Stop Posting “More Content”, Use This Simple System Instead

Creativity is not magic. It's a system. And trust. It's not earned by talking. It's earned by proving. Today you're about to meet someone who has mastered both. Welcome back to Chats with Jason. I'm your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. And this is where leaders come when they want to create work that stands out and experiences that create raving fans. Today's guest has helped some of the biggest brands on the planet unlock creativity at scale and build trust that lasts. Melanie Diesel is one of the most respected creative strategists in the world. She was the first editor of branded content at the New York Times. She has helped build the brand storytelling engine of HuffPost, and she led creative strategy for 35 major media titles at Time Inc. Now, if that's not enough, she has also delivered more than 300 keynote presentations, consistently rated among the top sports speakers at global events. And she is the best selling author of the Content Fuel Framework and Proven. And just for that cherry on top, she's helped more than 30 Fortune 100 companies build stronger ideas, stronger content, and stronger trust. Melanie, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I feel like my bio sounds better when you read it. I might just bring you along with me everywhere now.

Absolutely. Well, I know you get to go to some amazing events across the world, so I'm happy to carry the luggage and do the the on stage intro for you.

It sounds good.

So let's start off with what I hope's a simple question. If you were to open a nine year old's backpack and using only what's inside it, can you explain what you do for a living?

So to clarify, am I explaining to the nine year old or am I explaining to grownups using the nine year old supplies?

Let's explain it to a nine year old.

Okay. You get homework assignments and everybody in your class is probably gonna do those projects in a very similar way. And my job is to help people like you think differently about those problems that they're solving so that you can come up with ideas for your projects that are gonna surprise your teachers and your classmates and help you do something that maybe you didn't think you could do originally. Helping people think differently so they can come up with cooler ideas and make things that they're proud of.

I think that sounds pretty cool. And as an adult, I'd like to be able to do it now. You've called yourself a creative systems architect and you've just talked about helping people think differently. What does being a creative system architect actually mean? Feels like the growing up version of what you just told us?

Yeah, the grown up version. I made it up myself. That is one of the perks of working for yourself. You could just decide whatever you want to be, but it really came from trying to encapsulate all the different type of types of work that I do. And that just seemed like the best way to explain it. That really what I'm doing when I'm working with brands or even if I'm doing like coaching stuff with individuals, is trying to make sense of the creative process and make it work more efficiently. And sometimes that's reverse engineering based on the final product, like the content that's coming out of those creative processes. Sometimes it's more purely operational, like, why are we not creating the volume of content we want or the quality of content we want? Sometimes it's like, why is our team just a total disaster and we can't get anything cool made because our structure's all out of whack or we don't have the right resources? So I like to say that I'm really looking at creative systems and then building or rebuilding them to help make them more efficient.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And your first book really was the catalyst for that on a world stage, at least on your work, doing the work, you earning the right to be a thought leader in this space.

Yeah.

How. How do you think your first book, the content fuel framework, has changed how teams brainstorm. What problem were you trying to solve when you wrote the book?

I'm going to answer them in reverse. I think it probably makes more sense that way. So the problem I was trying to solve, being totally honest, is I would go in and do workshops with a lot of folks and teach them my processes. And I was always being asked, is there a leave behind? Is there? How do we keep doing this after you're gone? And that was the indicator to me that, okay, people are looking for materials on this, not just information. Right. Like, they want something they can keep behind and work with. And so the book was built to solve that problem, truthfully, is like, I wanted something that I could leave with teammates after I do a training, they could send to teammates who couldn't be there for a presentation, things like that. But the coolest thing for me is when I hear from teams a lot of times at like, agencies or in house creative teams in a brand, and they're like, yeah, we use your system in our brainstorms. And hearing the creative ways that people use it makes me so happy. I teach a gamified version of it. So the content field framework is a 10 by 10 matrix with different topics and types of content you could create on one side and then different formats you could use to bring it to life on the other side. And one of the. My favorite versions is using a ten sided die like the kind you'd use for tabletop gaming or something, and letting people roll the dice and have to come up with a combination that they might not have picked themselves. But it's a good creative exercise. That is what people tend to find the most fun. It's like I'm getting a challenge. I never would have thought to do something historically focused about this topic through an infographic. How do we come up with something like that? And I mean, my goal is just to make it more fun. I think a lot of times coming up with content feels like a burden because of how many channels we have to program and how many messages we have to share. So hearing that teams are getting together and actually having fun coming up with the content ideas is like the best to me.

Yeah, makes sense to me. I've been in the fortunate position of leading creative teams and it always amazes me. It doesn't matter what industry, what grouping of people, there's always a time where teams get stuck creatively.

Yep.

Why do you think they get stuck?

I think there's a lot of reasons. A big one just being the day to day grind. Right. Like we're. For many people, the task of coming up with content again to program all these disparate channels is something that was added on to an existing role before a lot of these tools were even around. You're being tasked with far more work than before and in many cases we're working with not as many resources as we'd like. So I think there is the exhaustion of just the volume of what we have to come up with. Oh my God. Another email. We have to send another one. Didn't we just do that yesterday? It just starts to get exhausting. And that's where when you're under the gun, you have this time crunch that you're under. It's really tempting to just fall back on what you've always done. Let's take something we've done before and just do it slightly differently or let's reuse something that exists. And while there's a time and a place for that kind of strategic repurposing, it can start to feel like a task more so than a creative opportunity. And so I think a lot of it comes from that. It's like, I'm tired, I'm busy. And I can't believe we gotta pump out another blog post this week or another video again. I think exhaustion is a lot of it, and I think there's also just a lot of constraints that we're under. Sometimes it's hard to be creative when you may have communication issues within a team. You may have someone with a stakeholder, with a different viewpoint that's vetoing or putting things, taking them off track. All those things get in the way of trying to produce something that you're proud of and you actually want to share with your audience.

So you've shared with us that part of why your system can be so successful is because it brings fun back into the creative process. What's another way that your system helps build that, that creativity into the workplace so that it doesn't become just another task.

One of the things that I think is most important is actually separating the content idea generation process into two distinct parts. And so a lot of times when people are trying to come up with content ideas, a campaign, some sort of idea, they're thinking of it as a singular item. I need this one thing that I have to put out on Wednesday or whatever the case may be. And that often forces us to think format. First, it's an email or it's a video, it's a podcast. And when we do that, we tend to shoehorn things that are would be better expressed in a different format, but we're shoving them into that format because we started with that box and now we're just trying to fill it. And the system that I share teaches you to start with the idea like, what is it that we actually want to say? What's the focus of this story or this piece of content? And then let's figure out how we might bring it to life in different formats. I think that allows the content to be more strategic, but again, it also just encourages us to break out of the norm a little bit. Because if we're just yet another video idea, yet another email idea, we tend to just repeat things that we've done in the past when we're starting with a new prompt. What if we told this story through data instead of audio? Or what if we told this story through the lens of history instead of through the lens of our product? It gets you thinking in a different way. And that alone is a bit of a freedom, right? Because you're being told explicitly to, to think about it differently.

And if I was to take an extension of that, what I'M hearing is it's okay for the content to be different across platforms. And I say that because quite often people are like, we're just going to post the same thing on every platform and it's going to land. It's going to work on everything. But perhaps that's not right. What's your take on that?

Absolutely. I think in an ideal world, we'd be creating different content for each platform. I think the reality of most teams is that we just don't have the resources to do it. And so there is some level of just sometimes we're just distributing stuff that's going to be more successful on a different platform. But when we are thinking about it story first. Right. Focus first instead of format first, it allows us to make those adaptations more easily. So if we, for example, say, look, we have this new community partner or this new nonprofit we're working with, we want to tell their story, we could say, okay, we could tell it through the lens of numbers. And that would probably work well for LinkedIn, where people are going to be more focused on the business impact. So let's talk about what our partnership is going to do financially for that group and the impact we can make. We could also talk about it through the lens of people. And we know that video and interview is going to perform better, maybe on something like TikTok, where we can talk to the people that we're working with. Oh, we've got to share it on Instagram and we've got to share it on Pinterest, too. Okay, let's look. See what compelling imagery we can get. Because we've started with what the story is about, we can now examine the different ways we could collect all that at once and have a differentiated strategy across platform. Whereas if we started and said, let's do an interview with the founder of this, this nonprofit, now we're stuck. We only have that video. We don't have the data, we don't have the images, we don't have the things that we need to distribute it differently. So it allows you to tackle those platforms with an eye for what might be better. And you could batch that collection so that you don't have to distribute the same thing everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Now, you've probably get asked this question more times than you like, but the reality is AI is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and it's definitely the buzzword of the year. How do you find AI in this creative process?

Well, I have a Lot of thoughts on this. We could talk for the whole time about this question. I think generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be an incredible thought partner in the creative process if they're used correctly. I think there are a lot of people who have the misguided belief that AI is going to replace content creation. And I think the fact that the phrase AI slop even exists and is a unified thing tells us that we're certainly not there yet. Until AI can become reliably accurate in a way that is remotely brand safe, I don't think we have to worry about it replacing creative activity. The other thing is, I think all the things that make content mean something to us are uniquely human. Right? AI can do research, AI can pull facts, AI can construct a sentence, but it doesn't have an anecdote about what happened with its cousin one summer when they were a kid and why that matters in the first place. Right. It can't describe the sensory experience of walking into a place and what it smells like and what it feels like. It can't talk about a breakup and how that affected their viewpoint on a particular thing. Like, it doesn't have human experiences or senses. And so it's not going to be able to create that emotional resonance in any sort of reliably true way. I mean, there are people who say the more it trains on those things, it can certainly manufacture them. But I don't know. I think if given the choice, would you like to read an imaginary story about an imaginary death of someone special to an imaginary person? Or would you like to read someone talking about grief and how they've processed that and how it affects their leadership? I'd much rather hear from a real person about their real experience because it takes away the entire meaning if I know that it's fabricated. Right? So I'm not afraid of it as a replacement for creative work. Uh, I'm afraid for the people who think it's a replacement for the creative work. And I think there's certainly gonna be growing pains for those of us who do creative work as people learn the hard way that it's not a replacement, but it really can be. It can be a great supporting tool. It can be something that you use. For example, I did a course for LinkedIn learning all about how to use ChatGPT specifically as a content creator and content marketer. And I talked about. None of the things that I talk about in that course are about generating content at all. It's about using it for gap identification. Hey, I've created this awesome long form blog post. What perspectives should I be pulling in that I'm not? What open questions would my audience likely have that I haven't addressed? What personal biases are showing up in this work that I'm not aware of and that I need to address before sharing it with my diverse audience? There's a lot of ways that the tools available can help you find gaps, improve the work test, react based on a profile of your audience and give you some insight into how it might perform competitive analysis to inform your content. There's so many things you can do that are not wholesale content creation that I think those are going to be the folks who get ahead who are using it strategically as a partner rather than as a replacement.

Yeah, yeah. I really like that approach. It, it is more of enhancing our work and our authentic work than trying to create authenticity, which is how a lot of people are using ChatGPT at the moment, I think.

Totally. And it reminds me of a lot of other tools that like we've come to use too. I know those of us of a certain age remember when we were told that like using a calculator was going to make it so that you couldn't think anymore. You know what I mean? If you use a calculator, you won't be able to think strategically, you won't be able to do anything. And sure, there are certain things that we no longer have to do ourselves, but it certainly didn't make it so people can't think of. Right. There's no less numbers happening in the world. There's no less math occurring. In fact, we're able to compute things at a level we never could before because of these tools. But it didn't stop the need for understanding those things. It didn't stop people from developing those skills further. And I think the same is true for almost any technology. It doesn't necessarily replace the skills that are inherent or hard earned skills that can be magnified by those tools.

Yeah, yeah. They still teach math in school for a reason.

That's right.

And a side note, very different teachings to when I was at school. So I'm showing my age. But one plus one is still two at least in 2025. So can you give us an example of a team who went from being stuck to unstoppable after applying your system framework?

Yeah. One of the wonderful challenges about some of the work that I do is because I do a lot of internal trainings for teams, I'm often NDA bound and can't talk about the Specifics. But I can tell you in generalities, I worked with a very popular tech company that's probably in your top five or ten if you were to name them and their major issue, at least at that point in time, one of them that they were facing is that they had these brilliant engineers who were building out the technology behind their company. And those engineers couldn't always translate the brilliance of their ideas to the folks who were forced to then share that with the public. So you have marketing, sales, customer facing teams who have to try to explain these awesome new features and benefits, but they're not able to really communicate effectively with one another. So I did a lot of first facilitation between the two teams. Let's just have an open conversation. What do you need to know? What do you want to share? And then a bunch of training with the engineers specifically talking about, here's what people care about. Right. I know you know how this works. You know why it's important. Here's what your consumers are going to care about. I want to teach you to recognize those tidbits and extract them from the work that you're doing. What makes something newsworthy, what makes something interesting, really, the conversation was very much like, how do we think about benefits instead of just features? Right. And translating that conversation. And that team has gone on to produce even more awesome new features and to communicate those benefits really efficiently. And they haven't needed me to come back, which I think is a good sign. If they're off and running and they're like, we've got this now, that. That's like a proud mom moment.

Yeah, it's one of the pros and cons of the work that we do, especially when we're under NDAs. We can't talk about the specifics, but we always love to know when the work's really landed and delivered that result. So if a leader is listening today and they don't have the money to have you come and work with them straight away, what's one thing that they can do? What's the very first step, if you will, that they could do to help their teams be more creative?

So one thing that I really recommend is explicitly separating the time for building an idea and refining an idea. So without getting super technical. Creative thinking requires two distinct processes. You may notice something of breaking down the complex into smaller parts here. It requires divergent thinking where we're. Yes. And big builds, just building one another up. And then it requires that process of refining, bringing the reality of the budget and the timing into the room if they happen at the same time, which is what happens in most singular brainstorming experiences, it is very difficult to have anything innovative happen because the reality continues to knock down any dreams, any goals, any stretch, any future thinking that goes beyond what's already been done. Right. So if you are finding that stagnation of we're just doing the same stuff, we're not taking enough risk. Step number one is to separate the divergent time when we're coming up with our ideas, and the refining time, the convergent time when we're bringing reality back in. And usually you can do that. I prefer if you could sleep on it, have the building one day and then the refining the next day, so you can let things marinate for a little bit. But even if it's just splitting your same exact brainstorm in half and explicitly saying this is the yes and time, I don't care if it's a good idea, I don't care if it's a perfect idea, I don't care if it's in budget. Let's talk about what the best solution would be here. And then at a designated point, we will then switch to how do we take that awesome ideal and bring it into a level that's achievable? That's a much better way to get somewhere.

Yeah. I really like the idea of the yes. And just building on things before we. Because it's so easy to get into the why it won't work as opposed to trying to find the way it could.

And the other thing that we find happens a lot is that first idea might not be the idea, but it could be the idea that inspires the idea. If we cut it off at the knees, you don't get the spinoff, you don't get the derivative idea, you don't get the next iteration of that, which is very much feasible or very much possible. Right. So I think that's why that first stage is so important of just imagine, like we're going to take budget, timeline, resources, you know, that tough person who never approves anything. Those are for the second half. But right now, let's just talk about if we could solve this, we could come up with a solution that's ideal, like, what could that look like? And just keep building and agree and expand and just add to it. Then when you have this big beautiful thing that is messy now, you bring back and you chop off what's not in budget, you chop off what's not doable, and you get to something that is still original. Because you've allowed it to bloom beyond what it could have otherwise.

Yeah. So before we jump into the next section of the show today, what do you say to the person who says I'm just not creative?

My first thing is usually, how many ways have you imagined that it could go wrong? Because that usually puts right out the window that you're not creative, you're just focused on the wrong prompt. Because truly, and I know it's really trite to say this, but like we are all born inherently creative. You are. Our brains are built to iterate ideas, to imagine outcomes, to predict, to project. Like that's the way our brain works. Unfortunately, the realities of the systems that we all live in, schools, in society and work make us very risk averse because there's punishment when things don't work out perfectly. And so we become afraid to suggest things that aren't possible or that aren't guaranteed to work. And that is really what inhibits creativity. So you are totally creative. You absolutely are. You've just been trained to imagine how things won't work out because that's the self protection that you need to survive in this world. So it's something that requires conscious overriding to remind yourself, like, I'm actually really good at imagining outcomes. I'm really good at predicting possibilities, at thinking of these things. I've just been trained to focus on the wrong prompt. And that means you can retrain to focus on the correct one.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone respond to that question like that before. And I think it's brilliant. Like you can't argue. There is no arguing with that. Yep, it's absolutely brilliant. So let's shift to trust. We know that trust is collapsing everywhere.

Absolutely.

Your book prove it hits this notion on the head. Why do you think trust is so hard to earn today?

A lot of it comes back to what we were talking about earlier with AI and that hasn't always been the case. That's more so in the last couple years. But Even going back 10 years or so, right when we started to get filters happening on people's faces on the Internet, we started to get photoshopped that you couldn't trust a photo was actually real anymore. Right. We started to get more sophisticated video editing, we started to get deep fakes. Right. Like the more advanced technology has gotten, the less trustworthy media in front of us has become. And that's just a fact. Right. It's not, this is not political, it's not divisive, it's just A fact like you cannot trust the things that you see anymore because there are more ways than ever to fabricate things and layer that into existing. In a capitalist hellscape where you're getting scam emails, robocalls, scam text messages, phishing, all these other things, it can very much feel like a consumer that the world is trying to trick you and case telling the truth. And that's not a crazy conclusion to come to, given all these things that you're exposed to. I mean that I think acknowledging that reality is actually one of the best things you can do as a marketer, as a communicator, as a business owner. Acknowledging that nobody trusts anything you're saying, because it's actually really freeing to know that you have to back it up. You have to back it up. And that's an incredible opportunity because nobody's doing it. Everybody is continuing to go out and say, my product is the best. I'm going to get you results. Everything's amazing. You can trust us. Nobody is proving that they should. And so that's an incredible opportunity. But you do have to acknowledge that reality, first of saying it is just not enough anymore. You've got to back it up.

So what's an easy way for a business to start proving it as opposed to just saying it?

I often look for the easiest incremental improvement on something you're already doing. So I look at things like testimonials and case studies. Most businesses, as a rule, recognize the importance of those things, right? I know I need other people to back it up. I know I need other people to say nice things about me. But we usually leave it pretty, pretty minimal, right? We're saying like, yeah, I love working with Melanie, sincerely, Bob V. Or whatever. You're like, that's not enough. That doesn't give me enough. And I could make up that person pretty easily. So take those things you're already doing, whether it's testimonials or case studies or reviews, ratings that you're featuring, and really dial it up. Let's talk to that person. Let's find out what solution they were looking for and what did they try that didn't work. Let's expand it into a story that is so much more rich, so much more relatable, so much more detailed, that it's a lot more trustworthy than simply a half of a name and a sentence or two. Now. Yes. Can people make up whole personalities and whole businesses that. Yeah, of course they can. But it's a lot easier to put a fake a stock photo and a first name last initial than it is to come up with a full story where you're talking to customers, you're talking to people, you're bringing in quotes, it becomes much more substantial. So take those reviews, ratings, case studies, testimonials that you already have, and dial it up to a hundred. Pick one or two and really go in deep. Find out why they like working with you, what worked, what they tried before that didn't work, what the difference has been since they started working with you. Like, really get into the weeds of what that testimonial really means and give people something to grab onto.

So a lot of our listeners lead departments far outside marketing, hr, finance, operations. What's the one framework or the one tip that you have for them that can help their teams either be more creative, prove it more.

That's such a good question. One thing I think everybody can do, regardless of your department, is use educational content as a tool for trust building. And that can be a creative exercise too. Everyone, by nature of having a job, is an expert at something, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly mundane it is to you, right? You are good at something, and you are good at something that is necessary for the success of this business. And being able to help people understand how to do that better not only showcases your expertise and makes you look more trustworthy, like, clearly this person knows what they're doing if they're showing others how to do it. It empowers you to recognize your own expertise, to be seen as a subject matter expert. And again, it shows people that you're worthy of trust because you're giving them the secret sauce, you're giving them the recipe for success rather than just saying, trust me, this is how you do it. Don't ask further questions. So I think seeing how can I teach people, how can I help people understand what I do, is a good way to start to explore what opportunities might be right around you. One of the great ones that I've seen a lot of people do is there are probably certain email responses or slack responses or ticket responses, whatever system you're using that you find yourself having to write over and over again, right? Explaining how to do a particular process, explaining why something is done a certain way. Instead of writing that same email every single time, is there a way for you to put together some documentation, an FAQ page, do a screen share, and walk through how to do something right, so that proactively you can say, hey, I know you're filling out your onboarding paperwork for the first time. A lot of times, people wonder about how to do the 401k enrollment. So I put together this little video for you just in case that's what you encounter that person immediately.

Whoa.

They know what they're doing. They're proactively caring about other people. This is someone I can go to when I have a problem because they are actively trying to help me fix it. So those little things, just like an HR example, you can find those ways to use educational content to build that relationship and also showcase your expertise at the the same time.

Yeah, great stuff. Great stuff. As we come to the end of the show, I'm wondering, Melanie, what's one challenge you'd like to give to a listener today that perhaps you want to challenge them to start doing something this week?

This is something that could go a lot of different ways. I think the idea of separating your divergent and convergent thinking can actually work really well throughout your life. Now, it is something you have to do consciously, right? Because again, our system efficiency tells us we should just try to build the idea and refine it at the same time. But this could work for something as simple as, what are we having for dinner tonight? Because it's always, I suggest this. I don't like that. How about this? No, I don't want that. And it's the back and forth, right? The building and refining at the same time, and you never get resolution. Instead, like, all right, let's just write down each of us write down five things we might like to have for dinner tonight, and then you can veto and then go with what's left, Right? You. Instead of chopping off one at a time, you've got a list you can refine. And so I think if you could find an opportunity, a problem you're facing this week that seems like a challenge, and challenge yourself. Let me do the divergent thinking first. Let me think of all the possible solutions, all the things that could work, all the things I could try, and then let me refine that list rather than trying to write and edit at the same time, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah. Let's stop writing and editing at the same time. We'll have a lot, a lot fuller lives, I think, and also greater results at the end of the work that we're working on. Melanie, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me and let.

Me share my story and everyone listening. Remember this. When you transform the experience, you transform the business and the world around you. I'm Jason Espretchel. And this has been another edition of Chats with Jason. Hey, just quickly I wanted to reach out and say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Chats with Jason. I'd really appreciate a five star review on your favorite podcasting app. Or if you're watching watching along on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and show that you like this video. And be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on the awesome content and the great guests that we've got coming up for you.