SPECIAL SERIES: Why Every Brand Needs a Social-First Content Strategy with Eric Stark, Co-Founder of Slate

0:00A quick one before we dive in. If you're running a social team, you need to look at Slate. Video and image editing, long to short form clipping, team approvals, and all of your brand guidelines baked in one place to create content. No chaos. It was built by the guy who ran social for the NFL, so he actually knows what your team is dealing with. Go to slateteams.com to learn more.

0:30Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today, I have Eric Stark, the co-founder of Slate. Super excited for this conversation. He's journeyed through the NFL to co-founding Slate. We're going to talk about all that and talk about social media and dive into all that fun stuff today. But I want Eric to give you a little bit of a story of how he got into social and then climbed up and decided to co-found Slate.

1:23Thanks, Daniel. Excited to be here. Yeah, my background is really in sports and sports social media. And I started at the NFL out of college on the digital marketing side. And this was in 2012, like right as social was actually becoming kind of a full-time role. Like it was still, I think right when I started, the NFL had just hired its first full-time social media manager title people, you know, and it was really websites and, you know, homepages were way more important than social feeds. But that transition started to happen like really quickly from like 2012 to 2014. And yeah, I was always really interested in the content side of things.

2:09And I kind of followed the content and that took me from digital, from websites, from mobile apps, you know, programming content for those channels to social media, because that's where the content went, you know, and where most of the distribution of content went. So I kind of always had like one foot in both like digital and social. And now obviously those two things are much more combined in terms of content strategy and social is really where content gets distributed. I ended up going to the 49ers and was their digital and social content manager and basically kind of controlled all the content that went on the website and then was publishing to Facebook and Instagram and helped them launch their Snap account at that time and start with stories and all these places.

2:54So yeah, it really went from sort of, you know, air traffic control digital strategy to becoming like a content creator as social evolved. And I always found that I wanted my career to be broader than social, right? Like marketing and digital as well. But I would always find myself going back to social because that's where most of the impact was possible, you know? So I kind of always avoided the social media manager title, even though that's where most of my work ended up like funneling back to just because as a marketer and as like a content focused marketer, it's where all the impact was. So I kept finding myself, you know, I just realized over time that that actually was my like expertise.

3:39And yeah, I spent over a decade at the NFL before starting Slate, which, you know, now we're a content creation tool that serves social media and marketing teams. So definitely a type of tool I wish I had when I was doing the job. Yeah. I wanted to ask you that. What was that exact moment when you were in the trenches saying like, these tools are broken. I need to start something new. What was that click in your head that decided that I need a new tool? Yeah. I think it really came with the rise of the stories format on social. I think that format turned social media managers into like cell phone content creators, like very, very quickly, right?

4:25Like all of a sudden, and you weren't just asking your video team for, Hey, make sure this video is like one by one for Instagram feed or like curating highly polished photos. You were, you know, picking up your phone, doing behind the scenes content and like publishing directly to these platforms. um so within that shift like i think everybody who was in you know our space at the time like started realizing like oh like i need to film and edit on my phone um and that platform kind of introduced the idea of sort of or sorry that format kind of introduced the idea of like overlaying content right you'd like take a video add a font on top of it and then publish it to your instagram stories um and all of a sudden we started feeling the pain point of like all of this stuff is nice, but it's off brand, right?

5:16Like I'm creating this content in Instagram. Like, why aren't we using the 49ers red when we try to create it? You know, we needed to publish things to the public Giphy library just to have access to like our brand in those formats. Right. So that's when it really started to click of like, okay, you know, we have to send this media back and forth to a computer to maybe try to like make it on brand. Or some of us are using Canva. Some of us are using native. Some of us are like more adept at premiere and there just really wasn't a tool that was built for like social first creation at a brand. And that social first creation is kind of what the native platform sort of introduced, right?

5:57The set a duration on a piece of text or yeah, like add a sticker, wherever you want swipe to add an overlay or a lower third or a Snapchat filter. Um, and it's kind of like what happens with every platform, right? At first you want to be as native as possible. And then you want to start like differentiating and being brand consistent across these platforms. And yeah, I think as I started creating more stories, content specifically, that's when I really started to realize like I'm creating this content on behalf of like some of the biggest brands in the world. And I'm just kind of defaulting to the typewriter font on Instagram or whatever I want to choose and we need to kind of evolve beyond that but the tools weren't there to do it it's actually kind of crazy to think about that you only had two choices back in the day where you record a content live um whether it was like with a cam with someone with a video camera or on your phone and you had two choices like i need to send these assets back to someone and if you're the only social media manager that means you're going to have to go back and then go edit it yourself um or you had to go like use whatever is available out there and there's nothing available so you have really two choices you either could be like live in the moment or delayed a little bit and wait till you get back in the to a computer to edit something which is a crazy like way to live that was like five years ago it's like not even like it was crazy to live that way exactly exactly Exactly.

7:29And then I think what we saw too, and it was like a signal to us as well, that FlySlate would be valuable. This sort of brand powered creation tool that is still easy to use, right? Because social teams need to move quickly. They don't want to learn Premiere, which is why a lot of social teams just download consumer apps, right? The same apps that are really made for influencers or just you and I, any sort of individual creating content. but we saw like a wave of brands. I don't know if you remember this, like brands would post all of their stories would be these like old school film strips, like that look where it's like, okay, there's like a three photo film strip and it would like, look like it's like an old camera.

8:17And like all of these brands were downloading these random apps that had these filters or frames that Instagram didn't provide. because they wanted to differentiate from... Again, the first wave is like, let's be as native as possible. Everyone's using what's in app. Then it's like, how do we get more creative? So we saw a lot of brands doing that. And it was like, okay, this is different than native, but it still wasn't on brand. It had the app's name in the film strip that they were using. So it was still an influencer sort of thing, not a brand thing. And that was a real signal to us too, that like brands are craving and social media content creators, marketers are craving like more creative tools.

8:59They have all these robust brand guidelines, but those two things aren't like connecting, right? Like the creative tools aren't using that. The ones that are actually easy to use that are actually social first. I know. Cause you did this yourself. Like you posted on Instagram, you managed all these assets. You went through like how to do the old school way and not not being like a native designer doing like photoshop and premiere and all these crazy like tools that are actually pretty hard to use if you anybody's been in a photoshop it's like the old school photoshop it's a hard tool to use if you're not get down um and i know like slate is built by people who actually have done the role and and doing the role so what is like what is those like unique edges that you think like slate had that like the practitioner lens that beats out other tools that don't have the practitioner lens, if that makes sense?

9:53Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. I definitely think it comes to life in a lot of really little ways across the product. There's so many small product decisions we make every day that we just come naturally to us because we do the job. I'd say first at a high level, we make sure the editing is built for social media, right? And that means it's like fast, it's easy, it's intuitive, it's as like mobile friendly as it is like web. And it doesn't feel like heavy in both its complexity, even though it's powerful, but also the content scope, right? So when I say complexity, that's when it's like you're comparing it to like, yeah, using a Photoshop or a Premiere.

10:37When I say like scope, that's when you're comparing it to like, maybe a Canva or a CapCut that has a lot of power and a lot of things you can do in it, but it's a lot of stuff you don't need as a brand social person, right? It's like Canva, for instance, amazing tool, but it's like designed for everything and everyone, right? It's like the same tool your mom will use to, you know, make like an invitation for her like birthday, right? Like you can make mugs on it. You can do a ton of stuff. So like the purpose built stuff just for social media, right? Like how to edit an Instagram reel is kind of like lost than that.

11:10I would say CapCut is more social first, but it's also filled with so many things that are TikTok focused and also creator focused. Things that might not be approved by a brand or things that a brand would have to sift through to find anything that is consistent for them. And a lot of things that they can't customize on both of those tools because they're really built for someone to just jump in and use stock templates. So what makes us different on the creation side is like a kind of like a deep, deep focus on just like social media formats and how social media managers create. Um, and that comes to life in things like, you know, safe zones, like always updating the sort of TikTok L bar to make sure like when you're creating a piece of content, you could actually see what it would look like, you know, when it's, when it's live on social.

11:58Um, and then the customization side on the brand part of it is, you know, being able to set like your text presets for reels versus your text presets for a caption versus your um your subtitle font versus you know the stickers you want on tiktok versus the stickers you want on instagram so like the sort of customization of the experience on the back end and how you could set up your brand in slate that then the editing becomes like free and quick but within the brand framework, that all starts to kind of come together of just like, cause we're so used to creating content in that way. And we still, you know, rely on our own tool to create content for like slate social channels.

12:42You know what I mean? So we, we kind of have that feedback loop built in and yeah, our company basically like anyone who's not an engineer at our company has done social media management in some form or fashion, pretty much like we're a company filled of practitioners and it just it just shows up in a ton of little decisions yeah and that save zone thing's such a good call out because anytime i've used canva or cap cut i always like you i don't use like the the text overlay until i get into like when i used to use it like until i got into like native because i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't tell like where the save zone for text is where it's going to be cut off um and it was just so it's such a painful it's like i have to used three tools to to get the to get this one thing right and it's and and still like you might have to like move the image down or move like the the the video that overlay down because you like it's on the safe zone it's such annoying process to like go back and forth and back especially if you're doing that as your full-time job i'm doing it as a creator but like as a full time job like that would be so annoying to have to hop through 18 different tools um to do that Yeah.

13:56So totally. Yeah. We hear from so many brands, like how many different editing tools they use. And if you're a social team of like two or three, you know, um, oftentimes each individual is using different tools for different things and they're not connected. Right. It's like, Oh yeah. Like I have cat cut on my phone. I like it for that. Like this person uses in shot because they like in shot for a very specific like transition, but like none of them are centered around a brand and none of them are like collaborative with the team, you know, then it's like, you're exporting it, you're dropping it into frame IO, you're getting feedback in frame IO.

14:31Then you're like going back to the source material and that's only on someone else's phone to make the edit. So, you know, it's, it's more than obviously just the creation part of having it be easy to use and confined to your brand. It's also the like steps before and after of like, Like, okay, how can multiple people all work from that same framework in the same editor? Can you request approval in there? Can you get your feedback in there? Like, how do social teams sort of like work around their content creation? And that's, you know, been sort of the evolution of our platform. Yeah. I want to also go into, I know you have like a very strong point of view that distribution in 2026 starts with social.

15:14um can you walk us through like what like operationally what that means like if you say like it starts with like social what does that mean as a marketing department and how should marketing departments think about starting with social i know because a lot of a lot of people think of it as the add-on like oh we're doing this campaign like what should we do for social like we're doing this like what they don't think of it as um i mean doordash was like a perfect example for like the Superbowl, how they like did the whole like campaign social first, they didn't like think about it. So like, how do you, um, how do you operate operationalize that, um, internally?

15:51Yeah. I mean, I think social is the best place to get like instant feedback on if your content ideas are resonating and you kind of have like infinite at bats, right? It's not like a super bowl commercial um or even like putting a bunch of money against like an ad campaign so one way to operationalize it that you know i think some of the best brands are doing is you don't actually have a content or a campaign idea extend to multi-platforms until it's been validated on organic social, right? Because it's so easy to validate an idea on organic social. Whereas taking like six months to come up with a campaign with an agency and you kind of go back and forth internally, everyone has different ideas.

16:44You're like spending so much time, effort and money. And then you release it and hope like the kind of old way of marketing, like you hope that it resonates and hope that it performs. Right. But on social, you can come up with different content ideas every day and like have lightweight versions of ideas or, you know, use the data from the content you're posting on social to inform like, okay, like what is resonating that we should now invest more in, in terms of paid, in terms of, you know, our messaging on digital, in terms of even like billboards and yeah, like commercials. Right. So I think reorienting marketing around social first doesn't just mean like, okay, everything only goes on social.

17:27We don't do other channels. It's more of like social is the sort of center of like excellence and intelligence, like the media entity that informs like the rest of marketing, because it's where content is created at the highest volume. There's like, you know, daily iteration and posting and creativity. And that provides such rich feedback and material that then can get used for what would be slower marketing, slower burn marketing or marketing that costs more and is harder to iterate. So, I think that's a big piece of it. And then the other piece, besides just looking at social as the first stop of any campaign to prove if it should go wider is resourcing that team accordingly and really thinking a bit more like I would say like a media entity that lives within your company versus yeah like a just another distribution channel right not just like a different stop like at the end of a campaign to share something but social teams have turned like you know 20-fold from what I was talking about of you know yeah we used to go from like posting links on social to creating Instagram stories.

18:43Now, social teams are really just in-house production houses. They're on-camera personalities, they're video editors, they're scripting, mini TV shows and skits every day. They're just this sort of production house and that should fuel social but fuel other parts of marketing as well. So, I think they should be resourced differently and resourced more like a sort of internal agency, like an internal media entity. And thought of as sort of the content, like heartbeat of an organization versus just like, okay, they manage like our Instagram account, but the other parts of marketing are sort of more prestigious or, you know, get more money because we, we have to spend money to actually get distribution on those other places.

19:29So I think that, that part really needs to shift. One of the craziest things I think in marketing, especially now is that like organic and paid don't work together. They're like organic should be like the validator of ideas that you spent. Cause once you validate idea and you put extra distribution through paid behind it, like you've already getting, you know, it's going to be seen by more instead of saying I have a bad piece of content. Let me put money to make the bad piece of content be distributed even more because you haven't validated that piece of content before. It's, it's crazy to me that people blow millions of dollars or thousands of dollars behind content that has never been proven out before.

20:13And it's well known and highly encouraged by every platform now that the best like paid performing creative looks and feels like organic social. So that means you should have one, it should be validated, like you said, on organic, but to the same team that's creating the organic content should be also informing and creating the paid content, which also means more resources for this sort of like content entity internally that can produce stuff that gets like super high engagement, right? Versus, you know, that team creating highly entertaining organic content on a shoestring budget, but then you pay an agency like insane amounts of money to make what looks and feels like a traditional Google ad unit in 9x16 or whatever, and those two things not working together.

21:13So it's all content at the end of the day. So resourcing the content team and having the social team really just turn into the content team. And yeah, organic needs to inform paid for it to perform well. And it is wild how many brands still really, really silo those two things. i want to also ask you i mean you have some huge brands on slate right now um when a brand comes to you and says like our social media is broken or it's like not working like where do you like go to diagnose the problem like what are that usually like the top one two three problems you see that when someone says like my social isn't working or like i'm not getting distribution or my videos are not performing like what are like the things you see as like common problems that could be fixed.

22:02I think there's two sides to that. Like there's obviously a lot of problems about the just like resourcing and structure. And that's not necessarily something the like individuals can fix, but it's more of the like institutions around social and how social is viewed and resourced. And that's separate. And that's more, I'd say there's like a shared misery and complaints about that. And that's what I try to do on my LinkedIn a lot is like advocate for C-suite and the folks who make the decisions of resourcing as to the importance of social. I'd say in terms of like, okay, how do we actually get our content to perform?

22:40And what do brands do to start to change that? I mean, those two things obviously are tied. You mentioned DoorDash and obviously they have made a decision from the top down that social is going to be a priority and are investing in that accordingly, both with who they're hiring. And, you know, it's not just the social media manager who gets to make a decision like that Superbowl thing. Right. So that's a big unlock, but you're always working within the constraints that you have, like within your organization. I think, I think volume and video are like two of the things that often are pointed to as like some of the harder things to the harder barriers to like overcome, right?

23:24The algorithm does need feeding. It's not just a volume game. And there's always quantity versus quality sort of balance. But ultimately, you do need to pump out ideas, fail with ideas to get the ones that hit, and then start going deeper on the ones that hit until they don't anymore. So being able to increase the volume of content you're actually producing and the like at-bats you're having is, you know, something that we talk a lot about with our brands and our customers. Obviously, video is like a format that always like wins, you know, carousels on Instagram are still very, very valuable and same with LinkedIn.

24:12And it's, you know, we're always surprised at how much static and image content still gets exported from our platform. It's honestly about 50-50. So, you can't sleep on the importance of like image and graphic and static based content for social media. But video is the more complex format and ultimately the most valuable format. And having workflows for producing enough video content is always something brands are looking to find ways to increase. Well, the two things, both those things work because the platform's reward now, like shareability and sends. And if you have a good slider or you, you have a good dwell time on like all the time on, yeah.

24:59Yeah. On the, on, on multiple slides or multiple, whatever you have on a static post, you're going to get seen bigger in the feed because it's seen as a post that is relevant. And if it gets sent after that, or to like in DMs or shared like on LinkedIn or whatever is going to get distributed more but i wanted to go into like the video content feed because um it has really i mean in the last like five years it's really like eating up a lot of the feed like before it wasn't like eating up the feed as much um and like you you probably came from like one of the best organizations that like clipping like videos and clipping highlights and clipping like the best type of content and redistributing but a lot of people they just get like a long form piece of content they clip it they don't think about like the social first aspect of it they just clip a video and then put it on social so what is like like when you were at the nfl or where you see other brands in it like what does it look like to be like social like video first with either repurposing or like coming up with original like skits and content or behind the scenes stuff?

26:17Like, what does that look like when you're thinking about creating video first content? Yeah. I think, I mean, sports teams and leagues have sort of a different challenge than, you know, I'd say the rest of us. Cause now, you know, even though a lot of our customers are in that space, sports media entertainment, we also work with a lot of brands and we ourselves are like a B2B company. Their challenge is there's such a volume of content and opportunities like incoming that how do they actually triage, like turn those around, optimize them for social in like a very rapid succession. I'd say most, you know, other brands, you know, whether you're like a supermarket brand, a B2B tech brand, a podcast network, the challenge is different.

27:06It's more of like, how do we get more content out of more limited source material. Right. And that's where, you know, at Slate, like we take the approach of like making original content, coming up with original ideas and having sort of these like content blitz opportunities where we like are both scripting things out, but also just like creating on the fly and trying to build up sort of personas and personalities like internally that we could like turn into content. It's also why we focus on like the other formats, like you said, like cutting down like webinars, interviews, podcasts, and thinking about those from a social first lens, both like when we're recording them, but also, you know, how we actually pull out like the social first moments from those.

27:58And obviously that's something like our tool that we use like our own tool for like, okay, we're going to just like actually get five or six really compelling social clips from this webinar without having to like scrub through each one. And then same with like live event coverage, right? So not a lot of brands have like sort of experiential moments, but you can make those moments, whether that be a conference, whether that be, you know, again, like sort of a manufactured tentpole event that you're covering in real time. Those are opportunities to sort of like run and gun and capture content more like an entertainment brand or a sports brand.

28:36And I think any brand should like, if you don't have those moments, start to manufacture them. And any ones that you do like get the most out of them by really thinking about covering them in a, in a content first way. And I know I also, I'll go one step deeper. Cause I know you've talked about this, like rise of serialized content and thinking of like radio first as like a series instead of like, I'm going to get this one-off post of this experience like and if you can come up with like a better strategy when you say like let's try do one or two or three or four episodes like part one part two part three or whatever so could you explain like from your point of view like how people should think of like executing serialized content like how does that look like in the back end um like because you and why why you think that that content performs very well.

29:31Yeah. I think, I think with all social media, there's people, audiences want to know what to expect. Right. And that's why we see a lot of like the same formats get repurposed across brands and the same sort of like jokes or memes or just like styles of video kind of repeat themselves. But it's about like having almost like, it's like genre, right? Like familiar formats, but mixing it up and having it be like specific to your brand. I think serialized content works well because it like provides deeper engagement, right? It provides like an expectation and you're able to like build a brand voice in like a very specific way.

30:14For us at Slate and like our own content strategy, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to script out like a five episode show and go like film all of those things. Like that definitely is one way we could do it. And something that, you know, we have done and like will do, but it also means like building certain themes and like personas over time. So like we have sort of like personalities on social media and almost like, you know, employee branding is really like important for us and like we kind of build up like our own like personal sort of identities on social but how those come to life like on our content even though it may not be like a specific series is almost like there's like uh an expectation for like there's like a character we all play in certain ways on our social content that we repeat in different formats that you know about like the dynamic within the team, for instance, and it becomes sort of like a humorous thing that we can now go film what would otherwise be like a dry sort of product promotion video.

31:27And since we've built up like a good example is like this Christina versus Christina thing that we're doing. We have two marketers named Christina. In real life, their personalities are very different. And like, we've like amplified those to be like caricatures for whenever they're on camera together. So when we're promoting a specific product, they end up arguing because one Christina wants to be bubbly and B2B SaaS and synergy and the other wants to be direct and no bullshit. So that's something we play across lots of different pieces of content. So I think when brands think of serialized content, it becomes daunting because it's like, oh, wow, I need to like script and film like a mini TV show.

32:13Um, but there's other ways to think about like serializing your content, your like personalities on social media. And those don't always have to be like super highly produced, although highly produced stuff I think does, does perform well. It's just a lot more, um, budget and time intensive. Um, yeah. And I guess just the last thing I'll say on that is like, there's been other things too, that we don't serialize until we've proven out it's worked once or twice. So again, like you can say like, okay, we got to make a show or you can just have a one-off idea, post it. And if it does well, be like, okay, maybe we should do more of these.