Creating scalable systems through content engineering: Josh Ritchie, Column Five

Hello there.

Welcome to the Changemakers podcast.

My name's Dave Corlett.

I'm the growth director at the creative agency Shaped By, and this is our podcast, The Changemakers, all about creativity in B2B.

We try and explore that from every conceivable angle you can possibly imagine.

And unbelievably, we are now at 75 episodes of doing just that.

Wow.

That's all I can say.

When we started this podcast four-ish years ago, We didn't really know what we were doing.

I mean, some people would argue that we still don't, but that's a conversation for another time.

75 episodes later, it's become one of the most enjoyable parts of my job here at Shaped by.

I really, really love just getting together with like-minded brand, creative and marketing geeks.

And seeing where the conversation goes.

On to episode 75, and it's no different.

Every now and then we like to get together with our fellow agency peers, folks in the same space as us, see what's going on in their world, see what advice they've got for you guys out there.

And with this one, we thought we'd do a little pod swap.

I talked about us not really knowing what we're doing.

Somebody who very much does know what he's doing is Josh Ritchie, as well as being the co-founder of Column 5 Agency.

Not too dissimilar to us really, operating in a slightly different space, but very similar client base in the B2B, SaaS and tech space.

Josh is one of the co-hosts of Best Story Wins, Column 5's podcast.

If you haven't heard that, I would urge you guys to go and check it out.

We've actually had a few guests that have spanned both podcasts entirely accidentally, I would say, unless they've been stealing our guests, which they definitely wouldn't do, and vice versa.

Just wanted to get that out there.

Josh is a lovely, lovely guy.

He is, like anybody in the creative space, in the agency space, navigating a lot of change at the moment.

So I thought it'd be nice to get together with Josh and just talk about what that looks like from his perspective, what he's seeing in his clients' worlds that's leading him to adapt and change and mould the way that they do things at Column 5 for their clients.

So that's exactly what we get into.

We focus a lot of the episode on what the industry and Josh in particular is terming content engineering.

You could also call it brand engineering to a degree, depends on which side you sit.

But ultimately, creating scalable content, scalable content systems with AI obviously very much at its core.

There's a bunch of other stuff that we get into.

One of the interesting topics that I think that you'll enjoy us noodling on is...

The level at which brands need to be really rigid in the way that they go to market.

Now in previous years, I and my team here would have said that's an absolute necessity.

Consistency is king.

You need to show up in the best way possible everywhere that you go to market.

actually, the reality is that AI is spreading everything so thinly these days that maybe that's just not possible.

Maybe we need to let go of the straitjacket just a little bit.

Anyway, that's something that we'll get into as well.

So I'm really excited to bring you this conversation with Josh Ritchie, the co-founder of Column 5, on episode number 75, a very proud moment for us here at The Changemakers.

Okay, here we go.