From the inside, what would you say actually broke?

Well, the company actually just sold for $20 million.

So if you want to go even deeper on that.

It was sold, I think, about two weeks ago in kind of what was a fire sale.

I mean, yeah, happy to go into it.

I think, you know, like when...

When BuzzFeed first started, there was kind of a gold rush in digital.

just sticking with the thread of click up you know click up actually ran a super bowl ad made entirely in-house love to find out from you what did it actually cost and did it work

Can you give me like the two minute career story? Who are you? How'd you get here? What do you do now?

Yeah, it's a little weird.

So early days, BuzzFeed.

I started BuzzFeed when there were 10 people.

So very early, the company kind of blew up, became a household name in media.

And my team there was all of brand, all of creative.

I grew it to, I think we were like 150 people globally, my team.

There's something different happening here.

Sure.

So everything that we're hearing is just like kind of across the market and things that I'm doing as, as the editor-in-chief of State of AI and, and the w- the research that my team is doing.

But, um, what we are seeing is that it, it's like fail a lot first, and then like let's figure it out on the back end.

I think the-- like there's a lot of-- maybe, maybe for the first time ever, companies are feeling like the, the guardrails and the safety wheels can be kind of taken off a little bit in certain capacities where there's a more room to fail because everyone's experimenting with like outcomes and, and what that looks like.

So we're not really seeing that be built in too much to start.

I think there's gonna be-- like once companies are able to move past the pilot stage, which I think a lot of them are still very much in, they'll, they'll start to understand like how it actually fits within, within the guardrails of the brand and the touch points and how it-- they treat it like a true like CS employee or contact center employee.

But I think for right now, like there's not, there's not as much like, I guess, company-wide governance over like what AI does and, and how it functions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, like, I think, I think you wanna try to find, like, the marriage between how do you turn angles and news into the rallying cry of that ICP and the things that they wanna read, and still mirror, like, you know, what the goals are or, of the organization.

The thing I will say is the single most valuable thing you could ever do is earn attention, and earn it day after day, and become, like, a catchall for all of those ICPs, and then eventually be able to convert them.

Because once you have them, you can figure out how to convert them.

Like, you c- you just can.

But it's getting them there to begin with.

Mm-hmm.

So I wanna, now that we've talked a bit more about that, I do wanna dive into the State of Brand and hear your thinking behind it, you know, why you all did what you did, and yeah, so tell me some of the behind the scenes details, especially if anything worked better than you were expecting when you launched State of Brand.

Yeah.

So what we do at Outlover, which I haven't touched on yet, is effectively we are building media ecosystems for our customers.

So a front-facing publication, something that allows them to capture the attention of an authority of the industries that they want to have relevance in without it being tied to a blog or something that is just feels like collateral, marketing collateral.

So our thought was two things.

It's working really well for our customers.

We should do it for ourselves, for our own business, for inbounds, for getting people to pay attention to us, for making noise.

But if I think back to, like, your first internship being at BuzzFeed and having this, like, thread of this kind of thinking, where do you think this came from? Like, where is this, like, drive and excitement in these worlds coming from?

But like for our audience out there working at brands or marketers, like what's like a good pitch to their internal teams on why they should invest in this area of marketing?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's over time you're gonna start ...

Like, if you haven't already, which I think every marketer we've spoken to sees this, like their- the, the efficiencies get worse, like within what you're already doing.

Like, if you're just kind of speaking into the ether and just talking about what you do, like you're ... that's not gonna like go up and to the right.

I think this is the only avenue left in terms of being able to like own a pocket of what's, what's happening in the market.

Um, you know, it, it's, it's just ...

Like, I think marketers speak in like, um, like acronym speech, right? Like it's IC- ICP and ABM.

A, do you think that that's gonna happen? And B, how do you prepare your clients or how are brands thinking about where they show up?