Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Stiles.
Mike, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started out in TV news, as the backup anchor at a network affiliate in SC. Fortunately, the main anchor was drunk quite a bit of the time, so I got to do a lot of anchoring. Eventually, I left to go back to my first love of radio and more to the entertainment side. I did weekends at Y106, where I met my wife (who was also my boss) until I got a full-time morning show host job at Rock103 in Columbus. Successful there, we moved up to shows in other markets like Austin and Raleigh, until I came “home” to Atlanta to produce Steve & Vikki on Star94 for seven very fun years. A few more drive-time show host jobs in Cincinnati and Charlotte later, we again returned to Atlanta. I was at that time running a radio network that supplied comedy bits to radio stations all over the world (just try being funny in Yemen), and was CMO, producer, writer, and actor with the live sketch comedy theater company Sketchworks. After screenwriting the brand content web series “High Rise” for the brilliant Steve Barnes, I was pulled into a social media marketing platform startup, Vitrue, to handle corporate writing duties of nearly every kind. The company was acquired by Oracle, so I found myself running all the social channels, the blog, event coverage, and the daily podcast I started for the Oracle Social Cloud product. In 2010, I wrote an ebook called “Showtime: Brands as Content Producers” that made the case for brands to start creating and producing original content. It was the early days of content marketing. After one more full-time stop managing enterprise content strategy at IHG, I started pursuing working with clients directly to help them create content-driven communications plans for their priority business goals, then get that content produced. That’s about when I started looking around and asking, “Wow, how did I ever get here??”
Has it been a smooth road?
My God, no. I tend to not be coy or do a lot of fraudulent professional branding where I come off looking all slick. All I ever wanted to do in my life was to make people laugh and help them forget their everyday problems. Radio was an exceptional way to get to do that and make a living and live wherever I wanted. The fact that we typically always took our shows to #1 let me know my gifts and developed talents were being applied in the right place and in the right way. But you have to be ready for change, and willing to pivot. Talk to anyone who “used” to be in radio, and if they’re being honest they’ll tell you how painful it is to not be doing it anymore. Once you get out, you kinda don’t get back in. At least not the way it used to be. I think we all struggle with how life was supposed to be (expectations) vs what life turned out to be (reality). So, the challenge is to always accept change, wherever that change takes you. I feel lucky that I get to bring a journalism and entertainment approach to corporate content that would otherwise be fairly bland, self-serving vs audience-serving, and help them put on a much better “show.”
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Brand Content Studios story. Tell us more about it.
Essentially, we help businesses figure out what they need to make, and then we make it. That can encompass all the ways brands communicate, such as website, video, podcasts, blogs, whitepapers, social posts, PR articles, and live event speeches and content. Many businesses, and departments within businesses, approach communication in a task-by-task, ad-hoc way, which of course weakens the brand via inconsistent feel and messaging. Customers and prospects can’t get a handle on who you are or how you can help them. Not having a guiding communications plan is devastating, yet so many businesses are operating without one. The same applies to internal communications, which requires deliberate thought about how the company can effectively communicate to their own people. Overall, it MATTERS who writes your material and makes your content. It’s a reflection of you as a brand. What makes Brand Content Studios so different is we’re journalists and creators and entertainers first. We aren’t happy until and unless the content is strong enough to capture an audience’s attention, hold it, grow it, and move them emotionally to take the desired action. It is super crowded out there in terms of content, so it’s not enough just to make something and say you did. Audiences don’t owe you anything. You have to prove to them your content is informative enough, entertaining enough, and useful enough that it was worthy of the time you asked them for.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
It’s not like we don’t know what businesses want. They want the robots or Skynet or whatever to get put into place so they can just flip a switch and qualified leads will come pouring in with no further effort or investment. If those same AI-driven systems can get the prospect all the way to closing, hey so much the better. That’s fine to want that. I wanted to be Batman when I grew up. Spoiler – it didn’t happen. That will actually work, and content won’t be needed – only raw data, provided it’s also machines who are doing the buying. For right now, and I bet for the next 10 years, humans will be doing the buying. And business is a matter of trust. So, as long as an appeal needs to be made effectively to human beings, that appeal will have to be a trust-building, relationship-building exercise. That’s what content in the right hands does so well. So, in terms of trends, the need for this type of content will only increase, and the war for talent who can make this kind of content happen will only intensify. On the flip side, an astonishing glut of very badly done AI-generated content and content cranked out by low wage talent is coming. You’ll always be able to get really bad content done very cheaply, and it will wreck you.
Pricing:
- A half-day workshop on the brand storytelling mandate and structuring around audience-pleasing content – $4k
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.brandcontentstudios.com
- Email: stiles@brandcontentstudios.com
- Twitter: @brandcontentst
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikestiles
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