673 - Why Marketing Teams Cannot Build CEO Thought Leadership
Jens Heitland on why marketing and PR teams, however well staffed, are not built for CEO thought leadership. A look at the specialized skills that content production actually requires, and why companies are better served buying that capacity than building it internally.
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Why Marketing Teams Cannot Build CEO Thought Leadership
Companies invest in PR and marketing once they reach a certain size, and both functions tend to be well staffed. What they are built to do is communicate the company to the market, explain the products, and reach the audiences the business needs to sell to. It is a distinct skill set, developed and refined over years inside those departments.
CEO thought leadership sits outside that skill set entirely. Producing content that carries a CEO's voice requires an executive producer, a journalist, someone who understands video in detail, the lighting, the pacing, the tone. It requires knowing how to turn a conversation into content people actually want to consume, and how that content moves business results. None of this overlaps with what a marketing or PR team is trained to do, because their mandate has always pointed outward toward the market, not inward toward a single voice.
Because these skills sit outside the normal marketing function, many companies would need to hire several specialists individually to cover them, an executive producer, a journalist, a video expert, each one at market rate. We built a different model. We assembled the experts once and offered the capacity as a package, priced below what it would cost to hire each person separately. Working across many CEOs also means the team keeps learning in ways a single internal hire never could, the knowledge compounds with every new voice they work with.
I have watched this gap sit unaddressed inside organization after organization, treated as a communications problem when it is really a specialization problem. Once companies see it as specialization, the solution stops looking like an internal hire and starts looking like access to people who already do this daily.
Highlights:
00:00 Why Teams Lack Video Experts
00:27 Building CEO Content That Converts
00:48 PR vs CEO Thought Leadership
01:08 The Package Deal Advantage
01:18 Compounding Expertise Over Time
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Transcript :
What we have seen over time that a lot of companies have PR teams, they have marketing teams, at least when they're at a certain size, but they miss specialized workers and experts in things. So one part is an executive producer, a journalist, a person that really knows in all details how do you work with videos, what are the different things that are working, what's the lighting setup, what's the tone setup. And then we looked into how do you translate that into content that is interesting for people to consume and that drives business results. And all of this are detailed knowledge that a normal marketing organization or a PR organization inside of a corporation does not have. Because what they're good at is how do we communicate what we do as a company to the market and/or produce, like what are the different products that we are going to sell, and how do we market them to the people that we want to reach. Has nothing to do with CEO thought leadership. So that's why we built this capacity where we say, " You can buy this from us as a package deal," and that's cheaper than hiring all of these individuals single. And that's why it works, because we have the essence, we have the experts, and they work with many CEOs, so they learn while we do this, and then compounding the knowledge even more so than the internal team will ever be able to do