How a Marketer Learns to Sell Brands Content Innovation

"Erik: So, where have you found your big company experience – most recently at HBO – most useful in serving clients, you know, in an agency environment? Caroline: Well mostly it’s on the content side. It has nothing, actually, really to do with big company/small company philosophy. It’s more to do with the fact that I worked for a content company; I now have a client that’s also a content company. So the fact that I was inside at a content company is extremely valuable, because [Sighs] selling innovation means that you have to convince a client to deal with a certain increased amount of risk. To do that, they must trust you. It’s like going to the doctor. So, if I don’t trust my doctor, no matter how great of a doctor he is, I will never listen to what he has to say – same with innovation. If the client does not trust me, well then this high-risk idea that I’m trying to sell them will mean nothing to them. So the fact that I came from a content company, for this particular client, I think is valuable because they know that I understand what it is like to be inside of a company – similar, but not quite like, but similar to theirs – and I know what their ills are. And that, I think, helps them trust me a little bit more when I’m selling them on ideas. Erik: How about building that trust with companies that aren’t in that same space? The non-content companies? Caroline: Yeah, different categories? So on that side of the business, I really had to educate myself on what those brands do, and how they operate. Which in the beginning was pretty intense. Because I didn’t know – you know take it the automotive category, or the CPG category – I didn’t really have any clue of how those categories worked. But it was figuring out the questions I needed to ask those clients, to get the answers that I needed to take my expertise of digital and technology and apply it to the brand. You can’t just do that right away, with anyone. You have to educate yourself on what the brand challenge is, and I spent a lot of time in the beginning doing that. So that, by the time I was selling that particular brand on an idea, I had asked questions where I could at least feel somewhat comfortable that I knew what their challenges were, and how this idea specifically related to them."