring guests that we have on Cut 30 is Chunky Fit Cookie. So the founders have come on.
05:54What I love about them is they'll have come on and given talks to the people we have in inside the Zooms at the high points and the low points of content, they're solving it like anybody else. But at a founder level, they're saying, hey, our content's flopping right now. Here's what we're about to test.
06:05Oh, our content's at a high. We're going viral. Here's what worked.
06:08They live and breathe this as much as they live and breathe the recipes of their product, and that's the core how to start with a media team. We'll get into actual team later. But you'll see they are shooting iPhone content constantly.
06:17Founders are on camera. They're documenting inside the commercial kitchen that they work in. They found a couple viral things that work for them.
06:24They're documenting the journey that they have. And you'll see a brand that starts with this at its core when it's just two employees and how that can build when you're much bigger. One of my favorite examples at scale, probably heard me mentioned before, is Ladder, the workout app.
06:36When I talk about team, they're gonna be a perfect example of what I mean by this. Where they have their own internal social media team who are creating content on main, but then also, they have all the coaches that work on their app. They're a fitness app.
06:46They all work with the brand. I believe there's 10 or 20 or more who create content on their own that also promotes the app and they're interacting characters with this. And And this is interesting because basically every representative of their brand is a content creator of their own right.
06:57They have to interact with the main account, and they're all working towards one goal and actually sharing advice. I spoke at one of their off sites, I believe, a year or two ago because they were looking to educate more of their content team about different tactics and techniques. So not only are they working together, but they're investing in bringing in outside people to actually talk to them and help.
07:13Now I'm gonna overwhelm you with examples here because I want you to understand that every size, every industry, there is somebody doing this and it is working. Rarefy, number one of my favorites. They're taking all the stuff they sell.
07:24They're a curated marketplace. This is such a good strategy for anything like secondhand or anyone who runs a store distribution operation. Every big retailer, Nordstrom, QuickTrip, seven Eleven, like, has the best opportunity to act on stuff like this.
07:36But Rarefile will go break down the history of the different pieces of furniture that they have in house with their team members in all of these different ways. They have an infinite library of their own products to to work from. And then perhaps the best who I look at kind of as the gold standard of this is Represent.
07:50So Represent has done this in long form and short form excellently. So not only do they have the Represent YouTube, George, the founder has his own YouTube. They have a twenty four seven YouTube for their athletic side where they've created the persona of the brand and the documenting it there.
08:02They also created the persona of the founders. Then you go to their actual social media, you have the represent core social media, very kind of straightforward clothing brand content executed at a high level lifestyle, lookbooks.
08:13Then you have the founder content that's a little more personable storytelling showing both behind the scenes and all the action that's arguably more important than the core brand account. And they're not just doing that from George and the charismatic leader angle. They're also doing it from his brother Michael and the creative angle and the design angles.
08:27You get to see all of that happen and the core account and they are the embodiment themselves of what the brand looks like. Multiply them by all the other characters in their story, the people that they sponsor. And you'll see if you are on TikTok and you interact with Represent, you're gonna hit with an onslaught of sponsored TikToks from them of creators of all kinds, small to large doing sponsored fit checks that they're running through Spark apps.
08:47It's a sophisticated media system operating at the highest level on short and long form on all networks, personal brands, and core brands, and what a modern media company looks like. And it takes a lot of planning and time and dedication and obsession to execute at that level. We're gonna talk about events at the end of this, and I'll tack on the Kosas and Merit and a few that do well there.
09:06I'm gonna end with an example for software and an example in the agency world. So Cluely changed how everyone markets software. Cluely has done a number of different things in terms of spinning out tons of accounts, obviously, the much talked about.
09:16They're one of the examples of someone whose marketing goes further than their product. Right? They don't have a product anyone's buying, arguably a product that works.
09:23Maybe they're doing okay, but their content's incredible. They built a machine that whenever they do find that fit, they'll be able to work into. Now you see a 100 software companies who are copying this.
09:31And there's a website for this social growth engineers that documents a lot of this really well. They are going and creating episodic funny content around the Cluelly world.
09:39And they're doing this again for software. That's why I want everyone to think is that there's no way this can't work for whatever program you're on. Right?
09:45If remember, I'm a recurring face on the Cash App social media. Whether you're in finance, whether you're in software, it works. And the last example I'll give before we dive into the tactics side of this is on the agency side.
09:55So many of you are familiar with Darkroom who, um, I've interviewed their founder on this channel in my art of advertising video. So they have a world of creators on their account too. So you'll see Max noted CutthirtyGrad is a recurring creator they have on there.
10:07600 k on this video. Tatum, another Cutthirty creator has recurring content on there. They're collaborating with people to help them make media about the core niche.
10:15They design my carousels and we collab post on those carousels. So I'm basically if I do a carousel about the art of the marketing campaign, they're a collaborator on. They are also gaining the followers, someone who provides a inside this niche.
10:25So they decide to build the world around the creator economy, which is something that they believe in as an agency. And we'll talk about this when we get to team, finding an agency that understands something like this the way someone like Darkroom does that runs your page or runs your email, understands the creator flywheel of this, the storytelling, the media co component, and then can use those assets to make you money is a core part of understanding how this new marketing world works, not just the actual content creation.
10:48Anyway, now that we've walked through a ton of the examples, I'm gonna explain the actual world of how all this marketing works and ties together. I'm gonna go through what you need to do it and the team that needs to create it. And then we're gonna talk about goals and anchors.
10:59First, let me explain the world. So every marketing org needs to look at what they're doing like this. You have your own organics, your own social media organic accounts.
11:08Maybe you have one Instagram, one TikTok, maybe you have multiple, but that is the stuff that you own and control. Then you need to have your owned paid ads that you run, that you create assets for. So your content team that you have is making content for your owned organic and is making content for your paid ad accounts, whether you're doing full TV ads, whether you're doing ads just on Meta or TikTok.
11:26Someone needs to be be creating that. And then that ideally in this generation starts in house. Maybe you have external partners once you have an in house team.
11:32We'll explain that in minute. But then you have your world. You have your organic world as people outside of that.
11:36So for instance, the Represent example, George and Michael are extensions of the brand. They're part of the brand world. Same thing in the darkroom example.
11:41So your organic world begins to get pretty big pretty fast. Then if you know the brand I've worked with this last year, Morphe, they have thousands of creators. They're being seeded product all the time.
11:49There's thousands of creators participating in their brand world. Are posting organically or getting their content sparked where paid dollars are going behind it to get it more reach. And then for any brand that's smart about this, they're taking content from that world and pulling it into their ad account.
12:01There are additional assets that they're spending advertising dollars behind. If you understand that core thing, you understand how this new marketing world works because the efficacy of this is so much higher than basically any other media buying that you can do. Creating a flywheel for this is the marketing.
12:15And then you have the conversion aspect of that. What are the landing pages that people go to? Whether that's the product detail pages or pages to sign up for a call or get a free download, whatever it is.
12:24How good are those pages? What are its messaging? And then what is your communications?
12:27Your email and your SMS that go out and how all this intertwined? You have the same assets, the same characters, the same media, the same faces. How do you fill up your email automation and your email marketing with the content that you're making inside the rest of that that I just discussed?
12:40That is your marketing world. And everything outside of that, anything else you are considering doing, trade shows, buying banner ads on whatever, sponsorships, any of this, forget any of that until this part is a .
12:54Because any industry that you are in from a retail store to a fashion brand to financial services to legal, this is the flywheel that gets you the most results for the least dollars in a combo of organic and advertising that is extremely scalable. And once this is a for you, you can expand outside.
13:11Now we're gonna talk about the team and what you need to get it together. But first, if you're like me, you keep reading and hearing about agentic commerce. But what exactly is it, and do you need to carry it?
13:20Let me explain. So right now, most ecommerce stores are a collection of static pages. Product detail pages, checkout, your homepage, your cart.
13:27And the shopper does the work navigating through all this. They read the reviews. They may even leave the site as part of the experience to find validation of what they wanna The journey is the same whether it's their first visit or their hundredth visit.
13:36And the data that the store captures and gives the brand owner on the back end doesn't actually inform their experience as they browse. I wanna make it very clear that this is absolutely changing. We all understand that LLMs are a component of search discovery now.
13:48So you can discover products or get to a website from Claude or ChatGPT the same way that you might from Google search. But that's not enough. The idea of AgenTek commerce is you're actually bringing that into your store.
13:58This near future of e commerce beginning to happen right now, what's called AgenTek shopping is where people are gonna interact with the site that knows their budget, knows their sizing, what they've navigated on before. It's able to change in real time as they move, answer their questions, and present options. Give real advice on mixing and matching, what works for their skin or their body type.
14:15There's gonna be a significant shift in how people shop online. So Swap, who I partnered with on this video, is leading the curve here. They're the first agentic storefront company.
14:22They've already partnered with Drake's, Percival, Frankie Shop, Retrofit, Tala, brand names you've heard me talk about on this channel, and many more to begin implementing this agentic layer in addition to your standard ecommerce store, just like a new channel. But what's most exciting is the stats of what this leads to.
14:36Two x conversion rates to the AI guided storefront, three x time on-site with deeper customer engagement, up to 20% reduction in returns with better fit guidance, and repeat customers increasingly prefer the agentic experience. This is just the early results. There's an entire ecosystem that's coming here.
14:50For everyone watching this right now, my main focus in this video is just awareness. I want you to understand what's coming up. Go to the swap side and visit it.
14:56Look at some of the examples. Look at some of the products, some of the customer stories, and just begin to think about what that could mean for your business and how you might build a strategy on it. People who make a bet on this for their career or with their brands may be able to see a radical amount of growth.
15:08And opportunities at this scale do not come around very often. You can learn more about Swap at the link in the description. Alright.
15:13So now we talked about all the examples of who's running their brand like a media company. We talked a bit through what the world of marketing looks like. Now let's get into what you need and what the team looks like.
15:22What do I mean by what you need? So to make media, you need a few things. It's actual editorial and media concepts.
15:27It's not just about the cameras and the shooting of it. You need a point of view. What is your content saying?
15:31Why is it different? What are you saying to your customer beyond just pushing the product? Are you selling them on a lifestyle or a function or humor or a key insight?
15:39You also need patience. Testing through this level of media isn't something where you go right away. It takes repetition over time.
15:45If you watch any of my videos where I talk about creating a brand social media from scratch and the pillar system and refinement, you are ninety days away from publishing four to five times a week and getting into a groove based on real metrics. You can dive into those in those video. And you need some editorial standards.
15:58You need to be able to say, this is good enough or this is not good enough and why. And then you need some process. You need the characters your brand's gonna talk about.
16:05We're gonna get to that in team. And you need product dev and content dev to work side by side. When you're coming up with product, content needs to be in the room.
16:11You need to be documenting the process as it goes along. You need be thinking through the future of your content in the same way you're thinking through your product road map. And the best orgs are gonna integrate these at the core level.
16:20They're gonna be side by side throughout this process. So what does this team look like? So the key person here, the most important, one of the hardest roles to hire right now is the head of growth, some call the head of social, sometimes it's a really high level creative strategist, marketing director.
16:32It's basically this director senior level role that's not a CMO, but whose job is to pull that world I described from conceptual idea into reality, action by action relentlessly every single day. This is usually supplemented by an agency that gets it.
16:47Like I brought up Darkroom before, but someone who is going to be able to make the assets that your team can't, that's able to run some of the email campaigns and put together the ads, or you have some level of media buying and standard operational support in house. But then the content teams itself, everyone's asking how do I hire those?
17:01How do I structure those? So what I recommend is doing this in pods. You can't ever have one person that they I have a social media manager that does this is no longer the way this works.
17:10It's always at least a two person group inside one of these pods. So one person is always a social media manager slash strategist. This is someone whose job is to make briefs, put together shot lists, run the analytics to the accounts, do the actual posting, do coordination of when shooting, etcetera, is happening and communications between orgs and media buyers, and doing ideation.
17:29This is what I train inside of creative strategy. The program I have that's, like, cut 30 of it for brand strategy. And this is what the orgs need to basically be the brain of a pod.
17:37So what does the rest of the pod looks like? So most often, the next hire is a creator, someone whose job is to make content. They're also working on ideation, but then they're actually recording and making content, whether they're the face or they're just shooting.
17:47And ideally, they're editing it too at the start. A lot of this is being done in CapCut. You will see brand after brand that has one really savvy girl or guy who shoots an absolute ton of content, does all the social media edits for it.
17:57When you pair them with a social media manager or a strategist and don't ask them to pull the analytics, attend a ton of meetings, have to brief all kinds of stuff, and you separate that right and left brain is where this really starts to hammer. Someone else is responsible for a lot of the organization. Someone's responsible for a ton of the creation, and they work together.
18:12And that's the core of a pod. But what's great about the pod system is that creative strategist can manage more than just that one creator.
18:18So typically, you'll end up seeing these pods look like internal creator, three to four external people. You can pull them for like mini social or super affiliate allows you to now go into the meta creators and like search through there. You're basically finding people that contribute at a cost per video or monthly retainer basis that you're also briefing and ideating on and then using that for your either organic socials or your ads going back to that chart I had of what your brand world looks like.
18:40Another great way to pull people from these externals is Outer Signal. If you haven't seen Outer Signal, it's a software I highly recommend. It actually goes through your customer base and this is one of the things it does, but it actually pulls all the people that are influential who are your existing customers, who are great people to hit up and offer to pay to make content because they already get it.
18:55And so that pop will usually end up being that strategist, let's say, to five people working under there that they can actually take care of the briefing and ideation and reporting from. Their meeting cadence, one on ones with the strategist and those people every single week.
19:06Maximum one on ones you want any one of your team members doing every week is maybe five. Creative review where everyone sits down and goes through the creative that's about to go live. Feedback that works on the hooks, etcetera.
19:15Analytics reviews where you pull the analytics in the previous weeks, and you're looking at this week over week, month over month. You have to be doing this. Have to be running something like the pillar system I've described before.
19:23This is absolutely crucial to success here. And the reason that everyone that comes out of creative strategy knows how to win is because they're running analytics, and then they're running it with their creators. People know what to improve and saying testing and saying, yes, this worked.
19:34No, this didn't. Research where everyone's reviewing the links and ideation and stuff that they have and use some sort of product management tool to tie this together. It doesn't matter what it is as long as you have it.
19:42I run a ton in Notion. At Jailblaster, when we're running an org like this, we did it all in ClickUp, Monday, Asana. It truly does not matter.
19:49You just need to have the tool. At the end of every week, the social media media manager or the strategist goes through and they actually go through, okay, what did every creator do? What are all the assets that came out?
19:57What is on our schedule for next week? And they recap that to their team and to management. Everyone understands what's happening in the media company side of this.
20:04That's when you begin to get a machine. And what's beautiful is you then get multiple pods. You will see the smart org start to have multiple of these where you have their strategist or their manager.
20:11You have a couple people of them creating content they're briefed into and reporting on. And all of a sudden, you might spin a second one up for TikTok. Or, hey.
20:17We're gonna do the founder content. Right? There's a videographer that follows the founder around or someone that's helping strategize that.
20:22There's an editor that works on it. All of a sudden, you're beginning to put a pod together in that combination of creators, outside creators, editors, shooters, whoever can put together a particular size of media around this. And once you start to get multiple pods, you may begin to have shared resources.
20:35You can look at your marketing orgasm. Pod. Pod.
20:37Shared resources. Editors become a shared resource because they can work across everything that you have. Designers become a shared resource.
20:42Someone needs to brief them. You can be hiring people off Contra for this. We're hiring more designers than ever off of there.
20:46None of these mentions I have a software or affiliate or anything like that. I'm just mentioning the stuff we actually use. Production.
20:52You end up getting a producer, working on the objects and the settings and the booking of places and things. A lot of times that can simply happen at the pod level, but as you begin to become a bigger org, may be worth having someone dedicated to that. So what you'll see when you start getting into 20 person teams.
21:04Then you want leads. Someone leading e com related repurposing. Hey, all these pods are making all this content.
21:08I wanna make sure everything being generated and seeding and influencer and all these different other aspects of the org are all going back into content. Someone who leads channel comms. Hey.
21:16I wanna make sure our marketing is supporting all of our channel partners. I'm communicating all the things our marketing is doing to those channel partners and the people we sell with. And eventually, you'll end up with an actual creative director or someone who has a vision for what all this looks like can help coach the creative strategist, can help put a comprehensive vision and standards into place, and has an extremely hard job to find the right people for.
21:34And that's what the team looks like. And it complements your traditional marketing org. You may have a media buyer.
21:38You may have an ecommerce operations person. You may have an email. You may have an influencer marketing person or any of those going out to an agency complemented by this media pod system.
21:46So what do you actually ask them to do every week? Let's get into goals. Your goal is net new creative in the ad account.
21:51You want new ads that are published every single week. I'd say a good goal for a pod even if it's two people is 10 really strong concepts a week in the ad account or on organic social. It's also worth it when you get off from beyond those first two people to have a unique concept to your team with traction.
22:05Way we saw Cheese Store or Beverly Hills is a couple of really unique things that they show. You want a unique repeatable thing. Your goal should be to get your team trying that and basically trying new ideas of that until they lock it in.
22:15A social show, a founder series, whatever it is. And you're gonna test into something like that. Basically, like a film.
22:20You Try a pilot. You four to six test episodes of something, then you iterate on it to improve it. You'll see wildly different amounts of creatives depending on what the brand or the org is like.
22:28Some people will doing hundreds of ads. Some people will be doing handful for these strong ones. But a good starting point is 10 unique assets.
22:33Let's just say five in the ad account, five that are going on organic, which some are also repurposed in the ad account. It's an excellent place to start. And you'll end up seeing orgs that do far more.
22:41And then last, what are the anchors? How do we build the rest of our world around this? What makes us unique or what makes us work?
22:45So fame is always helpful. A celebrity, anyone you can work in on that. Influence is another one.
22:49If you'll be able to tie an influencer into this at any level, the way Allsaints has done their recurring series with a really famous influencer in their niche, and he anchors some of the content they have on organic. If you have an amazing story that you're able to tell, You have different production elements the way we have a set, the spaces you have, the way Chunky Fit was filming inside of this commercial kitchen tells a certain story for the brand.
23:07I love to call it Fzotic where he's basically showing his house and his lab and his personal collection of fragrances is a big key part of the story of that brand on social media. And then events, a brand I love to call out is doing real great world building around events is Kosas. Kosas is a great example.
23:20Let's say, their core social media, they have their influencers, their founder has developed social media. She didn't start as an influencer and does it really well and tells a certain side of the brand in a compelling way. And then they do brand trips.
23:29They've invested fully. We're gonna get influencers out there. We're gonna create this cultural moment that's unique to us.
23:34And it's not like a huge brand like Tarte doing that. It's an upstart brand that's gotten somewhere. Merit is another great example of this where they're doing these like smart little activations like they had.
23:42Uh, they're doing editor deliveries on branded Vespas during Paris fashion week. An excellent example of, uh, those branded Vespas and delivery drivers is not a 100 k investment. Right?
23:51Significantly less than that. And they're documenting it for content and they're getting the actual use out of it. Now I'm gonna end on gear because I just went through this exercise where people recommending like buying this ridiculous equipment to do this stuff and how many people you need to have on set.
24:03And I cannot emphasize enough that you can do this with an iPhone and Osmo and some decent lights, Amaran three hundreds from filming this on. If you do need something, a Nikon ZR and FX three. If the Arris are coming out or people want reds, you're going too far.
24:16Stop. Use that money elsewhere. Give your team gear and an excuse to learn.
24:20This is the social media era. The emphasis has to be on workflow, speed, speed of in camera to usage. You can cut down editing because you're actually shooting.
24:28You're not even shooting log. You're shooting with colors. It's just gonna go right to social anyway.
24:32Fast editing. Workflow is everything. Optimize for that.
24:36But anytime you have like a sound specific person, there's more than two to three people on the shoot team. Anything with those hours doing color, you are losing. It is not that era.
24:44I cannot encourage you enough to be focusing on this in a different way. So like I mentioned, I am doing a community call where I'm gonna answer all of your questions around this. You can hop on here.
24:52It's the twenty fourth. It will be recorded. And we're gonna do basically q and a around building these modern teams and thinking through this world.
24:58Anyone that comes to that too, we're gonna summarize all of what we have here in a PDF, all the examples, all the tactics, all the charts. You can sign up for that link below. Next week, a bunch of my Japan content is gonna start coming out.
25:08So I'm super excited for that and for you to check out a bunch of what's happened there. If you have questions about this, drop them because I'm gonna hit a bunch of them in the webinar. And as always, thank you so much for watching.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every marketing guru on LinkedIn says the same thing: brands are media companies now. What they skip is the part where you actually have to staff for it, structure for it, and survive the first ninety days of it. This is the operating manual they left out.
Named ideas worth stealing.
16:43model
The Pod System
Minimum two-person content unit: a social media strategist (left brain) paired with a creator (right brain). Scales by adding 3-4 external creators per pod, then stacks multiple pods with shared editors and designers.
Steal forAny brand hiring their first or second content person
12:49model
Brand World Map
- Owned organic
- Owned paid ads
- Organic world (external creators)
- Conversions (landing pages)
- Communications (email + SMS)
Three-layer outward model. Content team feeds owned organic AND paid ads simultaneously. External organic creators feed the ad account. Email and SMS get the same characters and media. Nothing outside this framework gets budget until the flywheel is profitable.
Steal forPitching a content strategy to a CMO or board
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
24:44product
“I am doing a community call where I am gonna answer all of your questions around this. You can sign up at the link below.”
Double CTA: community call with recorded Q&A AND a PDF summary of the full playbook for attendees. Low-friction soft pitch positioned as a value add.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
