Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Steevan Glover, brand director and marketing expert, on why you should focus on creating evergreen content and more:

Carlota Pico 0:13
Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico, your host for today’s show, and I’m excited to introduce Steevan Glover, who is director and founder of Brewed and also has over 25 years of experience in content marketing. Welcome, Steevan, and thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix.

Steevan Glover 0:35
It’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Carlota.

Carlota Pico 0:38
The pleasure is ours. Okay, Steevan, let’s jump straight into your background experience. How did you get to where you are today?

Steevan Glover 0:45
As you said in the introduction, 25 years experience, I actually trained in drama at university, and I got a temporary job in market research back in 1995. From there, I just found myself moving through into the marketing mix. And I worked at various stages in house, in agencies, I’ve worked b2b, I’ve worked b2c, and settled down into b2b now. And once you have a lot of those experiences, eventually you come to the conclusion you need to work for yourself. And I did that five years ago, and I set up Brewed with a creative director at a fellow agency of ours. And it’s been great fun ever since.

Carlota Pico 1:25
And so what is Brewed? It’s a content marketing agency. But what do you focus on? Like, in particular?

Steevan Glover 1:29
Yeah, we call ourselves a design and marketing agency, we probably shifted and changed our view of ourselves over the years as everybody does. But fundamentally, we’re an agile marketing agency. And by that it means we wanted to disrupt the old agency model. We didn’t want to be a big flashy, show off, cool mid century retro design office with lots of stuff. We knew that that just inflated fees, inflated promises of delivery that many agencies were, and we have too much experience between us. So we decided we want to be different. We want to focus on messaging, value proposition, great design and great content, and finding a way bringing the best people to do that work for each client. So that means being really agile, using the right freelancers, the right micro agencies, the right small agencies, bringing them together, collectively, and building that rapport with clients that share the same values as us. And that was quite important. And it’s been good fun. It’s been great fun for the last five years.

Carlota Pico 2:27
Okay, very interesting. And so do you work with freelancers from all around the world?

Steevan Glover 2:32
Yes, yeah. Because you can get asked to do an EMEA campaign or a global campaign, plus also the dynamic nature of the world now, it’s quite useful to have a designer based in Australia, so that you can give them the work to do overnight, you wake up in the morning, and they spent twelve hours solving things. I mean, people have been doing that in the dev world for for a long time, in the Far East or in Eastern Europe. I mean, the truth of the matter is now it is a global village. It’s an oft used phrase. And you just need to use different people in different places, because native speakers are absolutely essential if you’re going to do proper localized targeted marketing.

Carlota Pico 3:10
Right, absolutely. So looking back on your experience, what have been some of your proudest marketing moments over the past 25 years?

Steevan Glover 3:18
Oh, god, my proudest marketing moments of the last 25 years? I suppose it was during one of the first email campaigns and digital email campaigns—that’s going back quite a long way. That was good fun, because it was just as the internet was beginning and it was kind of like the Wild West out there. That was great fun. The very first integrated social campaigns as well, that started in the early 90s and having to learn all of those things, having to learn all the new disciplines that came through because you knew what you knew then everybody was bringing something different. The ability to start using insight to create really, really good content, and knowing that if you create the really the best brand platforms, that allows you to then suddenly create this really rich, deep content that you know that the reader, the consumer of it, has a choice about where they go and then thinking through that journey of how they can take the short route content, take the bite sized content or go right down into the deep piece of content, and knowing that you can measure that engagement and bring it all back together and say, look, your brand is in a place now where it wasn’t before. And we can measure that. That’s always, that’s the most exciting thing about way marketing has done in the last 10 years.

Carlota Pico 4:35
Have you had to unlearn anything about marketing over the last 25 years?

Steevan Glover 4:41
Yes, the biggest thing I’ve had to unlearn is jargon. And the fact that our industry is possibly singularly the most fluent and annoying at self promotion. So you constantly get hit with jargon words, that everybody thinks “This is the new thing! And it’s just going to take over!” And “It’s a panacea, and this will solve everything” from “social learning” to, you know, “digital engagement.” And the truth of it is, is that these fad terms lasts about 18 months, two years, and then everybody comes right the way back and goes, “It’s really good to have a marketing mix.” It’s really good to talk about a full vertically based conversation that takes in all channels and embraces all audience perceptions. I think that’s the biggest thing to unlearn. The other thing is, is that for a long time, the alternate, the purveyors and the sellers of automated marketing software, were telling us how complicated marketing was. And it served their purpose to tell us that marketing was really, really complicated. Marketing isn’t complicated. And the thing that you need to learn is that marketing is actually beautifully simple. It’s about placing a great idea and a great service and a great product and a great brand in front of the people that are interested in it, and making them engage with it. And it’s about a human-to-human connection. And that’s a little bit jargony. But you know, I’ve fallen into that trap. You are talking to people on an emotional level, when you market properly. If you aren’t talking them at an emotional level, and they aren’t engaging in that way, then to me, the marketing is failing. So that’s to me the thing you’ve got to learn, unlearn the complexity, relearn the simplicity, and everything works fine after that.

Carlota Pico 6:22
Okay, on that note, let’s zoom into COVID-19. So COVID-19 is obviously taking the world for a turn and impacted our lives as people, it’s impacted the livelihood of companies, I mean, you name it COVID-19 has probably affected it.

Steevan Glover 6:39
Yeah, it has. I think the interesting thing about marketing in this time, is it…too many people immediately lept and tried to use COVID-19 as a lever and say, “Hey, we can help solve!”, “We, we can fight COVID-19 together!” And you’re looking and you’re going “What are you selling that in any way is directly related to COVID-19?” And I thought that was a really…too many companies did it, too many brands did it. And I think in this period of time, brand and marketing people have got to think that, you know, they’be got to think: is it needed? Does it help? And is it positive and authentic? And if you can say yes to all of those things in a COVID, or a crisis pandemic type campaign, that’s when you need to do it. Is it needed? Is it useful? And does it add value? Because you’ve got to be authentic in these times, because people are scared. People need reassurance. They’re looking for their brands and their suppliers, and the products they trust, to be truthful to them. Because actually, they’re scared, it’s a scared time. And the strongest brands are the ones that come out and embrace that, and say, “Okay, let’s do that.” And I think it’s actually almost a moral imperative that marketing stays in that space in these times, and doesn’t try to pull the wool over people’s eyes and stop pretending you’re going to solve pandemic crisis because you sell a cleaning product—you’re not. Stop lying. Just stop!

Carlota Pico 8:09
Okay, Steevan, so I want to throw a curveball at you. What brands do you think have disrupted the market during these troubling times?

Steevan Glover 8:16
Oh, there’s that word “disruptive.” Do you know what? I think the trouble is so many disruptive brands and the really powerful brands that were reshaping the consumer world or the business world—Airbnbs, the Netflix of this world—boom! They plowed into a brick wall when COVID hit, and they sort of went “Ah!”, and now you’re beginning to see a little bit of a shift. So weirdly, there’s a haircare company called OGX that have really done a great job. They’re probably the largest independent—well, they were independently owned they’ve since been bought by Johnson and Johnson—but they’re out of the big group of big hair companies, but they have used PR influencing and social media so, so well, and…but they’re ingredient-led, and their product-led rather than brand-led. And they’re a really interesting company. And most people have heard of them, but sort of don’t know the name. So their big challenge has been getting their brands known, but their products are so good and the way they’ve gone around their marketing, the way they’ve done it, it’s just been really, really impressive, because they’re a premium brand, but they’re incredibly authentic. And I also really like ClassDojo. I think ClassDojo is a company that was around for a while as a way of remotely engaging pupils, teachers and parents. It was way before everybody started using Zoom and Teams to start teaching kids who were locked down. And they had the platforms and technology to do it, and that’s an impressive company. I like the way they’ve gone about what they do. And I suppose there’s also other disruptors that have come through like you can’t hide it—I’m always impressed by what Amazon do. Not necessarily, like how they do it and what they do…they’ve quiet… Amazon quietly owned the internet. Amazon Web Services provides the data services and backup for 80% of the internet, and nobody noticed. When did that happen? Everyone thinks Google runs it, or Microsoft. Not it’s not. Amazon Web Services now run the internet. Now, I don’t like that particularly, but you’ve got to admire the fact that they’ve done it. And you go, “Wow. Okay.” So sometimes disruptors are really established brands, and they’re still in there finding a way to change the way things work. And one other one, I would say is Starling bank, and that’s taking old school banking, taking digital banking and going actually, there’s a better way of doing this, let’s actually make an online banking app that really serves the user, not the bank. And they’re good, they’re great. They’re really challenging the very idea of the old school financial markets, which I enjoy.

Carlota Pico 10:56
Okay, going back to the hair company, what makes their PR so great?

Steevan Glover 11:02
Just because the authenticity of it. They go straight after the ingredients first. So everything that they do is holistically based. So you can trace all the way back and say, hey, look, we can trace our ingredients back to, you know, responsibly sourced ingredients, we know that it’s of high quality. It was founded by, you know, somebody who was in the haircare industry, so have a passion for the products themselves. And that passion for the product comes out in the way they present themselves, especially in EMEA. In EMEA they’re really got it right—they’ve not taken a global route, they’ve gone down an individual market route. And it’s really, really powerful and strong. And then they engage influencers online and socially. But they don’t try to do it in a mass way. They target little audience groups, and they speak straight to the consumer, “Hey, this is really great for your hair, and here’s why.” So they’re immediately saying this ingredient, it’s really good. This is what it will do for you. And it puts the owners back on that and what value do we offer you as the consumer? Not, “Hey, we’re cheap, we’re better than someone else!” Just “Buy us, buy us because you’ll like us—this is the reason you’ll like us, give us a try! And we’re pretty certain you won’t go back to what you were using before.” Just really well done.

Carlota Pico 12:12
Okay, very interesting. Well, companies are expected to spend $120 billion on digital marketing by 2021. So what is that, like, five months from now? What do you think the future has in store for us as marketeers?

Steevan Glover 12:29
Well, you know, beyond saying, I tend to say more of the same, which would terrify anybody. I think I think it’s actually a fabulous opportunity for people to really do something inventive, to do something creative, to push the envelope. For God’s sake, stop putting out podcasts and blogs, just for the sake of doing it—add richness to it, add value to it. Try wherever possible to think about what I would call “evergreen content.” Evergreen content is something that is powerful and insightful, that allows you to create top line information and headlines that can bring someone in with a promise of deeper riches beyond. And if you can bring them into the door, and then take them through layers and layers of information, add real value to them, and be as flexible with the way you present it as possible. So think about animations, think about video, think about live events, think about face to face. Don’t assume that you can write a piece of content and then just layer it backwards in sections, and people are going to go with you. They might come to you because the social post is particularly intriguing, that the creative idea, the nugget that you have from your platform has got to work through every channel. What I find with a lot of marketing nowadays is there’s one core bit that’s really, really clever: “Oh, we’ll do the TV spot brilliantly.” Or, “Yeah, we’ll produce this really, really great and insightful, written piece of content!” And then what happens is that they just sort of repeat that and you just go hang on, why aren’t you being really dynamic with your social media? Why aren’t you taking your social media and linking it straight to a live event or, and obviously COVID aside, but thinking about the richer piece of it, that that that constant spiral of engagement? And I think that’s where marketing is gonna really offer itself up and in the future, saying, you know, we know that we can target different groups of people, we know can look at tribes within segmentations and let’s try and bring that together. You can still have one brilliant platform idea, and then you can work to make it work in those different areas.

Carlota Pico 14:27
I love that. Can you foresee any trends developing over the next few years?

Steevan Glover 14:33
Yeah, I think we’re gonna see, I think we have to see more third party collaboration between brands and influencers. So getting away from this. “Hey, will, you pay, won’t9 you pay?” to like it type scenario. So Instagram is a powerful tool for certain demographics, unquestionably, but nobody’s now sure what’s real. Are you just saying you like it because you’ve been paid to like it? So actually, that authenticity is gonna come back to it—now that’s a word I’m going to probably use too much on this interview. Authenticity is absolutely critical for any brand going through. If people don’t believe you, and they can’t see the actions behind your words, you’re just gonna, you’re just not gonna work. And there’s no way that you can be like some of these giant corporates have been, where you are telling a good story, but not backing it up. So for me, I’d like to see the trend where that authenticity is validated by other elements that we trust. It could be a multi brand platform, you know, where you want a product to be trusted, but you don’t necessarily trust the retailer, but you will trust a journalist, you will trust, a media personality, but they’ve got to come across in a way that’s not the old school way of doing it and going, “Hi, I’ve been paid to shake this bottle at you!” Try to make sure the influencer is showing it as part of their life, a part of their enjoyment of it, try and bring that together. That for me would be a really challenging place for marketing to go, it’s going to cost more money. But you know, hey, if it doesn’t have cost the earth, it’s just a question about being creative with how you engage both the influencer and your audience. I think there will also be a little bit of a look towards audience generated and interactive content as well. There’s a lot of it now, but it’s a little bit, you know, it’s, it’s mixing one, an old school format with a current format, and you’re just going, “I just feel like you’ve just done a voxpop video shoot” with somebody saying they like it, which is so 1980s, and then stuck it on digital, because you think that’s new. Now, it’s not really new. Actually, what we need to do is find a way of bringing elements of the audience together, maybe co-creating, co-creating content, and allowing people the freedom to do that. But a whole generation now that can can film better quality movies and animations themselves at home than often what we could have done 10 years ago in studios with agencies. That’s gonna be a pretty powerful place to start going.

Carlota Pico 17:02
You’re such a funny and wise man, Steevan. I’m enjoying this so much. Okay, so I’m gonna read off a quote for you. When it comes to content HubSpot’s CEO said the following: “What separates a good content from great content is a willingness to take risks and push the envelope.” Taking it to a marketing level, what do you think separates a good marketing from great marketing?

Steevan Glover 17:29
Depth, fundamentally, depth. So much bad marketing is surface. It’s a headline, a strapline. And then what you’re doing is just, you’re just seeing the same stuff that’s been there for a long time. So yeah, you know, that’s, that’s a good quote from HubSpot. It’s kind of right. And it’s understanding your verticals, it’s understanding the different channels, and making sure you don’t try and do “one size fits all.” It’s great to have a brilliant platform and a brilliant concept. But you’ve then got to make it work on all your different channels and all your different platforms. You can’t treat a Twitter campaign the same way as you do an Instagram, you can’t treat that the same way as you might do a marketing automation campaign through email. None of it works if you don’t get traditional media on board, you still still got to go through PR channels, you still got to consider traditional media, because actually the majority of people for a lot of brands are over 60, because most of the world’s population is now going to be over 60 in what, 10 years? So, so many marketers are obsessed, certainly on the consumer side with “Youth, youth!” Youth doesn’t have the pounds to spend the same way that the over 50s do. So actually, strangely, you know, the youth dominated market might change into a slightly wider dominated market, in terms of looking at demographics. But also there’s a fear that old people don’t have the same access to tech, which is nonsense. They do—they just use it in a different way. So that’s one of the big challenges and that’s why great marketing has got to make, has got to challenge its audience as well. It’s got to say to them “Look, you know, just because you’re traditional, and where you use things will pull you forward.” And that’s where it has to have the courage to not worry that it’s going to hit everybody. It’s going to hit who you need it to hit first, bring them in, and then that will add momentum so that you can gather other people. So, you know, a lot of you hear a lot of marketers, “Oo, I’m not gonna do something with that generation, because they’re not digitally savvy.” No, there’s enough of them that are, so start there and build it out and get the recognition.

Carlota Pico 19:31
Oh, that’s fantastic advice. Okay, so how would you address that cohort? What are some ideas that you have for addressing the over 60s?

Steevan Glover 19:40
It’s simply talking in a language they understand. It’s about not assuming that everybody who’s over the age of 50 or 60 is decrypted or insane. These are the people that drove most of the most of the political and social revolutions of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. So, you know, these are people who created the internet, created digital technology, and I sometimes think there’s there’s a generation of marketers who have kind of forgotten that everything that exists today is on platforms that were built by people who are a little bit older than them. So I think the thing again, it’s about writing content for them, you know. You know, your’re bound to ask something like, you know, what podcasts do you read, and what blogs do you read? Well, I don’t read as much of that online as others do because I tend to consume through through printed material, because it’s my preference. It’s just something I love. I’ve written books. So therefore, I love the feel of a book in my hand. So I slightly value something that’s been published and printed, but that’s my sensibilities. I think that’s the key is to understand that different age groups have different sensibilities about where they go. Some love radio, some will always want TV. But equally, they’re all in their own subscriber channels, they’re all they’re doing what they need to do to enjoy life. You’ve just got to find your way of tapping into them. That’s why rich content, but packaged in a way that works for the tribe, little tribal groups that you’re after. Stop trying to market one idea in one way to lots and lots of people. That is….and they’ll go, “We don’t do that anyway!” Yeah, you do, but you pretend you don’t. You know, that’s the trouble. You’re taking a campaign and you write a slightly different headline and a slightly different CTA, and boom! out it goes. What you’re not doing is taking that idea and saying “How does this work really, really well, digitally? How do I dynamically engage groups of people?” Actually, there’s a whole group of people that want to meet face to face, so let’s give them that experience. And there’s another group that says, “Actually, I want to be hands off, I’m introverted. What I prefer to do is stay well away from it. I don’t want to give you my email details, let me just get a little look.” So fine, give them that rich trail, that breadcrumb that they can follow. Yeah, I mean, it means you have to think very carefully about where you spend your money and how, and that then becomes a commercial driven decision. If you want to chase, it’s about modeling where the revenue is going to come from. And a lot of marketing people don’t get go-to-market strategies enough, and they don’t get sales enough. And so that’s the other thing they need to really work quite hard at is understanding how is the actual commercial model functioning in a business? Where does the money come from? Because if you don’t market to meet that, or your marketing helps to change that, well, there’s only ever going to do a percentage of what it can. So that’s pretty critical. And that’s where companies like Allbirds, are doing so well, because they’re sitting there going, “Okay, I’m going to take control of my distribution channel, my sales channel, and everything, I’m going to own it all, and I’ll be entirely responsible, and I don’t have to worry that my brand is diluted by what anybody else is doing. I own that, that it’s mine from end to end. I can literally run all my campaigns and base them on any tribal group, kitted out to them and I know that their end-to-end experience is my responsibility.” And that’s very, very powerful, and that’s really why retail is always going to struggle, because it’s got so many pieces in the mix that digital doesn’t.

Carlota Pico 23:07
Okay, speaking about personas and cohorts, Generation Z was born to stream and influence? How would you approach this new cohort on social or just across any district?

Steevan Glover 23:19
I don’t agree with that statement. I just…no, I don’t! They weren’t born to do anything. It’s just they have access to that. And it’s this assumption that they won’t do anything else. That’s rubbish. Of course they will! They still want live experiences. They’re not streaming every event. They still want to go to concerts, they still want to go to sporting events. If you present a TED talk live, there’s still people in the audience. Ted Talks don’t exist purely because they’re online. I don’t believe that. And I think that’s, that for me is a classic example of making the assumption about a group of people saying, “Well, we’re gonna market them that way because that’s the only way they’ll respond!” And it’s a way they will respond. It’s the easiest way to get that cohort to respond. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the only way. Print is coming back. Print is good. Print is brilliant, because if you send something to somebody in print, they go, “Oh wow! This is money that’s been spent, time has been spent”—you have been selected. You have been invited. There’s a personal experience to prove that you don’t get with digital. So I think the other thing about that cohort pieces, it’s there, they’re there to screen, but that doesn’t mean that they have to lose the live event experience. The world isn’t always just “Hey, I’ll do a binge watch on Netflix and we’ll go for it.” You can still create a theater, theatrical event, just like people who grew up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Let’s go the cinema, the water cooler moment, you know people forget that that used to be a real thing. Well, you can still do that. You just have to go to people and say “Actually, it’s an experience that’s slightly different.” So yeah, I sort of… I…that’s classic for me of pigeonholing a group and saying that’s the only way you can communicate with them. Nonsense. Not true. It works up and down the whole of the demographic. You can challenge the way your audience reacts to things and I think they want to be challenged. And I think that will be… that for me is the exciting thing about marketing going forward.

Carlota Pico 25:11
Okay, well, the exciting part of this interview is your pushback. I mean, I love that this is so entertaining at the same time, so challenging. Okay, for the final question—

Steevan Glover 25:24
The greatest way of me knowing whether client and I are going to get on is when I sit down and go “Am I ready to say I don’t think their idea is a good one?”, “Yeah, I’m ready for that! Let’s see what happens with this.”

Carlota Pico 25:35
I love this. I love this. Okay, so as the last question of this section, if you could do anything in this world, would it still be marketing, Steevan?

Steevan Glover 25:46
No. You know, I’ve enjoyed my career in marketing. I’ve been lucky to be successful in it. I’ve been lucky to work with some brilliant people, and on some brilliant products and campaigns, and some have won awards, and some have absolutely nosedived. I’ve learned probably more from the failures than I have the successes. And I mean, actually, I’ll be honest, I’d love to be an actor. I would love to try and go and do what I trained to do when I was at university. And I’d love to give that a go. And, you know, in retirement, whenever that is—I’m not sure anyone’s going to retire in the future, we’re all gonna have to work a little bit—I’d like to give that a go. That or carry on my writing career. Those are pursuing self-indulgent hobbies. But you know, I’ve got a while left in marketing yet I’m enjoying it and the time with it.

Carlota Pico 26:39
Well, I would totally watch you on the screen.

Steevan Glover 26:41
Oh, you are lovely. Thank you. You’re too kind.

Carlota Pico 26:45
Okay, moving into our rapid-fire section, which are basically your recommendations for our audience. To get the section started off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration, Steevan. So, for example, an influencer or professional role model that you really admire?

Steevan Glover 26:59
Sure, I mean, one thing I’d say to everybody is depth—go wide in your knowledge, look at things from different areas in different pieces of business. I am naturally reticent about most marketing books, I’ll be honest with you, I tend to find that they’re, well, most of them are plagiarized, but then I’ll probably get into trouble for saying that. And then just repetitive ideas with new jargon. I’m always…Okay, think for yourself. So people should try Simon Sinek. He’s been a real powerful influencer for me. I’ve also got a couple of really very, very personal role models that I’ve worked with and for: a lady called Kathryn Leno of BluePrint in the UK. She was a brilliant lady to work for. Very, very inspiring, super, super, super smart, and always challenged the status quo. There’s a book out recently, actually by a lady called Isobel Rimmer, which is called Natural Business Development. That’s a really good read. And it focuses around that go-to-market strategy, and how people need to focus on the commerciality right across the board. That is very, very, very, very powerful. And also read history. I think, near history and far history, there’s some fantastic elements out there. Take yourself out of the business side of things and widen that knowledge and sphere of culture, because I think what people assume is that the near world is how things are. Now I’ve always been fascinated about content marketing as an idea. And people think they invented it about 15 years ago, right? Nonsenes, right? Content marketing has been around since the first catalogs began. The first catalogs began in the US—Sears and Roebuck and people like that—because people had to read a catalog to know what they want to place their order, and then nine weeks later, it’d come by stagecoach too far towns in the West. They were selling the idea of what a whole look like in those catalogs. So people looked at the content, absorbed it, wanted it and said I want to aspire, too. The Michelin Guide—I wonder how many people remember that Michelin make tires. So 100 years ago, I don’t know, 50 years ago, when cars were first made, how do you encourage people to go driving, which means they will use tires? Will you encourage them that it’s safe on Michelin tires, and we’ll throw out a guide to the best places to eat and visit. Well, it’s a huge, brilliant piece of very simple and inspired content marketing. So go back, folks, and look at what was done in the past and look at what’s being done now. There’s brilliant thinkers today, there were brilliant thinkers then, and you will never know where you’ll find your inspiration. It’ll come all the way down that line.

Carlota Pico 29:43
And they also do say that history repeats itself. So…

Steevan Glover 29:47
Well, there’s no new ideas, they say. And I think, you know, good content is good content, whether it’s digital, social, whether it’s online, whether it’s offline, whether it’s interactive or dynamic. At the end of the day, it’s got to engage. It’s got to engage and it’s got to engage and be relevant to the audience that it’s trying to reach. If you get those little, little things, right, it’ll work. Have faith in good content. You’ll know if it’s bad. If it is bad, think about why you’re putting it out.

Carlota Pico 30:15
True story, true story. Okay, what about a publication, a podcast—apart from The Content Mix—an event, a group that you’d like to recommend to our audience?

Steevan Glover 30:26
The agency Collective, based in the UK, it’s a peer-to-peer network for sort of agencies and senior agency people and managers. That’s brilliant. That’s a great network for sharing information. And what I like about it is it’s a group of people who aren’t frightened to saying “I don’t know,” which is not prevalent in marketing people. When you look around and go, “I don’t really know how to do that. Anybody know how to do this? Can anyone help? And then they all help each other. And that’s always been really useful. I tend to consume news from different news outlets as well. So I tend to use BBC and CNN as my barometer for the world each day, just to sort of see what messages are going out there. And then, but I tend to not, on a daily or a regular or weekly basis, listen to, to any one particular thing at a time—I cherry pick. And I like to listen to what the trends are going on. And the agency Collective is very good for that, you begin to pick up, as is your podcast as well, you get to see what people are mentioning and talking about, and then you go, “Okay, it’s probably worth understanding where people are thought process on that.” And then the key to that is not been closed. I think a lot of people get quite closed, and they try to get into a little channel and go, “This is what I know. And this is what I like.” And that’s quite dangerous, because I think the more variety you can have and the content you consume, therefore, the wider the experience.

Carlota Pico 31:56
Well, thank you for that little shout out as well. Okay, what about your favorite app at the moment? And why?

Steevan Glover 32:03
Oh, God, I knew you were going to ask me this! I’m enjoying Slack. I’m a late-comer to slack, I’ll freely admit that I’m a late-comer to Slack, but once you get into it, once you know how to use it, once you’re comfortable with it, it is a brilliant way of basically uncluttering your inbox from emails. And it’s a really neat tool to work directly with clients, and projects, elements. So I enjoy Slack, especially when you create different channels, you know, you’re able to have private and public conversations. It’s a really good and useful tool, especially in a more agile and digital world. I mean being Brewed, being agile and focused on how we work that way, it’s powerful. So, to the same degree Trello is as well. I enjoy Trello. You know, the whole kind of concept of Kanban boards is is well proven, and it works particularly effectively. Just from a practical level Receipt Bank is really good. Oh, what’s that? Yeah, I mean, obviously in lockdown, I haven’t been traveling but Receipt Bank is brilliant. You’re picking up receipts left, right? And Bing! and it immediately catalogs the receipt, you just take a picture of it. And so it’s just from a purely functional work process, Receipt Bank is genius, because then it automatically links up to whichever accountancy package and software you have. So as a small business owner, you’re not doing the loads of pieces of paper, you take the picture and it goes straight to your expenses column inside your accounts package. We use Xero which again, I just think is brilliant and absolutely fantastic.

Carlota Pico 33:36
I’ll have to use that as well. What about measurement tools?

Steevan Glover 33:40
Oh, God. I mean, we are agnostic as a company, Brewed, totally agnostic. I will not advocate one over another—they are all good, and they are all terrible. That’s my view. And anyone that tries to tell you that it’s a panacea and solves everything is lying. It doesn’t, it just does what it does in the way that it does it. So if the client has a preference for HubSpot, or for whatever it is that they want to use, we’re completely agnostic—we go with it. What I’ve discovered over the years, especially when it comes to social measuring, no two tools ever measure anything the same way. If you ever tried to get correlated data from Google Analytics, and then out of web flow or out of WordPress, they don’t match. They’re not the same. And you try and monitor social media from Buffer or from Hootsuite, and then you look at what HubSpot is telling you—they’ll never match. Don’t get me wrong, I do not understand why! It annoys the hell out of me that measurement tools can’t be consistent on what is an open, what is a like, what is a retweet, what is engagement, what isn’t engagement. It’s hugely frustrating. So you know, from my perspective, that that’s the biggest thing they should be allowed to change. It bloody will make these things even add up and talk to each other. And how annoying is it that one social media platform isn’t available as a reporting tool in another. It’s just like, really?! Come on everybody, you know, I thought, we were in a source, let’s get together and sort this out! You know, do I really have to go to a different tool to find out what LinkedIn is doing to what my Twitter accounts are doing? You know, there’s agencies making a fortune out of this, and all they’re doing is manually typing stuff in. I went on a bit of a rant there, I apologize!

Carlota Pico 35:22
I can foresee a very interesting roundtable coming out of your last response.

Steevan Glover 35:31
Yeah.

Carlota Pico 35:32
Okay, Steevan, well, thank you so much for joining us on The Content Mix. It was awesome to meet you and to pick your brain on so many different subjects.

Steevan Glover 35:39
Absolute pleasure. And I’d love to do a roundtable sometime in the future. Keep up the good work, Carlota, it’s good to be part of it.

Carlota Pico 35:48
Thank you. Thank you so much, and to everybody listening in today, thank you for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews, just like this one every day, so keep on tuning in. Thanks again, have a fantastic day, and I’ll see you next time. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai