My name is Jason Miller. I lead global content social for LinkedIn marketing solutions. I've been with a company for about three and a half years. They hired me. They brought me on board to build a global content engine to drive brand awareness and lead generation. So it's interesting. So three and a half years ago when I started with LinkedIn, we had just launched sponsored content. So it was a really interesting time to come on board. So my job is to tell the story of the marketer on LinkedIn and how they can use the platform to meet their marketing goals, to expand the reach of their content, to connect with what we call the professional mindset. So that's kind of what I do. And the focus is around the world. So my team is in Dublin, but there's also a team in North America that I kind of left and came over here. So I am here to, I just moved to London. So I'm here to be a true global marketer and actually understand the different nuances between the markets. Because it's kind of the next step in the evolution of my career. We have a concept we call the big rock. And what the big rock is, is it's a substantial piece of content that you're creating with a purpose to own a conversation. So for example, at LinkedIn, when I started years ago, you would type into the search engine, how do I market effectively on LinkedIn? And you know, there was lots of competition there. So my job was to own that conversation, create content that mapped back to that, but also use our platform to amplify it. So and the big rock is how we attack that. So how do you find that conversation? Will you do a little bit of keyword research and you look for the conversations, look for the search queries that are driving traffic on the conversations, on the topics that are important to your brand? It's really quite simple. If you think about what is that number one question that you, that your product or service answers or can solve. And then you create content around that. You create a big rock and you map this empire back to that. The role of native advertising is important to me because it helps amplify the content and reach new audiences. So I think there's a lot of folks who think that the inbound marketing alone is enough. And I think that's crazy because you're only reaching that audience that's following you. If you want to break through and get beyond that, you need native advertising to break through just the folks that follow you and expand your reach beyond that. I would say just the opportunity to amplify their content in the feed, right? Using both sponsored content, direct sponsored content, which goes directly to that audience and that audience only. But to take your content and amplify it in the feed is, I think that's the real opportunity. Just expand on that audience, get to the professional mindset and connect with a professional audience. I used to work in a music business and I love the music business. I watched it fight digital. Instead of embracing digital, it fought it and it just crumbled in on itself. I finally got fed up and quit back in 2009 and I had to reinvent myself. I don't want to lose my connection to music. I've always been a fan of music and it turns out that I can take these very complex marketing stories and distill them down using rock and roll analogies. It just makes sense to me. It's a fun, entertaining way to deliver it to. You'll always see a little bit of a, there's always a reference to guns and roses or kits or Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. There's always a heavy metal reference and almost everything I do. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not so. It's important for marketers to differentiate themselves, right? Because it's a very crowded space. There's lots of smart marketers out there, but how do you stand out? So I think if you find your passion and you can infuse that into your content, then you're going to be able to stand out. I love being a metal. I love sign-filled. I always kind of leave that into my content and it's my personality coming through. If you find a company, I used to work at Marquetto and they empowered us to bring our personality work. LinkedIn is the same way. So if you have that environment that fosters creativity, true creativity, and you can bring in that personal element at the same time, that's where you hit a home run, that's where you differentiate yourself and that's where you stand out as a marketer. It's forcing us to be better marketers. It's forcing our content to be more relevant. It's forcing us to understand our audience is better. So I think marketers have a challenge to do better, to be better marketers. And I think native advertising is that kind of litmus test where we can test and measure our efforts. And I think if we do well, then maybe this adblocking thing won't make sense anymore. Native advertising is fueled by content. It's powered by content, right? Without good, remarkable content, you don't have a strategy, right? So, but having a source of good content that is consistent and relevant and looks, you know, it has a purpose. That's the own media empire. And it's it powers native advertisers. So you can't have one without the other. But why would you not to have in the era of, you know, brands thinking like publishers or the newsroom, why would you not want to create this kind of own media empire where you're not renting space for your content anymore to live on, your own content? I think there's a big there's a movement to go back to kind of, you know, your own channels, right? So the blog, the website, your app. And so that's kind of the idea behind a concept is this own media empire. I own the space. I own the content. I use native advertising to amplify. I think that brands as publishers is a new idea. And I think it's still a new idea. And I think we have a lot of work to do. I think some folks have figured it out, the usual suspects, but the rest of us, you know, I think are just need to try a little bit harder. But the opportunity is to just be more relevant and be smart about your audience and your targeting. Focus on quality over quantity, which I think is a pretty hot topic here. We don't we don't force ourselves to post something every day or write an article every day. And like you just do it. You say something when you have something to say. And then you just be smart about it at the angle that you go to put that out to the world. It goes back for me. It goes back to just are you an interesting person? Do you have something interesting to say? How can you take your personality, combine them and make it into something that someone wants to read? I don't know if there's lessons the publishers could take for me. I mean, I think I take a lot of lessons from publishers just on a much smaller scale. But yeah, certainly, certainly I'm my own audience, I guess. So I market to marketer. So maybe I have a little bit easier than other folks do. I don't know. It's easy. You should think like a search engine, right? So the search engines job is to deliver the most relevant content based on the query. Your job as a content marker is simply to be that best answer. So through through all those those tactics, through all the disciplines coming together, you know, SEO, PR, social content, all these things coming together, that's where the sweet spot is. But if you have these these different disciplines working in silos, then it's a fragment that disaster, right? But all these coming together, if you do the keyword research, if you know the conversations, if you understand your audience, and you just basically answer their questions and supplement that with some editorial thoughts and some inspirational ideas and a little bit of entertainment, but you just want to be that best answer. That's what remarkable content does. That's where all this is moving to. And I think it's really we over complicate this all the time. Answer a question and then have just some good content to back up the conversation along the way.