Orin Bliss Brecht00:02 — I don't think the audience about the complexity. I don't think anybody wants to know how the sausage is made. People want to know what the solution is and how it makes their lives easier. Nobody cares about the space age polymer in your...
Whatever. They want to know what is it going to do for me? And how is it going to make my life easier? And how is it going to save me money and time?
Ben Ard00:50 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Orin. Orin, welcome to the show.
Orin Bliss Brecht00:54 — Bye then.
Ben Ard00:55 — Orin, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. Your experience is so rich and so cool. Before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you. Let's get to know who we're talking to today, so the audience has an understanding of who you are. If you don't mind sharing your background, work history and all that fun stuff, it'd be a great place for us to start.
Orin Bliss Brecht01:15 — Sure, yeah, my name is Orin Bliss Brecht. I am an independent creative director coming out of branded content and content marketing primarily. I started all the way back in print magazines, working as a graphic designer at Spin Magazine, moving into more regional magazines with Austin Monthly and Austin Monthly Home in Austin, Texas. From there, I found myself as a conceptual art director with Victoria's Secret Direct. We created the final creative strategy for everything from print to digital, but we really created the conceptual end of things and pitched these things internally. From there, I was at a company called Time Inc. Content Solutions that had become recently called the Foundry at Time Inc.
We created branded content solutions for the likes of Lincoln Continental, Geico, and Ram Trucks — a lot of automotive stuff, a lot of insurance stuff, a lot of healthcare stuff. From there, at Hearst, I was more into the fashion end of things, also doing work for Popular Mechanics with clientele like Verizon, clientele like California Closets, and clientele like Jim Beam for Esquire, among other clients. And then I went back to the Foundry, continued working with them and collaborating with that team there.
Before bouncing to Pace Communications and leading the marketing strategy and creative strategy for the Verizon account back in the 5G days and demystifying the ability of 5G and its low latency capabilities. And finally, I went to a company called Choreograph, which was an ad tech, martech company that was a fledgling company when I started, and their plan at that time was to go rather customer facing and be a household name in that space. And they needed a story told and they needed a refined point of view that was conversational, not heady, approachable, and demystifying, if you will.
Ben Ard03:20 — Love it. That's amazing. So Orin, the subject that we pick for today is something that every marketer goes through all the time. And it's for different areas and industries, but the overall concept is universally applicable. Demystifying complex topics. Whether it's your product, the industry, regulations, technology, it doesn't matter. It's a big deal.
So you started as an illustrator and a visual storyteller before moving into content marketing. How has that visual first approach shaped the way you think about marketing complex topics to make them super accessible to a wider audience?
Orin Bliss Brecht03:59 — Sure, with illustration, and I think I'm a little lucky in this, an illustrator doesn't necessarily know anything about the subject matter that they have been tasked with illustrating, especially in an editorial sense. If you're an editorial illustrator that is working for some sort of publication, either online or in print, you're usually sent a draft. It could be about anything. You need to summarize that draft into one or two or five images, not a lot.
These images aren't like consecutive images. They have to stand alone and illustrate a pretty dynamic topic in one image. So you have to become a subject matter expert. Obviously you read the draft, but you ask your editor, you ask your client, you really get under the skin of what the thing is and then you sketch it out. And as you do that a lot, and I've worked on the other side as an art director, you develop this skill set of how to conceptualize complex things and strip them down into the simplest form, and then you have fun telling a story around that simplified version of things. If the illustrator gets it, the audience will get it. And that's the fresh perspective on demystifying the complex. You're not a subject matter expert. If you can understand it, you're the best translator for that complex message.
Ben Ard05:24 — I love that. That's cool. The ability to say, hey, I have to know this well enough from what I'm doing to break this down, really fully understand it. So let's say you're a marketer and you have this crazy hard subject, like a really technical, something that might even make your eyes glaze over — something like the cloud back in the day. What's your process for finding the story and breaking through the complexity? Where do you start in that process and what does that look like?
Orin Bliss Brecht05:56 — I don't think the audience cares about the complexity. I don't think anybody wants to know how the sausage is made. People want to know what the solution is and how it makes their lives easier. Nobody cares how the chrome plating on the vacuum cleaner's wheels. Nobody cares about the space age polymer in your...
Whatever. They want to know what is it going to do for me? And how is it going to make my life easier? And how is it going to save me money and time?
And so you focus on the solution. And from there, you tell a human story around that solution. You present a scenario. You present a story. And when I say story, I don't mean on the nose story. It could be a story, but it's — you position yourself as if you're trying to tell the solution to somebody who knows nothing about it. How would you do that? There's analogies at work. There's, you know, a story can be engaging and it really makes people try a little harder to understand. I take the Cliff Notes approach and make an engaging frame around that.
And that is usually probably the most effective, I think, way to creatively market a complex solution or offering.
Ben Ard07:11 — I love that. That makes perfect sense. Now you're in a unique position where you've seen the industry kind of transform. You start out in print, you moved into digital, you've done brands, you've done all these things for different sizes of organizations, different kinds of organizations, things like that. What are the constants in storytelling and simplifying complex ideas across all of the different industries and the mediums? And maybe what are some of the things that have evolved or changed over time in simplifying those ideas?
Orin Bliss Brecht07:42 — Well, I think storytelling — we're humans, we tell stories to humans. I think it doesn't matter. And a lot of people will disagree with me and a lot of people have to my face, but it doesn't matter if you're B2B, it doesn't matter if you're B2C, it doesn't matter if you're B2B2C, you're telling a story to another human who's going to pay money to buy something because you told them a story. And as simple as that. It doesn't matter. And that's how it's always been. And go back before the marketing thing — you're going to get people's attention because you're telling a good story, whether or not it's going to benefit you or not. That's the constant. People engage with other people. And people — that's just part of being human. So tapping into that and leveraging that for marketing has been done for hundreds of years.
I think the one biggest thing that changed is attention spans have gotten much shorter. And I think that's social media's fault. I'm a victim of the same thing. I think the challenge now is to create impactful snackable content. You know, maybe start with a big picture and then pare it down, pare it down, pare it down to whatever your platform is where you're showcasing that, and maybe use that as breadcrumbs to the bigger pitch — maybe on a home page, maybe on YouTube or something. But it's really the same story just reformatted to shorter attention spans in the social media space. I think that's the biggest change, and that's a challenge, but it really, once you kind of get in the groove, that can be kind of your magic bullet, really, with a creative team that knows how to do that.
I don't think — and here's the soapbox part — AI can't do that. AI can't strip down. AI can't create a strategy for a creative sales pitch. And other people are going to argue with me — I wholeheartedly believe that so far. So who knows what tomorrow holds.
Anyway, that's my kind of storytelling perspective through the ages up until the present day. Excuse me.
Ben Ard09:40 — Yeah, no, that's great. The TikToks and the reels and the shorts of the world have absolutely wrecked our attention spans. I can't imagine everyone going back to newspapers and magazines again. I think it would be interesting to see if people could even take the five minutes to look in the index to find the article or page they wanted to be a part of anymore. It would be kind of interesting to see how that would work. I know my kids couldn't do it at the moment. They need instant gratification in literally everything.
So I think that's fascinating. So as a marketer who has spent a lot of time breaking down complex subjects and demystifying them, making them easier, explaining them, telling them story — what are some of the biggest mistakes you've seen along the way, where people are just maybe messing up in a place here or there that you can give advice on to help people on this journey to figuring this out?
Orin Bliss Brecht10:34 — I think this overlaps with another answer to one of your previous questions, but I once worked with a product marketer who wanted to create content from the perspective of a product developer. And we weren't selling to product developers. We were selling to C-suite individuals who lead companies, who, you know, these C-suite guys and girls aren't product developers. They're even less tech minded. Not all of them, but a lot of them — they don't care how the sausage is made any more than the guy walking down the street or whatever.
So trust your creative team, trust your non-subject matter experts to tell that complicated story in a simplified way and bring it to the masses. And when your creative team gets it, you're going to win every time. So again, don't tell about the nitty-gritty, the technical aspect. Tell about the solution. Talk about the solution and frame it in an engaging way.
Ben Ard11:34 — Love it. Well, Orin, we're almost out of time. These episodes are short and sweet to the point. So let's go into one final question before we end this. For content leaders who are sitting here and they work for a company that has innovative, complex, difficult to understand products or services, what is some advice for them that they can use today, this week, next week to actually start telling their story in a better way?
Orin Bliss Brecht12:00 — Break it down into bite-sized chunks, use a very conversational tone, and turn that elevator pitch into eight elevator pitches and create a content stream against that.
You can do that on your website, on your social channel. You can do it in writing. You can do it obviously in a visual way with animation. And they can be sister bits of content that cover the same topic in different visual and editorial capacities. But break it down into bite-sized snackable bits, use plain English, and then feed the pipeline.
And I think eyes will un-glaze at that point. And people will follow those breadcrumbs all the way to your master manifesto, if you will, or what have you.
Ben Ard12:46 — Well, Orin, I really do appreciate it. I think we're all struggling, especially in an industry where AI and a whole bunch of things are playing a massive role and it's not necessarily something we all understand, and innovation is happening all the time. Breaking these subjects down, breaking these products and services down into a simplified coherent story is very much top of mind. So thank you for sharing your insights. For anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Orin Bliss Brecht13:14 — You can go to my website, OrinBlissBrecht.com — also OrinBrecht.com will bring you to the same place. Shoot me a message through there, or just hit me up on LinkedIn as we all are doing these days anyway.
Ben Ard13:26 — Love it. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. You will see Orin's website link and his LinkedIn profile link. Go ahead and click on those. Connect with Orin right there. That'll be great. Orin, again, thank you for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it.
Orin Bliss Brecht13:41 — Thank you, Ben. This has been a great time.
