The Evolution of Social Media (with Hugh Stephens, Founder of Sked Social) | 326

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Evolution of Social Media (Episode 326)

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Marketing Millennials
• Host: Daniel Murray
• Guest: Hugh Stephens, Founder of Sked Social
• Release Date: June 4, 2025
• Platforms: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Newsletter

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Introduction

In Episode 326 of The Marketing Millennials, host Daniel Murray engages in an in-depth conversation with Hugh Stephens, the Founder of Sked Social. The episode, titled "The Evolution of Social Media," delves into the transformative changes in social media management over the past decade, the impact of emerging platforms, and the pivotal role of AI in shaping marketing strategies.

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Guest Introduction and Background

00:52 - 02:10

Hugh Stephens kicks off the discussion by sharing his journey into the social media landscape. Originally a medical student, Hugh transitioned into communications and marketing, founding Sked Social in 2013. He reflects on his early days in social media management during the rise of platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, highlighting his transition from management consulting to the dynamic world of digital communications.

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The Early Days of Social Media

02:17 - 04:36

Hugh reminisces about the inception of Sked Social, initially launched as Shedigram, during the burgeoning period of Instagram (2013-2014). He observes the shift from text-centric social media to a visually driven ecosystem. This transformation necessitated a broader skill set for marketers, expanding roles from pure content creation to include video editing and graphic design. However, this evolution also led to the diminishing focus on community management, once a core aspect of social media marketing.

Notable Quote:

"The job got so lost in suddenly having to do all of these other things. That core piece of like how do we actually get people into the tent and how do we actually engage them and connect them with each other became less and less important."
— Hugh Stephens [02:40]

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Shift Towards Stories and Direct Messaging

04:36 - 09:01

Hugh analyzes the current era of social media, emphasizing the decline of feed-based engagement in favor of stories and direct messages (DMs). He points out that approximately 80% of engagement now occurs through ephemeral content and private conversations, signaling a fundamental shift towards community-centric interactions. This transition reflects a broader user preference for more intimate and immediate forms of engagement over traditional, algorithm-driven feeds.

Notable Quote:

"If 80% of engagement are stories and DMs, that signals that people are using it to create their own communities."
— Hugh Stephens [05:36]

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Impact of TikTok and Content Discovery

09:01 - 13:46

The discussion turns to the revolutionary impact of TikTok on content discovery and social media dynamics. Hugh credits TikTok for democratizing content virality, allowing even accounts with minimal followings to gain significant exposure. This contrasts with earlier platforms where follower count was a primary determinant of reach. The platform's algorithm fosters a passive consumption model, where users engage more by scrolling than actively creating content, mirroring the passive nature of YouTube consumption.

Notable Quote:

"TikTok has taken a lot more out of YouTube than it has anything else. TikTok manages to get that perfect little piece of like, oh, when you're just sitting on the toilet scrolling, it's just enough time."
— Hugh Stephens [11:30]

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The Role of AI in Social Media Management

13:46 - 25:33

Hugh explores the burgeoning role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in social media management. He discusses how AI tools are enhancing efficiency by automating repetitive tasks such as caption generation and content scheduling. However, he cautions against over-reliance on AI for creative tasks, emphasizing that authentic brand voice and creative storytelling remain irreplaceable by AI-generated content.

Daniel Murray and Hugh debate the integration of AI in marketing operations, highlighting its potential to streamline processes while underlining the necessity of human creativity to maintain engagement and authenticity.

Notable Quote:

"Having a sort of authentic and interesting brand and actually being able to do that in a way that's interesting and engaging is going to be really, really hard to do with AI."
— Hugh Stephens [16:44]

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Authentic Brand Voice and Creativity

25:33 - 32:53

The conversation underscores the critical importance of maintaining an authentic brand voice amidst the proliferation of AI tools. Hugh argues that genuine creativity and a well-defined brand identity are essential for standing out in a crowded digital landscape. He notes that smaller and emerging brands often have greater flexibility and risk tolerance to experiment with unique voices, unlike larger legacy brands constrained by established identities and processes.

Notable Quote:

"Creative concepts are really great with AI, but actually creative voice is quite awful a lot of the time with AI."
— Hugh Stephens [16:44]

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Integration of Paid and Organic Strategies

32:53 - 37:46

Hugh and Daniel discuss the evolving interplay between paid and organic social media strategies. Hugh envisions a future where these two domains converge, with content first tested organically before being amplified through paid channels. This integrated approach leverages the strengths of both strategies, ensuring that paid content resonates authentically with audiences.

He highlights the necessity for marketers to adapt their strategies to prioritize creativity and storytelling, recognizing that traditional targeting methods are becoming less effective in a privacy-conscious digital environment.

Notable Quote:

"Finding those unique voices and finding the ways to actually present those voices to the public is going to be really, really important."
— Hugh Stephens [18:13]

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Best Practices and Brand Success Stories

37:46 - 43:37

Hugh shares insights into what distinguishes highly successful brands on Sked Social's platform. He emphasizes the importance of efficiency, streamlined processes, and a cohesive team approach to leveraging social media tools effectively. Brands that embrace efficiency and invest in robust social media strategies, rather than relying on patchwork solutions, tend to achieve superior outcomes.

Additionally, he discusses the resurgence of high-production-value content and serialized storytelling on social media, drawing parallels to the golden age of television advertising. This trend underscores the enduring power of compelling narratives and high-quality visuals in capturing and retaining audience attention.

Notable Quote:

"The smaller brands just have more risk tolerance than the other brands and could do more things than the other brand, which is kind of cool to see."
— Hugh Stephens [37:16]

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Challenges and Future Outlook

43:37 - End

In the concluding segments, Hugh reflects on the challenges marketers face in maintaining authentic connections and adapting to rapid technological changes. He advocates for a balanced approach that integrates human creativity with AI-driven efficiencies, ensuring that brands remain personable and engaging in an increasingly automated digital landscape.

Hugh also touches on the importance of process documentation and scalability in marketing operations, advising against the pitfalls of "duct taping" solutions that can hinder long-term growth and adaptability.

Notable Quote:

"The best marketers are making ads that are clicking that you don't know that worked on you or brand moments that you don't know."
— Hugh Stephens [42:10]

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Conclusion

Episode 326 of The Marketing Millennials offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic evolution of social media marketing. Through Hugh Stephens' expert insights, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the shifts from community-focused strategies to content-centric approaches, the transformative impact of platforms like TikTok, and the indispensable role of authentic brand voices in an AI-driven landscape. The conversation underscores the necessity for marketers to balance technological advancements with creative storytelling to effectively engage and grow their audiences.

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Connect with Hugh Stephens:

• Company: Sked Social
• Social Media: X (Twitter)

Join the Discussion:

• LinkedIn: The Marketing Millennials
• Instagram: @the_marketing_millennials

Support the Podcast:

• Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your preferred podcast platform.
• Rate Us: Leave a five-star rating to help grow the community.

Transcript

[Daniel Murray]

Some social tools are too basic while some are too bloated. Sched Social is the best of both worlds, built just right for fast moving teams who need power without the price traps. Get 20 off a full year with code [e-mail] that's S K-E-Social.com welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up.

[Hugh]

What is up? Hugh? Welcome to the podcast. Hey Daniel, I want you to give a little intro of like who you are. How did you get into the social media space? How did you found the company that you founded? Let's get into the quick story behind it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sweet. So I run Sched Social. We're a sort of social media scheduling analytics, creative management I guess platform started 201314 long time ago the software company before that I was in management consulting and I guess really helping brands get into digital comms again. Those were the probably earlier days of social that some will remember. But it feels like every day I'm older and older and no one remembers the old days of forums and communities and things like that to the same degree that they were. And actually before that I was a medical student so I actually ended up somehow weirdly in comms and marketing and things like that out of initially studying medicine. Although my mother will tell me I never actually finished any of my degrees. So you know, serial dropout.

[Hugh]

That's funny. My, my wife always, her line is that she's a law school dropout because she was going to be a lawyer and then decided to get into E commerce. So quite a pivot.

[Unknown Speaker]

So it's, it's, it's good. Many years on hearing hearing all of your ex colleagues tell you that the grass is definitely greener where you are now.

[Hugh]

So I bet, I bet people think marketing is not a real job until they get into these other grinding professions which marketing is grinding too. But I want to get into social media. Like you said, you've seen it from 2013 and now 2025. What are the big shifts from early days social to now? What social is today.

[Unknown Speaker]

So I started scared really around and it was called Shedigram back in those days, but it was really around Instagram and that was really because back in that sort of 2013, 14 day, I guess you could say that Instagram was still on its sort of its trajectory up, right. And there was still this sort of debate of who's going to win and what does this mean? And Snapchat was still emerging and stuff like that. And I think we saw for social media managers and on the marketing side we saw this big shift and I guess scared was lucky to sort of be along with that shift of suddenly we went from sort of content that was very sort of the text and links days of social into this sort of visual first piece. Like, remember the old Instagram days of where everything was like you had your hipstamatic photos and the filters were off the charts. And I think it changed the nature of what it is to actually work in the marketing side of social media marketing and digital even. It used to be that you were very much sort of what you'd call now, I guess a pure content person, whereas increasingly sort of, I guess that world of suddenly you're also a video editor, suddenly you're also a graphic designer. Like all of those things suddenly became a bigger part of the repertoire that before then, I think it was very much more around that community management side, community building side. And I think one of the things that fell off as a result of that was a lot of those sort of, I guess, original OG community management, you know, how do we actually engage with people elements kind of disappeared, you know, And I think sort of the job got so lost in suddenly having to do all of these other things. That sort of core piece in some ways of like how do we actually get people into the tent and how do we actually engage them and connect them with each other became less and less important.

[Hugh]

It's crazy. I do remember those days where you would just swipe through and find the perfect filter on your photo and you then you just posted it and then you went to the next phase was let's post these highly posed, filtered outside of the app photos. Now it's whatever device you have, you could do whatever you want posting, but you have to now learn how to make great cuts, make great edits, make sure the job got harder and harder for people in brands, which is why the problem you're solving and you're working to keep solving. So what now the era of social right now of you you alluded to people forgot the community element of social. Why do you think it's gotten more and more important to have that component? And what are some ways that people can.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, like it's a good question. And I think why are we missing. I don't know. I don't know why I think it's that important, right. Some people could say, well, if people just want to yell into the void, then they can just yell into the void and good for them. Or maybe communities are fine if they just live in the sort of outer reaches of the Internet, the corners of Reddit and, I don't know, threads on X or Blue sky or something. I think there's that piece of the way that we sort of envisioned or I guess designed these platforms was the connection side. Right. And I think the way that we should be using them as marketers. And yes, I am talking here from a brand sense, but I think you see the same thing with a lot of the influencers and I guess other brands in that sense of not necessarily just purely businesses is that piece of how you connect and how you actually engage with other people. How can we get it back? I don't know. I think a lot of the time, I think part of what's happened is that a lot of brands are too scared to actually take that risk, take the risk of having a little bit less of that brand custodianship. You know, like on an influencer sense, for example, like, you know, we have all these arguments about like, authenticity online and things like that. And I sort of go, well, the reason we have all those arguments is because we've set this community expectation that everything is this sort of on brand and polished and beautiful thing. You know, sometimes it feels, you know, you sort of go to a brand's content and you may as well be scrolling their, you know, Facebook ad catalog, you know, and it's sort of like there's no real differentiation between what might be organic content and paid content. Because they see it as this, like, oh, we've got to, you know, the brand has to be presented right. And you know that. But I think the more and more you sort of try and put so much polish on things like that, a the harder it gets to actually, you know, sort of get among it. But I think because you just run out of time. But I think secondly, you know, you actually lose the ability to, you know, really properly see some of the, you know, like, the heyday of organic social was the piece of like, you know, you saw the behind the curtain, you know, feelings of what it was, and that was the organic experience of, you know, of social for a lot of those things.

[Hugh]

And I think, I mean, back then I would say 80% of all engagement came in the feed, and now 80% of all engagement are stories and DMs. So if 80% of engagement are stories and DMs. That means that community aspect is what people want, at least in Instagram, for example, because you have stories where people are like replying, polling, all that good stuff. And it's a quicker view on someone's life versus getting lost in the feed where it gets served intent based content. And then DMs is where people are sharing your content to everybody. And now they have broadcast channels too, which is technically like another DMing thing in the app. So if 80% are now in DMS and stories, that signals that like people are using it to create their own communities, whether it's with their friends or with colleagues or whoever. So brands should also be thinking about that. But it seems like they still thinking back in what you said, early 2019, maybe 2018, how Instagram worked then.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I think it's really hard to keep up with those things. Like one of the things that we've always had those sort of flash in the pan moments as social media people of channels that appear and then sort of disappear again. Like someone was reminiscing something about the clubhouse days, right, where for a while everyone was suddenly about, oh my God, audio is the future. And these sort of drop in audio chats was the future of everything. And that's pretty much disappeared now. Right. And I think, you know, one of the things that, you know, we've certainly seen is that while all those, you know, a lot of those things you said like broadcast channels and things like that, like in the past you would think that they would be these, you know, sort of new social channels and they would be these, you know, new places and everyone would be sort of chatting about how we could use all these things and even Bereal, I guess briefly had its moment, right. But like it's actually all just recentralized back into, you know, yes, you've got, you know, shorts and you know, TikTok and that, that I guess is a different format in the sense of, you know, in reels I guess, but like different format in the sense of different way that the consumer engages. But you know, the core of it is still like they're very successfully rolled all that sort of stuff into like Instagram and you know, so I guess the meta ecosystem such that as social media managers, it can be very hard to ever really think about leaving there. But also it can be impossible to keep up to date with what actually is going on.

[Hugh]

I think you make a good point because you actually never know. I mean vine was the OG TikTok RIP vine and then yeah, RP, vine and TikTok probably got a lot of their ideas from vine and just made it a better algorithm, a better experience than vine and vine died off. So no other platform could compete until TikTok came around and no other platform was competing with Instagram. But the what TikTok did, which is now even hard actually better for social media managers for this day is now you can any the younger competitors is now you can compete on with a relatively small following where like back in the day it was follower based campaigns and if you didn't have a larger following you weren't going to be seen in the algorithm. And now you have chances to go viral with 15 followers, which has changed the game a lot too for smaller brands and mid scale brands.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I think, I think Definitely, you know TikTok definitely really enabled that discovery side and you know, I think I put it actually as more that TikTok and TikTok I think has taken a lot more out of YouTube than it has anything else. I think that was the big fumble there, right was that TikTok. YouTube could have been the TikTok of sort of I guess the western world but successfully got that like I call the toilet scroll. The TikToks are just that ideal time of being able to burn that small amount of time and then as YouTube videos seemingly became longer and longer and longer and you look at a lot of things like mrbeast content and things like that sort of seemingly has gotten longer and more complex every time TikTok managed to get that perfect little piece of like oh, when you're just like sitting on the toilet scrolling, it's just enough time. You don't have to get sort of stuck halfway through a video on shipbuilding techniques from the Vikings or something that you'd see on YouTube instead you can sort of go through. And again as you said that discovery algorithms was very successful. But it's that more passive. Certainly if I look at most people that I know, TikTok is that much more passive environment and also I would say a lot fewer of the people I know have any desire to be creators on TikTok. You know it does seem like the sort of no Pareto thing of 8020 is like possibly even further of like most people are very much passive consumers. Whereas you know you have on things like Instagram and Facebook back in the day and you know, snap and whatever it might be, people are actually much more posting content whereas TikTok is much more that passive consumption, a bit like you would see on YouTube you know, I think it's like there's a stat from ages ago of, you know, I think like point 5% of people have ever commented on a YouTube video because everyone just goes to watch videos. And I think TikTok's not that, probably not that different.

[Hugh]

So I mean, knowing what we all know now, how should social media managers, brands, like, where should they focus? What should they be focusing on? Let's start there. Like what, what? Like knowing that social hasn't, it's changed a lot. But also the platforms, there's not many really new, new platforms in the last, like besides TikTok in the last 10 years.

[Unknown Speaker]

You know, the thing that's coming for us all obviously is, you know, AI, as he says, is a big, big sort of scepter, you know, like hanging over us. And I think, you know, some of that is really this question of, well, what does that mean for, you know, a social media, what does it mean for a marketer? Right? And, you know, and I was talking to a friend who, you know, sort of an SEO world friend, and he was sort of saying, oh, you know, there's still conversations what that, what that means, you know, it's coming for our jobs. But the other side I think is that really, you know, what I think we're seeing and what I think is going to happen as brands like, you can already start to see it in some places. There's some really good, like, you know, Twitter slash X accounts, you know, of like the AI slop that you get on Facebook and stuff like that, of like some of the just bizarre generated content that's clearly just, you know, engagement farming and stuff like that. And I think you're sort of seeing this like slow drive in some ways of a lot of those tools and to just kind of generating more and more crap and not good crap. And I think when I think about the sort of the role of social media marketer or you know, like marketing, I think broadly, you know, same same thing with blog content and everything else, right? It's like I think having a sort of authentic and interesting brand and actually being able to do that in a way that's interesting and engaging is going to be really, really hard to do with AI. Creative concepts are really great with AI, but actually creative voice is quite awful a lot of the time with AI. And so I think really being able to do that is, I think, going to be where things go. It's very hard to say in terms of are we suddenly all going to be. Two years ago we said we'd all be in the metaverse. Right. But that again, has also been one of those trends that's just disappeared again. But I think all of the usual things are going to keep happening. The cost of paid is going to go up as it always does, crawls up over time. The value of organic perceived by your boss is going to go down as it always has. And I think it's really going to be that piece of. As marketers, I think finding those unique voices and finding the ways to actually present those voices to the public is going to be the way to see cut through, whether it's, you know, on email or social or any other channel. And that can be quite hot. You know, it can be confronting for a lot of brands, but I think it also presents an opportunity, particularly for those, as you said, like a lot of those. So smaller or more emerging brands, you have much more of an opportunity to not have that sort of big historic legacy of a, of a bigger brand or have, you know, a whole lot of brand custodians who will yell at you about, you know, you know, taking a sort of duolingo or Ryanair type approach to social. Right. You know, you couldn't see that happening with a lot of those sort of more legacy brands. But I think, you know, developing that voice and thinking about what that voice is for you as a, as a marketer and also for the brand or brands that you're, you know, I guess selling is going to be, I think the really important thing because I think it's either that or we just have to give up.

[Hugh]

I agree. I think AI is as good as you like what it knows in the past and what do you feed it. And to make AI really good is you have to feed it your brand playbook. And if you don't have a brand playbook, it's just going to feed you what it's feeding that other social media manager who's asking the same question, like, what should I post without like having a brand identity, brand voice, brand guidelines, guardrails all in place to make sure you're posting something else. And then also what humans have been good at for centuries is like creativity and adding like your creative spin, your creative juice to it and, and knowing what's good and what's not. Because like I've tested social and I, I mean AI for social and it has some like decent like ideas. It could be good, it's good to brainstorm with. But if you try to make, make it right copy, even if you feed your brand voice or Come up with something that's like a hook for your audience or something. It falls super flat when it comes to that, which it could get better in a few years. But I want to go into the gossip question knowing that AI is going to get more and more used. But what are some of the ways that you thinking about equipping social teams with AI to actually just help them with their job instead of thinking about all these other things you could do with AI for content creation as well?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, certainly for us we use it a lot internally. We're a software company. Right. So there's purely. We see a lot of the benefit. I have an agentic AI thing that I can use for software development, for example, and again sometimes the engineers will tell me it's generating absolute rubbish code and other times it'll get something done that we thought was going to take weeks or months. So I think that for us and how we're seeing it both within our space and I guess within our customers lives is really around sort of the first phase, I think is going to be this whole efficiency gain piece. You know, what if it will be suddenly a lot easier to have to. Rather than having to learn capcut or Premiere, you know, like it used to be yours. Everyone had, everyone had to learn Premiere right now everyone at least has capcut, which is a lot easier. But you know, I think the. We'll see sort of, I guess the start being those efficiency gains, you know, and I think, I think some of the tools we've built, like we've built the sort of rephrasing stuff or the caption generation stuff and those things are helpful, right? They're helpful to drive that efficiency side in a way that makes life a bit easier. But I don't think anytime soon we're going to see sort of AI generated again. Google's. I say this and then Google's models just came out last week, just earlier this week with their new video generation, which is pretty cool and pretty good. But I still don't think it's quite the stage of where you'd expect brands to be getting on it. I think you're going to see a lot of that efficiency side in the next couple of years before we necessarily see the change. I think the more interesting thing, and I guess the more interesting trend is really to ask what is the role of that personal connection and in the way that I guess if you look at it on a purely consumer level, people go to social to engage with friends and see what they're up to and see Funny pictures of cats and everything else. I always say it's a rare consumer that comes to social and says themselves, I'm just desperate to engage with the brand today. And what does that mean in this world of things like character AI and all these sort of AI friends, girlfriend, boyfriend type solutions. And how does that change that sort of, I guess, true nature of human connection? And what does that mean for the way that, you know, for a lot of what we, what we've done in the past, as social media markets is go, oh, you've come here to, you know, see what, you know, your nephew looks like and you know, how his third birthday went. But here's some content from a brand. I hope you like it. It's kind of how we've treated this a lot of the time in the past. And what does that mean when they're actually going sort of straight to the source the whole time and what do we do? You know, like. And that's where I think it sort of is. You know, you need to become the friend is what I would say. But in terms of AI tooling, you know. Yeah, I think it still is. We're still like on the start of that J curve, I think, you know, it is definitely. You can see the places like, you know, universities and things like that that are obviously going to sort of, I guess, see the earliest disruptions and universities and schools in that it sort of changes a lot of what it is to write assignments. And, you know, even I remember the days of where you were told, you know, you couldn't use, you had to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica or, you know, God, Wikipedia was this awful, you know, you couldn't reference Wikipedia. And that's the same cycle, you know, you can see happening now about, you know, about school students using, you know, AI tools to help them with, you know, projects. And so I think it's going to be this really interesting element to see where things go. Like, I think it's actually a fun time to be in marketing. It's maybe a little bit controversial in saying that, but I think it's actually really fun time to be marketing because there are so many more tools you have available. And I think, you know, there's a lot more things that you can experiment with and I think there's a lot more license, I think, from the community to actually play than I think there was before. Maybe that was just also because it was Covid, right? No one wanted to play over Covid.

[Hugh]

I mean, I always think about, like, because my mom was Owned her own business but did marketing back in the day. And I always think like back in the day she had to do fax machines and filing and all these manual tasks that took her so long. And then we got the computer and it automatically did that for us. But you still had to do all these manual tasks like inputting numbers and writing briefs and making sure that all these long decks and writing assignments and now those things are going to get taken by AI. So like there's always like a next fade in. Like efficient. There's always going to be efficiency gains. But I also, I always look at like okay, like people are going to trust content less because AI, they might not tell the differ but they'll start questioning content less. And what does that mean is they're just going to go back to human connection which that's why you got to play the online offline game and have both of like how could I create social first experiences that using social media. But that is in real life as well. Like having both those aspects is going to be super important now. Which you wouldn't have said. You wouldn't have said that. I mean in Covid it was only social and, and then before like everybody had boring events and they didn't care about social media. Now like social media is like table stakes for most brands. If you want to win because you said earlier rising cacs it's going to and harder to market people have before you could game the targeting game like targeting people. Now everybody has the tools to game the targeting. So you have to win and creative, you have to win. And the people who know creative best are the people who have put it, been putting it out organically and fighting for views than the people who have been fighting for space and targeting. So I actually think that I see the convergence of like paid and organic teams in the future like getting really close to each other and playing the game together. And those are the companies are going to win who those social and paid teams can play the game together. You see it a little bit with UGC right now, but I think there's going to be even more like social is going to create content first tested on organic and then move it to the and it's going to be this like feedback loop.

[Unknown Speaker]

A valid theory. I think that the hard part I find is that a lot of the time the content you see performing on paid is often or has historically, I should say has historically often been very different to the content you see perform on organic. But we'll see.

[Hugh]

Yeah, I see that. But I think if you can get to the point where you're not. If it's not, it doesn't even feel like an ad. And some of the ads. Yeah. And that's what the organics really do, obviously. But I think the targeting has gotten so good but now with that privacy stuff, everything's getting harder to. Harder to get to that. The extreme targeting. So the. You see most people are like broad targeting and using creative to target which are like simple things that are going to work. But I think you got to have both those simple things that are working. There's just straight copywriting and then the game of how like these storytelling and creative ads that worked in 50 years ago that these big agencies were doing.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I was going to say we're back in, you know, the early, early to early 90s and things like that of, you know, sort of is. It is true in that it's almost like, you know, I don't often watch, you know, I mean probably a lot of people don't often watch like commercial television anymore. Right. You know, you're always watching Netflix or Prime or something like that instead. But I, the couple of times that I have and you know, it's for a football game or something like that and you see the quality of the TV ads. And I remember when I was, you know, when I was young, right. Which wasn't that long ago but like when I was young those, you know, there was, it was the era of the big TV ad and you know, you'd have, you know, like you'd have that almost like Mad Men esque thing of like, you know, you'd go to your big agency and you'd get your big TV ad and be this like big creative process and everything else. And the TV ads now on the whole rubbish, terrible like there is no storytelling, there's no interesting things. There's none of that like the big production value that you would have from. From TV as. I think, I think some of that is sort of drawn from Social. But I think we're almost in some ways, you know, I agree with you here and that I think we're going to kind of go full circle a little bit in that we're going to have to go back to those much more interesting and engaging ways of being able to draw the person in. And that was the whole point of a TV ad. Writers, you know, you've got to draw the, draw the attention in. And I think we're going to come back to that on social because Social is now kind of the Only place you have left.

[Hugh]

Yeah, I mean that's why you starting seeing serialized content becoming a thing on Social. You're starting to see some people going back to the high production where everybody told you that iPhone cameras are working three, four years ago now. It's like going. There's like a pendulum swinging of like these produced TV shows. Even if it looks like it's on an iph and it's like produce gets. But I also think like it's a great time to be the marketer who came into marketing who wanted to be the creative marketer and now those are going to be more sought after because I remember like going to marketing 10 years ago and if you weren't like a math person or and you were pretty much not succeed like not moving up the chain in marketing unless you're at a different company. Like you're gonna, you gotta know numbers. You have to know now the people who. The ideas are something that are gonna be harder and hard and those creative minds are gonna be somebody. Like people are gonna ask them like how do, how do we stand out in front of these people? I can't game the system anymore where you could game the system. I remember it was so easy to be good at finding, targeting to the right person at the right time. That creative could have been average and you still were winning. Like you do the same thing as you did five years ago. That creative is not working because there's so much better creative out there now.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, it's almost like there was that period of where Social was almost like running a hedge fund. Right. It was all about arbitrage and all those kind of things. But yeah, I think, I think a lot of that has, you know, I mean almost all of that margin has just disappeared off into the ether of, you know, Meta or Google or you know, all of the other big ad platforms and well, that. And I imagine that also more and more people are probably bidding to be fair. But you know, I think, I think there's. Yeah, as you said, like I just think that that creative piece is lost. And we started, you know, like I think even the video with. With Jony I've and Sam Altman again earlier this week of the OpenAI IO announcement. And that was that really polished, beautiful video kind of piece and seeing the community response that you sort of go, yeah, that's what we don't see enough of anymore. We don't see that sort of higher production value from a brand. And that was effectively for organic Social. Right. Because it was product release that didn't go to, you know, a, you know, Good Morning America or, you know, something like that. That was purely released, you know, sort of direct, I guess, to the consumer online, through social channels and, you know, had that really high storytelling and you expect nothing less of one of the world's most famous designers, but, you know, really had those elements to it. And I think that was the reason why it really sort of, I guess, you know, touched that touch, that human element.

[Hugh]

I think marketing always goes back to fundamentals, and sometimes people get lost in the fundamentals. But if you're good at the fundamentals, like you said, storytelling, copywriting, hooks, and, you know, like, what makes. Because that's the. Also the piece of AI that is missing from some people that don't know what good looks like. I think you still have to learn what good looks like to produce good. So you could put out something without a bad hook. And you think it's great because it's written better than you would have written it. But it's you. You didn't study, like those fundamentals of copywriting, psychology, storytelling, those elements and how channels do storytelling. Because video also changed the game for storytelling. Because now you have to think about a big, like, surprise at the beginning and then text overlay and then all these pieces in the middle. And how do I keep the continuous loop where some old school soaring styling is like dragged out, get to the plot longer. It's like things are changing, but it's based on platform. It's still storytelling, but in a new way.

[Daniel Murray]

Most social tools make you choose between simplicity and power, while Sched social gives you both. Plan fast, loop in your team, and show real results without per se pricing or shady upgrade traps. It's everything you need. Nothing you don't get. 20% off for a full year with code [e-mail] that's sked social.com.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. And I think that, you know, as you said, like, it is, it does all come back to that. I think even, you know, if I look at a lot of the brands, even that I just sort of, you know, see around, right? A lot of the time you look at it and you go, what's this content actually trying to say? And they've even lost that, you know, like, there's the storytelling. There's all stuff. And sometimes it's just like you've got to, you know, like when you even some of my friends and you go like, but what's this actually trying to like, give me, give me the two sentences. This is trying to say what are the two key messages? And they'll be like, oh, and some, a lot of those, you know, sort of very basic core principles of just like being very clear in your mind about what it is you're trying to do and what, you know, what you're trying to say and who you're trying to say it to and things like that. I think people often get distracted with a lot of the shiny things and forget that you've got to have that foundational layer and if you don't then, you know, you can have beautiful content or credible content or whatever, all the best hooks or whatever, but it's just, it's never going to land.

[Hugh]

What are, what are some things you're seeing the best brands on your platform doing? What are some common threads on them?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, it's a good question in my head. I sort of segmented and you know, like we're actually, so we're going through, we're actually going through the process of hiring new social media manager for us at the moment. And you know, we had had the debate internally of like, what is, what does the right social media manager look like. I think the hard part is there's sort of, it's almost like there's two worlds. There's a world where you're, you know, a social media manager or you know, digital marketing person for a known brand. Like, you know, you might want to say legacy brand, but I say known brand, you know, like they've got, and that usually means like more consumer oriented, they've got budget for out of home, you know, like it's, it's a, it's a known household type brand. And I think the nature of running, you know, like look at our customers and the nature of the brands that are the fmcg, cpg, you know, big multi, you know, big, big franchises, things like that, global franchises. The nature of what they see successfully and how they see success is very, very different because they have that existing brand equity. And I think that's very different to a lot of the much more emerging, emerging but still trying to be national brands that actually it's a very different style of marketing and it is much more about trying to cut through and everything else as compared to sort of making sure you're in that consideration bucket at the last moment that you might have if you're running marketing for a big, for a big brand. As for what we see, you know, people doing with our platform, you know, I think, you know, in the agency world, for example, you know, we're you know, like we sort of, we describe ourselves as having a fair price, right? And I think in agency world you see a lot of agencies that have kind of run themselves to the bottom. Like you know, we're a big company or I guess big company compared to what I thought, what I ever thought. But like, you know, certain, certain of our core tools we spent a lot of money on and you know when you sign that contract for that, you know, HubSpot renewal, it's you know, 150 grand or something a year. You go, jeez, gosh, that's a lot of money. But the other side of you guys, well, you know, well like this, this runs the whole core bit of my business. Like this is my CRM, this is my thing and you know, I've got global customers and do all these things and that's what the cost is. And so, you know, one of the things we see a lot of the agencies, for example, that work with us is you know, they've always got that drive for efficiency. And you can try and do, you know, social and even in our space you can try and do it really, really cheaply but you sort of end up with this cobbled together thing of like the Zapiers and the Google sheets and everything else. And we probably see the best customers of ours are the ones that sort of lean into every tool or every platform has its own kind of, I guess, house view on how things should be done and how you should collaborate as a team and you know, how that content production, workflow should work and things like that. And I think the teams that we see best, the ones that sort of lean into that, the in house teams I find generally speaking will actually take the time and effort to really think about it. The agencies I think I find sometimes can be a bit more resistant to doing any change management associated with any sort of tool. But the ones who really lean into it I think see the efficiency gains. Like ultimately that's much like CRM and marketing automation, things like that. Our tool space is we sell efficiency. You know, we, we sell better reporting, we sell easier reporting, we sell, you know, the ability to collaborate across the team more easily, all that kind of thing. And so I think the efficiency side is where you see the real difference. But I think in terms of the actual content that performs, there's just, it's such a, it's almost a chasm between these sort of, these bigger sort of household brands and the other brands and the smaller ones that are doing really, really well I think are the ones that really have developed that voice.

[Hugh]

Yeah, I like that you go and keep going back to the voice, the story a lot of people forget when they starting on social. Do you have that? And also how is it evolving and what is the different voices for channels? If you're trying to. Because different channels, you kind of have to tweak the voice a little bit because you can't play. You have to play the game on the field. You can't just play your game. So I think the best teams have a playbook for each channel, but it all comes back to, like, their values, like how we want to show up that voice. I totally agree. The. The smaller brands just have more risk tolerance than the other brands and could do more things at the other brand, which is kind of cool to see. It's fun.

[Unknown Speaker]

Like, you know, if it was. If it was me working for some. Someone in house, like, you know, I'd want to work for a smaller or smaller collection of brands because so much more fun. Like, you get to do all the interesting things and you get to, you know, you get to experiment with. With new activations and you know, as you were saying, like, you know that online offline events and things like that, like, you want to have enough budget for activations and things like that, but you also don't want to have so much that, you know, you sort of get stuck in that sort of legacy brand mode.

[Hugh]

And yeah, I do think that the thing you said about efficiency, it's. At some point you lose scale. When you're trying to scale, at some point it breaks. And if you don't set up the. What I learned in marketing operations for a long time is you can only duct tape for so long until you have to go back and rebuild. So it's better to just start the processes now and then not have to rebuild later and document the processes earlier. The duct taping, it's hard because only one person knows that if you get that person fires or quits, you're going to have to redo the whole process again. And then you're lost three or four months and just becomes like. And especially if you're growing fast, like, you don't want to think about that in a moment where you're scaling. And now I have to go back and redo everything to make sure that. And eventually a marketing leader will come in and be that market leader who says we need process when you get to a certain point. So do it earlier.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, it is a sad point, I'll admit. You know, like, I'M the, I'm certainly the, the 0 to 1, you know, like the chaos. Chaos is my favorite kind of, you know, I guess environment to work in. But you know, having, having also done some time, you know, building, scaling brands and, and in the venture funded world and things like that, you know, like you do definitely see what happens when the wheels fall off. And so you sort of have to have a bit of a developed sense of when to just accept, accept the duct tape solution to get the MVP out, get the first version out. You don't want to sort of be stuck so long in analysis paralysis. But then you've also got to have that sixth sense of when it's time to start layering in all the boring things or the older things I think are boring. But you know, all of the process documentation and all those kind of things, eventually you got to start layering them in and it's sort of, you know, it's a tricky sixth sense, I think as a, as a manager or you know, as an owner to work out the right timeline for those things to come in. And you know, even I often debate with other startup people, you know, the question of how, you know, how much do you hire ahead? You know, like in marketing context, you know, when do you hire the CMO that's, you know, you probably need in two years. Do you hire them today or do you sort of wait two years and try and stretch someone up instead? No right answer to it. But yeah, it's always a tricky balance.

[Hugh]

If I would go back and run marking ops again, I think this is probably one of the best errors to be in that job. Just because you have AI, where all that annoying stuff you could just do basically tell AI what you're doing as you're doing it and they can make it into a nicer doc for you and then you can go edit it where before you had it be like typing up your whole doc and having to. It's like that was my worst part. I'm a chaos marketer too. I thrive in chaos. I, I would say like I love startups more than I love going to big brands because the process kills me. But I do understand that you also got to know what type of marketer you are. Lastly, I wanted to ask you what is a marketing hill you would die on?

[Unknown Speaker]

Ooh, tricky question. Probably a hill I would die on is I think a lot of people who go into marketing should never have gone into marketing. I think you've got a lot of marketers that end up stuck in the profession and they're the ones that produce a lot of crap because they don't like their job. Should be fun. I like that we have good days and bad. Everyone's got good days and bad days and things like that. But like, I find often talking to people in marketing, even juniors. Right. And juniors, I'm like, what a great time to change career. But I find a lot of people talking marketing. You're like, you don't actually enjoy this work and that's a bad place to be.

[Hugh]

That is controversial. But I think that's also just like learning life's life. Yeah. So I think, I think, I think you're so right. There's a lot of people who just get I started here. I don't want to change a job. I'm stuck. I just want to come clock in, clock out. And that, that sucks. To be that marketer or you chose.

[Unknown Speaker]

It brings the quality of the profession down.

[Hugh]

Yeah. I mean, I always say to people like, marketing is one of the professions where you just see all the, like you owning people. Remember like the bad all the time. Because like you hear about the scammy marketers, you hear about the Miller, like people manipulating you. And all the good marketing kind of is not seen because it's working on you and you're not going to complain if it's working on you. You're going to notice like those terrible ads this bad, bad targeting those spammy emails and you're just gonna. But you don't think about all like the great marketers out there putting out things that is working and you're not noticing. And that's hard about marketing is like the great marketers are the ones that are doing things that you don't know they're doing.

[Unknown Speaker]

The best puppet masters.

[Hugh]

Yeah. It's funny, but it's true. It's hard to. The best marketers are making ads that are clicking that you don't know that worked on you or brand moments that you don't know. They created brands that you don't know that you're buying because of. Just because they've created this great brand. So it's cool. But it's also like you said, those bad marketers bring down the profession for marketing.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yep.

[Hugh]

Lastly, where could people find you and what everything you're doing?

[Unknown Speaker]

I mean, you know, you can find sked anywhere at Getsked Social. Sked Social. You can find me personally, I'm an X person. I'm a Twitter person. So it's pretty much my only social channel these days. It's Just injected into my veins. Yeah, so, so they're LinkedIn, but yeah, come and chat. Come and come and see what we do.

[Hugh]

Oh, an ex person. I, I was on X. I, I still on X. I'm like more of a lurker now.

[Unknown Speaker]

I wish I don't post as much as I used to. I, I agree. I don't post as much as I used to.

[Hugh]

It's gone through like a renaissance. The few, last few. Like it's gone from. I remember like, I think it was probably early days where someone texts me like, this is a great, this is like someone who is like five to six or like 10 years older than me said this new platform on Twitter, it's great for brands. Brands post all these things on there and that's be great. And now it's like this hugely conversational news news outlet that it's, it's crazy now. It's a crazy, it's a cool, it's a good platform to be a, a lurker.

[Unknown Speaker]

It is a good platter. It's, it's, it's a very, it's very much a melting pot.

[Hugh]

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Thank you for having me.

[Daniel Murray]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us.

[Hugh]

A five star rating.

[Daniel Murray]

It helps bring more marketers into our community.