Finding Your Voice in the Creator Economy with Christine Göös

Justin Levinson (00:00.823)‍

Hey everybody, welcome to the Agency Side Podcast. I am your host, Justin Levinson, and I am here today with Christine Yuss, who is an award-winning marketing leader and co-host of the House of Content podcast, which if you haven't listened to, you should go check it out. Christine's built her career helping SaaS, Smart Tech, and creative brands scale through smart storytelling and strategic marketing.

She's worked with some huge names in tech, retail, and media, and she's here with us today to share her insights on brand building, the creator economy, and what's really working in content marketing right now. Thanks so much for being here, Christine.

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Christine (00:37.144)‍

Thank you for having me. Let's get rolling.

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Justin Levinson (00:39.329)‍

Yeah, yeah, hopefully I got that intro all right. did my best. But yeah, thanks so much for coming along. maybe, yeah, before we get into it, you can just start by telling us, you know, maybe a little bit about the podcast first and how that all came to be.

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Christine (00:56.608)‍

Yeah, absolutely. So the podcast is a funny story because I have been hosting in one way or another for a, gosh, since I was 20 years old, really. So I'm from Helsinki, Finland originally, and I had an online television series on the line. It was kind of like our vice media, but obviously at a much smaller scale where a country of five and a half million people.

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Justin Levinson (01:17.965)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (01:20.174)‍

And I was hosting this nightlife show on the gigs and concerts, music venues and festivals in Helsinki. And so I started podcasting, I want to say back in 2019, 2020, but then I realized when I looked back that I actually had this sort of connection to hosting and being in front of a mic that's not all the way back there.

And, I originally hosted Brandside podcast, so similar name to yours, for Seltra, the creative automation company. And that show actually garnered some half a million downloads during its time. And obviously as I moved on to a different role, I had to also then give up that IP because that was part of the company's, marketing remit. Right. And so then I kind of had maybe a year or so that I was thinking about what was next.

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Justin Levinson (01:46.658)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (01:53.123)‍

Cool.

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Christine (02:10.478)‍

And I decided to start a show myself with two amazing social creatives out of TWA, Try It LA. Yanni and Mel, who are my co-hosts, they both work with some amazing brands there. If you've seen some of those Levi's campaigns with Beyonce, Yanni is behind those. And so we actually started with an Instagram or LinkedIn DM, just asking like, hey, like, would you be interested in co-hosting a show about the creator economy?

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Justin Levinson (02:27.746)‍

Mmm.

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Christine (02:39.406)‍

And I was also trying to break into that industry that time. I've been working in the realm of social media for a very long time and advertising and creative and ad tech, but influencers was something that I was very passionate about and I wanted to break into. And this podcast, when we founded it in 2023, was an avenue to start talking about those topics, having opinions and debating things that were happening in the creator economy at that time. we, you know, never looked back.

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Justin Levinson (03:05.709)‍

That's really cool. So you didn't know the other two ladies on the podcast before. was just, you know, you just met through online.

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Christine (03:14.104)‍

So funny story, they're actually, we have all worked in the same agency back in Helsinki, TPWA, but we never worked at the same time. Yanni and Mel worked together when they were still in Helsinki and then both of them one by one moved stateside to LA, but Mel and I just got connected via LinkedIn and she asked me for some career advice, how to move to New York or to the US in general. We had some drinks and that kind of, that.

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Justin Levinson (03:21.133)‍

Okay.

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Christine (03:41.218)‍

propelled into a full podcast at some point, I guess, and we asked Yanni to join in the rest is history.

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Justin Levinson (03:42.157)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (03:47.031)‍

Yeah, how did the process go from moving from Helsinki to the US? How is that all calculated and how did it all come to be?

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Christine (03:57.262)‍

So when I started thinking about moving to New York, I was young, naive, and very optimistic. And I thought to myself, how hard can it be? I've done the Young Lions circuit. I had some awards under my belt. And at that time, TVWH Helsinki was Gunn Report Top 10. They were one of the most awarded, most innovative agencies in the TVWH network. And some of that legacy is still there today. So I thought, I've got the roster. I've got the resume.

And boy was I humbled when I came to New York to meet with potentials or have the calls or try to even get my foot in the door here, right? Because you'll have to find somebody who would sponsor your visa. And it took me a good year and a half to find a company that would sponsor my visa. was applying and having those conversations out of Helsinki.

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Justin Levinson (04:28.322)‍

Hahaha.

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Justin Levinson (04:38.317)‍

Hmm.

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Christine (04:51.432)‍

And finally, it was able to make that move, but I actually pivoted into B2B marketing, into content marketing, on the tech side. And so it was kind of a moment where I had to sort of let my ego or put my ego away from coming from this like advertising, very flashy world, going to the startup world where small budgets, you have to wear 15 different hats and kind of build everything as you're also learning from learning in this new role and in this new practice. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (05:19.885)‍

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Do you like New York?

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Christine (05:23.936)‍

I'm in love with New York. It is something that I've wanted to do since I was 14 years old. I had this crazy dream that one year when I'm an adult, I'm gonna live here, I'm gonna be walking down Manhattan with a coffee in my hand and this is gonna be my life. Like, all the, know, I've watched Sex and the City, I'm that cliche, but it really, some of the millennial myths are very true and that's what happened to me as well.

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Justin Levinson (05:38.691)‍

You

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Justin Levinson (05:49.783)‍

Yeah, no, I totally get that. I mean, obviously I'm from the States. My family grew up in New York and New Jersey. So I was very accustomed to that. But Los Angeles always had that feel to me where I was just like Hollywood. What is this? You know, when I first moved out to LA, I was like, like, it felt like every day was, you know, it's that euphoric. It was just like every day was a vacation. Like, who am going to meet today? What is what is this person doing? Or it was just so so exciting. So I can relate to that. With the podcast, I guess

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Christine (05:59.884)‍

Mmm.

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Justin Levinson (06:20.093)‍

What do you see as the ultimate goal of the podcast? What are you guys trying to achieve?

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Christine (06:27.33)‍

I think it started out as a means to position ourselves in the industry. Again, we're a very niche show, I would say, but the opportunities that we've already gotten just from hosting the show are pretty incredible. You know, we've spoken at Future North America, influencer marketing show, doing the podcast rounds, but more importantly, it's a great conversation opener. And so when I was interviewing or looking for jobs, being able to send out something concrete.

To the people that you're interviewing with or even trying to open doors with it just changes the dynamic and changes the game And I think that was the number one

goal for us really thought leadership and positioning ourselves in the industry as well as bringing or bridging the social media and brand marketing worlds closer together because I feel like there is such a divide between the two still today where social people are like, like the brand platform creatives that they don't understand social and vice versa and right.

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Justin Levinson (07:19.511)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (07:26.924)‍

both are right actually. And then like you have the brand creatives and creative leaders saying that social people are coming to the table just with trends or very tactical activations, right? Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (07:28.673)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (07:39.139)‍

Yeah, yeah, totally. I'm always interested to see why people do podcasts and what the reasonings behind it. I for me, I use it, I mean, of course it's like, it can be a lead generation tool for us, which is obviously kind of like what you're saying as well that you guys are doing. But I sort of use it as just constant industry knowledge and constantly just trying to learn from the people that I'm speaking with. You know, I will even...

like use the discussions that I'm having with people and put them in a, you know, a GPT thread and kind of like stack them up and like, just so I can really just learn and absorb and, you know, understand the pain points of the industry, understand other people's perspectives. And of course, all of that can provide more social media as well, because you can make so, I mean, you can obviously share the magic clips, you can, you know, share insights that you gather. It's just a really like, it's just pretty amazing.

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Christine (08:13.688)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (08:37.603)‍

how podcasts seem to really just become such a thing even more so.

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Christine (08:41.763)‍

And I.

And I also think just strategically, it almost forces us to really deep dive into what is happening at a certain area of the creator economy or influencers or even brands. For example, one of the, one of the episodes that we just put out last week or recently was around this social behavior where creators are actually embarking on either no buys or low buys. And so they are trying to consume less and they're actually creating content around maybe getting out of

dead or becoming more mindful or shopping your closet. And I think these are really important undercurrents that both brands and agencies have to have to understand. And they're kind of they're born so quickly and they go very deep and there's multiple facets to it. And the podcast, it's a perfect way for us to kind of debate the different angles. What can brands do? What should creators do? And it's just also it makes us better marketers, I think.

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Justin Levinson (09:32.081)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (09:37.123)‍

Yeah, have you had any really like killer insights from anybody that has come on that has been pretty like eye popping for you?

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Christine (09:48.43)‍

So I think one of our best guest episodes, typically we try to keep it just between us. We're three hosts already and as you can imagine with remote recording, it might get a little messy, but we have had Mackenzie Green on the show. She is VP, VP Social at Future. So it's a parent company that owns Who, What, Where, Marie Claire, a bunch of different media properties. And...

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Justin Levinson (09:55.703)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (10:10.53)‍

Her episode around just how she approaches social overall and sort of she, comes from, I believe she went to Columbia business school. And so she is applying this deep business and now analytics type of modeling to social. It's definitely worth a listen and just understanding how you can connect the dots.

from social and brand over to commerce and e-comm even. It's just a, was a wild listen and I go back periodically just to kind of remind myself of the lessons of that episode. Yeah, absolutely, for sure.

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Justin Levinson (10:43.583)‍

It's like a good book, you know, you got to keep returning to it to get those golden nuggets. That's cool. Well, I guess maybe you could tell us like, you know, obviously, the creator economy is like, like, crazy, huge. What do you think? How do you think, you know, brands are adapting to that? Are there things that, you know, that they're they're getting wrong? Possibly.

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Christine (11:10.914)‍

I think there are, so there are brands who, and again, it's that classic challenger brands and brands who have really built their whole operations around social first marketing have been able to catch up quicker. And there are some larger companies too, like we all saw that Unilever announcement that they're going to hire 20 times more creators. I know that Walmart is investing big into building out their creator ecosystem across both awareness with influencers, but then also social

commerce and even affiliates and so that is something that's happening but then what we still see today is a lot of brands are still looking at follower counts and it doesn't really matter because if we look at most of the content that we consume on our FYPs that's not people that we follow it's topics that we follow it's it is the new way of

kind of even how the algorithm works. So it's the interest graph, meaning people are shown content that they're interested in on topics that they're interested in or niches and communities versus the sort of the social graph, which means who am I following? Who are my, the people that I'm following, following my friends kind of, it's not about that anymore. It's more about interest-based. And I think more brands need to move into that space and understand that you might have to venture outside of your vertical to be successful.

Obviously, let's say you're a beauty brand, you will have to partner with beauty influencers as well. But maybe you're finding a big overlap that you're launching a new foundation and you have, you find that the book talk community is extremely passionate about beauty overall. So you might actually hire a series of book talk creators to do content around the foundation. And again, you need to sort of find those almost like those axes and cross.

cross pollinate across the board and find different ways of breaking through just because the competition is so high. So that's one. And I think the second one is also, and this is something that we're really passionate about at Crowd, at my agency group. We have our performance and performance media side, but then we also have the social and influencer agency, Born Social is part of our agency group as well.

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Christine (13:23.904)‍

And really both the paid side and the organic side should not be separated anymore. It's all one and the same influencer marketing has brought this collapse of the funnel, meaning that these influencer assets, can both drive awareness and conversion and consideration all in one go. And so I think those two teams should be sitting under the same department in my opinion, and just working really closely together.

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Justin Levinson (13:47.544)‍

Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Do you find that they're separated a lot? in different... Yeah, they're never... Yeah.

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Christine (13:55.164)

‍they're completely different. traditionally, yeah, because traditionally, organic social sits under maybe its own department, or it might be part of brand marketing. Influencer sometimes even sits in PR, whereas paid social has been always part of the media department. And I think now it should all kind of converge and come, yeah, come together.

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Justin Levinson (14:17.891)‍

cross-pollinate. Yeah that's interesting. are there any brands that in particular that you feel are really crushing it that you're excited about that you think is kind of taking advantage of all these different things you're talking about?

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Christine (14:34.156)‍

I mean, there are multiple from the yeah, from the fashion vertical, Loueve and Jacquemus are doing fantastic job on social, particularly on TikTok. And what they're doing so well is that they are actually bringing high quality production into social without it feeling like somebody just stuck a TV commercial on TikTok. They're social first, but their campaigns and their content, it still stays true to their brand because what the other thing that happens a lot of times with

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Justin Levinson (14:35.393)‍

Hahaha

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Justin Levinson (14:52.995)‍

you

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Christine (15:03.018)‍

influencer and with social is that, okay, you're very social native. You know how to do the trends, but are you doing anything that links back to your brand? And so are you just another person, another content creator under that brand logo doing the same trend as everybody else? So how does it build your brand equity? Jacquemus and Loueve are amazing at doing that. Another brand that has done a fantastic job rebranding themselves through being social first is Guinness. And that's actually some of the work coming out of our Born Social.

side of the agency and they relaunched Guinness in the UK with the help of influencers, with the help of social first and trending content. But again, always bringing it back to the brand heritage. And I believe Guinness is now one of the most popular drinks again amongst that consumer group, which is insane that you're able to do that just by using social and influencer.

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Justin Levinson (15:54.391)‍

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. that's cool. In terms of what you're doing right now, know you also are a director of marketing, correct? Like personally? What is your day to day like on that front?

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Christine (16:06.57)‍

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I am, yeah. Yeah.

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Christine (16:13.772)‍

Yeah, so I am about a month into my new role at Crowd, leading US marketing, but also has part of a global remit working together with our, so our, our CMO, Dani Jordan. She actually, she comes from Dentsu. She is an absolute marketing powerhouse. And so we're right now, we're building out our brand fame and demand gen and integrated marketing plans for the year. And so.

you will be seeing us a lot at different industry events and mainstays. We're currently building out our canned prisons and content on the ground. I'll be there in about a month or so at the time of this recording. And really just building out a marketing strategy here in the US market that showcases the best that crowd has to offer. We have quite a unique operating model.

where we're around six house, in-house experts. And then we have a network of almost 3,000 on-demand specialists that are part of the crowdy network that we tap into, that we work with all the time when we need to scale up different areas of the services that we provide, whether it's performance or analytics or biddable media.

It is quite an interesting model where we, you know, we're seeing that media agencies and agencies as a whole and holding companies are in a little bit of flux. seeing the layoff announcements resulting in from merges everywhere. And I think the, the model of the future is it's tech enabled through both like proprietary and maybe third party tools, especially around AI and automation. I'm spewing a lot of buzzwords here, but it is true. It is, it is true. That's, and, it allows you to then work with.

a set of on-demand talent that's going to be able to bring the best results for your clients. And so I think there's a lot of great stories that I can tell through that offering. And that's what I'm figuring out right now.

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Justin Levinson (18:09.633)‍

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Do see as AI making a big splash here in your particular niche?

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Christine (18:17.428)‍

I think that AI is definitely going to streamline a lot of the media buying side of things, especially operationally. But I think as it becomes easier and easier to run the tactic, not even the tactical side, but the technical side of targeting audiences, spend optimization, all of those things, as that becomes table stakes.

What is a true differentiator there? And I think it's brand and what we're seeing also, you know, there's a lot of conversations around how is AI going to disrupt search searches down, especially these AI summaries that Google is now creating. It means that a lot of people are not going to click through, not the ad results or even the organic results. So what I think is going to happen then is that brand and we're seeing this already a lot of brands that previously, you know, you just

I'm simplifying it, but you throw money at platforms and you're getting revenue out of it, right? But for the longest time, it used to be a lot easier to get results across meta, across social platforms, Google, and now it's becoming more challenging. Everybody knows that. so brands are understanding that they have to go back to brand, but not the brand marketing that we did 15 years ago. So you're not going to have the same results just throwing your money on TV or any type of like top of funnel awareness.

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Justin Levinson (19:18.242)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (19:42.368)‍

Now it's combining brand and performance. There's this new middle ground that has emerged and not many know how to navigate that. And that's kind of the space that crowd plays in and is building out playbooks for sort of this new era of media.

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Justin Levinson (19:56.707)‍

Do you feel like you're just as passionate about the, do you like the paid analytics and the data and all that stuff or is that part interest you as much as the content creation or do you have like a one side of you is more into more than the other?

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Christine (20:12.958)‍

I would not say that it's one or the other, you know, I actually come from the performance side of things. So I worked at Smartly for a long time that today is the largest social and paid media advertising platform. And I think you need, sort of, it's the yin and yang and you need both. And I think in this role, especially, I'm able to work across, because we do offer both brand performance, influencer and social, I'm able to kind of work on stories that span the whole breadth of it.

Personally, I'm obviously I am a creator economy girly through and through that's my that's my number one love but I'm also loving how that world is sort of coming through to b2b marketing as well. We're seeing the rise of LinkedIn a lot of b2b companies and agencies are starting to dabble in the influencer space there. It's still very new. That's something that I'm very bullish on and something that I'm allocating budgets towards. So very excited about that.

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Justin Levinson (21:06.563)‍

Yeah, that's really interesting because it's like, obviously I come from a recruiting background and when I first started getting into recruiting and people were like, you got to get a LinkedIn page. I'm like, LinkedIn? I'm like, that's where all the nerds are. I'm like, what's that thing? You know I mean? And I was like, I didn't even have a LinkedIn page. like, you know, I think that there are more and more people jumping onto that platform now, like you said, and there's so much more content.

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Christine (21:20.878)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (21:31.33)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (21:34.979)‍

I mean, it seems like really a thing and I'm really curious to see where it goes as well.

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Christine (21:45.018)‍

I have been investing heavily into my own LinkedIn content for the past two years. I'm still quite niche. You know, I have a little under 5,000 followers, but I recently signed my first multipost brand deal. I've again gotten different speaking opportunities through that. I definitely think that it is not just for your personal brand and your future, you know, employability and being able to have sort of the control of like where you want to steer your career.

I definitely think it can become a, I don't want to become a full-time creator, but as a side hustle, it's a really fun space to play in.

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Justin Levinson (22:23.383)‍

Yeah, I love it. And I love the way it's changed the recruitment world because we, you know, we're more, it's more of like a digital marketing approach that we have too, because it's not just like, you know, if we have a role, we're putting that, we're like making a video to promote that role. You know what I mean? And we're putting somebody who's like good on camera, who can talk about the role in short and get eyeballs on there. So people are going to engage with it or connect with us.

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Christine (22:32.044)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (22:42.158)‍

Mm Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (22:52.355)‍

And we do personalized video outreach as well, personalized voice memos. And then of course, we're always trying to create content that positions us as like experts and especially in the creative agency space. But we also work in a lot of other different parts of, you we work with lot of members of entertainment. We work in, you know, traditional brand influencer, experiential gaming, theatrical marketing. We're sort of like all over the map. It gives us a place to like try to

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Christine (23:17.738)‍

Mm-hmm, yeah.

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Justin Levinson (23:21.559)‍

beyond message and to also share stories, like speaking with people like you, getting your message out there. So yeah, I'm pretty stoked on it. And I think one thing I'm finding that's interesting about LinkedIn is like, I mean, guess I could look into the analytics more. There's so much more I'm sure I could learn to be having things perform better. But I do notice that it's not a difficult platform to really have an omnipresence where

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Christine (23:25.506)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (23:50.997)‍

You can really be everywhere. And I'll definitely hear from people all the time that'll be like, you know, I might not see a ton of engagement, but people are always like, I just saw your podcast, or I just saw your post, or I just saw this or this or that. Like, it really feels like maybe the data isn't showing that whatever, I'm never gonna become, I mean, look at me, I'm never gonna become an influencer. But it's showing that people are like, you know, people are engaged with it. And that's, it's cool.

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Christine (24:02.816)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (24:17.14)‍

Again, for me, I think the best way to approach LinkedIn is to completely divorce yourself from the data. So I'll, I'll have my posts go out there and sometimes they will completely tank and I get two likes. Sometimes I remove them and I'll just tweak the intro or the hook and post it again at a different time. I don't really care if things don't do well because there are always going to be some that do better than the others. It's about experimentation. And again,

And I'm more interested in like, am I growing on the long term? Am I growing month over month or even three months or even six months or a year? And again, that's exactly what you said. Hearing that anecdotal evidence of people coming in, like I've listened to your podcast, I saw your LinkedIn post, I really liked that video. That to me is much more important than anything else.

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Justin Levinson (25:03.117)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (25:08.963)‍

Yeah, I mean, for me, sometimes it's just like, it's the reward can be also just like having the guts to say something, you know what I mean? Because people like, there's, mean, there are a million people in every, in any niche that have things to say, but they just are like that fear of like, oh, what's somebody gonna think of me? Or if I post this, am I gonna get like a bad reaction or like, you know?

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Christine (25:16.792)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (25:30.316)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (25:34.593)‍

that sort of like imposter syndrome that can really come with like when you're putting yourself out there. I mean, I get nervous when I do pretty much anything, know, a podcast or I'm thinking about a post or, you I'm not like overall, like I'm not paranoid that like, what if someone's not gonna like me, but I definitely have those intrusive thoughts that come into my mind. And sometimes just putting something out there, whether it does well or not, can really just be like, I did something today. You know what I mean?

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Christine (25:36.974)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (25:53.854)‍

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

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Christine (26:03.402)‍

Yes, yeah. And I've kind of adopted this mindset of what other people think about my content is not in my business. And kind of it sets you free. It sets you free. mean, obviously, I love it when people come in and my goal is to provide value. If people come in and say, I love this sub stack or this newsletter or this podcast episode, it's the best feeling in the world. And that's what I do it for. But if there are haters, that's not really any of my business. can.

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Justin Levinson (26:11.085)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (26:31.52)‍

They can keep their thoughts to themselves. Hey, hey, let the haters hate. And also I think it's so important to just get over the cringe because every content creator when they had a hundred followers were cringey. And that's the fact you're always cringey when you're a beginner, whatever you're starting out on. And you're going to have to be able to push through that point to like get on the other side. And if you, the less you care, the more fun it is as well.

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Justin Levinson (26:31.907)‍

can hate. But the haters hate.

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Justin Levinson (26:43.895)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (26:56.951)‍

Definitely. It's it is hard to find a voice though, and I find that maybe that's I You know, I think like when you do first start it feels like you are it's like you're trying to put on other people's faces You know, you're trying you're trying new hats you like I like the way this person Maybe if I position it like this or I speak like this it takes a while to kind of like find like who am I in? All of this which is also kind of a cool like soul-searching

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Christine (27:11.169)‍

Hmm.

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Christine (27:24.408)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Justin Levinson (27:25.069)‍

thing and because I mean, you see some people that they, you know, in the recruiting world where a lot of social people I follow, it's like they almost like, are trying to be conversational, like, like confrontational, like they're like, putting a story out there that's very much like, it's gonna get people like, there's two sides. Yeah, and they, and they, you know, they'll generate a lot of things, but

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Christine (27:31.97)‍

Mm-hmm

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Christine (27:39.863)‍

Mmm.

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Christine (27:45.728)‍

It's rage baiting.

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Justin Levinson (27:51.169)‍

I'm not a conflict kind of guy. That's not gonna be my, that's definitely not my window, but I see it sometimes. like, I'm kind of jealous that like, can't, I'm not a conflict, I wish I could be a conflict kind of guy, but I'm just, it's not me.

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Christine (27:52.704)‍

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (28:05.038)‍

No, you got to, you got to say true to yourself. I think I had an advantage in I'm a writer by trade. I started as a, as a copywriter, but I was writing even before I've always. That's always been my thing. And so I think that the voice that I had came very easily to me and I try to write the way I think, and I try to write the way I, the way I am. don't want to corporatize myself for LinkedIn. And you know, we, sometimes do end up writing in that LinkedIn speak a little bit and.

And now more recently, maybe some people are writing in AI speak, but I refuse to do that.

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Justin Levinson (28:41.217)‍

No, it's like, it's the emojis I think are what seems to be like the biggest turn off to me. It's just like the bullet points and emoji is where I'm just like, man, like maybe it would be just more like if it was just hidden a little bit more, you know what I mean? Like I'll definitely like make something, create it, like get like three quarters of the way there, use GPT to sort of be like, hey, like, is there anything that's

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Christine (28:47.383)‍

Mmm.

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Christine (28:52.459)‍

I

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Justin Levinson (29:08.547)‍

Could any of this be better, but can it stay human in my tone? obviously the thread knows who I am because it's been trained. But I'm never going into it at a blank slate being like, hey, GBT, make me a post that's going to be engaging about why creative agencies are going to be doing terrible in 2020. You know what mean? You have to be the ultimate creator 95 % of the way there for it to not be red flaggy.

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Christine (29:34.551)‍

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. For me, I use AI a lot for background research and then for versioning, for example, once we do have our episode ready, I would use it just to generate some of the outlines that go onto the platforms like Spotify. And then I do final edits there. But when it comes to my posts or my newsletters, those have to be in my tone. I do sometimes transcribe my thoughts just to get them on paper quicker, but then I'll take over from AI. I'm like, okay, buddy, you're done. It's, it's, it's over to Word docs now. And I.

I'm very adamant about that and I think that's all like part of the brand that I'm building as well.

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Justin Levinson (30:11.907)‍

Yeah, I love it. In terms of your daily workflow, what's your tech stack? What kind of tools are you using?

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Christine (30:25.24)‍

Sure. So for on the podcast side, we're also, we're, oops, no worries. So on the tech side, we do use Riverside as well. We use,

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Justin Levinson (30:30.797)‍

Sorry, little bang.

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Christine (30:40.64)‍

Mostly Chatgy BT, I've tried Gemini, but I have to say I'm more of an open AI person myself. I think it's a superior tool at least, least for the use cases that I have. And we use that mostly just for, again, for versioning once those main outlines are done. We use, what else do we use? We're mostly posting through all of the native platforms because that's how we see the best performance. We've been on Substack since January.

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Justin Levinson (30:48.259)‍

Totally.

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Justin Levinson (31:07.523)‍

Yeah.

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Christine (31:10.574)‍

want to say give or take and it's we do post all of our episodes there but that for us so we do we we push out our weekly episodes every Thursday and then that Tuesdays we have a newsletter that has a completely different topic that's related to creators or brand marketing or careers as a whole I think that's pretty much it on the on the podcast side of things and then obviously whenever it comes for you know for social and video editing it's it's all in CapCut

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Justin Levinson (31:40.035)‍

CapCut, yeah, yeah, that's cool. Do you use any other like just basic tools for workflow like you get like countily or do you use like any sort of like just other outside tools as well?

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Christine (31:54.03)‍

No, not really because again, because we're not a guest let's show so we don't really we don't really need to do the bookings there. So we just have our standing recording meeting we stack we usually try to do at least two or three recordings at a time so that we get most out of the hair and makeup that we've already done now that we're on video. It's our first video season. And then we actually have an editor in in Brazil who who edits our clips in our podcasts and founded through

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Justin Levinson (32:19.776)‍

Cool.

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Christine (32:23.02)‍

a mutual friend of mine and she's just fantastic and I used to edit our show when it was audio only myself. I have no business editing anything and so it is great to have that afforded for now.

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Justin Levinson (32:31.139)‍

I'm

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Justin Levinson (32:35.203)‍

I had the captions app for a while on my phone, which was kind of cool. I was messing around with the weird AI clone, doing stuff like that for a minute. was like, this stuff is pretty bizarre.

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Christine (32:43.17)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (32:46.726)‍

Yeah, yeah, I think I had once I had a salesperson send me a pitch as the AI version of himself. And I found it to be very bizarre. And he did not make a sale out of that. So I think AI clones for me is also another area. It's been debated in the creator economy a lot and people are saying, now AI creators are going to overtake humans. But the challenge there is that

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Justin Levinson (32:54.413)‍

Wow.

Yeah.

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Christine (33:12.032)‍

AI creators cannot be imperfect or messy or scandalous, or if they can, you're going to have to engineer that. And that's not something that's really engineerable. And I think all of this sort of AI slush is going to also push for people to look for more authenticity than ever. So I think we're going to see like two, like very conflicting streams in marketing in the. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (33:20.557)‍

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (33:33.123)‍

your mouth to God's ear, I hope that that's the case. Because I don't want to be looking at a bunch of clones on my feeds. I'm hoping that you're right. maybe that kind of thing is the great reset for content quality. Maybe we have to get to that, and then we become really organic and thoughtful again, maybe.

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Christine (33:55.23)‍

I think so because persona, if we're looking at the influencer arena as a whole, people are kind of backlashing against even they are real influencers, but there was this whole scandal around New York City influencers being boring. people were saying that these fashion influencers who are all dining at the best restaurants and wearing designer and they all actually there was a really great, I think it was a cut article about it, but there's one lady in particular who's behind

as a manager behind all of these big names like Audrey Peters, those types. And people were saying like they're all coming, they're all from the same mold. It's not made with AI, but people were already kind of backlash against that because they felt too engineered, too perfect, too curated. And now there's this other side where people are looking for.

personas for messy. I'm following a couple of creators who are like native New Yorkers and have that thick accent and they have an amazing style. And so we're seeing sort of, it's always gonna be an ebb and flow, but personality is gonna still win on social.

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Justin Levinson (34:58.147)‍

I love it. That's pretty cool. I guess, you we don't have too much more time, but I'm curious what you like to do outside of working in the socials. What do you like to do like in your personal life?

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Christine (35:02.54)‍

Mm-hmm.

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Christine (35:07.822)‍

Yeah. So my, my stepson, who is almost 11, he is my little restaurant buddy. We love going out to try new things. And what we do is, is he does not have TikTok, but we do scroll TikTok for new restaurants and specialty foods to try in New York city. And then we earmark our favorite places and it's a really fun experience for him to see the video first. And then we're actually going to go and try it in, in real life. Like for example.

there is this pineapple pork bun that you can get at this tiny Chinese bakery in Chinatown here in New York City. I think it's called Mei Wai Law, if I remember correctly, and it's the best thing either of us have ever eaten, but things like that. that's our little side quest. We're always looking for new cuisines to try in New York City.

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Justin Levinson (35:57.407)‍

That's cool. Are you like a book avid book reader or do you like to travel or any other sort of personal things you like to do?

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Christine (36:05.016)‍

Sure, yes, yes. So I travel a lot, both for work, but also because my family is all over the globe, so I'm married to a Brazilian, and so we go back to Brazil a lot. And my dad's Italian, he's a circus artist, so he's always touring Europe, and so I try to catch him wherever he is in the world and go see his shows as well, so we do travel quite a lot as well.

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Justin Levinson (36:17.443)‍

Nice.

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Justin Levinson (36:30.509)‍

That's really cool. Any favorite music?

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Christine (36:34.356)‍

Yes, so I am currently obsessed with the Bad Bunny album that he just put out. I think it is a masterpiece. He obviously coming from this reggaeton background, he then now tapped into traditional Puerto Rican rhythms. He's made salsa songs. He's kind of transcending his own genre and it's a masterpiece and

I'm hoping I can go see him in Puerto Rico when he does his residency. I think he's avoiding US as a whole in his world tour, which is a message in of itself. Bad Bunny. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (37:03.203)‍

Who's artist again? Bad Bunny. Okay. I don't know if I've listened. I'm have to this, give this list. I'm always interested in. That's cool. Cool. Awesome, Christine. Well, thanks so much for being here today and speaking with us and just offering value to our community. And look forward to following your journey and staying in touch with you.

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Christine (37:11.0)‍

Put the album, yeah. Put the album on the list, it's great.

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Christine (37:26.24)‍

Absolutely, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.

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Justin Levinson (37:27.947)‍

All right, take care, Christine. Bye.