Brewing Success with Steve Rubel: Amplifying Content in a Competitive World

This week on Pipeline Brew, Matt sits down with media analyst and communications strategist, Steve Rubel, who brings a wealth of experience from his nearly 20-year tenure at Edelman, where he served as EVP of Media Insights and Strategy. 

Steve shares how his early passions of media, sports, and technology have led him to where he is today. As he touches on the evolving world of PR, Steve highlights just how much the field has evolved to what it is today, where influences, creators, and journalists are increasingly intertwined. Similarly, Matt & Steve explore the dichotomy between screen time and content creation – despite more channels for advertisements than ever before, brands are often losing attention due to the stark rise of content hitting smartphones.

To counteract today’s media noise, Steve emphasizes the importance of crafting authoritative and engaging content, offering insights on how companies can effectively harness both earned and owned media strategies. 

Stick around to hear “What’s On Tap for Steve Rubel.” With their conversation taking place prior to the AFC & NFC championships, Steve successfully predicts who would go on to win the 2025 Super Bowl.

Steve Rubel is a dynamic media analyst, innovation catalyst, and communications strategist with decades of experience in anticipating trends and shaping actionable insights that help organizations stay ahead in an evolving media landscape. 

During a 19-year tenure at Edelman, Steve provided strategic counsel to hundreds of global corporations and nonprofits, earning consistently high marks from client CEOs, CCOs, CMOs, as well as the firm’s workforce.

Matt Hummel: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun yet insightful conversations where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.

Hey everyone. Today I’m super excited to be joined by Steve Rebell. You’ve most likely heard of Steve before. He was with Edelman for nearly 20 years where he was EVP of Media Insights and Strategy. He’s been named a several prestigious lists, including pr, weeks 40, under 40, and the forbes.com Web Celeb 25.

Steve also has a significant presence on LinkedIn with nearly 200,000 followers. Steve, welcome to the show. How are you today? I. 

Steve Rubel: Good. Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Matt Hummel: My pleasure. So Steve, we like to kick off each episode with a little icebreaker to get the ball rolling and if you’ve listened to the show before, you know what’s coming.

So with [00:01:00] that, Steve, what is your go-to beverage when you need a little pick me up. 

Steve Rubel: Okay. So I’m a Starbucks fan. They’re a former client of mine. I’ve been drinking Starbucks for 30 years. I wanna say as soon as they came into my area, I. And I have a, let me think. A grande iced coffee with extra ice and no sugar, no milk, black, 

Matt Hummel: A grande iced coffee, extra ice, black.

That’s it. That’s it. Okay. And how did you stumble on realizing you needed more ice for your iced coffee? 

Steve Rubel: For some reason when you order iced coffee at Starbucks? They don’t put a lot of ice in it, which you know, you would think you would want, but it makes it like. I don’t know. It makes it less of an iced coffee to me.

I mean, I find it’s more lukewarm than cold. 

Matt Hummel: Oh, nobody likes lukewarm coffee. Although I will have to say I’m not a cold coffee fan or an iced coffee fan. I guess there’s a difference in cold [00:02:00] brew and iced coffee. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but are, you’re not a cold brew guy, you’re just an iced coffee guy.

Steve Rubel: I never understood why I would wanna spend the extra money. I couldn’t really tell, you know, I don’t know how much, what the difference is, but it’s already expensive and I just don’t understand what the value is. I’m sure there is something. It just never was, it never rented my needs. I understand. 

Matt Hummel: So you’re also, you’re a northeast guy, you live up in Long Island, is that correct?

Correct. Strong Island. So it seems the more folks I meet from the northeast, the more I understand sort of the appeal, if you will, of iced coffee. So are you also a hot coffee guy or if it’s 10 degrees you’re drinking iced coffee? 

Steve Rubel: I used to do that. I used to switch like around October, November, and then switch back.

I never talked about this in, in March or April, and then I just noticed that I, it took me forever to drink the hot coffee and, and I’m weird. I like to go and have my coffee at Starbucks. It’s like my, yeah, five or 10 minutes, or 15 or 20 minutes of, of, [00:03:00] you know, peace before whatever I’m gonna do. And so I found that when I drink the hot coffee, it’s so hot that, and especially now that they don’t have the milk station anymore, you have to put it in yourself.

I’m sorry that they, that they put it in for you and, you know, sometimes it’s not enough and sometimes it’s too much and sometimes it’s, it’s not. And so I, I just said, you know, why aren’t I just drinking ice all year round and even though I’m not always freezing, but, 

Matt Hummel: well, there you go. Well, rumor has, its, Starbucks is coming back out with the self, self-service milk station, so I 

Steve Rubel: Did you hear that?

Yes. Before I left Edelman, I did hear that. Yes. 

Matt Hummel: Steve, before we talk about what you’re up to today, I’d love to hear more about, you know, yourself, your passions, and really your background. 

Steve Rubel: Sure. So I have a couple of different fascinations that have pervaded my life and this, I would say there’s three of them, two of which I’ve somehow managed to [00:04:00] combine and, and you know, have that power of my entire career.

And those three fascinations are media, sports, and technology. So the sports, you know, we could talk about another time, but on the technology and the media side, I’ve just been hugely fascinated by both those industries. And also I was fortunate to be, I think, born at the right time, you know? Right. You know, I started my career just as the internet era was getting going in the nineties and was there, you know, during the social media era and now during the AI era.

So. I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve been able to kind of follow those two passions and have that really, you know, be the, uh, underpinning of a lot of what I’ve done over the years. 

Matt Hummel: Well, that is awesome. And media, sports and tech. Are you familiar with Bill Simmons, by chance? 

Steve Rubel: Of course. Of course. Yeah.

Yeah. We could talk about sports all day. I don’t know if that’s what you wanna talk about, but I mean, I could talk about that whole day. 

Matt Hummel: Well, [00:05:00] I could too. I think we may lose some of the audience, but yeah, we would lose 

Steve Rubel: half the audience. Yeah. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Well, no, you mentioned media, sports and tech and, and my mind goes to Simmons, who’s obviously he’s a Boston guy, so I’m, you know, being a New York guy, I didn’t know how you’d feel about him, but he has been, I would say, pretty revolutionary for the industry.

And I think his sort of. Bringing together passion of media and sports, and there’s probably a tech element in there somewhere, but it’s just been fascinating to see sort of how he stepped away from ESPN and then really built this media empire somewhat centered around sports. I think his sports background certainly helped him get to where he is, but then he, as you know, he, he folds in a lot of pop culture and.

He’ll do movie reviews and all those things, so it’s pretty cool. 

Steve Rubel: Absolutely. And we can talk about this too. There’s a blurring of the influencer slash creator world at the media world also. What do you mean by that? There are more journalists now that are going out on their own. Hmm. Either intentionally or just due to reductions in force in in the media community.

[00:06:00] And I think they’re seeing kind of the movement that’s long been underway. For people who are really excellent at their craft and excellent understanding audiences to be able to become a creator on, whether it be on TikTok, especially, I would say Instagram. Mm-hmm. YouTube, those three snapshot to a degree, but also, you know, I mean X, you know, blue Sky will be next.

LinkedIn. Absolutely. You know, Substack and those channels two. Many of them are, are starting to go on, on their own. Uh, whether it be a Taylor Lorenz who was with the, um, you know, with the Washington posts most recently, uh, Paul Krugman, who was with the New York Times was the, you know, was the economics writer and now has a Substack, uh, or Tina Brown or you know, who was, you know, with, uh, daily Beast.

I mean, so they’re, and and it’s not just big names, it’s increasingly specialized names too, so that you have that and then you have the individual creators. Podcasters, [00:07:00] YouTubers, et cetera, who are more and more covering news content and bringing on news guests. And most notably, during the, you know, during the 2024 election cycle, they had an influence on, on the outcome.

And, you know, many of, and the, you know, the, the two candidates went to all of those, you know, those podcasts to be on. In some cases they actually could not get on the show. And then you have also a blurring in the sense that you have some of the, the media brands hiring those creators. So you see that as well.

Pew did a, a recent s uh, study on kind of what they call news influencers and news adjacent, uh, creators and the power that they have and who they are and so forth, and where they publish. And so I think that that world, there’s been a collision that’s been going on there for a number of years. 

Matt Hummel: That’s really interesting and yeah, I think you have a follow on question.

When I think about someone like Bill Simmons, who I think arguably started out [00:08:00] where he was more of that kind of individual or brand individual and then eventually built out the Ringer Network, which I would contend, you know, has been a, a competitor to some degree of, of a major conglomerate in ESPN. Do you see sort of the pendulum swinging.

Not entirely back to where we were, where you have all these folks joining the major networks or news stations, but where you have a collection of these individuals who maybe have spun off and then start to come together to form sort of these smaller, yet more powerful brands who start to create a bigger presence and could potentially even take some, some of the market share from some of the larger organizations.

If not, replace ’em all together. 

Steve Rubel: Yeah. I’m not seeing them gang up together as much. I’m seeing them because they’re, I think they make a bet on a platform and they realize that they’re beholden to that platform and hence the, you know, the, the kind of the hand ringing that’s been going on over the potential shutdown of TikTok as we, as we record this.

Matt Hummel: Mm-hmm. 

Steve Rubel: That, you know, [00:09:00] I think that, you know, they, a lot of those. Creators bet on that platform, and now they’re saying they have to go take their audience and, you know, somewhere else where the, where the algorithm may not be as hos hospitable to them. So there’s always that tension between do we do something on the open web or do we create a podcast network or, or do we make a bet on a particular platform?

But I think more and more the media companies are getting savvy and they’re hiring them. I think, you know, ESPN for example, just to name an example from the sports world, you know, hiring a Pat McAfee. Who, you know, who is, you know, controversial, new to a degree, I mean, a relatively new voice. And they let him, you know, pretty much run his own, you know, run his own reign and very successfully, I would argue, for both of them with occasional tension here and there.

And I think that you’re gonna see it both ways. And there’s no, and there’s no single solution. But I, I think that’s a super interesting model that could be applied. It’s not just applicable. Media. It’s [00:10:00] also, I think if you’re a corporation and you have individual employees who are empowered and can do that and are subject matter experts, it gets to be interesting as well.

Matt Hummel: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s a great example with Mac if you go into ESPN. So well, before we dive in further, you know, getting back to kind of your background, can you outline your point of view on the current PR landscape today? I. 

Steve Rubel: So I have a couple different perspectives on it. So first of all, I think it’s been a highly adaptable trade for the, you know, 30 plus years that I’ve been in it for many years.

It was really only one thing, it was media relations. It was, you know, mm-hmm. Earning coverage in, in traditional broadcast and print outlets. That has not gone away. I mean, that’s still, I think, you know, what we would call our media. I. It’s still a, a backbone of the profession, but it’s now [00:11:00] interdisciplinary and that you have, you know, over the years it’s grown to include.

Website development, content strategy, intellectual property development in the form of research or studies, social media management and community management, paid media, experiential, entertainment, marketing. So it’s really, the big firms especially have diversified and medium sized firms too. And small firms, they’ve, they’ve diversified into all of those different services and how they hook them together.

I would say unlike advertising. It has not yet been highly disrupted. It seems to get knocked around a little bit for a short while and then quickly finds its footing and figures out how to just become even more relevant in the changes. And obviously the rise of social media particular and that crisis and issues that come out of that, and the speed through which those happen now has [00:12:00] made communications and, and the advisory services that it provides.

Highly relevant, not only to chief communications officers, but to the CMOs and also to the CEOs. So the reporting structure for the chief communications officers. A lot of them now report into CEOs. They don’t report to, uh, CMOs. They, I mean, they’ve reported over the years to, to the legal, they report into hr.

Now they’re reporting more and more, you know, into CEOs. So they have a, they have more of a seat at the table. But it’s certainly diversified a lot in the practice of it over the last 15, 20 years. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah. So as you think about where we are today, and that’s a great unpacking of kind of the current state, why do you think we got here?

You know, I would imagine 20 years ago, the separation of church and state, right? You have earned coverage and paid to whatever degree it existed. Then those were sitting on two separate islands. They don’t talk to each other. How did we end up where we are today? 

Steve Rubel: I think the [00:13:00] major reason is, is because of the amount of competition, effort, effort, attention, and you know, and so we’re consuming more media than ever.

’cause if you just think about it, you know, the, you know, the smartphones fill every pocket of your day. There’s no thing anymore for most people in with downtime. I mean, they’re, look, you know, if you’re on a supermarket line, you’re looking at your phone. If you’re watching tv, you’re looking at your phone.

If you’re in your, you know, you’re, you’re falling asleep, you’re looking at your phone. So it’s, it’s filling all these pockets of time, but at the same time, there’s been explosion in content. And if you want, whether it be media coverage or, or owned content to be seen. You have to amplify it through a paid channel.

And there’s a lot of tremendous ways to do that, whether it be, you know, the Facebook advertising network or what LinkedIn offers with, you know, account based marketing or what, you know, with Google and wherever come, whatever comes next. So I [00:14:00] think the, you know, a lot of people in communications realize that you have to amplify earned with paid.

You have to, you have to find ways to make it be seen and owned as well. And. If you’re not thinking about that in a holistic way, that content may not be seen. 

Matt Hummel: That makes sense. Do you think there was a season and, and the answer could be this is still the case, but do you think sort of the coming together of all of that and, you know, you described the need for it for amplification, which makes sense because of all the noise, all the content out there, you know, an organization’s ability to stand out amongst the noise Today it’s, it’s, there’s still an element of that.

I think a lot of it is now the algorithms. That are at play, but did you see a degradation in the quality of content that was coming out, particularly when you were first starting out at Edelman? I would imagine to get a piece picked up and for it to be earned, the focus was on great journalism, great writing.

Is that still the case today? Was there a gap in that where it was more just churning out content because it [00:15:00] became more advertorial in nature? 

Steve Rubel: I’m not sure if I actually thought about that and and can observe a change. I do know that, for example, that journalists are more discerning than ever they used, so just take surveys, right?

Surveys used to be the backbone of every, you know. Earned campaign you would think of, and you would survey, you know, 500 people or you would do what’s called an omnibus, where, you know, there’s companies that go out there and they run, you know, they put surveys in front of consumers and they ask them like, you know, 15 or 20 different questions that are on various topics.

And each of those que chunks of those questions is owned by different companies. So that’s what they call it, omnibus, because it, and, and you would get back 500 responses or something like that, and, and the media would write about it because it was enough. That bar’s going up, they won’t write about those, that kind of stuff anymore, because they’re looking for things that are more thorough, more authoritative, more rigorous, and also sharper and, you know, more insightful and more than just a, you know, a [00:16:00] poll of, you know, 500 people.

So I think that they, they’re becoming more discerning at the same time, is less of them. Less journalists and at the same time as, you know, at any given time, there’s less outlets because, you know, they fold and new ones get started too. So it changes. But I would say that, I don’t know if it’s because the content volume is going up necessarily, it’s just, but the bar overall to be seen, whether it be through the algorithm, whether it be through, you know, an a, a third party.

Or on your own is going up. Absolutely. Is going up every single day. Mm-hmm. And these creators, for example, who are on LinkedIn, TikTok, et cetera, it’s deceiving when you look at their content, how hard they work, how many, you know, how many cameras they have going, how long it will take them to make a video and perfect it and edit it.

And sometimes they edit it [00:17:00] themselves and often they edit themselves. The bigger ones have teams, but the work that goes into that. Massive. And the creativity that goes into that is also massive. So I think that sometimes marketers, you know, it, it’s not a matter of building and they will come. It’s really, I mean, it’s about differentiation.

It’s about, it’s about quality. It’s about, you know, thinking about, you know, needs of people. And I should point people, you know, my former employer, Edelman did a study every year with LinkedIn on the types of content that B2B marketers. Find most appealing when it comes to thought leadership and the quality and the types of assets and thinking that you go into that and it’s free.

The most recent one came out in November and it’s always rich with, with great data points on, you know, on just, you know, what types of content least business buyers wanna see. 

Matt Hummel: That’s cool. I think that’s a great reference document. We get tons of questions and we have tremendous amount of data at Pipeline360 because we’re processing.

Nearly 20 [00:18:00] million leads a year on B2B for around B2B content. But I think that’s a great asset folks could reference because we do get that question a lot of what is the best, whether it’s, you know, type of asset, is it long form, short form video ebook? Is it omnibus? Is it all the above? So that’s a good call out, Steve.

I know, you know, I know you’ve got some perspective on, you know, the impact to call it trade press and some of the challenges that have been faced there. Can you unpack your perspective on that? 

Steve Rubel: So I, I love the trade press and on a lot of levels and, and I just wrote about this on LinkedIn, uh, recently. I, I did a, um, analysis of.

Some were trade, some were more consumery, vertical outlets. Because when you focus on a vertical or you know, or trade, you know, in particular, they have a built-in advantage and the advantage is scarcity. Right? There are not that many outlets that cover the, the [00:19:00] hospital industry or the grocery industry.

I mean, there’s tons that cover food, but there, you know, when you get to. Very specific, you know, and I’m a fan of the, um, like the retail dive and the, there’s a whole group of those, uh, dive outlets and they cover specific vertical industries. And when you cover an industry with depth, you build up a formidable expertise.

And unlike other content verticals. That information isn’t widely available. If you wanna find, you know, food sites or technology sites, there’s a lot of those and they have different points of view and they have different talent and some of ’em get different kinds of access and so forth. But if you really wanna know what’s going on in, in an industry that you’re in, there aren’t lots of outlets that are.

And, and if you, and yes, you can follow ones that are more general, that will cover that industry to a degree, but they won’t cover it with depth. [00:20:00] So I think they have scarcity going for them and they also benefit from Google because people are looking for very specialized things. Some of ’em have a very good LinkedIn game.

A lot of them certainly were very good on active on X, although I think that’s changing now because of the nature of where X is and how polarizing it’s become. And maybe Blue Sky will be next, or you know, whatever it is. But certainly on LinkedIn, they’re doing a, they’re active on Reddit in some cases, and there’s fewer of them because there’s less advertisers and they may not be able to charge for content the way that they used to.

I mean, years ago they used to do things like what’s called controlled circulation, where they would verify the actual audience that they have. Now it’s a little harder to do that nowadays, but they certainly, they’re, you know, formidable with email. They are also really good. I mean, big way they make money is through events.

Matt Hummel: Mm-hmm. 

Steve Rubel: And through, you know, webinars and, and the like, where some of which are, are paid and sponsored or a mix. So I think that [00:21:00] they’re, you know, I don’t see that there’s less in them, but I don’t see that being disrupted because those audiences still have information needs. And those needs are not going to be served through LinkedIn.

Mm-hmm. They’re not gonna be, and there’s not gonna be served. They might be served through email lists and things like that, but I think the trades are gonna hang on and, but they’re, you know, there may not be as many of them, but you know, I mean the, you know, dive 

Matt Hummel: Got it. 

Steve Rubel: The retail dive and, and the like is, I think he’s an it dive, you know, that they, I think they do, from what I understand, they do pretty well.

And there’s a, there’s a journalist out there, Brian Morrisey, who writes about all this stuff and he’s a huge fan of. Vertical media and the success around that. 

Matt Hummel: Interesting. Well, you talked about the role that social media has had on trade press and even Google, you know, as a search engine. Thinking kind of about the long form, long, you know, long form keywords that are probably shaping a lot of that.

Do you see AI or, or is ai, you know, [00:22:00] shaping that field as well? 

Steve Rubel: It’s starting to, because, you know, so chat, CPTI think has, uh, they said 200 million users every week, I think was the last stat that they gave. So that’s a huge number. And they now have a, a search product that is, I would say, excellent. Mm-hmm.

And it’s. You know, it’s hard sometimes I pay for the, for the, for the pro version or for the, um, plus version, I think they call it. Mm-hmm. And so it’s hard for me to know what’s in the free version, but I, I know that they’re making the search product available in the free version. It’s good. And it hasn’t replaced Google yet for me by a long shot.

But you could see that it’s starting to, the ability for somebody to come in and not just ask a question and get an answer, but ask a follow-up question. And get an answer is, I think that gets overlooked that that ability to have a, an add-on question, a two or three mm-hmm. [00:23:00] On top of a search, which really a, a typical search engine today can’t do.

The media companies, they seem to be in two camps when it comes to the AI platforms. Some of them are partnering with the perplexities, the anthropics, the open ais of the world. Some of them are suing them. Hmm. And the ones that are partnering, I think could benefit because we’ve seen that when these major platforms come along and they start to throw news sites, a lot of traffic, some of them right away, figure out how to take advantage of that.

And it’s early. But I think as more and more the consumer or the information, consumer behavior moves into ai. And, you know, look, I would never count on Google. I mean, they reportedly are gonna disrupt search this year in some big way. You know, I think there was a report about that a couple weeks ago, [00:24:00] so I would say that, you know, it’s early, but, but the, the media companies that are, you know, the Axle Springers and you know, and so forth, the News Corps that are partnering with the, with OpenAI in particular are poised to benefit.

In the short term. 

Matt Hummel: That makes sense. It’s, it’s just fascinating the number of use cases and current, but also potential disruption that, that Gen AI in particular could have on, you know, not just our industry, but really, you know, across, across the world, across all industries. So, great point of view there.

Steve Rubel: It’s the most disruptive thing I’ve seen in my career and I think it’s just, you know, it’s just getting going. And as agentic AI comes in and starts to really. Become a force where you just push a button and ask it to do something and it comes back and does it for you, which actually, mm-hmm. Uh, OpenAI demonstrated that yesterday with their first serious agentic AI launch.

So you could just see it’s gonna disrupt the buyer seller relationship in a big way. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah. I had a former guest on the show, [00:25:00] Greg Verdino, who runs an AI consultancy and 

Steve Rubel: Oh, I know, I know Greg a long time. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah, 

Steve Rubel: He’s terrific.

Matt Hummel: Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Yeah, he’s a Long Island guy as well. So he was on the show and he made a comment.

He said, gen AI is both the most overhyped disruptive technology, but also the most under hyped, disruptive technology. And what he meant by that was essentially the use cases that typical marketers are using it for. You know, plug in an outline or create an outline, and then create a piece of content. Eh, that’s okay.

I think it’s really how marketers were using it even six months ago. It wasn’t taking everyone’s jobs away, it wasn’t changing the world. It wasn’t even necessarily making things better. On the other hand, and I think in line with what you’re saying, he was saying it’s the most under hyped thing because people still really are just now starting to figure out its potential to be that disruptive technology that we all believe it truly could be.

Pretty recently, you presented a LinkedIn live session with MuckRack all about earned media and thought leadership, and can you start by just outlining what that was about [00:26:00] and how it relates to business content? 

Steve Rubel: Sure. So if your audience isn’t familiar with Muck Rack, first of all, I’m not working for them.

I’m, I’m just a huge fan of the, of the, of the product. I will disclose that I got, I’m getting access to the free product in, in conjunction to doing a little bit of covets with them. So just full disclosure there, M Rack is, I became a fan of it at a, at Edelman, and it’s a tool that the PR trade uses. Its primary benefit to the PR trade is, you know, it’s a fantastic media directory.

You wanna go find a reporter who’s at the New York Times and their contact information and see everything that that reporter has written about and their social content. It’s all in one place. And they also index the full text of 600,000 global news sources. I think they license the data from, from LexisNexis or, or some other source, and it’s used in the PR trade.

But that tool has a, the data that’s in it. Is tremendously powerful. And so the way I use that particular [00:27:00] tool is I have a process for pulling data out of that and analyzing what’s going on in the media to help really teams in our consulting clients that I’m working with currently understand what’s going on in the news environment so they can really be more effective with their earned media strategies.

But the content that’s in there, the data, the news data. Has so much more value than just brass tacks kind of, you know, PR stuff. Mm-hmm. It’s very useful if you kind of understand what the zeitgeist is in news and look at it through different lenses. It’s very useful for planning a content strategy because if that’s what the pros are doing.

Why not follow in their footsteps, you know, successfully is clues. Or if you wanna create a thought leadership franchise like the Edelman Trust Barometer, where I used to work or you know, Microsoft has the work trends study. You know, [00:28:00] Adobe’s got different, you know, studies that they put out. There’s a lot of companies that, you know, put out tentpole pieces of ip.

Then it’s helpful to understand what the media is writing about. So that you can lean into that and draft off that in building your content strategy. So it has way more uses than just, you know, very tactical PR stuff. So the LinkedIn Live I did was, I took segments of outlets that cover a specific industry, like three in tech, three in retail, three in healthcare, et cetera.

And I indexed everything that those outlets wrote. Over a two month period at the end of last year, and I didn’t publish this, but on my side broke down statistically the themes and topics that they’re writing about, and then the percentage of stories within those themes that are about critical issues, [00:29:00] about problems, and then really in the deck that I posted on LinkedIn, and we can link up in the show notes.

Really breaks down, like what are the top problems that they’re writing about. Mm-hmm. And the reason I like, and so somebody said to me, why do you like writing about the problems? That’s such a downer. And it is. But that’s where corporations can come in and showing that they either A, they understand those problems.

Matt Hummel: Mm-hmm. 

Steve Rubel: So, you know, thought leadership content that really, you know. Shows that you understand a problem like lack of trust in Edelman’s case with the trust barometer, which has been around for 25 years, and that you understand how to solve for those problems are gonna be more successful. You could do that in the abstract, you could do that on your own through your own knowledge, but there are data sources available to you to understand those better.

And then to plan your content around that. And so I think that’s a super exciting data set that I think [00:30:00] is untapped for that purpose. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah, that’s fascinating. If you think about, you know, that from an earned perspective, I. Then you think about it from a, you know, kind of translating it into the demand world.

Are you a fan of, you know, I don’t know if this term is still used, but the PESO model, you know, there was paid, earned, shared, and owned content. Do you still feel that’s a valuable approach to an overarching content strategy with an organizations? 

Steve Rubel: I would put share and earn together. ’cause I think that that’s kind, I mean, we could debate this, but that, that term is certainly, you know, well, you know, used throughout the industry and Yes.

And I think it’s, I think the hard part is really understanding where the cycle begins and where it ends. Unpack that for me. So you’re gonna get different answers. So let’s just say that there’s three, and it’s like a circle, right? And so one stars then drives the other, then drives the other. And so it’s, it’s a, it’s a round a circle.

The advertising people, I would imagine, think that [00:31:00] it’s often about the ad creative first and the brand ethos and the idea, and that television advertising can drive, can they probably see it as advertising first, earned media and social, you know, earned media, including social amplification. I. Off that creative, you know, whether it be through social media or YouTube and not, not only, you know, the paid media does not necessarily be, not only have to be a TV ad, it can be, you know, a piece of content that’s on social and then, you know, own content helps accelerate that.

Or is, or is a payload within that. If you talk to, you know, PR people, they might say that it starts with an earned, an earned centric mindset first. Have that inform the, both the, the paid and the owned and use paid to amplify that content, which I, which you talked about first before you have others who think that it starts at all with the content and that, you know, and then everything radiates out from that.

I don’t think there’s anyone answer [00:32:00] it. It varies by industry, it varies by need. If you’re dealing with crisis and issues, it’s completely different than if you’re dealing with brand promotion. If it’s, you know, top of the funnel versus bottom of the funnel. I mean, a lot of different. Considerations, but that model, yes.

But that model’s been around, I would argue, for a long time. Mm-hmm. An owned asset Yes. Is, is the newest one to a degree. Again, I’m lumping in social with earned, you can lump it in with paid also, because, you know, a lot of it is, is is paid too. So I, I don’t know if it’s its own thing anymore, like it, it used to be, especially given how much disruption is happening in that space.

Mm-hmm. But. I think you could argue that it’s been around for, you know, decades. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah, yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier in the show that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get picked up with earned coverage, and that’s because I think you said there’s fewer journals, there’s fewer publications. Yes. So I think you used three words.

You said content needs to be thorough, [00:33:00] rigorous, and authoritative. When I look at the challenges that I’m seeing in the B2B. Demand world. Those are the same challenges. Now, I shouldn’t say same challenges in terms of getting picked up, but I think in terms of getting read, there’s just so much noise out there.

And so, you know, I go back to your thought around just having a unified strategy and, and all content should start from that strategy. That’s been a big push of ours within the demand world because. I think the role and rise of Gen AI has really watered down so much of what’s out there, and I think a lot of marketers over pivoted towards this.

Oh my gosh, we need more content. We need more content. We’ve gotta keep it, we just need to be cranking it out to be able to keep up with Google’s new algorithm and just the volume and competition and. It became too much and I don’t know if consumers pushed back or search engines pushed back. I think probably a little bit of both.

’cause you know, Google’s got, I think their new eat review where it’s really just around the [00:34:00] quality and integrity of, of content, and I. I would imagine, you know, the role of earned and owned and shared and all that works together as part of that, you know, formula that helps Google’s ranking of your content.

But I think it’s the same thing I think for B2B demand marketers, and I’d love to get your perspective if you have, you know, anything different to add to this. But you know, your content needs to be thorough, it needs to be rigorous, and it needs to be authoritative. It needs to have. A strong and differentiated point of view.

I think the days of saying, well, if we’re, if we gate something, it needs to be an equal exchange of value. Now it’s, if you want anybody to read something gated or ungated, it’s gotta be an exchange of value. ’cause you’re still asking for that person’s time. 

Steve Rubel: I also think more and more it needs to be entertaining.

Matt Hummel: Ah, yeah, yeah. 

Steve Rubel: And, and that’s the hard part, right? That’s the hard part. So, but I’ll, I’ll give you an example that I’ve, I’ve long. There’s a company out there in the marketing industry, advertising industry called [00:35:00] Luma Partners, LUMA, and they, they have a founder who is very quirky. His name is, is Terry Kja.

And they are always putting out very, very useful information. They, they have made these things called the lu scapes, which you’ve seen if you’re a marketer, you’ve seen these things. They’ll do like one on the AI lu scape, and what they’ll do is they’ll take all the logos of all the companies that are out there and they’ll put them almost like on a, like on a Disneyland map, and they’ll circle off different segments of it and they say, these people do this and these people do this.

And, and they to, to really help you understand they do a whole lot of them and they put the up on their website. They also make really entertaining videos and they also make really fun infographics on LinkedIn and they put out authoritative decks that you can scroll through. But they are, they’re funny, but they’re useful.

So that, again, now that might be an extreme or small company and big companies, you know, can’t do that [00:36:00] for a lot of reasons. But you know, I think if you have a little bit of an edge, and the edge could be entertainment, the edge could be. Really thought provoking. I think the bar for what is thought provoking now has gone up.

You have to consider the macro environment that you’re in. You may not be competing with the Donald Trumps of the world for attention. You may not be competing with the Logan Brothers or you know, or the, or Joe Rogan or whoever it is, but you are. Mm-hmm. Because that, that every, you know, your buyer is making a choice what to consume and so.

You don’t have to be that, but you have to realize that to stand out, if the utility is really high, it, it can get there. But if you have a little bit of an edge, a little bit of a, of a point of differentiation, whether that is entertaining or whether that is a different, take, a different format. You know, now that I’m outside Edelman, I’m, you know, posting more on LinkedIn and I’m showing how to use the, the [00:37:00] news data in different ways.

That’s something that’s differentiated, I don’t think anybody’s doing. Mm-hmm. It may not be interesting enough to be honest. It may, I may need to think about how I package it up differently or how I work with a designer. We, you know, we get clever around how we present it, but I think more and more it’s having that little bit of an edge to it that is, again, there’s a lot of ways to do that.

It does not need to be controversial, does not, and humor is very hard to do. 

Matt Hummel: Mm-hmm. 

Steve Rubel: Well. But there needs to be some interestingness to it. 

Matt Hummel: Maybe that’s the right word. Maybe it’s interesting because I think entertaining people could take the wrong way and it starts to become silly. It starts to dilute or get away from.

The reality is most B2B companies are solving very real serious challenges and and many cases I. If the problems aren’t solved, then people’s jobs are at risk. Companies, you know, profitability and gross numbers are at risk. So Matt, 

Steve Rubel: it can’t be boring. I think that’s the whole thing. It cannot be boring.

It cannot be be boring. And some of these things, some of these topics are inherently boring. 

Matt Hummel: [00:38:00] Yeah. 

Steve Rubel: Even for people who are reading them and thinking about them all day. And so it’s, it just needs to be a little bit of a point of differentiation to it. And yeah. We’re, you know, where it’s thought, I think thought provoking.

And quickly, you know where you get to the point quickly. 

Matt Hummel: Love it. Well, speaking of entertaining, I want to jump to our last segment for time’s sake, which is called What’s On Tap. So what’s on tap for Steve? And you mentioned at the top of the show you’re a sports fan. I am as well. We’re both American, so we have our classic football, not the one that you actually use your feet to play.

So by the time the show is released, Steve, there will be a new Super Bowl champion. Who, and I know your beloved Giants Jets. No, wait, you’re a Jets fan, aren’t you? Jets? Yeah. Well, the Jets will never be in the Super Bowl. But that aside, who is gonna be the, 

Steve Rubel: probably not in my lifetime or your children’s lifetime.

Uh, the way they’re going. No 

Matt Hummel: doubt we got a new coach. Well, we never thought the Red Sox or the Cubs would win a World Series. And here we are. So don’t, don’t talk about the Red Sox 

Steve Rubel: winning the [00:39:00] World Series. I’m still thinking about 2000. Three, four. Um, wait, so 

Matt Hummel: you, are you, are you a Jets fan and a Yankees fan?

Steve Rubel: Jets Yankees, which is very, from this area. So in New York it usually the, the Jets Mets go together ’cause they both played in Queens for many years. Yeah. And then the Yankees and Giants, there’s a Jersey connection there for whatever reason. New Jersey and Bronx, you know, and also the Giants used to play at Yankee Stadium many, many years ago.

So there’s that connection. They, and it’s unusual that you find. You know, uh, Yankees, jets, combination, but so, well, super Bowl. I, so as we sit here, the A FC Championship and the NFC Championship for this weekend, I can’t go against the Chiefs to make the Super Bowl. So I’m gonna say the Chiefs are gonna win the A FC championship.

And in the NFCI like the commanders, but I have to go with the Eagles. I think that, you know, if that Saquon Barkley is unstoppable right now. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah. 

Steve Rubel: So, and if Jalen Hertz is healthy, I [00:40:00] and the games in Philly, you know, as great as the Commanders are as a story, I’m picking the Eagles. So I think we’re gonna see an Eagles Chief’s rematch and you know.

I, I think it might be the Eagles year. I mean, you know, they seem to have all of the pieces. I mean, it was very impressive that, you know, the playoff victory just pulled out. So I’m, I’m sure the Philly fans will love this, but I’m, I’m I. I know everyone cares, but I mean, I’m picking the um, I’m picking eagles.

Matt Hummel: Thankfully I’m in the seat so I don’t have to make a prediction because I don’t think it’ll be the commanders and I still have to remember they’re the commanders. Commanders. Yeah, I know, right? But I think the Bill’s chiefs game could be an awesome epic game. People say, I think it’ll come down to the refs in that one.

But then, yeah, the Super Bowl, if it is the Chiefs and the Eagles, I think it could be an awesome game. The Chiefs have some cracks in ’em this year and the Eagles. They do. Yeah. I think to your point, if. If Hertz is healthy, which is a coin toss, [00:41:00] whether he is or not, it could be, it could be a fun one. 

Steve Rubel: Yeah.

It’ll be, it’ll be a great game. And so I, but I, I, and you can’t count out Patrick Bones ever. You just can’t. No doubt. You know. 

Matt Hummel: Alright, last question for you. So you 

Steve Rubel: are a Knicks fan? Well, eh, I mean, basketball, I’m, I’m weird with, I, you know, I pay attention, but like, I don’t really, you know, have a, have a horse in the race.

Matt Hummel: Okay. Well I’ll ask anyways ’cause I’m curious. Maybe you can just be a representative of the State of New York with your answer. 

Steve Rubel: Okay.  

Matt Hummel: How do you feel about the Carl Anthony Towns trade?

Steve Rubel: First of all, I think he’s terrific and I just love his story. He’s just very likable. He’s got, you can just see he’s got a great, you know, personality.

His story, his, his mother passed away from Covid early in the pandemic, and so I, I like him and, and Dito a great coach. Yeah. 

Matt Hummel: Yeah.  

Steve Rubel: So, I mean, they might be for real this year, but I don’t know, I just can’t see. Teams getting past OKC, uh, or the Celtics, I [00:42:00] mean, or the calves. I know those, you know, those, those, those are really, really, really good teams.

And, and you can’t, some, I mean, you can’t cut out the bucks, you know, here, you know, so, yep. The Celtics are just so, they’re so well-rounded from what I’ve seen, and I don’t know, but they’re, but the Knicks are from, you know, from what I’ve seen, they’re, they’re getting there again, but I haven’t followed it.

I don’t follow the, I, you know what, I followed basketball really closely in the month In between baseball and, and football. So Super Bowl ends, whatever it is, February 15th or ninth or whatever it is. Yep. And then, and then there’s like, you got 

Matt Hummel: two months of basketball, you 

Steve Rubel: got spring training in a couple of weeks and you know, so, and then you really, but yeah.

Okay. You get, you know, those games are like, you know, they, they don’t count. Yeah. And so it really is till like March 31st, or whenever baseball starts. Those six weeks are when I pay attention to basketball. Got it, got it. And the playoffs. I watch the playoffs ’cause that’s for sure. 

Matt Hummel: Well, awesome. Well, Steve, this has been an amazing conversation.

I, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time today and I know our listeners gonna, are gonna get [00:43:00] a ton out of it. So thank you again for your time, Steve. 

Steve Rubel: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. And you guys are, you know, great company and I love that you’re doing it, so I, I appreciate it.

Matt Hummel: Thanks again to Steve for joining us on today’s episode of The Pipeline Brew. I hope you all enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a comment with your thoughts and make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel, and I’ll see you next time.