Stewart Hillhouse shares a refreshingly practical perspective on using AI for content marketing. He explains how the modern content marketer must operate at the intersection of strategy and rapid execution: "I don't think in this environment you can think more than 90, 100 days in the future because it's gonna be a totally different conversation."
Stewart offers concrete workflows, specific prompting techniques, and a clear vision for how content teams should restructure in response to AI. "I liked writing, and that was sort of my competitive advantage... So now just think of AI as being like another colleague that is better and faster than you." This mental model allowed him to develop new skills that deliver better content faster while freeing up more time for strategy and creativity.
Stewart Hillhouse has just completed a three-year tenure as Head of Content at Mutiny, where he developed campaigns that generated millions in pipeline while witnessing the company's growth from Series A through the emergence of generative AI. His background is unconventional — he started his career in forestry before making a pivot into content marketing through a self-initiated podcast where he interviewed marketing leaders.
At Mutiny, Stewart became known for creating integrated campaigns like "Survivor" — a series focused on how marketers could use ChatGPT that attracted nearly 10,000 participants. His approach combines personality-driven content with systematic campaign development and transparent marketing tactics.
Stewart is now beginning a new chapter as VP of Content at storyarb, where he'll focus on newsletter and narrative editorial content. Throughout his career, he has maintained a commitment to experimentation and knowledge-sharing, regularly publishing his techniques and insights for the broader marketing community.
Stewart's observations challenge conventional thinking about content marketing while offering practical systems for implementation, making his insights particularly valuable for the big AI transition we’re in.
Stewart emphasizes the importance of timing and agility in modern marketing. Rather than planning campaigns a year in advance, he advocates for shorter planning horizons that allow teams to respond to current conversations.
At Mutiny, Stewart's team developed an approach to campaigns where all marketing channels focused on the same topic simultaneously. This "1+1=3" approach amplified individual campaign results and had a lasting effect: even after the campaign ended, their regular day-to-day marketing activities saw higher baseline performance.
Stewart reveals a meta-approach to AI prompting: instead of writing prompts yourself, show the AI something you like and ask it to reverse engineer a prompt that would create similar output. This approach saves time and results in more detailed prompts than humans can create on their own.
Despite AI assistance, Stewart emphasizes marketers remain accountable for their output. He compares the responsibility to that of engineers or doctors who must verify and approve work before it's released.
Stewart advocates for a multimodal approach to AI inputs that goes beyond text prompts. By feeding AI diverse media types—voice recordings, screenshots, videos—content marketers can generate unexpected combinations and fresh ideas. This approach transforms AI from a text processor into a creative partner that can synthesize inspiration from multiple sources, yielding outputs that wouldn't emerge from traditional text-only prompting.
Stewart outlines a three-part system for reliable AI content generation:
When combined in AI tools with projects and memory features, these create a system that consistently produces on-brand content from minimal input.
Stewart articulates the existential moment many content marketers have experienced as AI capabilities rapidly advanced. Rather than resisting this shift, he responded by reimagining his professional value. He moved from defining himself primarily as a writer to focusing on operations, strategic direction, and the editorial oversight that AI cannot provide. This evolution mirrors the broader transformation happening across content teams, where pure creation skills are being supplemented or replaced by system design, editorial judgment, and strategic curation abilities.
Looking to the future, Stewart predicts a new role will emerge: the AI Content Operator. This person will manage the systems and workflows that move information efficiently through the content pipeline.
Hello... is there anybody out there creating real value with AI?
The AI conversation in content marketing has become deafening — skeptics shouting from one side, shallow tips from enthusiasts on the other. But somewhere in this noise, there must be pioneers who've actually figured something out, right?
We've gone on a search for the real pioneers — the ones who've ventured beyond the hype to succeed (or fail) spectacularly. Through their hard-won insights, we'll discover if there's actually something of value hiding in the noise, or if we're all just shouting into the void.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Mutiny (00:05:00): The personalization platform where Stewart served as Head of Content for three years, developing integrated campaigns.
Survivor Campaign (00:07:00): The AI-focused campaign Stewart ran at Mutiny that attracted nearly 10,000 participants and generated millions in pipeline.
Storyarb (00:11:00): The agency Stewart is joining as VP of Content, focusing on newsletters and narrative editorial content.
95% Content (00:13:00): The podcast where Stewart previously shared some of his AI content tips with host Eric Wilder.
DeepSeek (00:20:00): A newer AI model that Stewart mentions alongside Claude and ChatGPT.
Claude and ChatGPT (00:22:00): AI tools Stewart mentions using for content creation with the project/memory features.
Open Source Target Account List (00:33:00): A groundbreaking ABM campaign where Mutiny publicly shared their 5,000 target accounts and created personalized microsites for each one.
Follow Stewart Hillhouse: Connect with Stewart on LinkedIn where he regularly shares content marketing insights and AI techniques.
Stewart Hillhouse: [00:00:00] I don't think in this environment you can think more than 90, a hundred days in the future because it's gonna be a totally different conversation. There's nothing worse for morale when you like are ready to launch something and you look out and you're like, oh, well no one's even talking about this topic anymore.
And three other people have done it before us. Yeah. So
Ty Magnin: screaming into the void. Exactly. Welcome to the Animals Podcast. I'm Ty Magnan, the CEO at Animals. And I'm Tim s, the Director of Marketing and Innovation at Animals. This season on The Animals Podcast, we're focused entirely on AI content use cases, which means we're bringing you on an adventure to meet some AI pioneers, those venturing beyond the hype to succeed.
And sometimes fail spectacularly. Today we're joined by Stewart Hillhouse. Stewart is just closing the chapter on a great run at Mutiny and is beginning a new journey. As the VP of Content [00:01:00] at Story Arb, uh, Stu brings a lot of experience using ai, building out content programs that are AI enabled. And shares a lot about some of his best practices, tips and tricks about how to use ai.
Uh, some real practical use cases. And some ideas on how to build a stronger, more AI enabled content engine. I'd say stay tuned, uh, for, for everything that we're about to share. Did you know Animals Now offers a podcast service? We're taking over your audience's earbuds, reaching them during their commutes.
Their workouts are when they're doing tours around the house. From show strategy to editing and distribution, animals can handle your podcast for you. With that same originality and audience first approach that we bring to all of our content, every podcast episode can become fuel for your broader content program.
You can mine your podcast for ideas, for articles, social posts, and other kinds of content assets, helping you create more high quality work [00:02:00] in less time. Ready to start a podcast worth listening to. Head over to animals.co. Book a call with us and we'll start talking about your podcasting goals. We are here at last, really excited for today's conversation.
Uh, Stuart, you've got a lot to share around AI content, the future of content. I've always like thought of you as a content marketer that thinks outside the box. You know, uh, you're not someone that follows a lot of playbooks. You kind of make 'em, and then also you're generous to share, right? Like you're giving, uh, uh, back to the community by kind of like, uh, leaving some breadcrumbs along the way.
So, yeah. Pleased to have you on today.
Stewart Hillhouse: No, appreciate that, Ty. I feel like maybe that com, that stems from, I don't feel like I'm a marketer yet, and I'm like still proving myself, and so that's why like. Maybe do stuff that doesn't seem orthodox or isn't the traditional playbook. And then I'm like sharing it because I'm like, I don't know else how else to like brand myself,
Ty Magnin: so I gotta share it.
Somebody validate me. Exactly. I'm just kidding. [00:03:00] Well, tell us about that path that you've taken into content. I.
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah, I mean, my first career, uh, was in forestry, so I was not sitting at a laptop. That was sort of my, you know, first thing coming outta school. But very quickly realized that like, being in the woods is great, but if you're gonna be in forestry, you have to live where the trees are.
And I wanted to live in a little bit more of a city. So, uh, turned around and tried to figure out how I could get a laptop job. And I kind of didn't really have a marketing background at all. Like, hadn't taken any courses like. Maybe read a couple Seth Godin things in passing, but like really had no exposure to the marketing or business world.
But I knew that podcasting was something that I was interested in. Like I would listen to podcasts. This is like circa 2016, so like a very different podcast ecosystem, but there were still like, people were then, were like, oh man, we're saturated with podcasts. And it's like 10 years later it's like still the main medium right now.
So I was like, well, maybe I'll just try figuring out how to do this on my own. [00:04:00] So I like started up a zoom call with people. I would just like cold outreach on LinkedIn, people who are marketers who had cool job titles or worked at cool companies and I would just start making it up as I went and like literally learned on the go, like learned the language of marketing by being in these interviews where I got to interview them instead of me being interviewed for marketing jobs.
But in hindsight, what ended up happening was I actually found out what roles within marketing I did and did not like, because I got to kind of ask them about their day-to-day and like what gets 'em excited. You know? It was like, oh, like ads, ads seem cool and then you talk to an ad person, like I don't really think ads are what they look, they're not what they used to be and Mad Men.
And then you go and talk to like brand marketers and you're like, okay, that's really cool, but you don't really, it's hard to get your foot in the door as a brand marketer. You need to like start somewhere else and then you can move into that. Eventually, one of the people who was I was interviewing was like, Hey, can I hire you to do some content for me?
And I was like, W why? They're like, well, [00:05:00] content. What's that? Yeah, exactly. Content. What is, they're like, you're doing that right now. Uh, and I was like, oh, that was a light bulb moment for me to be like, oh, I guess I naturally like talking. People, people, and that turns into content down the down the road.
So that was sort of my first realization that gathering source material is the best way to create content because it feels natural to, to the way I do it. You know, some people are better at just pulling ideas from their head and writing them down straight away. But my method was like, I like talking to people and then sometimes I say something smart or sometimes they say something smart and that becomes the nugget for the marketing that I'll, I'll do
Ty Magnin: afterwards.
Other times you're just talking. So Stuart, you're just, you just closed a pretty epic chapter at Mutiny. Uh, how many years and what are some of the, your favorite content projects that you produced at Mutiny?
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah, I was, uh, head of content at Mutiny for three years. Got to see the, the epic growth going from, you know, I think I joined right as they were series A and then raised a big round and then grew headcount and got to go through the, the [00:06:00] Rocket Ship startup, um, story.
And then like AI came on the scene. So like I've gotten like three in those three years. Every year was bookmarked as like a hugely different year from like a growth year to like a scaling year to then an AI year. So I think I felt really fortunate to be at that team that was really, I felt like a very strong go to market team.
And our product also stood the test of time as well. So tough to leave. But the um, the big things that sort of stuck out for me was we really doubled down on the notion of like. Everyone is doing their marketing job, like the per they were, we're running ads, we're doing a BM, we're doing content, we're doing outbound and they're working, but they're all working at a baseline run rate and they're not like growing super quickly the way that you need to when you need to hit those like big growth numbers.
And so we kind of created this concept of like one plus one equals three type campaigns where it's like, okay, on our own we can only generate so much demand. Through our channels, but [00:07:00] what if we all talk about the exact same thing at the exact same time and create like an integrated campaign every quarter?
So it's not a novel or new idea, but it is a tricky one to execute on. Um, especially when you're kind of running, building, building the plane as you're, as you're flying it. And so that was sort of like our big impact in the market was we ran a bunch of cool campaigns. One was called Survivor, which was circa 2022, right when like Chad, GPT got good and everyone was actually like, oh, okay, it's in my hands and now it's real and now I have to learn how to use this thing.
Um, and so we were really quick on the draw to be like, okay, let's throw together a series of. Marketers from different professions and ask them how they could use chat GPT. And then we created, you know, a series of of videos that you could watch, but then we dripped them out like a TV show, and we wrapped it as like a survivor, the game show type event, and gave people prizes for showing up to a bunch of episodes.
There was actually like [00:08:00] tactical AI workshops that you could do afterwards to get more points. We gave away like $10,000 in cash plus a whole bunch of prizes to a bunch of people. And so we, you know, we had close to 10,000 participants and then we were able to measure it and it drove like millions of dollars in pipeline, um, for the company.
So we kind of had this like thesis of like, if we do something altogether and run ads and do a BM and do content about the same topic under the same wrapper, then people will take more notice. Something we found out afterwards that was interesting was it actually increases that always on content and marketing baseline after the fact.
So like once that campaign's over, let's say you were doing a hundred a month, now you're doing like 125 a month doing the same stuff, launch it, like ramping up for your next campaign. So it had this like. Rising tide effect for across all channels, which I found really fascinating. Yeah,
Ty Magnin: that was an awesome campaign.
I remember
Stewart Hillhouse: seeing it. Um, it was also really timely, right? The timeliness, I think is [00:09:00] really something that a lot of teams miss. They try to plan out a year in advance and they look backwards and try and get the quarterly cadence right, to be like, okay, is this strategic narrative the right one for this quarter?
I don't think in this environment you can think more than. 90, a hundred days in the future because it's gonna be a totally different conversation. There's nothing worse for morale when you like are ready to launch something and you look out and you're like, oh, well no one's even talking about this topic anymore.
And three other people have done it before us. Yeah. So I think screaming into the void. Exactly. Yeah. Like we're already doing that. So to to ride a wave is always gonna be easier, but you need to time it well and. Just based on like speed to execution, you kind of need to do it quickly. So I think you should like bookmark, you know, three big campaigns for 2025, but you should only be focusing on the one that you're gonna launch in March, or, you know, three months from now, you shouldn't be [00:10:00] thinking about the one you're gonna do this summer yet.
Tim Metz: Nice. That's nice. And I also like, and I think that's even more true in this, in the, you know, the volume of content and messages going up with AI that you need to get everybody focused and talking about the same thing. At the same time, 'cause it's so hard to get people's attention. So that's the only way to kind of have a chance of getting their attention.
I think it's a very important, very simple, but very important principle also for this age.
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah, I mean, it just reminds people, like if you, if you, let's say you're talking about AI agents, that's the, that's the topic you wanna talk about for this next step campaign from the perspective of a prospect.
Like everyone's talking about AI agents. But if you get, you know, still in the mind of a prospect, you see. Something casually on LinkedIn. You're scrolling and you see the CEO mention AI agents. Okay, whatever. That's cool. Then you get a cold email from A BDR that mentions AI agents and then you see an ad for AI agents and then you, um, get invited to like a webinar about AI agents like that is a more encompassing experience and eventually you're gonna be like, oh, [00:11:00] I'm associating that brand with AI agents.
It's becomes like a pull instead of a push type motion for them.
Ty Magnin: So Stu, you are turning the chapter, turning the page. What do people say? Uh, you're starting a new role on Monday. Uh, tell us about that.
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah, I'll be joining, um, the agency story, arb as VP of content. Um, so they've got a great team set up over there, and we're really focusing on the newsletter and the kind of narrative editorial style content world.
I was never an AI or um, an SEO. Content marketer. I never really hung my hat on that at all. Um, I always, you know, thrive doing the on topic, on on demand, like weekly newsletter because I became my letter from the editor. You remember in magazines, like in the front it said like, of course it was like a letter from the editor where they're still
Ty Magnin: there, by the
Stewart Hillhouse: way.
Yeah, exactly. So it was cool because it was talking about what was interesting that month in the world. Again, back to this concept of being timely. [00:12:00] But it also would naturally mention the stories that were written about in that edition, and I think that is what really good modern content marketing looks like is you need to have a strong point of view.
You need to have a strong voice, and you need to talk about the things that are relevant to your audience that are outside of your product, but you need to really naturally be able to transition into. Hey, but if you are interested in our product, go check this thing out. Oh, if you are, you know, consider, you know, in the early stages of consideration, here's a workbook you can do, or like something interactive.
So there's like all these opportunities to do that, and I think that still, like email is the best way to get people's attention in that mindset. You know, I think that any B2B business can really nail a newsletter in their industry, in their vertical, because frankly, I don't think that many people are doing them super well.
Ty Magnin: I agree with you, right? The email newsletter audience or, or market is still a little untapped. It's like long too, like, uh, uh, I don't think [00:13:00] it's going anywhere fast. Let's talk a little bit about AI usage. You've got some, some hacks, some tips, some tricks. We had the privilege of tuning into your podcast episode over on 95% content, uh, with Eric.
That gave me some ideas. I actually ripped one of them off, so I wanna start with. Uh, one tip I ripped from Stu that you can now rip from me and give me credit for as if I made it up. Uh, uh, and then we'll, we'll go forward with some other tips. So the one that I really liked was this idea of like creating a voice and a tone for a person.
You know, at animals we do some like LinkedIn thought leadership programs for founders. And so this comes up a lot, like how do you figure out what a founder's voice is? And I used to like. Take the example arc posts or you know, things that they've written and like feed it into Claude or whatever we're using and then like use that as the basis.
Mm-hmm. But what you did was slightly different. You took those same [00:14:00] assets, you fed it in and you said, give me a prompt for this person's voice. Mm-hmm. And then you use that prompt, uh, within your future prompts. I thought that was brilliant. I've used it. I think it does work a little better. It's like easier, you know, to just like copy, paste and run with.
That was a good one. So the question is, what else you got for us, Stu? Wow. I mean
Stewart Hillhouse: that was, that was, that was my it. That was it. That was what I was gonna. Ring the bell on for the next year. So, uh, I mean, I guess I gotta come up with something new. The hack behind the hack there is don't write your own prompts.
AI is always gonna write it faster and more detailed than you ever could. Give it an example of something you like, and then reverse engineer it. Ask it to reverse engineer it for you. Say whatever you like about it, and you can fine tune it a little bit. Like, let's say we're, we're talking about thought leadership, it's like.
You read a, you read a Post by Ty and you're like, I like Ty's tone. Um, but I want to, you know, obviously include my own, but I like the way he structured it. You just [00:15:00] copy and paste it, put it into your AI and say, I really like how he structured this. I want to be a little more punchy in the intro and I want to be a little more salesy at the end.
'cause you're not salesy at all. So I wanna turn up the salesy and get people to, to do something at the end of my post. Write me a. LLM prompt that will do that and it will spit out something and then you just try it a couple times and then start fine tuning what it's written for you. But that would've taken you like hours to kind of come up with, make it witty but not clever.
Make it, you know, whatever. You know, you don't know what you don't know. And the AI's job is now just to like fill in the blanks for you. And this works for in any use case. So like I no longer write all my own prompts, I just say, here's what I'm trying to do. If you have an example, it's even better create an LLM prompt for me, and that becomes the starting point.
Ty Magnin: Makes sense too. Like the LLM knows itself one would hope or maybe not hope. It's a little scary of a thought. So like asking it to write its own prescription, you know, smart. [00:16:00] But it's all like, we're
Stewart Hillhouse: all testing the waters anyways. Like a writer doesn't know that their voice is gonna hit until they publish, right?
Mm-hmm. And so even if the pro, even if the AI comes up with a wonky answer. If you'd hired a writer or you were writing it yourself, you would've come up with right wonky drafts as well. So it's like we kinda get mad at it of, 'cause it doesn't give us the perfect result the first time. It's like, neither do you.
So like, remember that when you're working with AI, that it's just giving you a draft. Now it's your job to refine it and make it perfect in the way you want it to be. I kind of see us now as more like, we're not accredited, but like engineers and doctors, they need to like sign off on their work. I think of like marketers now need to think of it in that way where it's like it's still going out with your stamp of approval.
Yeah. So whether it's AI or not, you still need to be the final person to look at it and say, I'm proud that this is going out on my company account. I'm proud that it's going out. My personal account, this, [00:17:00] yes, this is content that I'm happy with.
Ty Magnin: Totally agree. I used to use this metaphor of like, uh, I probably stole it from someone.
So like everything, you know, shout out to whoever I took this from, but, uh, the, like, the creative team ought to operate like a, like a, like a, a kitchen, right? You have like your head chef and then you have line chefs, right? Or, or something like this. Actually have 'em worked in the kitchen, but like there's a line of people doing stuff, right?
And like the head chef has to like, taste the soup before it goes out and be like, oh, this is good. This is good soup. It can go out now to the tables. So what you're saying is like, yeah, like a content marketer needs to be that head chef, right? Yeah. You know, does this soup taste right? Is it balanced, whatever, because they, you know, they are accountable for it at the end of the day.
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah, absolutely. I've got one quick AI tip that I've been kind of chunking on is Nice. Is just like using it to help mash together things that maybe should have never mashed together. Uh, I'll give an example in a sec, but like, that's a, that takes a lot of brain power [00:18:00] when you, you know, as a creative person, it's like, okay, I have this deliverable, so it's like fi it's, it's clear to me what I need to deliver on.
And then there's very strict lines of how to paint within it. And you need to kind of like, use your brain within those constraints to like give it, give the thing that you're trying to do. And so there's very little room for like, well, what if I learn something new this week? How do I like, inject that into my deliverable?
What I've started doing is using AI for is I have very concrete formats. So like my LinkedIn structure for example, I'm like here, you know, I want it to have this type of a hook for these number of sentences. Then I want it to go into something actionable and tactical. Then I want it to summarize a little bit of a thing and, and whatever.
So you give it like these structure formats, but then you just like feed it more than is more than is necessary. And see what happens. And so an example is like if you're on a website and there's like a paragraph that you, that you read and you're like, wow, that was really sharp copywriting. Just [00:19:00] like screenshot it, throw it, throw in this screenshot, throw in your blurb that you like thought about on the spot, and then like write a, write a LinkedIn post about this and include sharp copywriting like this.
You'll just get like cool results and try to be multimodal. And what I mean by that is like most people kind of just try to type into their ai, but like send it voice memos, like record yourself jamming on a topic for 30 seconds. Send screenshots of websites, send YouTube videos, like just feed it random stuff and be amazed by what you'll get out on the o other side.
You just need to kind of give it guardrails in the, in the shape of a structure. In order for the output to be something that's usable versus just like, you know, a thousand words that are like, cool, but I'm definitely not publishing this.
Tim Metz: Yeah, that, that's really nice. Um, uh, and, and something to try. Are you, are you, are there other guardrails that you recommend or other checks and balances [00:20:00] you have in place to, to keep your tone and to get the output that you want?
Stewart Hillhouse: There's three sort of foundational guardrails that, um, I've found if you're trying to get repeatable. Results from your ai and this, this applies to claw. This applies to chat GBT. This applies to what's the new one? Deep seek. Yeah. Like it'll apply to all of them as, as long as they continue to operate in the way that they currently operate is you need to give it a structure prompt.
And so that is a specific outline of what you want the finished result to look like from a structure point of view. Simply like how many paragraphs, how big do you want the paragraphs to be? Like where do you mention the product? You know, give it these like very granular details about what the structure of it is.
You should do this for every single piece, every single format that you're publishing. So LinkedIn, LinkedIn from a company page is gonna have a different structure than a LinkedIn. From a personal page is gonna have a different structure than a SEO blog is gonna have a different [00:21:00] structure from a narrative blog.
So like. Take an inventory of all the formats that your company's putting out, and then using our previous tip feed examples that you've already created and say, what is the structure of this content? Nice. And it'll give you that prompt. So that's prompt. Number one is structure. Prompt number two is style, which is then, you know, style slash voice, which is sort of a culmination of your company's existing content.
Like every, every, every. Writer, whether you're in-house or an agency or a freelancer, you're given a voice template of like, here's what I, here's the style I want you to write in. If you're gonna write for a company, and like every writer glances at it, and they might like refer back to it, but they're not writing every sentence thinking about that document.
But guess what AI is? So give it like a really detailed one. Again, feed it a whole bunch of existing blog posts, existing not newsletters, and say, here [00:22:00] is our voice. Describe it such that an LLM will understand and it'll give you a really detailed prompt. So now you've got voice, you've got structure, and then the last one is where you start actually putting in your company's like information.
So this is where you're gonna give it like your, um, competitive intelligence. You're gonna give it some product descriptions. You're gonna give it the high level narrative about what the company does. You're gonna give it some strategic narratives. So like, what are the three topics that surround your business?
Like, what are the, the high, the billion dollar problems that you're trying to solve? How does your problem solve All those? Again, give it like this huge strategic narrative doc about all the things that you know about your company. The combo of those three things now runs in the background for every prompt you run through Claude or chat GBT, since they've introduced this concept of like projects and in and in, uh, chat, GPTI think they're called, I think they're called projects in both Claude and Chat GBT.
Yeah.
Tim Metz: Yeah. You
Stewart Hillhouse: just upload those [00:23:00] as docs and now every chat you have with the AI is gonna take that into consideration. So now all you need to say is, write me a LinkedIn in the company voice. Here's a few notes about this, this concept I wanna explain to you. And then you can just give it like really unstructured gunk, either a voice note or just like free thought writing for two minutes.
And then it'll take that really early draft, take all the concepts that knows about your company and your voice and your structure, and give you like a way better draft than you would have if it was just a out of the box chat, GPT prompt. So that's how I think about like. Creating those guardrail prompts that will always kind of like bring it back to reality.
And then you come in with just like unstructured ideas and cool inspiration and it will figure out the medium, the happy medium, that's great. And then copy paste, you're done. Right. Plus a little bit of random shit. Like [00:24:00] I, I've had to reconfigure my entire role and what, what tasks a content marketer is now in charge of.
Since it got good like two years ago, I was like, oh, I'm still a better writer than ai. And then 3.5 came out and I'm like, I'm no longer a better writer and it can do it instantaneously. So therefore I need to figure out where I sit in the flow of creating content because it's still a workflow. But now our tasks within that have have changed drastically, I think.
Ty Magnin: Can you take us a little deeper there? Did it change the way that you. I don't know, uh, managed freelancers. Did it change like the way you collaborated internally? Um, tell us a little bit more about that, if you'll,
Stewart Hillhouse: I think the biggest one was like, I really liked the act of creating, I. I liked writing, and that was sort of my competitive advantage was like, oh, appar, apparently I'm a faster and a little better writer than my colleagues, therefore they put me as a content guy.
So I was like, that was my thing that I hung my hat on for a while. So now just think of [00:25:00] like AI as being like another colleague that is better and faster than you. So you're like, okay, well shit, that means I need to like uplevel and you know, move, you know, move up or move out kind of thing. Right? So that's on the content creation side.
Until you've like moved from a independent contributor role to a managerial role in a content org, you don't realize how much content is actually just operations. You're just moving information from here to there. You are making sure that we're hitting deadlines, you're making sure that we're measuring it, and then you're reporting on it, and that someone else is going to do the actual task of creating content.
Been, that was sort of like the biggest place was like, okay, let me use this crazy thing that I don't know how it works, but somehow if I just give it a little bit of information, it can just spit out a nine 80% done version of what I needed. So an example was like, content briefs are just like the bane of my existence.
Like why do, like, it's so annoying. I may as well just write it myself. That was my perspective two years ago. [00:26:00] Now it's like. Me a content brief, here's some inspiration, here's a, here's like existing prompts, and it just like writes the brief for you. So it's like things like that where it, it turned a lot of the admin part of content into templates and formulaic stuff and it freed up my time to be the narrator on top of it to be like, does this match our strategic narrative?
Is this something that's cool right now? Is this like topical and helpful for our audience? So I think everyone can kind of think about it that way, just like try to find tasks that it can free up. So you can think then about the company level strategy versus the content level, like execution.
Ty Magnin: Nice. And I also hear like you're the formula builder, right?
And that's an important part of the role. Um, you have talked about these different roles within the future of content marketing, right? With ai, uh, you talk about the personality marketer, the AI content operator. The campaign director, can you [00:27:00] unpack those roles a little
Stewart Hillhouse: bit? Yeah, totally. The first one is Personality marketer, and I didn't use influencer on purpose because I don't think that renting an influencer in the B2B space is as impactful as it is in the direct to consumer space.
You know, like you see a cute girl with a, with a golf driver and you're like, well, I'm obviously want the driver she has in B2B. It's like a much longer. Buying cycle and it's not about direct response, it's about like trust building and becoming the preferred brand over time so that when someone is in a buying position, they're gonna think about your brand first.
I think that the personalities of the faces of your company should be in-house people. And they need to be people who are doing stuff like this. Like it doesn't, you don't, I'm not saying you need to like launch really high production tv like shows. I don't think you need to do like TikTok style skits.
You just need to have people's [00:28:00] face in the feed, in the newsletter, and on video as much as possible so that they build that affinity with the audience over time. But it plays two roles. One, it's like it's gonna stand out just because you become a person and then that person, you know, becomes a little bit more trustworthy than just like the logo of your company.
But that person also then becomes a, a gatherer of source material. They, they're just out in the wild having conversations, recording it, and those transcripts now feed your entire content operation because you're giving it all this fresh insight. AI can't generate. That's the thing it can't do right yet is just like come up with interesting things off the on the fly.
Like it can, but it's probably gonna be wrong and it might be outdated or whatever. That's why in order to remain like in the know, you need to have people chatting with other people who are in the know, and that becomes the backbone of all the content topics that you cover. So you've got this personality marketer, now [00:29:00] they've got these transcripts where those transcripts go.
They need to then go into a workflow that includes AI automations, writers, editors, and then designers to make it look really good and get it out in the wild. So that's why I think there's gonna be a AI content operator role. I. Where they're gonna be in charge of the plumbing and they're gonna make sure that the information is moving where it needs to.
It's kind of like an an augmented operations role. You're gonna continuously be trying to like shorten the lead time so that it can happen like as quickly as possible so that you can be like putting stuff out as soon as it's recorded so you can be like on topic every single day. That's like, that creates a, the content, like we're not getting off the, the content hamster wheel in any way by doing that.
Right. We're actually like accelerating it. Yeah. So that's why I think the third role is this campaign director role who is thinking in those quarterly campaigns and is noticing like macro trends and is then curating [00:30:00] the insights that you are generating on that day-to-day. Always on content and.
Working with the team to then create these like more narrative like drawn out, more interesting wey stories that you then share across mediums. And guess what? That campaign is getting fed in the ear of the personality marketer. And that personality marketer is now seeding questions that align with the campaign that's gonna launch in 30 days.
Hmm. So you actually, by doing that, are getting off the content hamster wheel because you're always on content. Meaning just like your daily LinkedIn posts, your, you know, just the stuff that just goes out every day to keep the lights on, that can be pretty much outsourced to a very fine tuned proprietary like AI thing that you've built.
Whereas then if now freed up all the, all the team to dedicate at least 50% of their time towards like that bigger campaign. And so that's where I see the, the, the, the nuance of like what a [00:31:00] future content team looks like is. It's all feeding each other and you're not working. And just like on this one piece, the pieces are kind of like coming together with the help of ai and then you as a team are coming up with the bigger, like picture of what's going on.
What, uh, what, how your company fits in the bigger, um, story.
Ty Magnin: I dig it. I think, uh, the personality driven piece resonates like, uh, I definitely see the increase in importance there. You know, relationship based selling or what have you. And the second one, you know, the AI operator, like for sure, you know, someone that's responsible for the equation, the plumbing, like we're definitely seeing that and investing in that in animals.
I see
Tim Metz: the campaigns also, we, we've kind of been doing it by accident, but not as structured as you're talking about it. I've
Ty Magnin: got a highly experimental question here, Stu, so yeah, I'm willing to, willing to try. In prepping for this podcast, Tim was running a whole bunch of stuff that you've said and done through Claude or.
Whatever ai, various
Tim Metz: AI models. [00:32:00] Two. Yep. Oh one
Ty Magnin: and clause. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You got the full treatment here and it's about out a question that when we were prepping for the show, Tim and I were both like, the hell, like, did you make this up? You know, uh uh So we have no idea combination
Tim Metz: or a real question.
Yeah.
Ty Magnin: So you'll have to tell us if this question actually resonates, uh, and then answer it if it does, or tell us if it's total bs. Okay. Here's what we got. The open source target account list campaign you ran at Mutiny is fascinating. What inspired that level of transparency and how did you measure success beyond just pipeline metrics?
Stewart Hillhouse: Yeah. Um, a little backstory. Wait, is this a real question? This question real? It's
Ty Magnin: real, right? My question.
Stewart Hillhouse: Wow. That like it, yeah. That's a campaign we ran, so that's so cool that it was able to find that. It's hidden somewhere and then extrapolate on it and then like ask, how do you measure success other than pipeline?
I don't think you should be measuring success in any [00:33:00] other way other than pipelines, right? So,
Ty Magnin: yeah, that's a silly part of the question. Fair.
Stewart Hillhouse: No, I mean there's nuance there, but I, I genuinely, okay, so here's the whole backstory and yeah. What is an
Tim Metz: open source target account list campaign? I'm very
Stewart Hillhouse: curious.
Yeah. Yeah. So at Muni, we are selling a marketing and a marketing tool to marketers. I happen to be the content marketer there. So it became very meta where I'm just like, I'm, I'm marketing to marketers about marketing by marketing to them. And so we kind of leaned into this concept of like breaking the fourth wall.
And that was always our thesis with our content was like, let's just talk to them because they know what's happening. Like they know they're in a, they know they're on the newsletter, they know they're in a nurture cycle. They know they're getting ads at them. You know, we can't do anything to like surprise them other than.
Being so transparent that you have to pay attention. So we kind of experimented that over time in validating that yes, people are interested in our playbooks, are interested in our webinars that we, where we go behind the scenes. [00:34:00] So screw it. Let's just share our entire target account list as we roll out into an a BM motion.
Right? Wild,
Ty Magnin: like literally like you share names and email addresses or like at least names and. Positions. Um, well, we, we, we did it at the company level,
Stewart Hillhouse: account level. Okay. And so we literally put up a database, like a, a landing page with a searchable database that had every single, I think there are 5,000 companies that are perfect customers from uni.
Ty Magnin: Wow.
Stewart Hillhouse: You can scroll through it and when you click on one of them, so here's where it turns into like an interesting product play is. Let's say Airtable was one of them. You click on Airtable, it then takes you to a page that is completely personalized for Airtable. Using Mutiny. So cool. So the idea was when a person from Airtable lands on that page and clicks it, they're gonna be like, wow, this is really cool.
The whole [00:35:00] page is personalized to Airtable. I wonder how they did that. And we say, oh, we did it using Mutiny. And they're like, okay, cool. I get it. I get like, it was an aha moment and in the marketing versus like an aha moment in the product demo. And then that became sort of, that was our campaign. So now then we did follow up web, like, you know.
Eating our own dog, dog food. We then did content around how we built this campaign, content around how we built our target account list content, content on how we, um, use Mutiny to build this page. And like all this stuff like it, it fills your calendar really quickly when you come up with an interesting campaign theme.
Then you don't need to like worry about what are we gonna publish next week because it like waterfalls and you're like, oh, there's so many things I can talk about.
Tim Metz: Yeah.
Stewart Hillhouse: And so that one was cool because it then ties content exactly to pipeline because you can see, I think we just did it using UTM parameters, so nothing even fancy.
When was a meeting booked using this page? And if so, what was the source? Therefore, we can see that [00:36:00] like these meetings from these target accounts booked a meeting. By clicking on a piece of content and seeing their page and then booking the meeting. So I think that's sort of the, the thing that Mark the content and marketing is gonna need to get better at is account based marketing is sort of, you know, making a resurgence and needs to be part of your core strategy.
Like, you don't need to be doing top of funnel stuff if you only, if you know that you only have 5,000 perfect accounts, don't do broad reach SEO. Just go after those 5,000 people. So that was sort of my thinking and uh, I'm excited to see as we people do more of that kind of stuff.
Ty Magnin: Awesome.
Stewart Hillhouse: Nice. Well, listen, what kind of content are you enjoying lately?
I go through like waves of where I, where I don't listen to podcasts and then all of a sudden I just crush them. So I'm in the, I'm in the, the crush phase where I've got them ripping at like 1.7 times and I'm like out with the dog. I'm at the gym, I'm in the car. Like whenever I have a [00:37:00] second I throw EarPods in and listen.
I've been trying something new because sometimes there's just like, it's like, oh, that's a really cool episode, but I just don't have the time. You know? There's no way to listen to all of them at once. A little sneaky hack. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, but if the podcast publishes on YouTube.
You go into YouTube and then you somewhere in the menu, uh, you can find the transcript and I literally copy and paste the transcript of a two hour long podcast, dump it into Chad GBT and say, here's a challenge I'm having at work or in my personal life, or a thing. I'm trying to figure out are there any insights in this podcast that were mentioned that could help me solve this?
Gimme a timestamp. And if there's not, don't make something up. Just tell me, no, this podcast was not relevant. And it'll just like do it and it'll gimme the timestamps of where to go and listen to it. And, and if not, it just says, no, this episode has nothing that can serve you at this moment. And it just, and I'm like, great.
I didn't need to listen to that anyways. Dang.
Ty Magnin: What a time saver. [00:38:00] That's great. I mean, when you read a book or like you hear something that like is helping you with that problem that you're struggling with, like. I feel so good, right? Uh, but so often I'm like reading a book and I kind of get bored and I can't figure out why I am like taking so long to get through this thing.
And the answer's like, well, it's just not like, it's not like right book, right time for me. You know, I'm
Stewart Hillhouse: really interested in the future when someone finally figures out this like second brain concept where you just have like, you know, we're reading stuff all day, we're looking at stuff all day, we're podcasting all day.
This repository of this general information that we've consumed, I would, I'm so excited for when I can just be a re like living my life and all of a sudden I get a little AI notification being like, Hey, there's actually a framework that you highlighted in a book seven years ago that is actually gonna be really helpful for solving this problem you're currently doing.
Like that's gonna be. It's super cool.
Tim Metz: It's brilliant. It's really close. I think you can kind of did that with notion already, but it's, you have to be proactive about it in a way, but like Exactly. Yeah. But I think that's coming. I think [00:39:00] that's the personal AI agents, right? That just tell you like, you should now be reading this.
Or like, yeah, you, you should not be listening to this.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, it's not that far off. I think we should wrap up this episode, sir. It's been great having you. Thanks so much for coming on to share a little bit about your own AI experience, uh, taking us a few steps further, uh, in, in our own understanding of it.
And, you know, wish you best of luck as story a we'll have you back on maybe in the future. Where should people follow you?
Stewart Hillhouse: You know, you gotta commit to one channel and LinkedIn's my spot. So, uh, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn and, uh, say hi, and let me know, uh, that you came from this episode. I'd love to chat with more marketers.
Lovely. Thanks Stuart. Woo.
Ty Magnin: Another great episode. What'd you learn?
Tim Metz: I, I, the first thing I take away is like, I, I love his creativity and just like, having fun in his marketing. Right? It's not necessarily AI related, but it sounds like, yeah. It's like, yeah, this is awesome. Like these kind of ideas, like we've done a little bit of those kind of things, but I think that's the ideal, right?
Like AI frees you up to be able to thinking about this kind of stuff and do fun campaigns and, and, and cool stuff [00:40:00] that's not the,
Ty Magnin: the same as
Tim Metz: what everybody else
Ty Magnin: is doing, for sure. Yeah, I opened with that point of like, this is what I admire about Stewart. Uh, at least that's one big thing I admire about Stewart.
He kind of opened the aperture for me around this point of not writing your own prompts. Yeah, I think that's just like smart and easy. I think that the market's coalescing around kind of like the layers at which you need to. Prompt the AI in order to get a good output for content. And those layers being something like, it's like there's like a brand kit or like a brand style, right?
There's like company context, you know, product, market, whatever. And then there's like the actual source material that you're pouring into that thing. Oh, oh. And there's also the structure of the output, right? So is it a blog, is it a LinkedIn, is it a, whatever? I'm starting to see that enough in our conversations on this podcast.
In other research outside of it, that makes me feel pretty confident that like, that's the right way to use Gen ai.
Tim Metz: Yeah, that was a takeaway [00:41:00] for me as well. Like, I think I've been focused on the style part of like, use this as a reference, but not enough on, like, I just kind of say, okay, here's the style and it's kind of what I want now.
Write, you know, start writing instead of really being much more specific about like, you know, indeed the intro needs to be this long and then there needs to be this many sections and, and
Ty Magnin: whatever you end up editing more if you don't. Right. At least that's how I find, like I get a crappy LinkedIn post and I'm like, ah, it just like isn't punchy or format or has a good hook, but like I haven't told it my opinion on what a good hook looks like, you know, or what punchy looks like.
The the other
Tim Metz: thing, what he touched on, and I think has ever actually broader implications that, that I was also thinking about before is like, he was like, you know, for example, a, a style guide for a writer, right? He's like, yeah, before a writer would glance at it, but then he just goes off or he or she goes off and just writes, right?
Yeah. But he said, now that document really is valuable. And I think that's with a lot more documents, right? If you have your company values or you have your strategic plan, it's the similar thing. Like, it's like, yeah, it's good to go to the exercise, but then very often those documents then just gather dust, right?
[00:42:00] Whereas now you can always insert them into whatever you're doing. So making those documents actually becomes more valuable because you can always make the AI
Ty Magnin: aware of it. Definitely. It's like AI can play a role almost like a compliance manager. I. To make sure that you're on tone or make sure that you're on message, whatever that is.
And that's, that is hugely valuable. It's hard to keep, you know, an army of teammates or freelancers or whoever you're working with, uh, on tone and on message, right?
Tim Metz: Yeah. Like, I just feed the machine, right? It's like. That that kind of came back like get everything right, like get people talking to people, but record it.
Like take stuff from here, take stuff from there. Just feed it into it. Feed it into it. That's how you get like interesting output.
Ty Magnin: Definitely. Well, I'm personally really excited to do a few more episodes. Uh, I feel like we are starting to, you know, see the forest from the trees pretty well. A couple more at bats.
We can maybe round this thing out. What do you think? Yeah, maybe we need to open source our
Tim Metz: target guest [00:43:00] list.
