It all starts here

 

Lydia Chan (00:00)

In this episode of the Audience Connection Podcast, I'm joined by Amy Goodman, VP of Creative Content Development at TeamPeople. Amy brings a depth of experience in managing global creative teams and delivering successful cross-platform media campaigns. We had a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from how to bring more humanity into content to why we shouldn't think of social as just an add-on. But another way in for your audience to build brand trust. Amy also shares what makes a truly good brief and why she's on the lifelong mission to fix the bad ones and why the real opportunity for AI is not in the output but in making the briefing process better, smarter, and less painful for everyone, making the AI a nonpartisan moderator to help teams collaborate and stick to the brief.

There's so much packed in this episode; you'll definitely walk away with some fresh perspective and some laughs as well. Let's jump right in.

 

Lydia Chan (00:01)

Okay, Amy, welcome to the show. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So let's start with a brief intro for our audience.

 

Amy (00:10)

Amazing. Well, thank you firstly so much for having me today, Lydia. I'm super excited to be here. So I'm Amy Goodman. I'm the Vice President of Creative Content Development at Team People. I help oversee multiple kinds of managed service accounts at some very large technology companies and previously spent 14 years embedded in a large Fortune 500 technology company as a kind of executive producer and global studio director. So, I spent a lot of time making some cool content.

 

Lydia Chan (00:39)

Awesome. Yeah, no, I mean, you have such a deep background in content production, and now you find yourself leading creative teams. What have you learned throughout that journey about audience connection? Like, what does it take? What goes into it? How do we create meaningful content that really connects with the people we're trying to connect with?

 

Amy (01:04)

Gosh, I think some of the key words you use there, like audience connection, are so important in any content that is made throughout the ecosystem. And I think one of those key words is meaningful. I think it's about finding those connection points for your audience and for what they care about and how that impacts them beyond whatever the message is that you're sharing. As a brief comes in, there's obviously really kind of a narrative or a message that the brief submitter is looking to actually provide. But how do you actually take that, and how do you make the audience really kind of care about what that end message is, and where can they find kind of similarities in whether that's kind of something that they care about personally, professionally, and how can you then really build on that connection to ensure that they're going to stop and they're going to take that messaging in and they're really going to understand what it is that goes beyond really what sometimes can be kind of a piece of quite short content or a longer form piece of content? And how do you keep them engaged throughout that? And I think it's so multifaceted, but ultimately really the reason that people connect with a piece of content is because you found something that they actually care about, they're passionate about, they can find meaning in, and whether that's meaning it's going to make my life easier from a professional workplace or meaning this is something that I care about from a sustainability and environmental standpoint or a standpoint of gosh this actually can help make the world a better place, so there's so many different levels of connection and ways of really drawing that in meaning. But meaning, what does it mean?

 

Lydia Chan (02:20)

Yeah. And when you talk about building teams that prioritize that, right? Why is having the right people in the right place for the right clients so important, and how do you understand how to do that?

 

Amy (03:16)

My goodness. I just think it's ultimately we're all humans. We're all humans speaking to other humans. And you can't overstress that these elements of togetherness build in different ways, and it doesn't mean to be togetherness as I'm sitting next to you togetherness, but it's a togetherness of cultural belief and understanding, a togetherness of the way that a brand, a team, an agency wants to communicate. So I think that that togetherness really brings back to the fact that we are all humans speaking to other humans, and we need to find the right ones at the right place to bring them in at the right time to really help build trust. I think as well, I think trust is sometimes really underrated and sometimes forgotten because maybe it's expected. Or maybe it's that it should be there, but I think trust is really key in that because, again, as humans, I even, like, if I'm doing something in my personal life, if I'm going for dinner, I'm looking for reviews. I want to know what other people think. Are people trusting this? You know? And so from when you're building a team and you're looking at all those key elements, you want to build trust within that team so they can trust each other. The departments then trust them as an outer team. And then the content that's coming out from them. It's authentic, it's credible, it's feeling human, it's talking to other people, it's really building, you know, that connection base that we can really start to scale up on. I think reminding everyone that we're all human, we're speaking to other humans, we need to trust, and we need to enable each other. Think enablement is something when building a team is so important when people say, What's a producer? Or what's this? Or what's that? "And I always like, one of the ways I started describing it was I'm an enabler. If I can enable everybody else to do their very best job, then I'm doing my best job because everybody else has all of the pieces of the puzzle they need to build their best self.

 

Lydia Chan (05:26)

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the producer is the most underrated. I mean, they are the MVP in my opinion, right? In the process, I mean, they are the—I mean, if you kind of compare it to building a home, right? If you don't have a good project manager, I mean, you're going to sink funds, you're going to not have things done in time, etcetera, right? And the producer for me, yeah, they're the glue that holds it all together. Yeah, no, for sure. I think one of the things that

 

Amy (05:58)

They're your foundation. You need a foundation to build a house on.

 

Lydia Chan (06:08)

Brought up is kind of looking at talking to, building trust, right? Like you just mentioned that a few times, and that's kind of a theme that I've seen. Throughout my chats with individuals, I ask how we build trust with our audience and also not sort of hurt that trust in a way, right? And this kind of segues a little bit to, you know, how do we make sure that we're producing content that is appealing to someone and not everyone, right? Because when you're trying to create something that is appealing to everyone, you're really talking to no one.

 

Amy (06:49)

100%. So I would, I would say building trust, you know, authenticity and credibility is really the central resource for building trust. And sometimes that means having slightly harder conversations, or sometimes that means not showing that, you know, everything's amazing and wonderful all the time. It's kind of opening that slight behind the doors. And I think there's a really interesting space for social content in building authenticity and credibility and building trust with an audience who is maybe then seeing a more fully polished piece of content. So if you're thinking your long form, like you're fully polished, like it can be quite often highly edited and things like that. And it's like, you know, is this the version you're putting out? Where I think actually social is a really fantastic space for then opening little bits of peaks and curtains behind the door and finding those little moments, which are the most unexpected and captured very rustically as well. Quite often on social now we're finding ourselves capturing on phones directly. We still have the beautiful camera setups for that longer-form narrative storytelling, but actually having a team who are there focusing on capturing natively for social is really authentic.

Kind of goes back to that being human, like what's your favorite biscuit? You know, what's your, how do you drink your tea? Like all of those moments that people like, they're like, My gosh, I like a custard cream too. Like, that's my favorite biscuit. is those moments, and it's like, okay, so we're seeing this highly polished piece of output, and we're seeing these people who are obviously, you know, quite often the contents around amazing people doing amazing things and making a difference to the world around us. And you're like, wow, these people, is this out of reach for me?

How do I, you, or this person do this? Or how do I relate to that as a human? And then you find out they like the same biscuit as you. And you're like, okay, like we're all human, it's all good. Or their favorite takeaway is the same as yours. Or whatever it is, it's those little snippets of human interaction that I think are really authentic. And I think then people can relate more to that actual, maybe more polished kind of narrative kind of pieces of storytelling as well.

And I think it helps to build that trust across that ecosystem. And it helps build trust with your partners as well. Just because they see that actually we're here on a broader perspective where we are here for kind of the good of the overall, not just here to tell a highly polished, over-edited kind of style of things. And there's a place for that, a hundred percent. But I really think social play.

 

Lydia Chan (09:23)

Yeah, so two things come up for me with that, right? So it's a bit of a vulnerability in a way of a brand or of an organization, right? It's like, you don't have to be buttoned up all the time. And social is a way to, you know, undo the tie a bit, right? And to kind of show just what makes the organization, it's the people, right?

And the other thing you just brought up, which I don't know if I've ever thought about that way, and maybe I perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but having social as almost the brand awareness piece, right, or like the gateway in versus the brand content as the funnel down, right? It's almost like funneling up.

 

Amy (10:24)

It's funneling up because you're going to build kind of brand preference, maybe not awareness, maybe it's brand preference, because you're opening up that opportunity to see maybe these names that you see in media or you hear and you kind of around the news, but you're opening up as humans first. And then you can then lead that through to kind of, yeah, preference awareness, and then kind of by the time you get to that higher-level piece, you know a little bit more and you trust a little bit or you understand a bit more. And maybe it's not that you didn't trust in the first place. I'm not saying that, but maybe you understand a bit more about what the mechanics are that build that and the building behind it. I was lucky enough a few years ago to work with a team of Team GB Olympians. And we were doing quite a highly polished piece at this time. And we were doing it; we had a separate social crew on this, and we did a series of fun events. And one of the things we did is we got a children's basketball hoop. We had four gold medal-winning Olympians. We got a children's basketball hoop with a basketball, and we made them see how many—not a hole in one—slams, like how many shots they could get in. Yeah, how many shots they could, clearly not a basketball player, how many shots they could get in.

 

Lydia Chan (11:39)

Yeah, I was like, It's okay, Amy, you're not in the NBA. Yeah, you're in Britain.

 

Amy (11:48)

Not in the NBA, how many shots they could get in in 30 seconds. And it was like this plastic, bright-colored, like everything they're not. And do you know what? We had the most fun. They all found it hilarious. They had a competition against each other. And on social, we edited it, and we liked it, and every time the ball went in, the numbers went up. And it was just such a great piece of fun content that brought everybody in at the same level as well. And you had four; each Olympian was from a different sport, but this means none of them were basketball. I'll say that. Like, we chose something that was like agnostic across, and it was just such a great piece of content. And I think we got better hero content from that because we relaxed them; we had fun with it. We showed their human side, and there was one particular Olympian that really was not their skill set. And that showed it was okay.

 

Lydia Chan (12:43)

Did they call it a hole in one as well?

 

Amy (12:46)

Yeah, they probably did. They recorded a whole lot of things; they're playing golf. But it just really said it, and they were just all human. Like we think of people as superhuman. And actually, not everybody's great at everything. So it was just a little bit of openness, and it helped, I think, build an authenticity with these four individuals as we then looked at them in their sports doing wonderful things. But it just brings everybody back into the same playing field.

 

Lydia Chan (12:57)

Yeah, no, I love that. It's kind of looking at the things that you do, the sort of 360 kind of look around. It's not just that central project or that central piece of content or goal, but all these auxiliary things that you're either producing or trying to capture; it all trickles back up to...maybe making that final, like you said, that hero a bit better, right? So for teams, it's like not maybe considering, hey, this piece of social content is purely for social, and it's another tack-on that we have to do and add to the production. But no, actually it is like you said; it's building that trust with your talent and making the hero content even better because now they've given you their vulnerability, and that is translating to the camera.

 

Amy (14:13)

Absolutely. And I think sometimes social content can be an afterthought. I think overall teams are getting so much better at this, at building social in as part of an overall production plan, as part of an overall campaign. But there was a time when social was cut down on heroes. We'll do a cut down. And then you've got your poor editors. Yeah, I know, please.

 

Lydia Chan (14:36)

Yeah. Can we please stop doing that?

 

Amy (14:42)

You know, it's in 16 minutes, and I need it in the—actually, what we should be doing is we should be filming natively in those ratios, creating specified content specifically for those channels that reach the different styles of audiences. You've got a really different audience on TikTok and Instagram than you do on LinkedIn. You should not be using, and then what you're doing for a TVC, you should not be cutting down your TVC and putting it on TikTok. Like, we really got to break that as a whole, like, thought process. And we need, you know, we need a strategy to be thinking about that at the very start, like we need not, I need a piece of content, which, like, actually, I need a multifaceted campaign. And we need to start thinking about how we're creating the elements of that authentically for those channels. Because if someone's finding you on TikTok, they're not going to trust a cut-down, overproduced 16 by 9 piece of content. And it comes back to that connection; connect with your audience for where it's going to be. Don't leave your audience as an afterthought. Don't think about it; this is my tier one audience. I'm only going to speak to them. There are different audiences, there's different channels, and then there's different stars. And if you're authentically working within those realms, that's when you're going to connect with people. You know, you're not going to put the social content of Olympians throwing basketballs into a children's hoop and put that on a TVC. But are you going to put it on TikTok? Yes.

 

Lydia Chan (15:57)

For sure. I think this is a good kind of pivot to better briefs, right? Because all this can go into the brief versus looking at a brief that says, Hey, we're going to do a hero. We want six cutdowns from that hero. There's 30 seconds. There's another 30 seconds. There's 15 seconds. We know this feel. So why is it that getting clarity at the start really sort of... Will create content that resonates? And how do we make that argument?

 

Amy (16:46)

I feel like one of my life's missions is better briefs. Like, I feel like when I leave, one person is like, Amy fought the fight for better briefs. Um, and now I'll be okay with that. I think briefing is so important. I think sometimes it's looked at as a piece of administration. Um, and when it's looked at as an admin job and it's something that I'm ticking a box. I'm doing that. The thought isn't put in upfront to what those end assets need to be across a fully functional ecosystem. I think, you know, the more time and effort that is put into a brief, the better the content out the other end comes. And one of my absolute favorite things to do, I don't know if my clients feel the same way, but one of my favorite things to do is to pull apart a brief and ask 36 million questions to the point where I'm probably slightly too much. First comes in having the opportunity to actually dive in deeper and understand who those audiences are. So rather than like, there, we're looking for an IT professional.

Actually, I'm trying to understand what that's meant because honestly, what does that even mean these days? Actually, who are we speaking to? What do they care about? What are the things that are stopping them at the moment or making them think? And then how can we authentically go into that space and share a message with them that actually feels natural to them? What are the right platforms for that? What is the right element? And I think this is where what I would love to continue to see grow is agency cross-partner collaborations where the media team is part of that briefing conversation. So it's not just that, hey, we need a 30, 15, and six cut down for social for those platforms. So actually, where's that going? How are we targeting that? What's organic and what's paid? Because again, organic and paid social content, I think, needs to sit really differently in our thought process when we're going through that briefing and we're preparing a response to the brief.

I think way too often people look at briefing as, I'm going to get a statement and work a budget out of it. And then people will go in; they'll actually do the creative thinking afterward. I want to put that creative thinking on and take it. And I want to be going in at that very early brief stage with a response to the brief that provides some different creative options that speak to those different levels and a more full funnel review. And I want the media team to feed back on it. I want the brand team and want the marketing team. want, like, let's have all of those discussions upfront. So then, not when we've already filmed it all, we're in post-production, and all of a sudden we add someone to the thread whose name we've never heard before, who's got what is probably incredibly relevant feedback. But actually, if it had been shared with us in the beginning, we could have actually tailored it to it. But because it's all that, you know, media's after production, so we don't include them at the start. Actually know if we're bringing all of that as cross-functional teams in at that briefing process, we're targeting, we're talking, we're understanding, we're asking questions. What do you mean by IT professional? When you're saying you want cut downs, actually, what is it that the audiences, you know, what are they responding well to, you know, at the moment? ASMR, like on social media, is kind of like having this moment. So where is it, especially with certain audiences? If that's an audience, how can we build that in, and how can we look at specified content that really talks to that as well? And I think that's why I am fighting the good fight for better briefs.

 

Lydia Chan (20:34)

Yeah. I will be on that campaign trail as well. I, I, I love that. And I think, I think calling it admin is just so on point, right? What it really is, it's almost like the briefing process is like the creative process on its own. You know, you want to get all these parties involved in the room, brainstorming, talking, and just hashing it out. And then from there, that's where, you know, the baby, which is the brief kind of, you know, comes out, and yeah, the brief baby. And now we're because we're, we've all gone through this analogy. We've all taken part in this birthing process. We're, we're all invested now, you know, so now you have all these key players.

 

Amy (21:09)

Yes, the brief baby, yeah. We're all godmothers. We're all godmothers and godfathers. We're invested in this child. We want to see it go to university. We're going to put in for its college funds. Like we're going all the way here, and we're like dancing on the table at his wedding, right? We want to be that godparent the whole way through it. So

 

Lydia Chan (21:30)

Well, that's when you know that the product is going to be the best it can be, right? When all these parties just have a bit of a stake in the game, right? Where they feel again, it's that emotional connection. Like then, that's when you have an emotional connection to the brief. You're like, okay, now we're all partners. We've been through this together, and we're going to work through it. We talked a little bit.

 

Amy (22:00)

Your post-production team is happier because they're not getting last-minute feedback from people that they don't understand the context of. So you're also going to save time and money in post and have happier post-production departments, which doesn't the whole world want?

 

Lydia Chan (22:08)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The fix-it and post thing is, they're like, "We're tired of this, and we're ripping it off our walls. Amy, I want to talk about AI as a creative partner and fixing the briefing process.

 

Amy (22:23)

Yeah, no more. No more fixed in post.

 

Lydia Chan (22:33)

Can you shed a little bit of light on this because you, you've mentioned AI's biggest missed opportunity isn't in production, but it's in the briefing. And I, again, think that is a really great perspective on it because people look at AI and they think about how it affects the output. You know, as creators ourselves, as producers, as filmmakers, we want that thought process to change.

 

Amy (23:00)

Yes. So this is something that I've been thinking a lot about. I mean, who hasn't, generally, been thinking about AI and the impact that that will have both on ourselves as individuals within our workplaces, within our departments, and within just the industry in general? And there's a lot of AI focus on AI in production at the moment, kind of in that backend in that post-production. And that's because a lot of the tools that we've seen kind of come out at this early stage of AI are tailored to that kind of post-production kind of space. And, you know, they're being added onto packages we might already have and things. So we're starting to dabble, and we're starting to move on. And I think, you know, that's great. That's fine. You know, it could be time-saving. There are areas of that. And I think generative AI is another interesting area. There's a load of red tape, you know, and so it's a nice area to dabble. However, one of the things that's really surprised me is that I'm not hearing more conversations about actually what I think one of the biggest kind of time suckers and pain points is in this whole production process, which is getting a good brief. I mean, I don't know. Gosh, am I correct? I go out to a hundred creatives and say, you know, when was the last time you had what you considered a really good brief? I'm going to get some silence in the room. You know, that is just a common pain point across the industry. So one of the things that I think is really interesting is how we, as an industry, can look to use AI in that pain point piece to get better briefs, to get clearer briefs, but also from a production standpoint, how can we use AI to help mark briefs? And I don't mean like going around with a red marker saying you failed. But I'm talking about how we can get it to rate those briefs to get clients actually educated to write better briefs in the future. And also take it away so it's not us going, Well, I'm afraid your brief's not very good. Actually, can AI—I mean, I hate to call it the bad cop, but I'm going to. Could AI be the slight bad cop and say, Look, here are the missing elements of your brief for us to create the best work. If we can bring this in at this point, and then it won't feel

Hopefully not as personal because it's AI doing it. And then can we use that to help form better briefing? Well, I'm going to say for the world, why not? We're going big today. It's Tuesday. Better briefing for the world. So how can we use those key elements that we know we need to create a good brief? And we're not talking about AI then doing the creative because no, creative is human. And I truly believe that AI is not going to be doing the creative infrastructure. I'm talking about more of the process and operational parts of taking; sometimes we will receive a brief that comes with a 200-page PowerPoint explaining their audience segmentation across 36 slides, which you slightly don't get out of what the point is. Where am I meant to be going with this? How can we use AI to help distill that to bring those elements into the briefs, then give those defined AI-suggested and -helped briefs to our creatives, who are then the humans who are bringing the authentic, incredible response to a much better brief because we've actually used some of those processes and optimizations in what can be seen as a time-sum?

 

Lydia Chan (26:44)

Yeah, totally agree. I, I almost feel like we're, we're nearly there, right? Like, I think it's all about, yeah, it's all about process, right? Like, like you just mentioned about bringing all these teams together. If you had an AI agent in the room, again, bipartisan, nonpartisan rather, just the moderator here, know, put a little happy face on it, like the delivery bot that's outside our streets. And they're just listening, right, to the inputs from marketing, from creative, from post-production, and from distribution. They're just there listening, right? And then they spit out a brief of, like, here's kind of the best brief for this project.

 

Amy (27:15)

Yes. from what's said. You're feeding it; you're giving it these little nuggets of information, and you're like, Hey, take this, take this, take this, take this. And these are all of the different viewpoints and feeding it in.

 

Lydia Chan (27:44)

Yeah. And then, like you said, as you go through the actual human process of the creative process, the kind of logistics of, if you know, we can't actually really access this individual or this facility for three hours. So how does that, you know, affect the brief? and the sort of AI, you know, again, just this nonpartisan, you know, moderator is going to tell you this idea or this suggested solution that you've provided actually steers us a little bit away from what we're trying to do. So you're like, okay, cool. You know, you're not then…

 

Amy (28:24)

Bringing us back, they can own that. They can be like, We're centering you again. You've gone slightly out of, you've gone slightly left field. We like left field, but let's like bring it back a little bit. Like, have you remembered that original audience? Have you thought about how that sits on that channel? Have you thought about who's going to view it where? Like some of those basic kind of side points of bringing that into centralized.

 

Lydia Chan (28:41)

Yeah. No, what I like about that is it removes some of those just like fundamental tensions that we have with various different departments, right? And honestly, it's just like, it's not personal. Then you can poke it, or rather, point it to the AI that says this is the wrong way to go. So let's discuss something else.

 

Amy (29:09)

See, AI is the bag of puppets; it's not me, it's not the creatives, you know, we're all aligned, but the AI says, the AI says we're not aligning with our target audience, or the AI says that might not be best for the channel. And it just takes out that, I think sometimes when that feedback's given in post, it does become personal because people have invested like their emotional, but if it's done right at that top level, before people are overly emotionally connected, I think there's a real space for it.

 

Lydia Chan (29:14)

Yeah, for sure. Well, Amy, I had so much fun in our conversation. I felt like we went a lot of different metaphors and directions. Any final thoughts as we wrap things up?

 

Amy (29:44)

My goodness. Just think that this is such an exciting time for content creation, the industry. And I feel like sometimes there's a lot of fear. And I think instead of being afraid of all of these tools and these opportunities, actually, this is the time to embrace it. This is the time to try and push some of those boundaries, to try and push our clients as well. And by doing that, help build that trust, help build kind of those different ideas for those different segments and those different channels, and have fun with it. And make sure that you're showing some of that fun as well and not to be scared about, you know, gosh, will AI have my job? Will AI, you know, and all of these things that are just floating around and just, you know, even like whether consciously or subconsciously, you know. I think if we all come together and we work for ways that actually all of these processes and optimizations can support us as an industry, then really the future is endless. So it's a really exciting time.

 

Lydia Chan (30:57)

Awesome. Well, Amy, thank you so much for joining the show. Maybe next time we talk about naming the AI bot, and we'll build it from there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So many different directions we can go with the name. All right, Amy. Thank you, Amy.

 

Amy (31:09)

Yeah, the AI got the birth spree babies; you know, we need to give it a plus there.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me, Lydia.