1743 – The World of Online Content with George Huff of Opal

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0:58with us right now it's george huff george you are the co-founder and ceo of opal you're found on the web at workwithopal.com george thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me today josh and george you're based in a portland area right portland oregon excellent excellent yeah give us an overview of what opal is and kind of the impact that you have in the world Yeah, so Opal exists to drive alignment for marketing organizations with varying levels of complexity. So it's really, how do you take a brand and continue to reinforce what that brand's products and services are in the market and do that over and over again with all the complexity and layers of hierarchy and silos within organizations?

1:39How do you solve all that complexity and make it smooth? That's what we've been doing for 10 years, and it's a gnarly problem to solve, but we are hot on the trail. Yeah. According to LinkedIn, you have quite the industry respect and reputation. And similarly, I'll just point out for our friend that's listening to our conversation, Opal is trusted by leading brands everywhere, including, I'll list a few. By the way, let's play the drinking game. If you hear a brand that you know, take a drink. And by the end of this, I think you're going to be real happy about Opal's authority in the marketplace.

2:09Starbucks, Wendy's, Whole Foods, GM, Target, 3M, and a bunch of others. Where did Opal start and how did you become the size organization that you are today? It's a great question. Putting my time machine hat back on and kind of thinking all the way back to that initial moment, really what we were seeing was an explosion of content across channels. So at the time, I had an agency business and I was watching just like these gigantic brands try to operationalize for content across social and blogs and everything that they were doing. And coordinating all that, getting everybody on the same page was hard enough just to kind of like do the work, let alone watching what would happen in an organization with hierarchy where a CMO or a VP of something would say, hey, what are we doing for X?

2:59and then you have to like go through all the silos and pat shoulder tap everybody and everyone would be like losing nights and weekends. And these people were my friends half the time, right? I'd be like, hey, are we gonna go out to dinner tonight? Oh no, I've got to work tonight again because so-and-so VP wants a thing. And so I just started scratching at that. And at the time I really wanted to start a software company because I was kind of enamored with that business model. And we started chipping away at the problem right there and then probably circa 2012 or so. But that's how we got started alongside brands like Nike and Beats by Dre and a couple of big brands.

3:32Did some work with Pete Carroll and Seattle Seahawks at the time. So just seeing how this was all coming to life was pretty inspiring from a problem set standpoint. Can you illustrate the problem that can exist in a lot of organizations when it comes to managing content? And again, when we think about content, we have a responsibility to get that content in all of its varying forms in a lot of different places. that presents a big problem. What do you typically see before a client starts working with you? Like what's going on operationally? Yeah. Usually what happens is people build their organizations around where those different places content needs to live.

4:14And so what you have are different people responsible for that permutation of content because big organizations are kind of like on that factory line doing so much of it. you have it like there's like a sort of deviation from the mean as it kind of fans out and fans out and fans out and so what we'll see you know for instance we work with a large healthcare organization and a conversation I had recently was just basically hey we had 19 different content teams that were creating content for national mental health month and they're all hitting the exact same consumer that we all market to but it was like our consumer doesn't care that there's 19 of us that are maybe saying things in different ways or whatever it may be, just like we're barraging the same audience with like these 19 groups.

4:55And so I guess if I would juxtapose the way that I see it, I think that marketing has been sort of, I guess, like stuck with the tools they've been stuck with, right? You're using general purpose tools that are kind of spreadsheet models to have a chuck it over the fence from team to team to team across all these silos, like intake forms and all these things that you like operationalize around. You're like, great, we've got sort of MarTech stack. But I'm of this mind and I've been on, I've been, like I said, 10 years on this and just really passionate about like an orchestrated offense from a go to market standpoint of like, how are we doing everything that we do?

5:27And like kind of almost the planning side of it, I've been obsessed with this for 10 years. And I think companies that orchestrate just get significant, they kind of do more, like I was saying, like put more wood behind fewer arrows, but just do it exceptionally well and create that kind of content that breaks through. So yeah, we work with like the best of the best and we see the other side too. And, you know, we're there to kind of help people kind of move from one to the other. So I guess if I'm trying to describe, you know, where Opal is or how this tool then becomes used operationally, is this kind of the central planning and organization for all things content?

6:00Maybe you can define that a little bit more accurately. Yeah, the way that high level, we're building a platform for design for marketing, period, full stop, that is connecting strategy and execution. so there are many facets in that right there's some there's content planning there's some light project management in there there's content creation so like actually visualizing your content in our platform so you can see it all alongside all those different channels like what's it going to feel like for our consumer that's going to get hit with all these messages is it consistent is it on brand is it the message we want to be saying are we and then being able to see everything together like the fire hose and everything going out the door all at once on a calendar to say hey are we oversaturating our audiences is it too much should we turn it down here and turn it up here.

6:39And just sort of like all of that stuff before it goes to like actual publishing tools that like put that content in the channels that it needs to be in. And obviously, I think there's probably been some evolution of your platform over the past year or so, simply because in the market, I think that there's more demand for, okay, cool, but we have so much new technology in and around AI that it would be foolish not to make that a central piece of how we think about content. Maybe you could just give us like a quick, I don't know, state of the union, I think would be a great way to present this in terms of thinking about where AI fits, especially with some of these larger enterprise level organizations.

7:21I'm really curious what you're observing and where you see, if you're looking in your crystal ball, where you see things going over the next 6, 12, 18 months. Yeah, I mean, I think that's such an interesting place and I could talk on it for hours because we're dealing with large organizations that have a significant amount of, like they're careful about how they approach these kinds of things, especially AI, because it's such a hot topic. And so for us, we really want to be able, because we're already like one of their known vendors, we have long-term partnerships with all of our customers. So we know that they trust us to kind of bring AI to them in a way that isn't scary, right?

7:58And so we have to be really principled in how we do that. So I'll kind of talk about what we're doing and I'll talk about some of the headwinds we face, right? So the first thing is, what is AI really, really good at? It's really good at ideas. It's probably the perfect brainstorming partner, tons of ideas and no ego. And so how do we bring the ability to ideate around ideas even, like concepts, all the way to lines of copying content, all the way to variations that we've seen things like ChatGPT do very easily. So for us, it's like, how do we bring all the power of ChatGPT into our platform in like a million different places because it just sort of makes sense because it is content and AI is really, really good at content, writing specifically.

8:39The image side of it, I'm not totally sold on yet. We're getting there. Those hands are just too weird. Hands are weird and letters are weird. Once they figure that out, we're good. Yeah. So I think that for us, it's like, how do we help you across things like translations and ideas and tonality and just bringing like allowing you like because our platform is not actually a publishing platform it's a planning platform it allows a thousand flowers to bloom and you kind of pick the biggest ones or the best ones and you really get good it kind of changes the nature of your organization you're you go from we got to build a factory line to keep up with all these requests for content to now contents you can do it faster so like you're actually not building a factory line you actually want to build an editorial function that is really good at taste and so like taste and marketers as editors is actually significantly more important in an AI world.

9:30And so how that plays out is going to be really, really interesting. But we think we're in a really great position because we've got all the sort of necessary context to bring AI in in really thoughtful, safe ways. And that's what we're doing, right? The other side of it is like, what do we run into? Well, our position on AI is not figured out. We got to get a steering committee together to see if we're going to do this. And so we kind of have in the world of enterprise software, which we are, you kind of have like, you know, small words in contracts, like page 15, where you're like, you can't bring in a new thing like AI, unless you like have a conversation with us.

10:04And so there's just, or some, we can just turn it on and there's all that. And so I think a lot of people are still figuring it out. And I think in the enterprise, what we've found to be true is that you can't just like roll out a feature or an update and then have everybody just like jump on it. Because in the enterprise, people are kind of waiting to be told how they're supposed to use things. Like that's, it's so process oriented at big companies. So that's kind of an interesting thing. I think smaller teams that are more nimble that are able to like smaller companies, solopreneurs, those folks can just like get going with these tools and really extend their output a ton.

10:37It's pretty incredible. What level size organization does it start to make sense that Opal would be a great platform for them? You know, I think it's interesting because Amazon had like a famous, like two pizza box meeting size or something like that. I think that if like your team can fit in a room together, that Opal is probably overkill for you. But, you know, that kind of changing too, right, is the nature of our platform changes. And that's kind of, there's a whole like a bunch of things I could unpack in that statement. But let's just say that historically, 30 or more markers on your team, 20 or more markers on your team, Opal starts to make sense.

11:14You have like 10 people in a room, five people in a room. It makes less sense, right? But our product has also evolved a ton. And, you know, over the last year, we've introduced capabilities that are, you know, more freeform, less about like getting visibility in a calendar and more about just like planning and brainstorming and, you know, sort of briefing that kind of thing. AI is obviously really would be really valuable. Like if we gave it to your team, you would get a ton of value. And I don't think you have a 30 % marketing team. So I think the nature of that beats changes. But generally speaking, it's like 20 or above our sort of core.

11:43And I'm curious, George, the world of enterprise level sales and marketing, what do you do today for growth? Obviously, you have such a great reputation. You kind of look at what's still out there in the market. Obviously, there's a lot available, but how do you continue to grow the company? I think there's sort of like the sales and marketing side of it. How do you break through, you know, what we're finding to be true is that post pandemic, more and more people are wanting to get FaceTime and FaceTime was kind of our bread and butter before the pandemic. Pandemic kind of hurt us because like digital marketing wasn't something that we really got a lot of results because enterprise briars are just a different mindset, right?

12:24They're kind of looking at forest reports and all that kind of stuff, Gartner waves, et cetera, et cetera, to make purchasing decisions and categories that are sort of well-defined work emergent. Like there's not really anything that's quite like Opal because so much of what people do that solves for what Opal solves for, they kind of are pulling off the shelf generic things to do. So we're kind of a new beast. And so I think that part of it is how do we break through any new category creation? It's just tough to do in the enterprise space, but like we continue to do that. We get in front of people with events, we get in front of people with a lot of referrals, like a lot, most of our customer network is like customers all come through word of mouth, which is good.

13:00We're on your podcast. So hopefully that's going to lead to some sales and marketing. Oh, you better believe it will. Yeah. But like on the other side of it though, is innovation. And so I'm more of a, I suppose, a creative CEO than I am a sort of financial CEO. And I'm really, really big on how do we kind of continue to drive innovation in our category, adopt things faster than the next, you know, company and really like just bring our customers what they didn't know they needed until they saw it. And then they couldn't stop thinking about it. That's kind of how I've always operated. And we're really on a tear right now as a company.

13:32It's just awesome to see what my team's doing. Congratulations. To our friend that's been listening to our conversation right now, they likely know those points of contact or they may be that point of contact and listen to this podcast, just kind of part of their research. And now they've listened to our conversation. Where do they go from here? They're like, okay, I'm interested in kind of that next step. Yeah, well, there's kind of two things. And one is we have a free trial for any of your listeners. So if you go to opal.show slash thoughtful, you can get to a trial page and kick the tires on our product.

14:03But the other thing that I'm really excited about is we commissioned a Forrester report on the category that is emerging around just building a sort of system for marketing teams to connect strategy and execution and drive alignment. And so we commissioned this report. This is actually going to come up very, very soon. So I recommend checking out Opal on any social channel, LinkedIn or whatever, and we'll be talking about that. But it's just a really, really great report that kind of talks about the nature of the beast with alignment in a marketing organization is sort of how to maximize your impact and also what CMOs and VPs of marketing are thinking about.

14:38So highly recommend waiting. That's, I think, in the next week or two, we're going to drop that in the marketplace. But really, really great bit of information that I think people would love to check out. Well, George Huff, again, co-founder and CEO of Opal, the website workwithopal.com. The website that you shared, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was opal.show forward slash thoughtful. Is that right? That's correct, yes. Awesome. Great, great, great. And again, free demo and a lot more information there. George, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for all the insights to kind of what you're seeing in the world of content.

15:14I believe we are living in such an exciting time right now, the innovations that we're seeing in AI. I think a couple of years from now, we'll look back to where we were a couple of years ago and like, wow, remember that? Agreed. I agree. And it's just, again, just, you know, great innovators like the work that you guys are doing with Opal as well. So thanks, George, for joining us. All right. Thanks, Josh.

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